Giovanni van Bronckhorst should have gone home on Wednesday night, slept on the defeat from Liverpool at Ibrox then tendered his resignation on Thursday morning.
He is a good and decent man but the Dutchman’s moral authority to be Rangers’ manager was, to my way of thinking, lost on the back of an ignominious performance and 7-1 loss against Liverpool. There has been an inglorious succession of low moments for Rangers during the wilderness years created by the mismanagement of the club’s financial affairs.
The night when a lead, and a game, was lost to Alloa Athletic at the Indodrill Stadium. The day, 10 years ago this month, when Stirling Albion won against them by a single goal at Forthbank. The time when the hapless Pedro Caixinha went out of Europe to the fourth best team in Luxembourg then went rubbery in the shrubbery outside the home of Progres Niederkorn while under verbal attack from disgusted supporters. But those embarrassing episodes were enacted under circumstances unlikely to induce a state of hysteria.
The club was then on what they like to term the ‘Journey’ through the lower leagues back to the division they left on the back of administration and liquidation. When things happened then it kind of went with the territory. But Liverpool in the Champions League is the stuff of global television audiences and therefore worldwide ridicule.
The television pictures of thousands of Rangers fans streaming out of Ibrox while their team was still three goals short of their final, humiliating tally would be the ones that illustrated the story best of all. Because every individual who turned their back on what was going on and fled into the night was destroying a long-held belief at the same time.
So much for Ibrox being the place where the fans create an atmosphere that reduces opposition of a high profile to low self-esteem and, ultimately, renders them unable to compete to an acceptable standard.
On their first ever competitive visit to the stadium, Liverpool appeared not to get the memo about falling apart under the weight of spectator-created duress. And they didn’t even have anything like their recognised strongest starting XI. Not what the fans are looking for when they’re forking out £60 a head for a ticket. That’s a tenner for every goal Jurgen Klopp’s side scored in that calamitous second half. It was also a a night of torment that reduced Scottish football to the status of a laughing stock.
While sleep, as toiling defender Borna Barisic admitted afterwards, was difficult to come by in the aftermath of a nightmare, Ibrox chief executive Stewart Robertson’s reverie should have been disturbed for another reason. Surely it has gave him cause for reflection in the dead of night?
After all, he’s the figurehead at a club where there is a belief that Scottish football does not get the broadcasting revenue it deserves as it is governed by people who are unfit for purpose. Rangers are certainly not the only Scottish club giving rise to the opinion that this country has become a backwater in terms of European football – far from it.
But a public flogging of the sort they endured against Liverpool put the tin lid on a season that needs a veil thrown over it quickly. Robertson, and Rangers, should be glad the record deal between Sky and the SPFL is now signed and legally binding for the next five years.
There will, of course, be those who dismiss what happened against Liverpool, impossible though that should be. They will argue that European competition is a considerable distance away from what is the most important thing in life. And that’s being successful at Celtic’s expense on the domestic front. Far be it for me to get in the way of those who are locked in a hermetically-sealed bubble where deep division and mutual loathing is all they have for company. But football’s 21st Century world of sophistication at a European level has, on the evidence of Wednesday night, left Rangers behind.
The supporters who believe the world is restricted to ‘us’ and ‘them’ might be fine with that. But what if Van Bronckhorst can’t do it in the narrowed down version of the world? His approval rating with a growing percentage of fans is diminishing. He has managed, improbably, to lighten the mood of the Celtic support while their own team struggles in Europe, with just one point out of 12 in their group.
Next Gio and Rangers have to go to Napoli next Wednesday while the Italians are carrying all before them in a Champions League group that is suffocating Gers. But it’s not good enough to say it is “too much to ask” for Rangers to compete at this level. All managers are supposed to find a way to rise above adversity and not advertise the hopelessness of their situation.
Adversity is supposed to fire the imagination and not dampen enthusiasm before a ball has been kicked. The so-called Battle of Britain turned into a Tale of Two Cities. There’s a reason why the one on the Mersey got the Eurovision Song Contest ahead of the one on the banks of the Clyde. They’ve got something to sing about in Liverpool.
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