Rangers manager Philippe Clement has ‘revealed’ why both Nicolas Raskin and Kemar Roofe were not in the match squad for the visit of Celtic:

And it has nothing to do with injury.

Speaking as his team looks to (maybe) travel to (possibly) Dundee on the (possible) chance the game actually goes ahead, Clement was mercifully able to confirm at least that neither of the players had knocks or sprains, good news especially in Roofe’s case, but that his reasons for omitting them were nothing more than ‘tactical’.

He said:

“That depends of positions, how the opponent is, how we are, the form they show in training and I didn’t have anything to say about that it’s not that they are not performing or not doing their best, there’s a lot of competition. This is Rangers and this is what we want also. To have competition for spot and that everybody needs to fight for their spot (except Tav and Goldson) to be in the team or to be on the bench.”

Of course he didn’t say Tav and Goldson, we just sarcastically added that in.

This is how dumbass Rangers managers sound when they talk about competition and no one is there by right, which is, quite literally, an outright lie when it comes to Tavernier and his buddy Goldson.

But getting back to the point, in Raskin and Roofe’s cases Clement made the call that he preferred Kieran Dowell on the bench over Raskin and Sima over Roofe.

It was a surprising omission, Roofe – the striker has history for doing it in that fixture, but Sima’s impact from the bench vindicated his being there.

But the fact is Raskin and Roofe were omitted tactically. They weren’t injured, they were just omitted.

That Clement spun a bunch of waffle about his reasons for not including them then bare-face claimed every player must fight for their position despite the fact at least two don’t was more than a bit trite.

Don’t get us wrong – we are not big into Raskin at all, he’s not kicked a ball in anger since last May and before he announced Rangers were ‘just a step’ in his career. So we don’t care much for him at all and we have much better options.

But the Roofe one was a bit of a surprise given we do only have Dessers and the out-of-form Silva up front, with Sima still regaining fitness. We thought Roofe would be there too.

Wasn’t to be.

Can’t exactly say the result vindicated Clement’s decisions, mind you.

Que sera.