St Mirren are standing by to bully Rangers at Ibrox | OneFootball

Forget Thursday, and the ‘glory’ of gubbing the Romanian equivalent of Ross County, Rangers’ real bread and butter is today at Ibrox v St Mirren.

Stephen Robinson’s improving side will be a much stiffer test for the home team, sitting with a low block and more than willing to get their hands dirty, and after a losing streak they’ve arrested it with a win and two draws lately.

Robinson’s sides are notoriously physical, just ask Fabio Cardoso who took a shameless elbow to the nose under Robinson’s tactics in his Motherwell days.

He organises his teams well, and he tells them to take no quarter.

Rangers will have a battle today, because if there’s one thing Rangers aren’t (ok there’s quite a few things Rangers aren’t) it’s strong.

Not a single player in Rangers’ team aside defenders John Souttar and Leon Balogun is physically big and strong – every manager since Mark Warburton has insisted in fleet-foot lightweight players, and after the days of tough lads under Walter Smith, we’ve ended up with a team of absolute wimps.

Which shows Walter’s understanding of the SPL and his successors’ painful lack of it.

Igamane does look like a bit of a unit of a boy, but generally our team is lightweight and can’t just bully a team like St Mirren.

Which is why Govan at 3PM on Sunday will be a battle, and a bit of a slog.

Robinson will be instructing his men to mete out some roughness, and Rangers will pass the ball to death in our own half before a defender tries to lump it forward for a Cerny or Bajrami run, which will 50% of the time go out of play.

But of course, there’s every chance Rangers will somehow take their European form into domestic, and actually produce a strong dominant performance.

In terms of team selection we reported that Philippe Clement is missing up to 6 players, which doesn’t make it easy.

We will offer a prediction article soon.

But boy do we need the win today or the gap is 8 points to Celtic and Aberdeen. Or more.