Rangers have been hit with a hammer blow for the foreseeable future after Philippe Clement confirmed all five wingers he has are injured.

Speaking before Rangers’ clash with Lisbon giants Benfica, he revealed Ross McCausland’s return to training was only limited, and he is only modestly-likely to feature at all tonight, while Scott Wright has added to the injury list with an unspecified knock.

Meaning all 5 of Oscar Cortes (who couldn’t have featured tonight anyway), Abdallah Sima, Rabbi Matondo, Ross McCausland and Wright are out for the foreseeable future to varying levels which really is a dire situation.

Rangers’ injury position is literally a daily fluctuating situation, one day there’s a recovery, the next day a knock.

We report as often as we can on Ibrox Noise with what’s going on but as soon as the latest goes to press there’s often another update. Which just makes us look stupid (not hard, right?).

But Clement said:

“We are missing four wingers tomorrow. Ross maybe also, we will see. He did the warm-up today and didn’t train with the team he did individual work. We will see tomorrow if he is available to play some minutes or not.The other four wingers are out. I have five wingers and maybe five of them will be out. That’s a bad situation.”

That’s a disaster.

Ex-manager Giovanni van Bronckhorst had to deal with a defensive injury crisis losing John Souttar, Filip Helander and Connor Goldson, but Clement has an even worse attacking one.

He went on:

“We miss two playmakers with Kieran Dowell and Todd Cantwell and one striker with Danilo. So that is a lot of offensive quality that we miss tomorrow. It’s about finding other solutions.”

In short, Rangers are short of 8 attackers for this one, which is literally and utterly ridiculous.

To get anything in Portugal from this one given the tightness with which Clement’s hands have been tied here will be a literal miracle.

This may already be damage limitation.