Three years ago I wrote the article Fourth Tier, No Tears for this very site. In it I expressed the hope that Rangers would use the club’s time in the 4th tier of Scottish football as an opportunity. An opportunity to shed a lot of baggage and to build a solid platform for long-term success.
Did that happen?
Did it f***.
Rangers’ time outside of Scotland’s top flight will go down as being one of the greatest missed opportunities that Scottish football has ever known. It makes Chris Iwelumo look clinical.
So what went wrong? Well, we already know about Sir David Murray and Craig Whyte’s earlier roles, so let’s look to the figures who were in play when I wrote that previous article.
Charles Green presided over a revolving door boardroom at Ibrox and appears to have been instrumental in allowing/welcoming the presence of some particularly controversial figures in it. What he also did was either allow or facilitate a situation in which Rangers’ youth structure was stripped back; the very structure which should have been developed to allow for a stable long-term future.
Although Green and Ally McCoist seemed to be at loggerheads for much of their time together at Ibrox, they both played their part in devastating the returns potentially on offer from the club developing its own talent.
Lewis Macleod, Barrie McKay and Fraser Aird made decent impacts in 2012/13 (the season Rangers spent in the 4th tier)… but McCoist had also signed Ian Black, Emilson Cribari, Anestis Argyriou, Sebastian Faure, Francesco Stella (?!), David Templeton, Dean Shiels, Francisco Sandaza and Kevin Kyle.
Last year, the former Rangers boss commented:
“If we’d fielded a team of youngsters we wouldn’t have won the league. I don’t care what anyone says, I don’t think it would have happened.”
Bear in mind that Rangers started that season with Neil Alexander, Lee McCulloch, Lee Wallace and (admittedly a fringe player until then, but a Northern Ireland international) Andy Little. What McCoist was saying was that a team training full-time, with a spine of 4 internationalists and the rest made up of still some of Scotland’s best young talent (unless the claim is that Annan Athletic’s scouting system surpassed that of Rangers) couldn’t have won the Third Division.
To me, that says less about the Third Division and more about McCoist’s coaching. Especially as the desperation to get bodies in meant signing players who would turn out to have no place in the kind of formations that McCoist actually liked to play.
It became apparent that in a world which had turned to 4-2-3-1 or (or 4-3-3 that switched to 4-5-1 when the ball was lost), McCoist remained obsessed with having two men up front in a 4-4-2 or 4-1-3-2 formation. The problem with this? Signing players like Shiels and Templeton who like to play behind a main striker but then putting out sides with no space for them.
Still, Rangers moved up to the 3rd tier with Francisco Sandaza having been sacked along the way and Kevin Kyle paid off. Barrie McKay didn’t get a look in until Christmas, at which point he was punted off to Morton on-loan.
Of course, McCoist’s signing-mania (like he’d been bitten by a radioactive Harry Redknapp) continued. Ricky Foster and Steven Smith arrived for nostalgia’s sake, followed by Jon Daly, Nicky Clark, Nicky Law, Bilel Mohsni, Arnold Peralta and Cammy Bell.
Charlie Telfer would go on to make one substitute appearance that season before turning down a new contract and decamping to Dundee United, to become young player of the month in the Scottish Premiership.
What about the actual football being played though? Well, in general the model was that we’d go in 0-0 at half-time having created nothing from open play. In the 2nd half against tiring part-timers, our superior physical strength would pay off and we’d get a goal from a free-kick or corner – usually finished off by Jon Daly. An increasingly tired and demoralised opposition might ship another goal or two to add a bit more shine to a fairly dreadful display.
‘Stopping’ 3rd-tier opponents seemed to be the main aim as Arnold Peralta – a classic snarling central-midfield lunatic – was preferred on the right-wing to Templeton, Aird or McKay. It was a bewildering move which helped bring a premature end to any hopes the Honduran may have had of making an impact in Scottish football or winning over the fans.
If Brian Laudrup had arrived at Ibrox and been played in goals for a dozen matches, the fans would probably have been pissed off by his performances too.
If nothing else, you thought that maybe there was a level of psychopathic, pragmatic calm to McCoist’s decision to send out sides set up to create nothing then rely on the ball bouncing off Jon Daly’s head with ten minutes left. I thought he was at least aware of it.
This season though – the season when the chaos engulfing the club had become too much and I decided against a season-ticket for the first time in 20 years – it became clear that Ally didn’t even know how he was getting the results that he did.
Jon Daly’s a battering ram (albeit, credit to him, one with surprisingly good feet), while Kris Boyd’s a poacher. McCoist slotted Boyd into the side in place of Jon Daly this season yet proceeded to play in the same way and simply couldn’t understand why no goals were arriving.
Even after he’d departed, it turned out that a shell-shocked Kenny McDowall had no separate ideas from McCoist. For example, the ‘Stunned One’ explained that Dean Shiels was a good player but didn’t really fit into the formation Rangers he liked to play as he felt Rangers needed two men up front for “firepower”. This off the back of a run of matches when Rangers were struggling to score as two strikers would wander around alone, cut off from the ball by the absence of any creative players behind them.
Back to young players then. With McDowall’s departure, Andy Murdoch stepped into the limelight, along with Tom Walsh and Ryan Hardie – putting paid to the notion that there simply weren’t any young players available who could make an impact.
Barrie McKay? He spent most of the season on loan to Raith Rovers. When Raith beat Rangers in the Challenge Cup Final (a game he missed due to being unable to play against his parent club) it occurred to me that it was bizarre that he was apparently good enough to get a game for that Raith side but not the Rangers side they’d just beaten.
So what happens now? Well, we’ve finally got a board in place who are talking about the long-term – great.
According to reports, this week will see the appointment of Mark Warburton, who has experience from Brentford of being both a Director of Football and a promotion-winning coach – great.
They’re saying we don’t need a Director of Football – umm…
They’re saying that we need to spend big to put together a side capable of competing in the top-flight – aw f***, not this again.
Gasparotto, Murdoch, Stoney, Walsh, Gallagher, McKay, Hardie, Aird… let’s see what they can actually do please. And then let’s give them the opportunity to get better at doing it.
If we are going to sign players, let’s make sure that they can play in the formation that the coach actually wants to play and let’s make sure that they have the ability and desire to improve. Players need to have a sell-on value instead of the phone number for a good pension-planner.
Oh, and please tell me that Mark Warburton’s aware of a loophole in Lewis Macleod’s contract…
By the way, I’m aware that I haven’t touched on the Easdales or Mike Ashley in this article. Please don’t interpret that as letting them off the hook; it’s just that I don’t have the time to turn this article into a book.
