Rangers players need to stay off social media permanently | OneFootball

Rangers star Todd Cantwell’s latest social media spat with someone, this time a Rangers fan, raises attention back to the sniping we’ve seen the past four months between fans and the players and the club, and the question of why these players need to bite their tongues a bit.

In the recent past we’ve seen him have goes at the Rangers support via his ridiculous ‘shooshburger’ embarrassment and now calling a fan a ‘weapon’, while now-departed Fabio Silva twice attacked fans for their criticism of him, with two petulant gestures aimed at the support.

Then of course we had John Lundstram’s love affair with our club coming to a hard end as he blocked fans out and seemed to react indirectly to the criticism coming his way, before Borna Barisic more or less square goed with a fan outside Ibrox.

So, where do we stand?

With Fabio Silva’s garbage at the fans, we actually found ourselves disquieted at Ibrox Noise by the number of fans taking his side, backing him up, and happily slaughtering other fans for being critical of a terrible player.

They did the same with Borna, slaughtering the fan who dared to call the Croat out and backing up the player – despite 99% of those fans slaughtering the player themselves last season.

The reality?

Footballers are in a massively privileged position – they are paid huge sums of money to live the dream that 99% of the population can barely imagine, and that position comes with responsibility.

They will be heckled, abused, harangued. It’s part of the territory and sensible players like Connor Barron aren’t interested in it, good or bad. Guys like he stay away from that nonsense.

Cantwell? Just an immature wee boy, who can’t take the criticism, but then goes onto social media to go on the warpath and make himself and his club look bad.

This is not to endorse abuse, absolutely not, but there’s a certain level of stick players will get, and they have to bite their tongues and just get on with what they do.

Taking it to social media and getting distracted by that nonsense isn’t going to help anyone.

The key? Make your football do the talking, perform on the pitch so no one can even try to judge or nitpick your social media activity.

Not a single Ger shone last season very well at all, aside a few exceptions, and none of the ones giving fans stick were playing the football which justified their actions.

Cantwell was a million miles away, Lundstram ended up being too, Barisic was abysmal, and Silva was diabolical – and all of these guys dished it out to some extent.

Butland didn’t, Sterling didn’t – they kept away from that rubbish.

Pretty telling the players who are louder on social media than they are on the pitch.