The party’s over for Russell Martin. The dogs in the street know it. The only way to restore harmony and energy at Ibrox and turn it back into a place of love is to boot the self-proclaimed weirdo parroting all this garbage out the door ASAP.
His future is already written in the runes. Rangers are so indescribably bad under his guidance that nothing that happens in today’s first Old Firm game of the season is going to change things.
There’s no point even chewing the cud over it. He’s done. Kaput. The guy’s tea’s oot.
Where the real focus ought to be when the fragile, exposed messes that are Rangers and Celtic totter onto the pitch in Govan with all the confidence and assurance of a giraffe on a curling rink is on the opposition dugout. On Parkhead boss Brendan Rodgers and the grand question of whether he can prove he isn’t a busted flush as well.
Right now, that one is very definitely open to debate. Yes, this is the Brodge we’re talking about. Ex-Liverpool manager. Treble winner. Gucci belt. Celtic Invincible. Beautiful smiles. Clyde Tunnel.
That’s all in the past, though. In the present, this Celtic squad is a badly-managed shambles and the standard of performance in going out of the Champions League at the qualifying stage over two legs to Kairat Almaty is something Rodgers has to be held responsible for.
Brendan Rodgers is not entirely unaccountable for the mess Celtic find themselves in
Russell Martin’s days as Rangers manager look numbered no matter the result of the derby
Rodgers suffers in Almaty after the calamity in Kazakhstan against a very limited Kairat side
Sure, you can get away with falling off the bike now and again, but failing to turn up for big games is becoming a pretty regular occurrence under his watch. And when that starts happening as a Celtic manager, you have to be put under the searching glare of the disco lights. No matter the strength of your CV.
Rodgers has taken a bit of heat in wake of Carry On Kazakhstan, but the loudest noise continues to centre around Celtic’s chief executive Michael ‘Mr Invisible’ Nicholson and major shareholder Dermot Desmond.
These guys rattle on about being ‘world-class in everything that we do’ and using Europe as a yardstick of the club’s footballing development. It’s utter nonsense. Emperor’s New Clothes stuff.
They knew last summer that first-choice centre-forward Kyogo Furuhashi was leaving, sold him in January and still haven’t replaced him. Not properly.
Same goes for Nicolas Kuhn. You sell the fella to Como for £17million — excellent business, by the way — but you don’t bother bringing in someone new for him before arguably the biggest game of your season.
The whole recruitment set-up at the club is a mystery. Any strategy that existed seems to have been chucked out the window. It certainly isn’t working and Rodgers has admitted as much, conceding there has to be an internal inquiry into why talent cannot be brought in earlier.
The club’s supporters have not been slow to point the finger at the board for transfer failings
What Rodgers doesn’t discuss so readily is how much money has been wasted on his watch, though. On guys he fancied. We’ll give him the benefit of the doubt on his first summer back at the club when he had the likes of Luis Palma, Odin Holm, Gustaf Lagerbielke, Maik Nawrocki and Marco Tilio at his disposal and pretty much ignored all of them.
He cannot be absolved of blame over what has happened since, though. If the profit on Kuhn bought him a bit of leeway, the loss of at least £20m by failing to make the Champions League group stage has cancelled that out big-time.
He spent the guts of £30m on Arne Engels, Adam Idah, Auston Trusty and Paulo Bernardo. Trusty has a foot injury, of course, but fell behind Liam Scales in the pecking order a long time ago.
None of the other three were deemed worthy of a start against the might of Kairat Almaty in a play-off second leg with the potential to define an entire campaign. It’s ridiculous and it hasn’t been talked about enough amid the ‘Sack The Board’ chants and the manager’s subtle finger-pointing towards those above him in the food chain.
If you factor in the £8m spent on Jota, a shadow of himself before being injured at Tannadice last term, Rodgers has been given plenty to spend. And it’s been squandered on guys he clearly doesn’t trust any longer, guys who often haven’t turned up when it mattered and now don’t get picked for the crunch games at all.
Arne Engels, signed by Rodgers, looks anything but an £11m footballer at the moment
Idah hasn’t been up to the mark since joining on an £8.5m deal and is being offloaded at a loss to Swansea City. To hear and read suggestions that Rodgers never felt he could hang his hat on him is bizarre, because he was so publicly effusive about the Irishman after the 2024 Scottish Cup final and insistent on getting him signed.
In a way, it felt like showing his cards too readily. Celtic had been stupid enough not to negotiate an option-to-buy in Idah’s initial loan deal from Norwich City and Rodgers’ Hampden admission he wanted him brought back to the club put the Carrow Road outfit in a strong negotiating position. Which they most certainly cashed in on.
Engels, meanwhile, isn’t doing what an £11m signing ought to and it looks clear that kind of cash won’t be getting spent again any time soon. Yet, it should. Celtic should be well into the process of turning profit on players, reinvesting that in replacements of a higher level and increasing the transfer fees — and, ergo, the quality — involved along the way.
Instead, they are bringing back Kieran Tierney on a free, paying a big wage to someone with no resale value and who, for the moment, seems unable to play more than 75 minutes. Recent dealings, no matter the manager’s talk of everyone being on the same page, just create the impression that the board don’t believe enough in Rodgers to burst the bank again.
