If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.
After not laying a glove for the first five minutes against Celtic, the Rangers players and management team decided that the best course of action was to do nothing and hope for the best, three or four outstanding Allan McGregor saves later and still, lessons hadn’t been learnt, we didn’t adapt and we got punished.
Sir Alex Ferguson always spoke about being proactive and not reactive, the game plan – whatever it was – obviously wasn’t working so why not change it; go to a flat three in midfield, press higher up the park, allow the full-backs to overlap in possession?
I wrote after the Aberdeen game that if we were passive against Celtic we would get punished, it was the one tactic that played into their hands and didn’t suit the players that we have in the squad. Nobody was moaning about the XI when it was announced but it was completely wrong for what they were trying to achieve.
Strangely though, in Ryan Jack’s post match interview and Giovanni van Bronckhorst’s there were suggestions that allowing Celtic to have so much time and space on the ball was down to the players rather than it being tactical, that we were the better team in the second half is of little consolation, the score was 3-0 and the game was all but over.
Against Aberdeen we threw away two points by letting them dictate the game, we had a lot of players missing but still enough quality to control the game against a team with David Bates and Ross McCrorie at the back, Livingston was a better performance given the conditions and players missing followed by Ross County which was an absolute freak, we should have won comfortably but for three ridiculous defensive mistakes.
There have been mitigating circumstances in the last few weeks for sub-par performances, I don’t think it has been systemic, against Celtic though it was the perfect storm of the manager and players all hoping something worked rather than doing anything about it when it didn’t.