There were a few winces when Rangers were drawn out of the hat in the proverbial group of death, and they have been vindicated by the opening three games. Last season's run to the Europa League Final was all glitz and clamour but in the Champions League, it's three games, no points and not even a goal to their name.
We're halfway through the campaign and Gio van Bronckhorst and his team are staring down the barrel of elimination before they've even got going. Anything but a win - and a convincing one - against Liverpool next week and the best they can hope for in practice is Europa League knockout football after Christmas.
It's very unlikely they will pull off the comeback of all comebacks to haul in the Reds and Ajax and finish as the least likely of runners-up in Group A. Next to impossible. But not quite impossible.
Cast your mind back to 2002 and Newcastle United, managed by the great Sir Bobby Robson, were in an identical position. After landing a tough group with Dynamo Kiev, Feyenoord and Juventus, they stunk it out in their first three games, losing all three without scoring a goal, and advancement to the second group stage looked fanciful at best.
They needed a win against Juventus, who had beaten them 2-0 going on five or six in Turin just a few weeks earlier, at St James' Park to give themselves a lifeline. They got it in some style, with Andy Griffin taking on the entire Juve team before squeezing one past Gigi Buffon to give them an unlikely three points.
It all looked to be over once again the following week when Maxim Shatskikh put Dynamo Kyiv ahead in Tyneside, but a Gary Speed header and an Alan Shearer penalty teed up a photo-finish and took it to matchday six. That left Dynamo on seven points, Newcastle on six and Feyenoord on five, with Juventus already qualified. And as it turned out, a dramatic 3-2 victory over Feyenoord, with Craig Bellamy striking at the death, was enough to send them through as runners-up.
The way things stand for Rangers, they'll need something similarly dramatic to stand any chance. For six points will not be enough for second place, Gers would need all the stars to align; Liverpool and Ajax would both need to finish on six, while also losing both games to Rangers by a big enough margin to overturn their head-to-head superiority. Realistically, that won't happen.
Even seven leaves a lot to chance; they'd need to rely on neither Liverpool or Ajax matching that total, or beat the team that does convincingly and finish level on points. For Rangers to qualify, realistically, it's going to take a repeat of the Newcastle turnaround which was dubbed a "miracle" by the English press at the time.
READ NEXT
