Quite a few Rangers fans are starting to panic over Philippe Clement and his potential for being new Ibrox manager. A lot of ‘PLG mk2’ coming up as fans understandably compare a foreign manager with the nightmare that was the French boss and his disaster in Govan.
Ibrox Noise holds our hands up – we were hugely in favour of PLG, actually touting him back in 2005 well before he got the job. So we got that one as wrong as we did, technically, with Michael Beale.
However, just like with Beale, we overlooked something huge with PLG – PLG was not taking over a team at Lyon who he took to a first title, they’d in fact won the previous season under Jacques Santini, so they already had a winning side.
He just continued that, and that is also a case against Kevin Muscat, who simply took Angie’s work in Australia and Japan and continued it.
In both cases, Muscat and PLG took over winning sides, with infrastructure already in place, and just continued it.
But here’s the big catch:
Philippe Clement did not. When he took over Genk, he was taking a side who had finished 5th in the league and took them to the title in his first season. He usurped Club Brugges, runaway winners in 17/18 and destroyed them in 18/19.
And Brugges, realising how good he was, took him from Genk, and he then crushed the Jupiler again with his new charges, doing it the following season as well and smashing Genk (and others back).
So, instead of taking over a winning formula, Philippe Clement takes over high-demand sides down in the dumps in modest-to-strong leagues and turns their fortunes around entirely. Sound familiar?
This guy is the real deal, a top-quality manager – and despite Ibrox Noise’s Ross’s scepticism of his displays in Monaco, the reality is he took a side in a top 5 European league and only just missed out on the European place, having come in midseason, and getting just one signing, Vanderson from Gremio.
He did well, not incredible, but well.
So is he the right stuff to take over at Rangers?
Even Pep is a risk, Jurgen would be – no manager aside our late great Walter would be anything other than a risk.
But Clement does have all the right stuff and ticks all the right boxes for what Rangers need.
Time will now tell if it happens.
He must be the safest bet surely,his record is better than the rest of the list
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