RANGERS players can be forgiven if they feel like group of unloved mongrels.
Those they trust and look up to keep deciding to walk out on them. It is not even a month since Kenny Miller said Rangers suffered from "a severe lack of confidence" these days. "We lack belief in ourselves and our team-mates," he said. Miller coughed up this withering assessment about half an hour after they had been shredded by Hibs, when his views were understandably raw and trenchant.
Since then, Rangers have hawked off their most promising young player, Lewis Macleod, to Brentford for a modest fee. Their football department has limped on amid the latest installment of the ownership soap opera. Hearts have signed a battering ram striker of some pedigree, Genero Zeefuik, and Hibs have brought in Franck Dja Djedje and Martin Boyle. Rangers, potless of course, have done nothing which in any way compensates for Macleod's departure or strengthens their resources. The players who are out of contract this summer have had no indication that any attempt will be made to keep them.
That Hibs game on December 27 was Kenny McDowall's first as caretaker manager after Ally McCoist tendered his resignation and was quickly placed on gardening leave. Now McDowall has resigned too, although so far he remains in charge. What hope can there be for a team with "severe lack of confidence", which will be scattered to the winds in the summer, when it now looks to a leader who wants to get out as soon as he can?
We went through all of this only weeks ago, when McCoist announced he was stepping down: the commentary and analysis of how this never works in football, of how the fragile web of footballers' morale and confidence is broken when a manager says he wants to leave in a few months' time. Good teams see their form go into decline - Rangers themselves when Walter Smith said he was leaving in 1997-98, Manchester United when Sir Alex Ferguson intended to quit in 2001-02 - let alone one already "lacking belief in oursleves and our team-mates". Rangers are too far behind Hearts for automatic promotion to be realistic but promotion via the play-offs is no certainty now. Rangers have better players than Queen of the South and Falkirk, the teams in fourth and fifth, but they don't have the morale of either of them and that 4-0 rout at Easter Road after Christmas proved they were no match for Hibs.
Monday night was Rangers in microcosm: a development, followed by confusion and uncertainty. So McDowall was gone? No, wait, not quite. Social media burst into jokes about him joining McCoist on gardening leave. That wasn't true either. Maybe things will change - scratch that, of course they will, it's Rangers - and McDowall will be knocked into the metaphorical cabbage patch with McCoist for the remainder of his 12 months. But their circumstances are different. McCoist was a nuisance to the Rangers board of directors, a nuisance to them around the club and a nuisance with a weekly platform to address supporters via media conferences, however diplomatic he was in choosing his words. It was better for the board to shunt him into the long grass and to silence him.
McDowall does not have the influence of McCoist and there is no swirl of politics and intrigue around him. He is not a threat. Besides, removing McDowall from the coaching equation to put him on gardening leave would create a vacancy which would have to be filled, which would cost money. When McCoist went, McDowall stepped up, Gordon Durie and Ian Durrant exchanged positions and Lee McCulloch became player/coach. Four men to run the first team and the under-20s is stretching things, and removing McDowall and reducing the coaching team to three would be asking too much. This Rangers board, sitting there with its pockets hanging inside out, could jettison McDowall and try to find a low budget replacement, or it could simply tell him to carry on and eat into his notice period. The latter seems most likely.
Names like Ian Cathro, Billy Davies, Stuart McCall and Terry Butcher are tossed around and in normal circumstances those would be the calibre of manager and coach Rangers would consider. Instead the club has two factions fighting a power struggle and no money to spend until it is resolved. Thinking about the actual football team and what would be best for its promotion prospects may not be at the bottom of the list of priorities, but it's not far off. Rangers is a football club where football is an afterthought.
At his press conferences since taking over, McDowall's face has been tripping him. He has looked deeply uncomfortable, almost squirming, about occupying the position vacated by his pal. McDowall's coaching reputation was established over a decade with youth and reserve teams at Celtic and both McCoist and Walter Smith, who brought him to Rangers in 2007, talk effusively about his abilities on a training pitch. But he has never looked like he wanted a managerial position as big as the Rangers job. After only three full games he activated the countdown clock to get out as soon as he can.
He has been a flat, unhappy presence at the helm. For as long as he remains in charge he faces a task which has been beyond managers of far greater renown. Beyond Ferguson, even. McDowall must try to lift a dressing room for an Old Firm game and a promotion race when the players know he wants out. That is a scenario which only ever ends one way.
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