Rangers gap to Celtic widens more than under Beale | OneFootball

Rangers are now officially worse off than at any time under Michael Beale, after Philippe Clement’s side finished 8 points behind Celtic, beating Beale’s deficit both at the end of last season, and the gap behind when he left.

The gap to Celtic is now the longest it’s been since the early Steven Gerrard days, since 2019 when Celtic won the league by 9 points, and despite this, the fan tribalism behind Philippe Clement and the blame culture on the players are both at epidemic proportions.

We’re sure, already, that the rage seething at this article from the support section who whine about negativity or yell ‘support the team ffs’ is currently hitting fever pitch, but all Ibrox Noise has ever done is present the facts as they are.

And the fact is that Clement under Rangers now are worse than at any point since May 2019 and Steven Gerrard.

The Beale factor is done – Rangers are now worse than at any point under him, and while again, the fans are foaming at their mouths screaming at us for ‘hating’ (of course we don’t hate him) Clement, and yelling ‘WELL WE’LL GET BEALE BACK THEN SHALL WE’ the table doesn’t lie.

It didn’t lie under Gerrard, Gio, Beale or Clement, and we’re further behind Celtic now than at any point in the past 5 years.

Fans keep on blaming the players, but it wasn’t them who selected Borna, put Sterling out of position, kept praising Tav and Goldson, kept putting Silva up front. And before you argue injuries, Gio suffered with them as well and went through the UCL with James Sands, Leon King and Ben Davies at the back and didn’t have half the backing from fans at the time that Clement is enjoying and also didn’t do anywhere near as badly in the league.

We actually probably are more on the players’ side overall here – simply because the buck ALWAYS stops with the manager.

If the results aren’t there on the pitch, and the manager has been making the same mistakes since he arrived, how much blame can be given to the players?

If it’s Borna and not Ridvan, if it’s Tav and not Balogun (much better RB by far btw) and it’s Sterling wasted on the wings, what exactly can those players do when the manager is putting them there?

They can run, work hard, but they are being shoved out of their comfort zones and they can’t play the positions they’re being asked to.

And the number of times Clement has picked the wrong XI during our horrible run certainly didn’t help, did it?

We do have a bad squad, true, and it absolutely needs an overhaul, yes, but it’s still SURELY better than the remaining 10 sides in the SPL, and it still can’t get results against half of them either.

It’s not even just about beating Celtic, it’s about being clearly better than the rest of the SPL at the very, very least, and over the past 10 matches, Rangers were 4th in the league, 5th if you take Aberdeen’s results in the lower split division into account.

But given Ross County and Motherwell from that same division got results against us, we’re not sure it makes a difference which half of the split.

No, Rangers are in immense trouble under this manager, and with this squad.

But let’s just support the team and manager ffs, eh?