Rangers manager Philippe Clement has taken a little jab at predecessor Michael Beale over his poor preseason after admitting there is a possibility the players, who continue to fall like flies, weren’t prepared well in the summer and we are now seeing the cost of that.

The Belgian boss sees player-after-player sustain injury, and Beale’s preseason preparations are very much in the line of sight here, but we’re not sure quite how much we can buy that reason given preseason was a long time ago now and Clement can’t really blame Beale for Oscar Cortes or Dujon Sterling, or indeed Ross McCausland.

There is no denying Beale was a diabolical manager whose preseason was a shambles – we saw the extent of that as the shocker results started coming through before he was fired, but Rangers’ bad injury history goes back to even before Giovanni van Bronckhorst, so this is nothing new.

Clement said:

“Maybe they missed a lot of things in the preparations for this season, I think that’s really clear for everybody so we need to make a big preparation next year [so that] we’re not in this situation anymore.”

They probably did, but Cortes didn’t, McCausland was in the B team, and Sterling was barely on the fringes. We don’t completely disagree with Clement, there are huge intrinsic issues with the squad and its fitness, but Abdallah Sima’s injury was on international duty. Not too sure how much to blame Beale is for that.

What we know is there’s a really, really bad injury problem at Rangers, and we’ve expressed how Clement has clearly taken a risk or two with those injuries, high risk, high reward.

It’s absolutely paid off, results-wise, but obviously we may have lost Sterling and McCausland for the season, recent-wise, so we’ll see what the cost is.

But in general he’s not wrong to be exasperated with Rangers’ injury crisis, which is basically 3-years old now.

It gets to the point we wonder if there’s just a hidden hex bag somewhere in Auchenhowie…