'Rangers must halt away trend to grab reality-changing riches'
- Published
Who will emerge triumphant when friends-turned managerial rivals Giovanni van Bronckhorst and Ruud van Nistelrooy go head to head again in the Eindhoven decider?
It's a sign of the giddy times at Rangers that for all the seismic quality of the £30-£40m game they will play in Eindhoven next Wednesday, it still won't be their most significant European encounter in the last three months.
If you support the old-fashioned values of kudos over coin then the Europa League final against Eintracht Frankfurt wins hands down, but the second leg against a smart and dangerous PSV must be a very decent second.
When it comes to Rangers in Europe everything is on a grand scale now.
The thrilling home-leg comeback against Union Saint-Gilloise a week ago; the Ibroxian tumult of the wins against Leipzig, Braga and Red Star last season; the huge feat of removing Borussia Dortmund from the competition, a home draw polishing off an away win that kick-started their run to near glory in Seville.
It's epic and seemingly unending stuff.
They go to the Netherlands locked at 2-2 with PSV. Everybody knows the glory that's at stake here, the feel-good factor of rubbing shoulders with the continent's most monied [or debt-laden] outfits, the satisfaction of knowing their city rivals aren't the only ones in Scotland hoovering up the international attention.
There's the reputational stuff at stake, but no assessment of Wednesday can be complete without a dive into the numbers which are, of course, deliciously vulgar for whoever wins this game.
Right away, the victor gets £13.2m for qualifying. For every group-stage win they get £2.4m - the same prize money for finishing second in the Premiership last season. For every draw they get £785,000 and for a place in the last 16 there's an £8m bonus.
They'll also get a cut of the overall TV market pool. Draw a heavy hitter or two in the pool stage and that share rises - the big pot is estimated at £253m.
This is another world. Compared to what Rangers have experienced before, it's a different reality. Since Dave King, Douglas Park and Co took over they have required soft loans from supportive directors to help keep the show on the road, but their financials are on the up.
This year they've sold Calvin Bassey for nearly £20m, Nathan Patterson for £12m and Joe Aribo for £6m. The player trading model they've talked about for so long has finally materialised in a substantial way. But it has obvious inherent risks if you don't hit the jackpot in properly replacing the talents you've sold.
Wednesday will be the biggest gauge of that. If Antonio Colak, Tom Lawrence, Malik Tillman - the three new arrivals who started at Ibrox on Tuesday - play a part in getting Rangers into the promised land of big-time football and unimaginable lucre then the club will have, in every sense, hit the bullseye.
The problem is the 'if'. We're so used to fireworks, dominance and victories from Rangers at Ibrox in Europe that Tuesday was a bit of a letdown.
Giovanni van Bronckhorst said he was happy with the performance, but the result could have been better. You could easily argue it the other way around. At 1-1, PSV had three decent opportunities in eight minutes, at 2-2 they almost got in again. A draw was as good as the Rangers display deserved.
Still, it must have been a little galling for the Rangers manager to largely curtail PSV's exalted dangermen - Cody Gakpo, Joey Veerman and Luuk de Jong - only to concede twice from routine corners.
Rangers twice conceded from corners at Ibrox leave their tie with PSV in the balance
Rangers should have known about PSV's aerial threat - they get a lot of goals and create a lot of chaos from crosses - but still they conceded twice in that area.
PSV will be coming for them again - the weakness has been identified and exploited. Van Bronckhorst has some decisions to make about personnel and zonal or man-for-man defence on set-plays.
How he'd wish for Filip Helander to be fit, but he's not. How he'd wish for his expensive summer recruit, defender Ben Davies, to be firing, but he's only started one game since his arrival from Liverpool and missed the first leg with PSV through injury.
James Sands is a stop-gap. Van Bronckhorst could do with Connor Goldson being more aggressive and decisive when the ball is in the air in Eindhoven.
Rangers will also know there's a trend they need to halt if they are to go through.
From August 2020 to March 2021, they had a terrific record on the road in Europe. They played seven, won five and drew two, Yes, Lincoln Red Imps were a part of that run, but so too were Benfica, Lech Poznan and Slavia Prague.
Since then, it's been poor. They've lost away to Malmo, Sparta Prague, Red Star, Braga, Leipzig and Union Saint-Gilloise.
Of their last 10 European games on foreign soil - not counting the Europa League final in neutral territory - they've lost six, drawn three and won just once, which was that remarkable occasion in Dortmund. They haven't scored in any of their last three.
PSV are clear favourites to progress, but the underdog tag is not going to bother these Rangers players all that much. When their backs have been to the wall in knockout games, they've regularly delivered. Nearly always at Ibrox, though.
That's a hard fact to get away from.
PSV, for all their gushing words about Ibrox, will be supremely confident of getting the job done in their own place.
Rangers have hope. They're a proud team. They're also a team that scored twice against PSV without delivering their best stuff, without much input from Ryan Kent, whose influence rarely matches his admirable work-rate. He needs to step up now.
Walter Benitez's erratic goalkeeping is a weakness Rangers will look to exploit
The strength of the Dutch is unquestionably in attack. They've played six games this season and have 20 goals to their credit.
Their weakness, if Rangers are ruthless enough to take advantage, is in defence. In those six games, they've conceded 11 times. Their goalkeeper, Walter Benitez, was known as The Wall at his previous club Nice. The Wall looks like he's got a couple of bricks missing.
He fumbled one into his own net at Ibrox and committed a not dissimilar error in the Dutch Super Cup against Ajax last month. A couple of early howitzers from distance wouldn't go amiss in Eindhoven.
They heard Handel's Zadok the Priest at Ibrox on Tuesday. You sense they could get used to it. To hear it beyond next week they'll have to get a handle on PSV.
They're 90 minutes away from a glory-laden, finance-changing experience. There are 30 or 40 million reasons why Rangers folk will be nervous wrecks on the night.
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