Perception is everything.
When Rangers were banging their heads against the Champions League brick walls that were Ajax, Liverpool and Napoli, a common conception was that we simply weren’t putting in the effort, the players weren’t as fit and we miles off the level of work rate that we saw last season.
Our distance covered statistic was the lowest in the group so the correlation that we weren’t as fit led to us being so poor must be accurate – right?
Wrong. There is far more to it than that.
Take Celtic as a comparison. An easy one seeing as they are who we measure ourselves against in both the good times and the bad.
One of us ran 666kms across our six group games, the other 598kms. That means that one of the teams is far fitter than the other, doesn’t it?
Again, wrong.
It was actually Rangers who ran the furthest, over 10kms a game further in fact, and yet, they seemed a lot more competitive than us, registering twice as many attempts at goal in the process.
As an article in The Athletic explains, it’s so much more than just total distance that matters. For example, a team might run straight back into defence to recover and sit in a low block before running in the opposite direction to counter-attack, and yet, they could register a similar total distance to a team that tries to win the ball back quickly by engaging in a high intensity, high press.
Fitness and how far we ran isn’t why we were so poor in the Champions League, injuries, poor tactics and bad luck were a much bigger factor. If success was as simple as just being fitter and running more, football would be an easy game to master.