Rangers: Clement reveals he’s been selecting injured players | OneFootball

Rangers manager Philippe Clement has made the shock admission that, effectively, he’s had to wilfully ‘injure’ players this season in the face of adversity.

Speaking recently, the Govan boss has had a colossal injury crisis to deal with, and when it was put to him about his strategy of selecting players and minutes and trying to allocate them, his reply was telling:

Translation:

He’s been caught into the vicious cycle of Rangers’ ongoing injuries by having to select players who weren’t ready, so he says.

So the Kemar Roofes, Simas, and other players who had ongoing injury issues, Clement found himself still using them anyway knowing full well he’d cause likely further and more serious issues.

Now, the worrying issue here is what he said about Dujon Sterling less than two months ago, when he talked about definitively reintroducing him gradually because anything else would lead to longer-term injury.

All the while he was already doing that anyway with Sterling and other players, and now admits that openly. AKA he was saying one thing but doing another behind the scenes.

Where does the blame lie here?

With Clement, for selecting players who he now openly admits aren’t fit?

Or the medical staff for not getting them fit quickly enough?

Or the players themselves for breaking down so easily?

It’s a bit of all three, really – Clement is selecting players who aren’t ready, and he now openly accepts that, and this only means the cycle worsens.

Some will argue that if he doesn’t, he doesn’t have a team – and that’s the argument he makes.

But then, he kept Roofe off that surface in February to stop injury, and yet selected Cortes for it, who ended up out for the season from it.

We’re not quite sure he really knows exactly what he’s doing, here.