Frosty Wind Made Moan
On a day which felt very much like the depth of mid-winter, it seemed somehow inevitable that Rangers would turn in the bleakest of performances.
Kept waiting by a tardy Dundee United side, who preferred to visit their hotel pre-match instead of accepting the offer of early stadium access and provisions, ironically it was Rangers who failed to turn up.
There is no positive spin. The first half on Saturday was, in a litany of woeful performances, a display which looked as if we had scraped through the dregs at the bottom of the barrel in search of something even less appealing. What makes it worse, was that no one was particularly surprised.
The sad fact, which I amongst a dwindling number of others have tried to ignore, isn’t that we are failing to improve; it is that we are falling into desperate decline.
The opening 45 minutes were littered with lethargy, lack of quality and little or no discernible drive or desire. In Diomande and Dessers we had two players on the field who not only failed to positively impact events, but contrived to sabotage any moments of promise. Dessers’ eight touches in the first half are indicative of a player who wasn’t good enough to be on the pitch and didn’t want to be there. Diomande’s decision making and execution made a mockery of his transfer fee. The manager’s post match comments about players not being “available” is probably one of the very few perceptive comments he has recently made. From my seat in the Copeland Rear it was clear that both were hiding.
Less convincing were Clement’s comments in which he juxtaposed the fans’ reactions at 45 and 90 minutes. The displeasure deservedly meted out at half time was significantly muted by the end, but this was neither a reflection of the marginal second half improvement nor a result of the vastly diminished crowd, it was something far more damning. It was apathy.
Is this then where we are? A belligerent acceptance of mediocrity?
The seven stages of grief is a concept embedded in our cultural understanding of loss. We move through shock and denial, pain and guilt, anger and bargaining and depression until finally we reach an upturn and some sense of hope. Unhelpfully, it is not a linear process and we will all experience the peaks and troughs in our own very personal manner. It feels very much as if we as a support are flitting between several of these stages as the season trudges depressingly on.
The shock of Kiev, painful as it was, left many in anger and some – including this writer - in denial. The denial though was not merely a refusal to accept the evidence of our eyes but more of a self-deception; a coping mechanism to avoid the growing realisation that we had seen this all before.
Domestically, we have been largely pathetic and consequently anger and frustration have grown. Empty seats in the boardroom has meant that often our frustration had no target; the recent performance by players and management have provided a laser focus.
Perhaps this is over-egging the pudding. No-one has died. It seems wrong to trivialise this very human experience.
However, perhaps the worst thing you can take from anyone is hope. It doesn’t really matter whether you are angry, frustrated or pleading with some higher power for things to be different. When the anticipation of something different or something better seems impossibly distant then apathy sets in.
This is what faces all at Rangers right now and it is clear that something needs to change very quickly to reverse this slide. The players, management and board cannot accept this. The fans most certainly will not.
The Damoclean sword hangs precariously over Clement. The thread is perilously thin. It is difficult to envisage it being reinforced any time soon. In this bleakest of mid-winters, for Clement the temperature is rising.
Robin Erskine
