If you’re Giovanni Van Bronckhorst, self-deception will only take you so VAR. If the Video Assistant Referee hadn’t disallowed a goal from Mohammed Kudus, which would have put Ajax three up on Tuesday night at Ibrox, there would have been a possibility the manager wouldn’t have been in charge of the team in Perth today.
The ground would have emptied. Those who remained would have intensified their demonstration of disgust and animosity towards the Dutchman. As things stand, if Gio gets off the team bus at McDiarmid Park this morning and sees Michael Beale, up for another weekend visit to see the team he used to coach, there will be only one course of action available. Van Bronckhorst will need to get dropped off at IKEA on the way home to buy storage boxes in preparation for the flitting back to the Netherlands.
Beale’s visit to Ibrox for the game with Aberdeen looked like a shameless show of self-promotion to the cynical observer. Steven Gerrard’s former right-hand man knew the pressure van Bronckhorst was under after stumbling to a draw with Livingston the week before. He’s also aware of the extent to which his name has been touted as a future Rangers manager. And he knows the image he enjoys as the supposed brains behind the operation with manager Gerrard that stopped Celtic’s longed-for 10-in-a-row. Diplomacy might have dictated that if the QPR boss had a free weekend, it would have been more sensitively spent elsewhere. But his appearance in the directors’ box at Ibrox gave him the look of a vulture circling his prey.
Fortunately for van Bronckhorst, his team reacted to their most vulnerable moment of the season by dismantling the dodgy Dons by a margin that in no way flattered the home side. That’s why it was so obviously wrong of Gio to emerge from the humbling against Ajax and complain that the SPFL should have copied the Eredivisie and given them the weekend off that Ajax got in order to prepare for the Champions League.
The win over Jim Goodwin’s side was the high point of the season so far for Rangers. It was a psychological lift before what turned out to be the final indignity in a Champions League group that brought nothing but embarrassment to the front door at Ibrox. No points from six games and a goal difference of minus 20 – the worst Champions League group stage campaign in tournament history.
And it has left van Bronckhorst in the kind of managerial tailspin that inevitably ends in a case of crash and burn on an unspecified date. But it could arrive as soon as this afternoon, if defeat should come in Perth. It’s a situation not helped by Gio having failed to pick up a tip that was inadvertently handed to him on his first day at work.
He watched Rangers go down heavily to Hibs at Hampden in the semi-final of last season’s Premier Sports Cup on the night Connor Goldson publicly stated the Ibrox players knew the game was up at half-time, by which stage they were three goals down. The reaction to that comment from the defender was predictable.
The Rangers supporters will not have the people who represent their club indulge in premature capitulation. Never. Not under any circumstances. Van Bronckhorst failed to learn that lesson, however, and now the manager hasn’t so much lost the dressing room as the living room.
The homes of the Rangers supporters are populated by people who are disillusioned by the manager’s apparently endless inclination to talk down players in his charge and talk up the opposition. Any manager who persists in telling players they are, in European terms, inferior to the ones they’re up against faces an inevitable consequence.
Subconsciously, his players believe it and gradually grow less determined to prove the assertion is wrong. What chance has van Bronckhorst, now living on a game-to-game basis, got given the doubts he has himself? If he believes budgets determine the outcome of matches, how could he withstand defeat to a St Johnstone side, who are relatively poor compared to Rangers?
The manager also needs to be careful when it comes to the danger of insulting the supporters’ intelligence. He has stated, presumably as an act of self-protection, the money made from being in Europe isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Whatever the amount, it could have been spent more wisely, and more often, than it has been by Rangers.
Pressure at the highest levels of the game, like the Champions League, is supposed to be a privilege. Not the palaver, the pantomime and the persecution Group A turned out to be for players, fans and management alike. Injuries are an allowable factor to be introduced into any debate over a woeful European misadventure.
But so must individual error, collective lack of concentration and application and failure by some to live up to their reputation. If the sight of big names is enough to induce a state of fear among players and management, what is the point of it all? If a manager gives the impression he is enfeebled, as opposed to emboldened, by meeting tough challenges head on, what is the point of having him?
Across the city, Ange Postecoglou says greater familiarity with the Champions League will make all of that better in the long run. It is impossible to prove, or disprove, that assumption. Only time will tell.
But trying to turn a 5-1 defeat into any kind of triumph is a sizeable stretch of the imagination, even if you were playing the reigning
European champions on their own ground.
In the end, Celtic’s return to centre stage in the most glamorous club competition of them all amounted to the accumulation of two points and four goals from six matches – and no place in Europe for the remainder of the season.
Their lowest-ever points tally in the tournament’s group stage. A caller on the radio said I was guilty of trying to "belittle” Celtic’s achievements against Real Madrid, RB Leipzig and Shakhtar Donetsk. Nothing of the kind. I simply present the fact and rest my case.
If Celtic’s removal from Group F was something more than the bald facts suggest why did Ange Postecoglou say: “We paid the price for not having the quality and clinical finishing at one end, the opposition took
advantage at the other?”
European football at the highest level isn’t a vanity project and refusing to deviate from a naive style of play when the game has so clearly, and so often, turned against you carries a danger of painful retribution.
But some fans can’t take umbrage over what’s happened and attempt to portray a poor campaign as something it wasn’t. When Celtic scored their ninth goal of the game against Dundee United at Tannadice in the league in August the response from the fans was revealing.
A chant of “We want 10” reverberated around the ground. Supporters saw nothing wrong in rubbing their lesser opponents’ noses in Celtic’s superiority. There’s nothing wrong with that. All is fair in love and league games.
But what goes around has a tendency to come around in this game – and sometimes you have to accept it when it’s your turn to be out of
your depth. Celtic at least lose in a manner that is sometimes encouraging. They have an identity and the courage of their convictions instilled in them by the manager.
But that has been shown to be inadequate towards making progress in Europe. Being two goals and two points better off than Rangers would be terrific if that’s where the clubs stood at the end of the final day in the league season, crowning Celtic as champions.
READ NEXT
