By David Herd
MATCHES NEXT WEEK:
RANGERS V DUNDEE UNITED PREMIERSHIP SAT 18 OCTOBER 15:00
Most Read on FollowFollow.com It Happened This Week – October 17 to October 23. Russell Martin’s Waterloo – Rangers 0-1 Genk Russell Martin quotes from Graz
SK BRANN V RANGERS EUROPA LEAGUE THU 23 OCTOBER 17:45
Welcome to the latest edition of the website’s weekly preview feature.
The painful, embarrassing and ridiculous Russell Martin eras is mercifully over. A man never suited to lead our club, and a man who the fans knew from day one would fail, did indeed fail. And the decision to hire him has left us in a monumental mess on and off the pitch. Mass protests, eighth place in the league, five successive defeats in Europe, and a massive financial hole created for the club to absorb. All goodwill towards the owners has been just about used up, as the majority of supporters have turned their justified anger towards the Sporting Director and the CEO for overseeing this complete shambles.
And the recruitment of his successor hasn’t seen the club look any better. The open letter from the owners might as well have said “don’t worry, we will give you Steven Gerrard”, while at the same time the man himself was telling the world how he had “unfinished business” and wanted to go to a club “who challenge for trophies”. His second spell in charge seemed a formality, but this is Rangers 2025, and nothing ever seems to go smoothly. Gerrard walked away, for whatever reason, after things initially appearing to be all on track, and we then went into total farce. Danny Rohl was favourite, but the reaction to this was so negative that suddenly Kevin Muscat was favourite despite there being no contact yet with his club in China. We might have an interim boss, we might not. Ex-Manchester United players tell us that their former Norwegian manager has been sounded out, then the bookies make Gerrard favourite again. Then Rohl withdraws, presumably because either he was fed up waiting for a reply, or he didn’t want to be the one to get knocked back. At the time of writing this, the only certainty is that the team will have the club’s Under-19s coach in charge this weekend, while we all expect to hear confirmation that Muscat will be the next Rangers Head Coach. Every fan wishes Stevie Smith well in a situation that he had no control over, and we thank him for stepping in such difficult circumstances. And if Kevin Muscat does get the honour of leading Rangers FC, we hope he proves his doubters wrong and provides the winning, attacking football that all of us crave.
It’s hard to escape the obvious conclusion that the club’s senior leaders actually didn’t know who or what they wanted when Gerrard turned them down, they had assumed he would come back and the fans would then give them peace. We got total silence from them for days on end after promising a swift process, and that just allowed the vacuum to be filled by the usual rumours and “leaked” Whatsapp messages, none of them actually believable but all of them grabbed onto by a support desperate for news. And desperate to see an appointment in time for the match on Saturday, as the upcoming run of games look crucial in the season.
The summer saw us all welcome the new ownership, and look forward to an era of greater professionalism, greater financial muscle, and greater success. It’s not unfair to say that since then, just about everything the club has done has gone wrong. If Kevin Thelwell’s performance at the club is not giving the American owners serious cause for concern, then I’m not sure how awful he needs to get. From choosing Martin, to deciding on a strategy of Rangers being a “development” club, to recruiting too many project players, to hiring his pals from Everton instead of looking far and wide were all bad enough to warrant dismissal. He then told us Russell Martin was one of the best coaches around, which was beyond unbelievable. But to then pay his old club £8 million+ for a striker who can’t score, then give the Head of Recruitment role to his hopelessly under-qualified son, and then take over a fortnight to hire someone in place of Martin when it’s been plain for weeks he would get sacked is beyond bad performance. It is taking this club for mugs, and his position looks increasingly untenable.
Above him, the hapless and hopeless Patrick Stewart in his time as Chief Executive has given his full backing to Philippe Clement then sacked him two weeks later, and has told us we can’t keep sacking managers, then sacked another one. He was quick to apologise to our enemies for a display that had nothing to say sorry about (I suspect he had no idea who Graeme Souness was), and he told us that he had a list of club traditions from John Gilligan then allowed the last head coach to look like a well-dressed tramp instead of a Rangers manager. He signed off on Purdy and Thelwell junior, he recruited Thelwell senior. The fact that the owners seem to be backing both him and Thelwell is a massive concern.
The last fortnight has created the impression that our top executives are writing this season off – in October. The whole point in sacking Martin was to rescue the season, not to discard it and wait months for Rangers to try to be Rangers again. I expect there to be a loud, angry, and poisonous Ibrox on Saturday with Thelwell and Stewart in the firing line now they have lost their terrible Head Coach to hide behind. To be honest, neither of them have much cause for complaint if that does happen.
What could yet save them is a Rangers team who now go on a winning run, including the upcoming semi-final. If Kevin Muscat is the man about to be named, I really do hope we don’t have to wait till the end of November for his arrival. We need our new man as quickly as possible. I have bad memories of caretaker managers in League Cup semi-finals…
PREDICTION TIME
RANGERS 2 DUNDEE UNITED 0
It’s anyone’s guess how good the current Rangers squad are, they have been motivated and organised so far by the worst head coach / manager to ever represent Rangers. It’s also anyone’s guess as to how long it might take to get them to totally forget the nonsensical approach drummed into them for weeks and to show why most of them arrived with decent reputations. And to complete the unknowns, few of us will have any idea what the man in temporary charge will have in mind in the way of tactics or team selection.
This is the fourth Rangers home game in the league of 2025/26, and so far we have won none and scored just a solitary penalty goal. Things, surely, must get better. The scoreline prediction is one based on the law of averages and blind optimism.
BRANN 1 RANGERS 1
Rangers last lost six successive European matches in that horrific Champions League campaign of 2022, but that was against teams of genuine top quality. Now, we are facing a sixth defeat in a row, and against teams who the Rangers of recent European history would have surely swatted aside. Our coefficient is sinking like a stone, and the loss of prize money as big a worry as the reputational damage being caused. And when we go to Norway next midweek, who knows what the name of the head coach leading them will be.
Brann sit in third place in the Norwegian league, which is reaching the end of the season rather than just starting. In the Europa League, they lost narrowly away to Lille (Hamza Igamane scoring), then defeated the Dutch side Utrecht at home. They will see this as a great chance to get on to six points with a chance of qualification. Defeat for us will leave us looking at elimination, who would put any money on us getting anything from Roma, Porto or Braga in the games to come. Maybe a draw, and both teams avoiding defeat, would be an outcome that both teams could paint as acceptable. Again, it’s a prediction based on nothing other than thinking we can’t just keep losing.
PLAYER OF THE WEEK
This will return next week, no Rangers games in the last seven days.