Rangers and the paradox of a painful exit that boosts their trophy chances

Rangers booking their place in the Tin Pot playoffs, earlier. Photograph: Kirk O’Rourke/Rangers FC/Shutterstock

Rangers and the paradox of a painful exit that boosts their trophy chances

AND NOW FOR SOME PERSPECTIVE

All new managers want to hit the ground running. But landing with a dull thud has never been a barrier to future glory, certainly not at Ibrox. Take Graeme Souness, whose start as Rangers’ player-manager put the ‘pish’ in ‘inauspicious’. On his league debut, away to Hibs, he was sent off in the first half after a revenge attack on the wrong mullet. Rangers lost 2-1 and were beaten in the third game as well. Graeme out! Rangers won the League Cup and finished the season as champions for the first time in nine years.

Dick Advocaat had a similarly awkward start in 1998. In his first game, played at Tranmere’s Prenton Park, Rangers went 3-0 down to Shelbourne in the first leg of their Big Vase tie. They went through comfortably in the end but lost the first league game a few days later. Dic-Advocaat out! Rangers had to settle for a domestic treble that season. Different times, when toys were played with for more than a few seconds before being launched from the pram with maximum force, followed a few seconds later by a handful of freshly sourced excreta. In 2026, alas, hot air and horse pucky are an acceptable substitute for reasonable discourse. And so, after failing to win any of his first four games as Rangers manager, Derek McInnes is “out of his depth” and a “dead man walking”.

Que Sera, Sera? Eff that! Turns out the future is ours to see after four games, two of them in a competition Rangers had no chance of winning anyway. Football Daily hasn’t a clue if McInnes is up to the Brobdingnagian challenge of managing Rangers, one that most tea-timely newsletters don’t really understand. But we do know that a culture of self-fulfilling poppycock, where ostentatious negativity is football’s version of the fatberg and many people would rather be right than happy, is a stain on our daily bread.

That said, what a roflcopter of a start! Given the events of last season, it was never going to be an equanimity-cultivating experience for a new Rangers manager to see Russell Martin’s start and lower it. Rangers have one point from two league games and are out of Bigger Vase after the most costly 1-1 draw against Polish opposition on British soil since Brian Clough called somebody a clown. Paradoxically, the aggregate defeat to Jagiellonia Bialystok – and subsequent drop into Tin Pot – has increased Rangers’ chances of winning a trophy under McInnes. Time will tell whether those chances have increased from 0.0000001% to 0.0000002%, from 9% to 9.4% or from some other figure to some other figure. Right now, the supercomputers know, and the bairns in the prams certainly don’t.

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QUOTE OF THE DAY

“If Gianni Infantino doesn’t get re-elected unanimously, then whoever voted against him needs to get their head examined” – Andrew Giuliani, the chief suit of the White House Task Force for the Geopolitics World Cup, emerges from Donald Trump’s fundament to give his view on the Fifa crisis. Alas, Giuliani’s interview with the Athletic didn’t take place at Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

Gianni Infantino doing loads of things that Andrew Giuliani approves of. Composite: Getty, Alamy, Reuters, Shutterstock

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