Rangers and the paradox of a painful exit that boosts their trophy chances

But landing with a dull thud has never been a barrier to future glory, certainly not at Ibrox. Take Graeme Souness, whose start as Rangers’ player-manager put the ‘pish’ in ‘inauspicious’. On his league debut, away to Hibs, he was sent off in the first half after a revenge attack on the wrong mullet.

Rangers lost 2-1 and were beaten in the third game as well. Rangers won the League Cup and finished the season as champions for the first time in nine years. Dick Advocaat had a similarly awkward start in 1998.

In his first game, played at Tranmere’s Prenton Park, Rangers went 3-0 down to Shelbourne in the first leg of their Big Vase tie. They went through comfortably in the end but lost the first league game a few days later. Rangers had to settle for a domestic treble that season.

Different times, when toys were played with for more than a few seconds before being launched from the pram with maximum force, followed a few seconds later by a handful of freshly sourced excreta. In 2026, alas, hot air and horse pucky are an acceptable substitute for reasonable discourse. And so, after failing to win any of his first four games as Rangers manager, Derek McInnes is “out of his depth” and a “dead man walking”.

Turns out the future is ours to see after four games, two of them in a competition Rangers had no chance of winning anyway. Football Daily hasn’t a clue if McInnes is up to the Brobdingnagian challenge of managing Rangers, one that most tea-timely newsletters don’t really understand. But we do know that a culture of self-fulfilling poppycock, where ostentatious negativity is football’s version of the fatberg and many people would rather be right than happy, is a stain on our daily bread.

That said, what a roflcopter of a start! Given the events of last season, it was never going to be an equanimity-cultivating experience for a new Rangers manager to see Russell Martin’s start and lower it. Rangers have one point from two league games and are out of Bigger Vase after the most costly 1-1 draw against Polish opposition on British soil since Brian Clough called somebody a clown.