Although I didn't play football very well I loved to watch it and got a real buzz out of watching football on the TV can still remember Gemmil's goal in 1978 as if it was yesterday. I really loved watching the Bears, my dad was a Bluenose and encouraged me to follow them. When I reached my early twenties I started to watch Italian Football on Channel 4 it was round about the time that Gazza signed for Lazio, at first the Italian football didn't excite me it was a slow well thought out game between two technically balanced sides, high on tactics and low on the kick and rush of Scottish football. However over the many months of watching Juve, AC Milan et al, I developed a great love for football played with tactics and where players, with the aid of their coaches, played to their strengths. I would however never class myself as a football tactical genius and certainly haven't got any Football coaching badges.
This rather brings me rather painfully to a cold Wednesday night down Ibrox way at the start of March 2009. As you know Rangers were playing Caley Thistle a team at the bottom of the SPL and thirty eight points below us in the SPL. On paper we were a stick on for a win, indeed one guy told me at half time he had put money on Rangers to win 4 or 5 nil. Walter as always attempted to bamboozle the fans, Caley Thistle and perhaps the players with his team selection.
He started off with Allan McGregor, Kirk Broadfoot, Madjid Bougherra, David Weir, Sasa Papac, Steven Davis, Maurice Edu, Barry Ferguson, John Fleck, Kenny Miller, Kris Boyd. Four of the starting eleven by my reckoning were played out of position. Papac and Broadfoot, both natural centre backs played as full backs, Davis a right sided central midfielder played as a right winger and Fleck a left sided attacking midfielder/striker played on the left wing.
In my opinion Papac and Broadfoot have done very well as left and right backs respectively. Kirk is the perfect example of what a player can achieve if he works hard at his game, he still needs to work on his final delivery but overall he does really well. Sasa, well what can I say the big man is a cracking player and at times against thistle was one of our biggest threats he seems to combine well with Fleck.
I've watched a lot of Davis over last and this seasons, his biggest weakness as a wide right player is he tends to move in towards the centre of the park, then again his natural position is as a central midfielder. The first time I saw John Fleck was when he was a precocious 14 year old playing for the under 19's against Dundee United at Auchenhowie, even then it was clear he had the potential to be something special. I felt he showed real bottle to take his penalty against Dundee United. Definately one for the future.
The rest of the players played in their "natural" positions, Bougherra continues to confound me, is he a really good central defender or attacking midfielder can someone please tell me. Within fifteen minutes or so of kick off it became blindingly obvious that we were going to struggle to score. There was the usually Miller fluffed attempt at goal, the dodgy offside decision and so on and so forth, after 20 minutes, to me it became blindingly obvious that three players just weren't at the races that night, Ferguson Boyd and Miller. During my time watching Italian football I can remember one game where a coach made a substitution early in a game, then later on took off the substitute because it wasn't working out. In my book it takes a lot of guts to pull a player and even more to pull his replacement.
Did Walter attempt to change the game by making a first half substitution or two, as per usual he didn't, did he decide to change things at half time? No. He decided to take off one of our better players Edu and replace him with Lafferty, Kyle is in many ways an enigma I think given time and a run of games he will be a great striker for us, if you compare his movement, situational and positional awareness with that of Boyd, it's like night and day, I can't recall ever seeing Kyle get caught offside and he played the lone striker role at Celtic Park to a tee. Walter re jigged the formation moving Miller to the Left wing, Fleck to Right wing and Davis to Central midfield.
Some people will argue that Miller isn't a football player, I'm more than happy to argue that he isn't a left winger. Fleck is very left sided so whenever he went forward after Walter's re jig he was always going to cut inside. Davis moving into Midfield allowed Ferguson to move to his favoured role playing from deep in central midfield. With this one substitution Walter killed our chances of winning the game.
The bold Barry took it upon himself to imagine he was playing Real Madrid and effectively killed the game, I lost count of the number of times the ball came quickly from defence to Ferguson only for Barry to take an age and then decide to pass the ball back the way. Not really what was needed when we were drawing nil - nil and needed a win to maintain our position at the top of the league.
Walter's next tactical move was to replace Fleck with Naismith, followed about eight minutes later by Arron replacing Miller, by that time it was too late, we were up against it the game stretched and Weir was left exposed at the back for the penalty. I could go on and slate Boyd for his lack of work ethic etc etc but I won't, or our inability to make use of set pieces.
In conclusion all of this leads to a couple of points.
1. Some of players need to take a long hard look at themselves, when a player with Broadfoot's supposed lack of ability can improve in a position that is not his natural position, what could some of our other first team players achieve, if they put in half of his effort and hard work.
2. If I can see that something isn't working after fifteen minutes, bearing in mind the fact I've hardly played football, let alone had a career spanning over forty years. Why can't Walter? Or maybe he can but doesn't have the tactical ability to change it? If it's none of these what is then? Fear, lack of confidence or something else whatever it is he better sort it or all my visits to Ibrox over the next couple of months are going to be hellish.
WATMAN