They have spent over £30m on transfer fees and loan fees since the summer only to be humiliated by Brann. It beggars belief.
You have to feel for Rohl. He’s clearly an impressive coach, having worked at Bayern Munich and with the German national team.
Stellar names in the management game talk of his ability. The story of his brief time at Sheffield Wednesday and how his players and how the fans loved him is evidence that he can be a fine leader, too.
It’s easy to dismiss Wednesday as ‘not Rangers’, and it isn’t, but it was a pressurised job at a club with a monumentally difficult owner and he did it really well.
What he’s got now is an incredibly supportive owner and a hierarchy at the club that is praying that he succeeds, but he’s also got players who are afraid of their own shadows.
He has players whose heads are full of mush and whose nerve is all but shot from the torment of the repeated failures under Martin and the visceral abuse they have endured from the fans. They’re like quivering jelly.
They are so lacking in self-belief that Rohl doesn’t just have a coaching job on his hands. He needs to send for the sports psychologists.
That’s not being glib. These Rangers players lost any faith they had in themselves when Brann made it 2-0 with a free header from a free-kick. They were broken at that point.
Rangers defenders remonstrated with each other, but it was the kind of frailty everyone has seen from them for quite a while. They’ve now shipped 15 goals in their last five European matches.
For Rohl, it must have been an education in how much work he needs to do. Maybe he knew it already. He certainly knows it now.
What he wants from his team – speed of thought, speed of movement, aggression, togetherness, relentlessness – is light years away from what he actually has, which is what did for Martin, although Martin did for Martin in many ways.
As tends to happen at Rangers, the honeymoon doesn’t last long. Rohl is now embedded in the reality of how challenging his new life really is.
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