Get off my lawn

 Thursday sure brought about a lot of talk for Rangers, or, more accurately, talk about Rangers. It saw what should have been a straight forward European night get twisted into another "lets pile on Rangers" event. Some deserved, some undeserved, but at Rangers you expect nothing less. To paraphrase the great Ric Flair "The players want to be with Rangers, the teams want to be Rangers".

Bad Press

Thursday morning saw reports that members of the Rangers support had spray painted a piece of Rangers themed art on the Lyon team bus. This was met with the usual histrionics in the land of social media. Now don't get me wrong, it was a silly thing to do and it gave Rangers' detractors another stick to beat the club with, but in the grand scheme of things who really cares? It's a bit of paint on a bus. It's noise the club could have done without, especially right now, and it gave the faux offended something to complain about for another day but nobody got hurt.

Then later that day news broke that the club had denied ex employees of that mob across the city, Chris Sutton and Neil Lennon, access to Ibrox to cover the two games for BT Sport. The reason cited was "security reasons". 

Chris Sutton took to twitter to put out the wolf whistle for his following to take to the tweets and slate the club for this. He even took the tact of putting in "Everyone, Anyone is working well...". Lets be straight here, Sutton was being perfectly obtuse by using Rangers inclusivity campaign slogan. The purpose of that campaign is to "to help create a positive environment where our differences are celebrated, our shared bond of our love of Rangers and no one is excluded". I'm fairly sure Sutton realises fine well that doesn't extended to "welcoming members of the press who take every opportunity to slate us and take digs at us, as well as push conspiracy theories about teams lying down to us to come cover our rivals from our stadium".

Lets also not ignore the fact that the exact security reasons weren't given. Who's to say we didn't trust Sutton and/or Lennon not to behave inappropriately? Or perhaps the concern was that if word got out Lennon was at Ibrox then the same fanbase that were seen hurling barriers and attacking police to try and get at him last season would turn up and look to finish what they started?

It would also be amiss of me to overlook the fact that Sutton works for the Daily Record, and lets face it, we're not exactly on the best of terms with that particular national paper at the moment.

It's a move that has once again seen social media and members of the media criticise Rangers, which in a vacuum would probably be acceptable, however if you look at the two members of the media that were involved, and their long standing hatred of Rangers, as well as the way they have ridiculed the club when it was at it's lowest, then you can start to understand it.

The match

The line up for the match wasn't overall a massive surprise, the only raised eyebrow being that of the inclusion of John Lundstram, who after an impressive preseason display in my book, has failed to set the world alight this season.

Rangers had quite a lot of possession in the first half and looked on the surface to be the equal of Lyon. Lyon scored a lovely goal from a Rangers mistake where they gifted Lyon possession but other than that there was very little to separate the two teams. Rangers had two decent chances to score themselves, one of which from Lundstram who did excellent to get a shot off from the edge of the box that went just wide of the goal.

Unfortunately though the difference in class showed all too well in the second half. Lyon again scored from a Rangers mistake when Ryan Kent tried to be too clever with the ball on the edge of the D, and then despite a good shot block from McGregor and a goal line clearance from Goldson, the ball ultimately hit off Tavernier and into the net. It was an unfortunate goal to give away but it was not a score line that flattered Lyon.

Lundstram had a decent 2nd half, and I've seen quite a few people slating him on twitter, but overall I thought he played well. Davis however didn't have his usual standard of game and it's led to some questioning if he should be playing Thursday-Sunday every week at his age. 

I discussed this with my friend on the journey back to England and for me I think Lundstram is getting a raw deal, if it was Davis or Kamara that played like he had we would likely be saying they had a decent game, but you have to remember they have a LOT more credit in the bank and after a few shocking games to start his career, as well as a stupid red card, he's going to have to work hard to win the support back over.

I also thought Balogun had another solid game, probably my man of the match for us, which is good as we're going to need a confident Balogun for a wee while yet. I have again seen people suggest if Helander was fit he would have started over Balogun, I'm not so sure. I love Helander, I think he's our best CB, but Gerrard has seemed to prefer Balogun in European matches, and it's not to say the result would have been any different even if he had, because as I say Balogun had a good game.

Ryan Kent picked up a groin injury that will see him miss a number of weeks, which may not be a bad thing. He's looked devoid of confidence lately and we were told he was carrying an injury that should have ruled him out until the international break when he played in the Old Firm. Perhaps a couple of weeks to get healthy will do him the world of good, because if we can get a flying Ryan Kent we will be in a good place.

Unfortunately I'm not seeing it from Sakala so far. I wrote pre-season about how excited I was about him and he looked the business against Real Madrid, but since then it's come nowhere near what I thought he would be. Granted that is with very limited minutes and I run the risk of judging him not good enough too soon. I really hope I'm wrong and he goes on to have a wonderful Rangers career, but I'm going to need to see signs of it soon.

Motherwell

Sunday sees us finally hoist our league winners flag. A move that was wise to put back to allow a full Ibrox to see it instead of only a small handful against Livingston, but hopefully once we get this out of the way we can put last season to bed and push on this season.

Last season was brilliant, amazing, superb and so on, but it's done. We're into 2021/22 and 56. The players need to get back some of that hunger. The fans need to see performances to invigorate us so that we can, in turn, spur the players on. At the moment we seem to be in a state of apathy. We are, fortunately, for the most part getting the results in the league, but we need to put in the performances we did last season and finally step it up a gear.

I've no doubt that step up will come, and when it does the league better watch out, because this Rangers side firing on all cylinders is a very dangerous Rangers side. The important thing is we've still taken 12 points from 15 without reaching that height so far, but now it's time to fully engage.

In no shock we've also managed to create further negative headlines about the club for this event, from commissioning our own league flag without cinch on it to not inviting Neil Doncaster to the event. I'm not sure why any of this came as a surprise to anyone. We've already explained we can't advertise cinch in the stadium due to another deal we have, as per SPFL rules, and why would we invite them to the event when we have made it very clear we do not view them as competent, or fit and proper to govern our league?

Bring on tomorrow. Bring on Motherwell. Bring on another 3 points.

The Rambling Ger

Twitter - @GerRambling

IG - TheRamblingGer