Philippe Clement may be out of his depth at Rangers | OneFootball

We’re going to be bold and ask if Philippe Clement really is the right man to take Rangers forward.

The reality is the record over the last 10 SPL matches was a disgrace, worse than any manager in the post-2012 SPL era aside Pedro, and that includes all the Murty, Warburton, Gio, Beale and Gerrard declines.

You can blame the players all you like, say they’ve let down all these managers previously, but no one aside the crazy Portuguese came close to being as bad as Philippe Clement these final 10 matches (and at that point Pedro was gone, it was Murty and Nicholl), and they had notably worse squads.

We’re talking defences in years gone by with Senderos and Clint Hill, we’re talking midfields with absolute mince like Rossiter and Kranjcar, even Andy Halliday and Matt Crooks – these guys all played in SPL Rangers and none of these squads going back to 2016 and promotion onwards plummeted the way this current regime has.

There is absolutely no doubt that Clement has lost the dressing room – you can whine about injuries all you like but these players, who you all say ‘have let down previous managers too’ are way, way worse, less organised and completely messed up under this manager.

Let’s not lie and say they’re not working hard – we are ALL seeing them running around like idiots a lot of the time, they are pressing, they are making runs, but the football just isn’t there. The tactics aren’t there. We are playing a winger system without wingers. Sounds familiar? Exactly the same thing Beale did.

Look at how many times we’ve seen our players running around aimlessly – Todd Cantwell, Ross McCausland, Cyriel Dessers.

The workrate is there, and in terms of pressing we’re seeing a lot of them close opponents down.

But the actual coherence of the gameplan is not clear. There is no identity. The tactics haven’t adapted to the injuries, haven’t seen an alteration to the gameplan to accommodate the players fit.

Clement got away for about 20 matches with New Manager Bounce, and because we were getting a bit of luck with it (which Steven Naismith called out, and many fans agreed with him), we all decided this guy was a genius and the team was now a smooth-running machine.

The football since then hasn’t changed much, but the results caved.

And the big worry?

It’s exactly what happened at Monaco. He crumpled last summer at Monaco at the business end just like he did this summer. They lost second place and ended up 6th and out of Europe, and he was fired.

History has repeated itself in terms of his performance.

Are we defending the players – partially yes. Clement has not managed them well at all, and it’s too easy to say they’re all rubbish. Yes, they’re not Rangers Standard, we admit that, and we do need a clear out, but the last 10 matches haven’t even been Hearts Standard.

That isn’t the players, that’s the manager. The manager who refuses to put Sterling in midfield. Who kept on selecting the hopeless Silva, who kept choosing Lundstram despite his heart now elsewhere – pretty sure Barisic was playing a lot as well.

He has smacked of absolute cluelessness the past few months, and we fear the summer window going forward with him. And that’s even before Celtic’s infinitely bigger budget.

We’ve run polls and 90% of fans claim they still trust him – fair enough, but we do think it’s more that they want to trust him. There’s no evidence that he’s the right man any more.

We thought we had Harry Potter in this guy, but it’s far from magic any more.