The clamour for ?real Rangers men? like Ally McCoist and Walter Smith to take over the reigns at Ibrox got louder following an utterly dismal display against Dunfermline in the Scottish Cup this weekend.

To lose 3 goals in 46 minutes to a team who hadn?t scored in 9 games and had won just one of their last fifteen tells the whole sorry story for Rangers.

Rangers man though he is, Ian Durrant couldn?t field a side capable of beating the weakest side in the SPL. Not because there wasn?t enough commitment in the dressing room, not because of fancy, foreign formations the players couldn?t understand. We lost for a simple reason. The vast majority of the Rangers first team squad is shit, not worthy of the shirt.

I hate to use a well worn clich? but Rangers genuinely stand at the brink of the abyss at the moment. If the next manager of the club does not achieve success, Sir David Murray will have finally undone all of his preceding good work.

There are those who feel that Walter Smith simply has to walk up the marble staircase and re-occupy his old office for everything to go back to the way it was.

That plainly won?t happen without major investment and Smith will be wary that his second spell in charge has a more that evens chance of mirroring the disastrous return of another great, Jock Wallace.

Like Smith, Wallace was a man to be feared and respected. Like Wallace, Smith will inherit a team so awful the chances are they will kill his reputation stone dead.

You have to like the names that are being bandied about as transfer targets ? Paul Hartley, Scott Brown, Alan Gow, Kevin Thompson ? all capable players and surely a vast improvement on the drek we?re being forced to watch at the moment, but where?s the money coming from to buy these guys, and why wasn?t it given to Paul Le Guen in the first place? You have to wonder what kind of sorcery Sir David imagined PLG was capable of with the paltry sum he was given to rebuild the worst Rangers team in the club?s history. Fair enough, he bought poorly, but he had sod all to spend in the first place.

Of course, getting new players in is only half the battle. With the ?Kuznetsov curse? claiming new centre half Andy Webster around 5 mins after he pulled on a training top reminds us, you?re only ever as good as your second string. I?ve listed the players I feel don?t cut it before (and owe only Dado Prso an apology) so there is no need to do it again. We all know who they are. How much is it going to cost to jettison yet another batch of total failures? And who do we turn to in the event of injury to a first team regular?

The bottom line is simply that Sir David is going to have to pull yet another investment rabbit out of the hat, or Smith will fail as surely as his predecessors.

I?d love to believe that bringing in a ?true Rangers man? was the alchemic key to turning base dross into footballing gold, but without a hell of a lot of cash for new players and pay offs for the duds, we are being asked to put our faith in a mirage; the notion that really wanting to win guarantees a better chance of success.

The club simply has to buy some decent players rather than ask the fans to buy that.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 8th, 2007 at 11:16 am and is filed under Rangers. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.