During the build up to our final Scottish Premiership game of the 2023/24 campaign against Heart of Midlothian, Rangers manager Philippe Clement faced two obvious main questions from the media.
His feeling on us ultimately losing out on the domestic Scottish title this season, and then his plans for the summer, with everyone in the Gers fanbase knowing that we are set for big changes in the next few months, not least given the situation we face with a good number of player contracts naturally coming to an end.
For those fans who like a small flutter on their football, our odds going into next season will undoubtedly be higher given the campaign we did have once Clement did take charge. Depending on the kind of summer business that we end up competing this window, you would expect us to be more favoured in 2024/25 – or at least for us to be better favoured if we improve the squad the way we all want the club to do, according to offersbet.co.uk.
Our 50 year old gaffer was obviously deeply disappointed with how the chase had slipped away from us at points during the second half of the campaign, but he despite his frustration and disappointment (and that of all of us), there is no denying the clear improvements that have already been made following on from his arrival as former manager Michael Beale’s replacement.
Equally, we are not fully there yet and some players who clearly have the talent, continue to lack the consistency in performance that is demanded of them, and there are also some pretty quick improvement fixes that can be made to the first team group as a whole when it comes to players, who simply put, are not good enough for where we are striving to be.
With big changes expected by fans, Clement has now confirmed that the club do ‘need a big rebuild’ this summer, but he is of the personal belief that ‘the will is there in the club’ to do just that and make the necessary changes that he feels needs to be made to make us far more competitive, and consistent, in the coming 2024/25 campaign.
One thing that I think fans will like, is that Clement clearly is not looking for excuses. Whilst the injury issues we have suffered this year did feature in his questioning, whilst he knew that had hampered us, it was not an excuse, it was just something else he intended to fix during the summer as simply put, he felt ‘the foundations’ of the squad currently were not ‘good enough to play at high intensity three games a week’, and in his mind that was the ‘reason for so many injuries’, so fix the core foundations and the injury issues would show improvement as a result.
He did reveal, however, that given all the work on our summer plans that had been going on in the background, he remained very confident that ‘almost everything’ was aligned for us to forge ahead with the moves we wanted to make, but now the trick was to ‘execute’ them fully as there was no point in having a great plan and exciting aims, if then nothing actually happens and you end up standing completely still if you are lucky.
If Clement needed any further proof, his thoughts would have strengthened when it came to the changes and improvements that we need to make after the Hearts game. He pointed himself to how disappointed he was for us to concede three goals given they only actually had four shots across the 90 minutes, and effectively losing out on all three points right at the death of the game, with an incredibly poor final ten minutes, was an even bigger kick in the teeth and again just points to the mentality of some of the players when it comes to how they handle a games big moments.
With the improvements we did see under Clement this year, we simply have to trust his judgment and hopefully next season will be what we all want.
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