MONDAY, 21 OCTOBER 2013 You Cant Judge Rangers...Can You? After recent entries focused on behind the scenes nonsense, it comes as a genuine pleasure to write about football again. So if politics are what you came for, I hate to disappoint you with 11 men kickin a baw. With a patchy 4-3 victory achieved at Glebe park, to a 4th-bottom Brechin City, coming back from both 2-0 and 3-1 down no less, it is abundantly clear this Rangers team is incredibly difficult to judge. More or less the same first XI absolutely destroyed Stenhousemuir 8-0 at Ibrox, and have effectively coasted their way through the season thus far, with only one defeat. Consequently judging either the players or the manager is an extremely tricky process because of the unprecedented nature of the situation Rangers find themselves in. Dunno about you but Im not sure Ill ever get used to it. It is difficult to give too high a praise when a convincing win is achieved, because the disclaimer is they should be destroying teams like this. Equally it is hard to criticise too harshly after a poor team display because this club is used to playing Aberdeen, not Ayr and as a result the circumstances and comparisons are thoroughly skewed. Rangers fans are incredibly fussy, and expect 8-0 every week, but of course footballers are human and will not produce high-quality performances every match, no matter how poor the opposition are. However, with a return to the SPL (Or Premiership as it is now called) within mid-term sight it is worth considering exactly where Rangers will be, personnel-wise, by the time the club reaches the summit. A valid question to ponder is how many of the current squad are truly good enough for an SPL-winning Rangers team? While the return to the SPL will almost certainly not yield a title during the first season, Rangers fans, for the majority, will still expect it to happen anyway. As a result, it is worth examining the quality of the current squad compared with the last SPL-winning Rangers team. In 2010/11, Rangers team was, give or take, the following; Allan McGregor; Steven Whittaker, Madjid Bougherra, David Weir, Sasa Papac; Maurice Edu, Steven Davis, El-Hadji Diouf, Vladimir Weiss, Nikica Jelavic, Steven Naismith, Kyle Lafferty, Kenny Miller. Our first team today is, give or take; Cammy Bell; Richard Foster, Lee McCulloch, Bilel Mohsni, Lee Wallace, Ian Black, Lewis MacLeod, David Templeton, Robbie Crawford, Nicky Law, Jon Daly, Andew Little, Arnold Peralta. Ultimately, the difference between the two squads is that the title-winning team only contained two players signed from lesser SPL teams - those being Naismith and Whittaker. Nowadays effectively the entire squad is made up from such players and those groomed through the youth system. From a Croat international... Now, this is nothing fans do not know. However, I polled the question on Twitter yesterday of who the fans believe is good enough for a Rangers SPL team, albeit I excluded the term title-winning, and only one response of the many I got believed that a mere solitary player, that being Lee Wallace, was good enough. The rest of the replies considered the likes of Bell, MacLeod, Law, Little, Mohsni and Templeton to be suitable. ...to a reserve Norn Iron cap Is this blue-tinted specs? Have Rangers fans standards dropped so much that we now feel a 25-year old Templeton who has been, frankly, a grossly disappointing player for Rangers, is good enough to play in an SPL Rangers team? Bottom line is few of these players would have been consistently selected in the SPL prior to administration. Only Wallace (who played along with Papac rather than instead of him) and Foster managed it, and even then, the latter was a squad utility player. It seems unlikely that Jon Daly, Nicky Law, Ian Black or Dean Shiels (Remember him?) would even have been signed by Rangers in the SPL let alone take up a space on the bench far less start every week. This is not to deride them; Law, Daly and Black are in particular having fine seasons. But the world will change markedly when Rangers return to the top flight and supporters have to remember that the current team (upcoming mid-term changes notwithstanding) will almost certainly have a massive overhaul in 2015. I will put it out to you guys out there reading this; do you agree with me that this team (and all the players in it, with the possible exception of Wallace) is miles off the quality of a title-winning Rangers SPL team? Or do you think there are fragments of isolated quality (or more) in it which would be good enough to make the step up? ibroxnoise.co.uk/2013/10/you-cant-judge-rangerscan-you.html
Posted on: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 14:20:50 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015