Before the arrival of Michel-Ange Balikwisha, Benjamin Nygren was the summer’s big signing at £2m.
Rodgers greets new arrivals Marcelo Saracchi and Michel Ange Balikwisha in training
Time will tell, but are these guys really going to take Celtic to the next level as Rodgers demanded after running Bayern Munich so close in the play-off for a place in the last 16 of last season’s Champions League in February?
Rodgers’ biggest issue, arguably, is that Bayern is starting to look like Brigadoon. A one-off. Something that isn’t going to be witnessed again during his reign.
That was a big game in which his team turned up big-style. They were brilliant. And so, so unlucky to be knocked out by a last-gasp fluke in the Allianz Arena.
As for the other big games of 2025? Oh, my days. They left their hearts and brains in the dressing room when going down 3-0 to Rangers in the New Year Old Firm fixture. The first half of the 3-2 home loss to Philippe Clement’s Ibrox side was exactly the same.
And the less said about the Scottish Cup final against Aberdeen, the better. They were beyond atrocious. What happened against Kairat Almaty looks less like an aberration than part of a developing pattern.
Of course, the clever money remains on Rodgers disappearing at the end of his contract next summer. That doesn’t mean there still isn’t a huge amount to play for — outwith the inevitable procession to the Premiership — and a huge amount his eventual legacy can be judged on.
First time round, his big ambition was to turn Celtic into a last-16 Champions League side. He failed.
Rodgers has plenty to ponder as the club stalls and his contract runs down
This time, the target is to restore the club’s reputation in Europe, to make them competitive on a sustained basis. It was the entire reason he returned.
Getting the side into the latter stages of a UEFA competition — maybe even a final — was talked about in the negotiations that led to him agreeing his three-year deal in the end. The Europa League offers that opportunity.
Yet, if he can’t beat this Rangers team — who simply cannot defend and whose summer signings look as unsuited to the Glasgow goldfish bowl as their doomed manager — in front of an Ibrox ready to descend into a spewing geyser of venom and invective, it’s hard to see how he’s going to do anything other than fail all over again.
Glasgow is no place for flannel merchants like Martin
Dear old Glasgow is a pale shadow of what she used to be, for sure.
Sauchiehall Street, once a shimmering thoroughfare of such splendour and adventure, looks like a bomb hit it.
George Square is a building site. Either end of Argyle Street is notable only for the fact that an inordinate number of people hanging around on the pavements are the spitting image of Nosferatu. Just less healthy-looking. And invariably wearing a trackie top.
Rangers boss Russell Martin has the chat and the chakra, but not the support of the club’s fans
How a stroll through the city centre makes the mind wander back to happier days of childhood trips to La Scala cinema, garden festivals, late licences, endless nightclubs and 4am finishes at the Noodle Bar.
Where the city still stands strong, though, is in remaining defiant and unwilling to be sucked in by flannel merchants trying to tell your granny how to suck eggs. That hasn’t changed a bit.
Just look at how Rangers fans have made their minds up on Russell Martin in the time it takes to polish a pair of brown brogues.
Martin’s heart may be in the right place. He is a philanthropist. He remembers to phone his mum. But, my God, you can’t turn up in Glasgow — in football, of all things — and start rabbiting on about love and harmony, caring for each other, ‘healing’, when you’re putting out a team that wouldn’t win the Yoker and District pub league.
No offence to the guy, but he’s just in the wrong movie. The fact he thinks he can pitch up in the Second City of the Empire and sell this claptrap to people tells you that. It just ain’t that kind of place.
It’s all good and well in his native Brighton, where an entire industry exists around tie-dye trousers and checking out your chakra.
Rangers ‘stars’ look ashen-faced after their 9-1 aggregate tonking at the hands of Club Brugge
Hit most folk in Glasgow with some chat about investigating chakra and they’ll be expecting you to take them there for a three-course Indian with a large bottle of Kingfisher thrown in.
Imagine your own workplace, Glasgow persons, if a bloke turned up with a wavy centre-parting, going on about giving you a telling-off from a place of love and needing you to restore harmony and care for each other.
You’d have him down as a wassock worth the watching from the get-go. And that probably applies to most of Scotland, by the way.
Martin started going on about harmony in the wake of that midweek hosing at Club Brugge and fair play to TNT Sports interviewer Danny Jamieson for calling him out and asking what in God’s name he was talking about.
We’re unlikely to be listening to it much longer, mind. Rangers punters have had their fill of him and their insistence on making that crystal-clear with the much more direct, industrial language that filled the area in Brugge’s Jan Breydel Stadium will force the hand of the club’s US owners in time.
Rangers chairman Andrew Cavenagh will hear the fans’ opinion on Martin loud and clear today
That, thankfully, remains the Glasgow way. No messing. And chairman Andrew Cavenagh and co. ought to remember that when bringing in the next boss.
After Martin and so many of the others who have filled that manager’s role in recent years, they need a straightshooter, someone on the level.
A guy capable of talking in layman’s terms, with clear messages, and capable of getting both players and punters buying in.
Oh, yes, being able to beat Motherwell, St Mirren and Dundee would be an advantage too.
