Six-step guide to fixing Rangers – it’s not just about the boss | OneFootball

For the good side, most of our team is putting in a decent amount of effort.

But effort does not make a good football team. If you are going to create a genuine football team, a team like we oldies keep screaming about, then we need to see these things.

1) The players need to be fighters. Every single one. There can be no exceptions. Fight for the team, fight for your teammates. If your teammate is having a bad day help them out. Run, give them space, and give them an easy pass.2) The manager picks the team, but it’s the captain’s job to give the players stick if they’re not up for the fight. Have you ever seen Tavernier give anyone an earful?3) You create your team around your playmakers. It’s never the other way around – not in good teams. Good managers never force their best players to play in a straightjacket, and they don’t yank them off the park when all they did was see a gap. Look at Lammers, he was driven insane at Rangers. Now he is the boss at Twente. Ok he will never be the greatest of players, but others managers show that when you treat players right, you get far more out of him.4) Now this is the biggie. Managers let the players know who is the boss. If the team does not play it is the manager who walks. If the manager is not up to the job, then replace him with a real bastard who knows how to motivate players to play hard and win.5) We need to pick players who have good balance. You honestly can see them a mile away, and it can be trained into our young players. I routinely work with the US Kung Fu team and you can see how much effort they put in to make sure their athletes develop balance and training them on how to avoid injuries to the knees. They do it in martial arts. We let down our players, far too often.6) We need to pick players who are always looking and think quick. In our team, far too often our players are not looking and they make the wrong choice in the final pass. Just one, final pass, and they always just seem to know how to screw it up.

Note the things I have not said. There is nothing about how fast the player can run. When we are playing against a low block, who the hell cares if we have a player who can run 100 metres in 5 seconds. It is skill with the ball, and the quick mind to use the ball that is more important, a pass will always be quicker than someone running, but we don’t play Hagi, and we never play our players in their best positions.

You always need players with stamina. But that is not enough. You also need players who will willingly run through the pain barrier; the fighters who will do everything they can to get that win. Just now we have too many stamina runners. There are only a few in our team who genuinely give it all.

We need players who can shoot a cannon ball from outside the penalty box. When the opponent is defending well, just hit them with the artillery. Stop play nice. You have to soften them up, by changing where the attacks are coming from. This goes back to playing smart. Just ow we are far too predictable.

Sadly, and this is the biggest problem, this current Rangers team is built for skirmishes. It is not a team of warriors, and the biggest problem is we do not have captain or the manager, or the scouts who can build a team of warriors, and that is what we, the old hands, can smell a mile away.

We have spent far too much money bringing in skill, when there is far more to skill when making a great football team….note, I said team. I did not say player. The task for those bringing in new players is to create a fantastic team. It is not to buy a group of individuals.

And all I see is we keep making the same mistakes, when, I don’t know why, but this all this just seems so obvious to me. It just drives me absolutely crazy.

So, what do you think? Am I being crazy?

Ohh I almost forgot. There is a football match tomorrow. OK, my prediction is we should easily beat this nice Nice team, as long as we put out an angry Rangers team, and that will set us up for a very interesting match against Spurs.

Game on.