When it comes to the Champions League, Russell Martin is damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t.
At this point a column should probably warn the Rangers manager – in a statement of the glaringly obvious – that the optics won’t look great if he fails to reach the league phase.
Mess up qualification for the new format and tens of millions of pounds disappear down a man hole. The plans Andrew Cavenagh and Paraag Marathe have to rebuild the team, improve the structure and functions of the club and spruce up the stadium would be delayed. They’d have less wiggle room to negotiate UEFA’s financial sustainability rules. The fans who’ve already seen enough of Martin would have more reasons to want him gone.
Here’s the thing, though. Unless there’s a rapid and dramatic improvement in the general standard of defending, beating Club Brugge only buys some time.
The fall-out is a couple of stations behind, hurtling down the tracks.
The patience of fans paying through the nose for season tickets has been spent in recent years. They’re fed up seeing points dropped against the Dundees and Motherwells of this world. After the boardroom chaos, Michael Beale and Philippe Clement, new owners, new investment, a new technical director, a new manager and new players were supposed to usher in a new beginning. Now here they are enduring the same old results and performances, delivered – this time – by a coach they didn’t want in the first place.
And while a morale-boosting win over the Belgians might get some of the naysayers back onside, there’s no guarantee of keeping them there.
If an undercooked team spent their games in the Champions League proper against the best teams in Europe serving up as many gilt-edged chances as they did to Panathinaikos and Viktoria Plzen, they’d run the risk of a hammering or two. At this point in time, Martin needs that scenario like he needs another tactical schooling from Steven Pressley.
Plzen might easily have turned a 3-0 defeat in Glasgow into an aggregate victory. The Czech side mustered 27 shots on target, 21 of them inside the box. In their opening six games of the season – the others were against Panathinaikos, Motherwell and Dundee – Rangers conceded 101 attempts on goal. League One Alloa breached them twice with two goals so ridiculous they’d have damaged the credibility of the Keystone Cops.
Give John Souttar carte blanche to pass the ball out from the back and the only way to watch games against Real Madrid, PSG, Bayern or LIverpool would be through the cracks of the fingers. They’re simply not ready for that.
Whether Rangers or Celtic are ever really ready these days is a fair question.
The pretence that Scottish clubs can still compete against Europe’s super clubs, with their oil sovereign funds, vast television revenue and £100m signings, has gone the same way as landline telephones and the Sinclair C5.
The Champions League isn’t really about glory or prestige or going toe-to-toe on the big stage anymore. The best a team from these parts can really hope for is to win a couple of home games and limit the number of spankings on foreign soil.
In a good season they might make it to a play-off or a last 16 tie no one will remember in 20 years’ time. Strip away the fat cheque at the end and they’d be better off in the Europa League. At least there they might make an impact.
The blood money on offer from UEFA might help the new owners of Rangers to build something better and more sustainable. Unless things stabilise on the pitch quickly, it won’t do much to improve the mood music around Martin.
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You can hear the knives being sharpened already. There’s already mutterings of ‘the new Michael Beale’ and a conviction that Martin didn’t do nearly enough to merit a crack at the job in the first place. The system and style of play has yet to click and Andy Halliday almost broke the internet when he went on Open Goal and spelled out where he thinks his former team-mate is getting it wrong.
In an ideal world, a Rangers manager would make it to October, avoiding calamity in Europe and defeat in the first Old Firm game of the season. In the real world, very few of them ever do.
Months after reaching a European final, Giovanni van Bronckhorst was undone by a 4-0 thrashing at Parkhead and an embarrassing set of results in the Champions League.
Two years have passed, meanwhile, since Beale offered a fair summary of a chastening night in Eindhoven.
Hopes of qualifying for the group stage had been brutally cut short by a ruthless PSV side. But for the excellence of goalkeeper Butland – him again – the 7-3 aggregate scoreline could have been even worse.
“For this team, this game came far too soon,” said Beale in a rare moment of brevity.
Five days later Rangers lost to Celtic in the first derby of the season at Ibrox and the Englishman could have packed his man bag and left by a side door there and then.
This time last year it was Clement’s turn to be chewed up and spewed out by the Champions League meat grinder.
After a 2-0 defeat by Dynamo Kyiv the Belgian blamed a Jefte dismissal for his team’s demise saying it was the ‘worst decision [he’d] seen in more than 30 years of football.’
Two weeks later Rangers lost 3-0 at Parkhead and supporters began to regard the day Clement got the job as a bigger cock-up than the red card flashed by Italian referee Marco Guida.
If Martin suffers the same Champions League fate as Beale and Clement and follows it with a defeat to Celtic days later, the former Scotland defender would have a notion of how Custer felt at the Alamo.
The job of bedding in a raft of new signings, fixing the heads of the old ones and finding a winning style of play takes time and patience.
Change the manager before Christmas and the new regime become indistinguishable from the old one. Rightly, they aspire to change the record, hold their nerve and take the club in a more stable direction while Martin speaks of ignoring the outside noise. The trick is to prevent the din growing so loud that the men in grey suits are left with no choice.
Martin compares the task of transforming Rangers to turning around a tanker and to stop oil spewing into the River Clyde he really needs a number of things. A strong supportive boardroom, a decent left-back, a central defender comfortable on the left side, a nailed-on goal scorer and a west end cuppa with Andy Halliday. The last thing he needs now is a one-way ticket to the killing fields of the UEFA Champions League.
