'Dessers leads way for weirdest Rangers team ever'

Cyriel Dessers scored one goal, assisted another, and had two efforts disallowed against Fenerbahce

Just short of the hour mark in Istanbul, after he had scored Rangers' first, brilliantly assisted their second, then came inches away, twice, from adding a third, Cyriel Dessers reminded you of a boxer, dancing around the ring, toying with a bewildered opponent.

The Fenerbahce backline were on the ropes. Their defences were down and so were their heads. They remonstrated with each other about this menace in their midst and their inability to stop him. Dessers was running amok.

There were many major performers on this night of nights for Rangers - all of them, quite frankly - but Dessers was one of the star turns.

Rangers folk have had a torrid relationship with him. A kind of Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor vibe if you are old enough to catch the drift, an on-off thing, love and hate, tempestuous, never dull.

The big man scored his fourth European goal of the season and delivered his fourth assist. He is on 22 goals this term now, to match the 22 he got last season.

If you look back over Rangers' past 25 to 30 years, you'll see that Alfredo Morelos and Kris Boyd managed back-to-back 20-plus goal seasons in the top flight, but it is a pantheon with few heroes.

That's not a word many among the Rangers support would associate with Dessers.

He has spoken before about feeling written off only months into his first season at the club - last season - how his misses were more talked about than his goals and how it made him feel like the worst Rangers player ever. His description.

On Thursday, he looked like one of the best Rangers strikers of several decades. Classy, dangerous, resilient, he was inches away from an away European hat-trick.

One goal, one assist and one lovely cushioned pass to Nico Raskin before his sumptuous delivery to Vaclav Cerny for the goal that made it 3-1 was a mighty contribution from a maligned player who just keeps going no matter the doubt that rings in his ears from the stands.

Maybe that has changed now. Or, perhaps, it is changing. Not there yet, but moving fast in the right direction.

Can any team rival this one in Rangers 'odditorium'?

Maybe you could say the same about Rangers in Europe.

This tie isn't over, but they produced something very special in Istanbul and take a two-goal buffer to Glasgow next week. Nobody saw that coming. Absolutely nobody.

They were immense. Had they won by four instead of two then Jose Mourinho suggested that he could have had no complaints.

This was a glorious night for the 'Four Bears' - the interim coaching team of former Rangers men led by Barry Ferguson - and a continuation of the surreality that surrounds this collection of players.

Defeats in recent weeks by Motherwell, St Mirren and Queen's Park in the Scottish Cup. A manager sacked. A support in uproar. A Glasgow rival laughing in their face, 16 points clear in the league and so far ahead on every metric that you wonder when, or if, the chasm between them will close.

A team that struggles hopelessly when dealing with the low blocks of smaller clubs domestically - they have dropped points in 11 out of 29 league matches - and then delivers their very best stuff against better teams in European football.

Sigmund Freud could not get to the heart of this lot. He would end up on the couch himself with Carl Jung waving a fan and some smelling salts in his face.

From joyless defeats at home against teams with fractions of their budget to steepling victories away against European big shots, this lays claim to be the oddest of all Rangers sides, the one that is capable of the most jaw-dropping extremes.

Is there one to rival them in the Rangers 'odditorium'? Club historians will have plenty to say on that.

In more recent memory, the Giovanni van Bronckhorst side of 2021-22 are worth a mention. They got to the Europa League final that season, only losing on penalties.

They beat the Borussia Dortmund of Mats Hummels, Raphael Guerreiro and Jude Bellingham then the RB Leipzig of Konrad Laimer, Josko Gvardiol, Dani Olmo and Dominik Szoboszlai.

One missed penalty in the final shootout against an Eintracht Frankfurt side later broken up and sold on for serious money was all that stopped them.

All of those massive nights against heavy-hitters in Europe and they had to settle for second place in the Scottish Premiership to Ange Postecoglou's new Celtic team.

There are big differences between that team and the Rangers of today, though. Van Bronckhorst's lot fought hard domestically, losing the league by just four points and winning the Scottish Cup.

They were never as far off the pace in Scotland as the current crew, and never displayed the kind of incredible turbulence that has been so pervasive this season.

Winston Churchill described the geo-politics of the old Soviet Union as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma - a description that could be stolen and applied to the twin personalities of this Rangers outfit.

Fenerbahce, like others before them, afforded Rangers time and space on the not unreasonable premise that a team not good enough to score against second-tier opposition in Scotland was hardly likely to cause them too many problems.

Big mistake. Huge. They reckoned without the Jekyll and Hyde, the domestic Rangers and the European Rangers, the Rangers who have the devil's own job in breaking down defensive teams in the Premiership but who are like kids in candy stores in Europe when there is space and an ability to counter-attack.

Dessers typified the effort: strutting, lethal and head and shoulders ahead of more celebrated strikers down the other end.

Ferguson and his coaches deserve huge credit for a formation shift to three at the back, which worked well. For sending their team out with belief when those players had reason not to believe.

And for delivering a massive result that sets up a pulse-quickening night at Ibrox next Thursday. Bonkers, but brilliantly so.