If the last few days proved anything for Rangers – that professional 2-0 victory over Hearts in the Scottish Cup semi-final aside – it’s that it takes some time to fix deep-rooted issues. Philippe Clement breathed fresh life into this Rangers side when lifting them off the canvas in the early-Autumn.
But it will take longer than a few months to solve the club’s self-defeating tendency to get a little twitchy when glory is within their grasp, collapsing against Ross County, stumbling against Dundee, and putting in arguably their worst first-half of the entire season against Celtic in the Old Firm derby.
One of the men who was linked with the Ibrox job before Clement’s October arrival is discovering, too, just how quickly the tide can turn, from swimming in warmer waters to gasping for breath in a punctured lifeboat.
Rangers linked manager now facing relegation dogfight
Nenad Bjelica certainly had big boots to fill when he was chosen to replace the legendary Urs Fischer in the Union Berlin hotseat. But, following a four-match unbeaten run in February, Bjelica appeared to have put those relegation fears firmly in the rearview mirror.
That Union are now staring down the barrel of disaster once again, then, has that February purple match feeling less like a turning point and more like a ‘false dawn’. After years of continuous and rather remarkable growth – from the second tier to the Champions League in the space of just a few seasons – Union are struggling to cope with a very different challenge, Saturday’s 5-1 collapse at home to Bayern Munich their third defeat in a row, their fifth in seven, with the gap between themselves relegation play-off spot now standing at just two measly points.
“I’m quite satisfied with the first-half. We had our counter-attacking chances. In the first-half, I saw a lot of commitment and good tactical discipline. That was perfect,” Bjelica, the former Trabzonspor, Lech Poznan and Dinamo Zagreb coach, told One Football after his team went from 2-0 down at the interval to 5-0 down just 16 minutes later.
“In the second half, we tried something new and changed things. But Bayern made it 3-0 with their first chance. That was the end for my team. We wanted to put more pressure on them. We have a ten-minute blackout where we concede two more goals after being 3-0 down. That’s on me.
“It went wrong. That’s my fault.”
Union’s collapse puts Rangers problems in perspective
Perhaps the most damning assessment came not from Bjelica but from two of his players. Two highly-experienced players, at that. Kevin Volland, the one-time Bayer Leverkusen and Monaco forward, admitted that Union ‘completely fell apart’.
‘Crumbled’, was the not-unjustified description of Germany international Robin Gosens.
Rangers’ debut season under Philippe Clement might not end in the league title the fans are craving, but with a pair of domestic cups as consolation. For Nenad Bjelica’s Union Berlin, the punishment for a sudden drop-off of their own could be far more severe.
