Rangers limped out of the Scottish Cup and all but handed Celtic another treble in the process with Philippe Clement the latest boss to fail domestically.
The manager has struggled all season away from home with Ibrox being a relative fortress until a mid-table Championship side provided too tough a test.
Worryingly, Clement doesn’t seem willing to take any responsibility for a result that is the worst in Rangers’ history at home in the Scottish Cup.
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Philippe Clement fires back at Rangers tactics complaint
Speaking after a dismal performance against Queen’s Park, the Gers gaffer absolved himself of all the blame:
“OK, but if you look purely to the result, yes, it’s nothing to do today with tactics or with putting too many other players or whatever. This is one of the days that doesn’t happen so much, that’s true,” Clement claimed.
“It doesn’t happen so much that you have that many chances and you don’t score goals, that you have 12 shots on target, that you don’t score a goal.
“Maybe the team wanted too much in the second half to score it and because of that lost composure. It’s nothing to do with the work that the team has been doing the last couple of months.”
Clement is placing far too much weight on a run of results that came when there was little to play for.
The Scottish Premiership title was all but over in November and there is little pressure other than the standard expectation to win.
A pressure that some seem incapable of handling.
Does Clement insult fans with tactics claim?
For Clement to say that tactics had nothing to do with the defeat is an insult though.
As a manager who always talks about “beating the block”, he doesn’t seem to have any plan of how to do it.
For 90 minutes, Rangers wingers drove into the middle of the box and into a packed area or, the full backs threw hopeful crosses into centre halves who love nothing better than to compete for headers.
There was no change of approach, Vaclav Cerny stayed on the right when his dribbling ability might have been better suited on the left to get Rangers behind the Queen’s Park defence.
When plan A is questionable, not having a plan B is unacceptable.
It’s even more worrying when the manager doesn’t think that there is anything wrong with plan A.
