Lets not kid ourselves: the Unirea debacle has been on the cards for a while. We got out of jail in Stuttgart , we've struggled against some pretty poor SPL sides, we told ourselves there was no shame in losing to Seville , even talked up our prospects of making it out of our Champions League group. As Steven Davis said in the build-up to Tuesday night, we haven't really started to play this season, there is plenty of room for improvement and, when we click into gear, we will be a different team entirely. But can anybody see even a hint from where this dramatic transformation is going to come?
Our basic control of the ball has been a joke, the players look incapable of stinging two passes together, there is no imagination in our play, no pace at the back, no penetration from the midfield, no movement up front. No matter how hard I try - and I have been trying! - I can't find a solitary positive line to give myself a lift.
There can be no excuses for our midweek mauling. A perfect start had us all on our feet and, even after we'd given away the equaliser, the penalty kick gave us a great opportunity to quickly get ourselves back in front. The half-time debate was all about how we might step up the pace, get support to Kenny Miller a bit quicker, make better use of the wide areas and get a few telling balls into the box, with maybe Boyd and Lafferty being pushed into the action to get on to the end of the crosses. So what did we get?
Being a right auld bassa, Tuesday night reminded me of the Gornik shocker in 1969, Davie White's last game in charge. Without playing particularly well, we were in front and there didn't appear to be any great threat from the opposition then, BANG!, the whole thing fell apart. Gornik didn't need to be too clever to blow us away back then and Unirea were hardly world beaters in midweek. But they were able to hit us with three painfully avoidable goals - they were clearly far too good for Rangers - and that is what really gets under my skin.
How can a team which was playing in a European Final just 17 months ago be made to look so inept by a no more than competent side? Unirea’s use of the ball was no better than ours until they had their lucky pops at our goal. They were there for the beating, if only the Rangers had been able to up their game, retain possession sufficiently to put our opponents under some pressure and have a shot at goal, instead of taking too many touches, passing the buck to a team-mate or, as was so often the case on Tuesday, just giving the bloody ball away.
All of which prompts me to ask: Where do we go from here? Sadly, there is no instant answer and certainly not one to lift our spirits. We are in a bad place, owned by a man who couldn’t care less, our finances are in a right mess, we have no carrot to dangle in front of new potential, have a squad made up of players with next to no sell-on value - there is nothing our club can offer to secure the necessary new investment to see us move forward again.
When Walter returned to mop away the debris from PLG's ill-fated reign, his remit was to halt the slide, then get us moving in the right direction. With two Scottish Cups, a League Cup, an SPL title (and cheated out of another!), plus an appearance in a UEFA Cup Final, he succeeded beyond our wildest dreams but, as we move towards the third anniversary of his return, we seem to have hit a brick wall.
He was 58-years-old when he came back to Rangers so Walter was always going to be a stop-gap appointment. In the interim his successor should have been identified and groomed for the job but I'm very disappointed that nothing Ally McCoist, Kenny McDowall or Ian Durrant has done has convinced me that our next manager is already on the payroll. All of which means that, when Walter finally decides to walk away, our club will be plunged into turmoil again.
New chairman Alastair Johnston has spoken of sitting down with Walter and mapping out the future together. The manager has made it clear he is not interested in moving upstairs in any supervisory role so I wonder what shape their discussion will take. Despite the trophies we have won, the three years since our last managerial shake-up has been wasted time: we have been running on the spot. Worryingly, there is no production line of starlets ready to make the big breakthrough, no foundations have been put in place, the entire gameplan has been based on a day-to-day, patch-up-and-make-do strategy, one game at a time and all that guff.
Lack of forward planning was cruelly exposed by Unirea. Without Boogie, we were left with a thirty-something stop-gap and a man approaching his fortieth birthday as our centre-back partnership and, when Pedro went off injured, we had nobody capable of taking the ball and moving it around among guys wearing blue jerseys. Yes, the dividing line between success and failure at the top level is wafer-thin and the Romanians benefited from a few fortuitous deflections but sometimes you have to make your own luck and you don’t do that by playing just one man up front in a must-win home game.
While Walter was sticking to his 4-5-1 strategy, Dan Petrescu took just 19 minutes to see that we didn’t really fancy it, he gambled by making an early change and his courage was rewarded with those three goals in a 15 minute spell in the second half. He who dares wins, eh?
Over the past five years or so, we seem to be finding ourselves at a crossroads on a regular basis. The club has ducked and dived, pulling rabbits out of the hat quite frequently, but there MUST be a better way of doing things. The Rangers are a massive club, properly harnessed (nor ruthlessly exploited!) our fanbase has amazing potential, the team might be a joke but the name still carries some clout, and with a football brain and a business brain working together we can push ourselves back in amongst the big boys.
Walter Smith has taken himself out of the frame by declaring he is not interested in a desk job so Alistair Johnston should make it top priority to find a football man capable of filling the Director Of Football post. Then and only then can Rangers plan ahead decisively, mapping out the path the club will take over the next five or ten years, setting realistic targets along the way, making sure that every move we take is made with a specific purpose in mind, rather than the procession of short-term solutions we have sought over the past three years.
Tuesday night’s embarrassment hurt each and every Ranger but I fear there will be more to come unless we get our act together. Elsewhere I’ve welcomed the new chairman’s appointment. If he didn’t know how big a job he faced, he surely found out on Tuesday night and the success, or otherwise, of his chairmanship will be measured by how he responds to such a daunting task.
Over to you, Mr Johnston.