Rangers were far from great, but they were dogged and they hung in there and when their chances came they buried them. Youssef Chermiti, of all people, was the chief tormentor. In nine pulsating minutes he doubled his total for the season and wrote his name into a new kind of Rangers pantheon – from zero to hero.
Nancy spoke later and in trying to talk his way through the latest submission from his team he only reaffirmed his sense of distance from footballing reality.
He mentioned that Celtic “deserved more” than a 3-1 loss, when they didn’t. Not taking their chances when they had them was on Celtic, not anybody else. Deserve had nothing to do with it. It was the Celtic board who created a situation where their manager was left with scant options upfront. From meagre rations, he plumped for Johnny Kenny. It didn’t work out.
The Frenchman made some comments about the loss not being about players and tactics. “It’s about moments, it’s about details,” he said, as if moments and details exist in a parallel universe from players and managers.
“It’s not about myself,” he said. Well, it is, but to a point. It’s also about the players he has confused and bewildered with his ill-fitting shape and the ideology he refuses to alter no matter how befuddled things become.
On Friday, he made much of how difficult it’s been to introduce his system without a pre-season to bed-in his ideas. He didn’t have a pre-season to work with his players and he didn’t have a transfer window to bring in more players that could play his system. And yet he pressed on with the system regardless. Stubbornness? Arrogance? Naivety? All three at once?
Danny Rohl went into Rangers, surveyed what he had and got pragmatic. Like Nancy, he needs new players, too. Many of them. But he’s found a way to drag his team forward when his counterpart has only succeeded in taking his players backwards in the pursuit of something that only he can see.
The soft progress achieved under Martin O’Neill has been sacrificed on the altar of “process” and some self-regarding notion that Nancy is a visionary who’s building a footballing monument.