Rangers fans went into the 2024/25 Scottish Premiership campaign with optimism from the performances we saw under manager Philippe Clement in the 2023/24 season, and whilst everyone was hoping we would kick on further and take another step under our Belgian gaffer, a number of fans had concerns that we had pivoted too far in our summer transfer strategy and that going more youthful would eventually come back to bite us.
Sadly it had long looked like that would be the case given how we started the year, as European performances aside, we have constantly struggled for appropriate performance levels and a baseline of consistency to deliver the results we all expect.
The hope was that following the November international break things would click in a way that they had not before but there was a sense of beginners luck thrown into that hope. We were unbeaten across the month, with back to back domestic wins and when football returned we just absolutely had to ensure that the points gap to top spot did not grow.
So cue an Ibrox tie with Dundee United who were a little bit too close for comfort in the table, and rather predictably another dominating performance was married with a woeful showing in and around their penalty box. 71% possession and a mind blowing 29 attempts on goal resulted in only nine efforts on target, with a solitary effort in the 66th minute beating their goalkeeper.
Making things worse was the fact that the visitors scored 30 minutes earlier with their only attempt on target across the entire 90 minutes. 1-1 was how it finished and our deficit now stands at eleven full points, and well, to put it bluntly the runners up spot looks increasingly unlikely now, let alone closing the gap fully and making a late charge for top spot.
The more pessimistic amongst the faithful will now have one eye fearfully looking behind us, and whilst Clement was undoubtedly trying to temper expectations, the continued growing anger and take some pressure off the players in the hope that they would quickly respond and improve, there will certainly be those fans out there who feel his after match comments were the proverbial throwing in of the towel when he said ‘we don’t need to speak about titles now’.
The 50 year old former international centre half was saying all the right things again when it came to how it was ‘not acceptable’ to have dropped this many points, but even his strongest supporters would now be saying a manager can only talk about ‘raising our level’ so often when we consistently fail to do just that, and ultimately he is the man in charge and he cannot keep explaining away his own failure and promising improvement when we can all see very little is actually changing.
Dropping points at Ibrox for the first time this year is an unfortunate cherry on top and will simply fuel the press reaction and calls for a switch, but where we go from here is anyone’s guess at this point in time.
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