See Naples and Die is a centuries-old saying. It’s meant to convey a message that the city is so beautiful and magnificent that it has to be on your bucket list to visit.
See Naples and Die on your backside is a more graphic description of what Giovanni van Brockhorst and Rangers must avoid this week. They will face Napoli on Wednesday night in the penultimate match of a so-far tortuous Champions League group. Talk about a game you could do without at this particular moment if you’re the Ibrox manager. It is customary for fans to boo their team off the park if they’ve lost a game at home.
Particularly if it was a seven-goal mauling of the type Liverpool inflicted on Rangers just 10 days ago. But some supporters booed van Bronckhorst’s side at full-time on Wednesday night after they had won a Premier Sports Cup tie against Dundee. In Italy this midweek, the fans who travel – or those who’ll watch the game on television – will have a tolerance threshold that must not be exceeded to an extent where they go into full insurrection mode.
When Rangers started their group with a four-goal battering from Ajax in Amsterdam, van Bronckhorst summarised the experience by saying it was “too much to ask” for a club of Rangers’ size and financial structure to compete with top-class sides on the continent.
It was a negative tone from which neither manager nor team have so far recovered. The question the manager has to answer now is what is too much to ask, demand or simply hope for in the Diego Armando Maradona Stadium? First of all he has to hope Napoli have satisfied their own ambition by having already qualified for the knock-out stages of the Champions League.
Facing a weakened Napoli team, with players rested for bigger matches to come, would be preferable for Rangers to facing the maximum-strength version who have destroyed everyone in their path so far.
If you do Napoli by the numbers, they are terrifying – with a three-goal win at Ibrox not even the most eye-catching of their achievements. The beat Liverpool 4-1 on their home turf and took 10 goals off Ajax, home and away – and the Dutch were much too powerful for Rangers.
Van Bronckhorst is under the kind of scrutiny that’s painful to watch. Rumours are rife about who might replace him only five months after he took the club to the Europa League final in Seville. Last weekend he said he didn’t fear the sack.
On Wednesday night he said the fans were right to boo his team. A troubled picture begins to form in the mind.
Some pundits interpreted Michael Beale’s decision on Thursday, not to enter into talks that might have taken the former Ibrox coach from Queens Park Rangers to Premier League Wolves, as him waiting to see how the coming days pan out for van Bronckhorst. It wouldn’t take a particularly vivid imagination or a terminally-cynical frame of mind to suggest Beale had an awful lot to do with Steven Gerrard stopping Celtic from winning 10-in-a-row when they worked together at Ibrox.
Examine the progress both men have made since Beale left Gerrard to his own devices after dissolving their partnership at Aston Villa.
Rangers fans, like their counterparts at Celtic, have no sense of humour when the joke’s on them. They don’t do humility, either, after decades of dominance on a rotational basis at domestic level. On that basis, Rangers must avoid defeat in Italy on a scale that prompts ridicule or it really will be no laughing matter.
It’s fair enough holding up van Bronckhorst’s remarkable achievement in taking Rangers to a European final as proof of it being irrational to discuss his immediate future. Drawing attention to the fact Rangers have done no domestic damage in spite of some fans’ irritability is equally valid.
But events in everyday life in the past few days have shown stability is becoming an alien concept for Prime Ministers, never mind football managers.
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