Rangers fans can argue all day, but there are two different kinds of “truth” getting thrown about at the moment. There’s the stuff that’s actually on the record, and then there’s what we’ve filled in ourselves because the club stays quiet and the mood turns sour.
What’s on the record, and what isn’t
On the public comments side, if someone has said they “didn’t underestimate” Rangers, that’s pretty straightforward. It exists, it’s quoted, and it can’t be brushed away with a shrug. You can disagree with the judgement, you can call it naive, you can say it didn’t match the performance level, but you can’t pretend it was never said.
Where it gets messy is the stuff around Thelwell and Stewart. It’s fair to say it didn’t work. People moved on and the arrangement clearly wasn’t right. But that’s as far as most of us can honestly go without drifting into guesswork.
Fans will always build a story from the gaps. The popular one is that it must have been about recruitment, backhanders, “brown envelopes”, the usual. But unless the club comes out and tells supporters exactly what happened, that stays in the box marked opinion. Even the timeline matters. Stewart being in the building before a takeover or shift in direction might simply mean he no longer fitted what the club wanted next. That’s not a scandal. That’s football.
The defence: are we watching the same thing?
This is the bit that really sticks, because it’s where the shouting doesn’t line up with what’s happened on the pitch. If you take the common fan line at face value, we’ve apparently got a dreadful centre-half in Djiga, a poor captain in Tavernier, and Souttar getting pelters as well. Fine. Plenty supporters have their reasons for not being convinced.
But then you look at the basic output across eight games: three goals conceded. That’s not me claiming they’ve been flawless, because they haven’t. There have been mistakes, lapses, moments where the shape goes and everyone panics. You see it. I see it. Nobody’s pretending it’s perfect.
Still, if the back line was genuinely performing as badly as the noise suggests, you don’t usually get that kind of return. You don’t get to concede so little while supposedly carrying a “dreadful” player through the middle and a “poor” player beside him. Football doesn’t work like that for long.
Maybe the problem isn’t just individuals
Truth is, defending is rarely just about the defenders. It’s the press in front of them, the distances between the lines, who wins second balls, how quickly you kill transitions. Sometimes the back four looks “better” because the team is protecting them, not because every individual is playing out their skin. Other times it’s the opposite, and a decent defender looks hopeless because the midfield leaves them exposed.
So if the numbers say Rangers are keeping the goals down, maybe the more honest debate is about where the performances are still falling short, rather than deciding three or four players are simply useless. Facts are facts. The rest of it? We can argue it, but we should at least admit what’s guesswork.
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