PHILIPPE Clement has played down his decision to substitute his captain James Tavernier with half an hour remaining in Rangers’ heavy Europa League defeat to Lyon at Ibrox tonight.
Clement took off Tavernier and replaced him with his summer loan signing Neraysho Kasanwirjo after his side had fallen 4-1 behind in the second half of the league stage encounter.
It was unusual for the Englishman to be hooked at such an early stage in such an important game – but the Belgian felt that he needed to inject some energy into the hosts’ play.
He made no fewer than five changes during the course of the 90 minutes and argued that Feyenoord defender Kasanwirjo, a Netherlands Under-21 internationalist who had acquitted himself well against Malmo in Sweden last week, deserved to get some time on the pitch.
“Everybody can be replaced,” he said. “Tav has played already a lot of games so not much to say about that. And Nana showed also last couple of weeks that he can be a really good replacement, and he's defensively very solid so those are normal things.
“On the other side, players were changed. We're going to play more than 60 games this season, so it's impossible to play all these games. So in every good team in the world, our players change and sometimes start on the bench. It's normal, whoever it is.”
Meanwhile, Clement has expressed confidence that midfielder Connor Barron, another of his summer acquisitions, will have no difficulty recovering from the mistake he made which gifted Lyon their second goal.
“About Baz, I don't have any worry,” he said. “He's still a young lad, it’s his first time playing at this level and he’s had so many games in a row. So it's normal this season that it still will be with ups, and he had already a lot of ups, and sometimes a down. That's part of the story.”
Rangers playmaker Tom Lawrence injured himself scoring an equaliser in the first half and failed to reappear after half-time. Clement said: “With Tom, he felt something in the hamstring, so we could not take a risk with that.”
Clement admitted that Rangers paid the price for failing to capitalise on the scoring chances they created early in the game - but he was adamant the Glasgow club could have got a result if they had been more clinical up front.
“We didn't reward ourselves on two sides,” he said. “I think we started the game with good intentions, with good intensity, with good quality also. We had the first two chances of the game. So you need to kill them off to get a special European night.
“It's like that against teams with this quality, you don't get so many chances. So that's disappointing. It's also disappointing the way we got goals against with losing balls in the areas where we couldn't lose the ball. “But 1-4 is a really harsh result. In the end, it's the same amount of chances that both teams have and we had more in the first half. But it was 1-3 with half-time and that's the difference in quality. They're killing those moments and don't need many chances to score goals. So it's a big working point for us. “They have a lot of technical players and we had to chase the game also. That's a big difference. If you start the game and you can score the first goal or even two goals, as we should have scored, then they need to chase the game and it's a totally different story. But we didn't do so, we didn't reward ourselves, so in the end you don't deserve more.”
