Rangers vs Club Brugge: Take Two
It's UCL playoff time for Rangers, have they got what it takes?
This article was written for Scottishfootball.info by Adam Bortkiewicz, a Rangers fan and online sports writer, who has his own Rangers blog you can follow.
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Evening all, it’s European preview time again, and we have lots to discuss about the game and tomorrow’s opponents.
Options and the lack thereof
Rangers go into tomorrow’s game with a noticeable gap at left back. With Jefte removed from the European squad, it falls to the feet of new loan signing Jayden Meghoma to fill the Brazilian’s average sized shoes.
The 19-year-old joins as a highly rated talent from Brentford. His minutes in recent seasons have been limited, hence him spending the second half of last season on loan at Preston North End. From what little I’ve seen of Meghoma, he looks physically robust while unspectacular but solid on the ball. I don’t expect him to be Rangers first choice left back this season, but he may find himself thrust into the limelight tomorrow night given the lack of an orthodox left back in the European squad.
Our European squad has however been bolstered by the addition of Thelo Aasgaard and Mikey Moore in place of Jefte and Oscar Cortes, while Hamza Igamane will be fit to feature this round.
We saw both Aasgaard and Igamane introduced from the bench against Alloa and they brought a real level of sharpness and zip to the team. If either, or both can play at least 55/60 minutes, I’d be tempted to start them. Tomorrow’s game is exactly the kind of game that it’s worth taking a risk for, we need more dynamism in attack, and both the Norwegian and the Moroccan would give us that.
The rest of the team will likely be restored to what we’ve seen in recent games, Raskin appears to have edged ahead of Rothwell as first choice number 6, although Rothwell started our best performance of the season against the Czechs in the previous round.
Gassama and Antman will be restored to the wings, although Moore and Curtis did no harm to their squad value with positive contributions against Alloa at the weekend.
Blue Belgian Club
Tomorrow’s opposition are no strangers to playing in the Champions League in recent seasons. As always, for a more in-depth breakdown of the opposition, you should check out the piece
released today.It’s worth making brief mention of the dress rehearsal for this game from pre-season. A 2-2 draw at Ibrox stadium. Both teams made plenty of substitutions throughout, but a disappointing first half saw Rangers go in 2 goals down. Some changes and reorganisation allowed Rangers to get back in the game, a Danilo goal (remember those?) and a well taken Findlay Curtis first time finish meant the game finished all square.
Given the timing of the European qualifiers for both sides, there wasn’t much to put between the teams physically, but it’s not really the kind of game that we can read into, given it was far more about match sharpness than the result.
Similarly to Viktoria Plzen, Club Brugge have lost a number of key squad members to transfers. However this is a team built around a successful player trading model, so you’d expect them to have planned for these departures and they have reinvested heavily already this summer.
The away side could arguably be coming into this game weaker than they ended last season, and if so we need to take advantage as best we can. It’s a cliche, but with key players departed and new signings still bedding in - there may be no better time to play the Belgians than now.
Unfortunately for Rangers, we can expect tomorrow’s visitors to have a very strong defensive shape out of possession, if we do hold more of the ball as you’d expect at home, then there needs to be a massive improvement in the speed that we get the ball to our wide players. Risk-averse play will just let the away side drop into a comfortable shape.
The biggest attacking threat for the opposition is Christos Tzolis, by far. The Greek wide forward is a serious threat in the penalty area, and I don’t imagine he would be so quick to pass up some of the chances that we’ve presented to opposition forwards recently.
Sadly, there isn’t much to be excited about in terms of weakness in the visiting side, even with the loss of significant players, the squad that remains is extremely strong and may just be too much for this Rangers team over two legs.
What about us?
So we’ve reached the toughest part of the pre-match analysis, what will Rangers do? As I said in my write-up of Saturday’s game, 10 changes or not, the performance and manner of the victory was frankly embarrassing for this Rangers team.
It feels like we are currently racing towards a potentially cataclysmic match for Russell Martin. As each game goes by and we struggle to see any improvement, as supporters we will grow impatient with the management team, that’s a fact. Even as someone who vocally and publicly backed the appointment of Russell Martin, I can feel my dissatisfaction growing.
In my heart I am hoping we will see a sudden turning point domestically, things will click and the team will be playing football in the way the manager intends. But at the moment it doesn’t really seem like such a click is on the horizon any time soon.
However - we witnessed the best performance of this new management era in our last European home game. If we can top that level of performance, I’d back us to really kick on, but that seems like a pipe dream at the moment. The financial benefits would be clear for all to see also.
The manager's message at his press conference was one we’ve got pretty used to hearing already, we have to improve and we have to seize the opportunity put in front of us.
My only vain hope at the moment is that we really are striving to improve as much as the manager insists, and that we will get there, eventually.
All we can do as a support is take each game as it comes, and let’s start that off with a positive result and performance tomorrow!
Video: Scott Nisbet scores the sensational winner for 10-man Rangers against Club Brugge in the Champions League in March 1993
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