Giving Russell Martin a Rangers Chance Is A Dangerous Game | OneFootball

With the appointment of Russell Martin, it is abundantly clear the Rangers fans are once again slightly split. The minority, to be fair, are those giving him absolute, steadfast backing in the sense of believing he’s the right man. The mid-range are more vague give him a chance notion, hoping that he might be the right man. But a very strong chunk do believe he is the wrong man. But regardless, the give him a chance crew are very strong and vocal in their protestations over anyone who has misgivings about this appointment, which is of course, abundantly, the wrong appointment.

So now we have the situation where we have a manager who like many before him has come from the mid to upper level championship. Michael Beale and Mark Warburton are the two cases in point of when Rangers went for an upper mid level championship manager and it just did not work out. It was okay for Warburton in the Scottish Championship of course but in the Scottish Premiership quite a different ball game, quite a different story. And we’ve seen this movie several times now. Beale was another. These mid-level managers who don’t have the stock to take the pressure that is with Rangers in the Scottish Premiership. It’s a tough gig and it’s only a small number of people who can handle it. One of them could have been Brian Priske.

The former Feyenoord manager, in fact, was champion at Sparta Prague, a club who have very similar demands to Rangers, and who have won a similar number of titles as well. They had 37 or 38 when he took over, and he took over a side that was a sleeping giant, expected to win, but incapable of doing so. Sound familiar? Yes, he took them to two titles. He turned around their mentality entirely, and made them champions again. That is what Rangers need. Unfortunately, that’s not what we’ve been given. We’ve been given Russell Martin.

Martin has no attributes that scream of a Rangers manager. Now many might say well what is a Rangers manager? Who is the right man? And it’s true they were struggling to find that man in general terms although we have just quoted one potential earlier on in this piece.

But we certainly do know what the wrong one is and Martin fits that beautifully. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. And the majority of fans do know this. They know he’s not of the pressure levels that are required at Rangers. They know that he doesn’t have the career or CV that a Rangers manager needs. There’s nothing about him which screams of a suitable Rangers manager.

So we are left with those fans screaming give him a chance FFS. And we do understand that blind optimism and faith. We get why they’re doing it. They want their team to be successful and this is the card, the hand, that they’ve been dealt with. Well you have to deal with what you’ve been given, that is very true. But the reality is there is a very very bad hand that we’ve been given again by an ownership or board that simply doesn’t understand or care about what Rangers actually need.

Just like the previous regime didn’t. So at the end of the day we cannot see how on earth Russell Martin is going to be of the stock to make Rangers champions. Heck even the players we’re being linked with sum up what the same movie that we’ve seen before showed us. League One championship the occasional modest Continental player. It is the same mediocrity as before and don’t even get us started on him appointing Tavernier captain again. So yeah our optimism is very modest to say the least. We are extremely pessimistic. We’re fairly sure that this is the wrong guy but the give him a chance crew will always stick up for him and that’s fair enough we suppose. We’ll just accept the abuse that will come our way whenever we’re skeptical.

But hopefully they prove us wrong.