Rangers overcame a physical and stuffy St Mirren side thanks to two moments of quality provided by Cyriel Dessers and, first of all, Nedim Bajrami, in the buildup to the two goals scored.
The manager would have wanted his team to kill the game off quicker, however, there was a light at the end of the tunnel for Philippe Clement if his squad can fix just one problem on a more consistent basis.
Getting into positions to score goals isn’t what is holding Rangers back, as seen at Ibrox against St Mirren, it is what is happening once opportunities are opened up.
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Rangers creativity isn’t the biggest problem for Philippe Clement
Looking at statistics site FotMob, Rangers xG – expected goals – was 2.24 for the 90 minutes with five big chances missed.
The following images highlight perfectly what is going wrong and why Ibrox is a bag of nerves when games are in the balance.
Expected goals is a useful tool for measuring, over a period of time, how creative a team is when looking at the quality and quantity of chances being created.
Take this example of Dessers failing to execute an easy lay-off to Vaclav Cerny at 1-1, it could have been costly, it also didn’t register on the chance count or xG count.
It was Rangers best chance of the half to get their noses in front and it typifies the biggest issue that Clement must deal witth.
None of these images led to goals and only one of them led to a save being forced – this one from Cerny, who couldn’t quite find the far corner.
Does Clement even know what the issue is?
Rangers fans have been unhappy with Clement recently, but when he spoke to the Sky Sports about the performance after the game and emphasised a similar point – it could, and should have been more than 2-1:
“The performance could have been better, you need a third goal for that because when you score the third the opponent comes out more and maybe you score a fourth.
“It’s about winning the points and about deserving to win the points and clearly today we created most of the chances and we scored two goals and two good goals.
“We had a really good performance on Thursday [in the Europa league] we had an ok performance today, but we started with seven new players who weren’t in the building two months ago.
“They need to get this experience to become better. That’s a work in progress so it’s important to take this well-deserved point.”
Rangers are never going to play like Man City or Barcelona under Clement, but the aggressive and front foot style of play that he is looking for will rely on the right decisions being taken by the players in moments like these.
If they aren’t made against Aberdeen, the manager’s future could well be decided by them.
