Rangers are fearing the worst from Oscar Cortes’ scan assessment after the Rangers winger appeared to clutch his hamstring on ‘that’ pitch before being withdrawn at Killie.
There’s no point crying over the spilled milk that he clearly should not have started, and Philippe Clement got that one badly, badly wrong, he did start and now he’s injured so now we have to deal with it.
The best we can hope for at this point is that the scan comes/came back with good news and his absence is only brief, because Cortes was already looking a spectacular signing and based on that fleeting instant impression, maybe the best impact player at Ibrox since Todd Cantwell and his brilliant start last February.
Clement spoke on the matter, admitting he didn’t have a clue, saying:
“No (we don’t know), not yet. We need to make that assessment tomorrow or the day after.”
He was clearly waiting on good news from the scan, but that might be a little optimistic.
Put simply this was a screw up, it was a manager new to this kind of pitch completely underestimating it and fielding some of the wrong players to field on it.
Silva, Diomande and Cortes should not have been on it, and in truth neither should Lawrence but his hands were a bit tied there.
But we opted for other options on Ibrox Noise for Silva, Dio and the Colombian but Clement thought he knew better.
Now, a few angry Rangers fans will be pointing at Ibrox Noise saying ‘you think you know football and Rangers better than Philippe Clement?!’ and the answer is, in part, yes.
Clement is a fast learner, and he’s picking it up quick, but to claim a man who has been at Rangers 5 months knows more about the club and Scottish football than lifetime fans is insulting to those supporters.
Clement is an intelligent man, and a great manager, a champion, but he underestimated the pitch which Rangers fans could have easily warned him about, and most fans could see he’d picked the wrong team. One of those decisions may have cost us our star winger for a period of time.
He went on, optimistically:
“To make really good choices we have a lot of games, so we’ll see if he was tired or it was more.”
But again, it’s spilled milk.
We hope it’s just tired.