It’s difficult not to worry about Danny Rohl. After a long period of doing his best to say the square root of nothing in most of his appearances in front of the media, he opted to lob a couple of verbal grenades in the direction of Martin O’Neill ahead of the Old Firm league game the other week and saw them blow up in his face.
That was fine. One of these things. Nothing wrong with a bit of mischief. Plus, it got a rise out of the Celtic manager — even if it didn’t prevent his own team bottling it and letting a 2-0 half-time lead dissolve into a potentially costly 2-2 draw.
Having questioned the Parkhead outfit’s mentality in ‘not trying to win 2-0, 3-0’ when on Europa League duty in Stuttgart last month — where a first-minute Luke McCowan goal earned the slim consolation of a victory on the night if not on aggregate — he just has to accept that he is now going to face similar accusations every time Rangers fall flat on their face. Which is pretty regularly at the moment.
Making a point of bigging up his defence ahead of today’s visit to St Mirren, though, carries the air of another dangerous strategy.
Look, Rohl is a great believer in backing his players, not throwing them under the bus. He’s gone on record in the past as admiring Hansi Flick’s policy of protecting those in his squad at all costs during their days together at Bayern Munich.
Going out on a limb and talking about how he has ‘great centre-backs available at the moment’, however, is maybe a step too far. Just something else, you fear, that might come back and bite him on the backside when he least expects it.
Danny Rohl has faced Martin O’Neill three times and is yet to emerge victorious against him
There are lots of things that can be said about Nasser Djiga and Manny Fernandez, but ‘great centre-backs’ is not necessarily the first thing that springs to mind.
Djiga has been generally underwhelming and, occasionally, a bombscare. Fernandez offers plenty at set-pieces, but he remains extremely raw. John Souttar is on the scene as well, of course, but is the type you always fear has a big mistake in him.
Rohl will surely disagree, as will many Rangers supporters, but, with Derek Cornelius still not quite ready to return as he recovers from surgery earlier in the campaign, it felt like the rearguard could have done with greater strengthening than just the arrival of left-back Tuur Rommens during the January window.
Time will tell, of course. The absolute requirement of leaving Paisley with the points today, though, is self-evident. After failing to win away from home at Hibs, 10-man Motherwell and bottom dogs Livingston, there’s a pattern of results on the road that needs breaking.
Indeed, to have any chance of competing for the title, Rangers surely have to be looking at maximum returns from Aberdeen, Dundee United and Falkirk before the split as well.
It is the visit to Celtic Park after that 33-game staging post, however, that is likely to have a huge say on whether Rohl sinks or swims as Rangers manager.
Of course, he won there earlier in the season when Wilfried Nancy was in the opposition dugout. That’s not saying much. Almost everyone beat Celtic when the Frenchman was in the hotseat, putting Venn Diagrams on Twitter under pressure from his missus and telling the world he was an expert on Scottish football because he once came close to signing for Carlisle.
The Rangers boss has done a sterling job at Ibrox but he will be judged on results against Celtic
What is becoming a progressively larger problem for Rohl is that he seems incapable of getting the better of O’Neill, a 74-year-old man who had been out of management for six years and earning his corn as a talking head on radio before Celtic descended into a state of absolute chaos earlier in the season and sent out the bat signal.
Lots was made about Rohl and his players being unable to get the better of their Glasgow rivals at home in last weekend’s Scottish Cup quarter-final when O’Neill was without a host of established first-team starters including Callum McGregor, Kieran Tierney, Cameron Carter-Vickers, Alistair Johnston and Kasper Schmeichel.
What’s more concerning is that Rohl has squared up to O’Neill three times now and has still to come out on top. In addition to those back-to-back league and cup games at Ibrox, he also lost 3-1 in extra-time at Hampden in the Premier Sports Cup semis in November during the first of the Blessed Martin’s two comeback tours.
Celtic cannot get much worse than they are at the moment. No matter the problems that exist behind the scenes there and the gulf between the board and large sections of the support, they will surely strengthen in the summer.
They will surely get their ducks in a row to some degree in the wake of this nonsensical — and wholly unacceptable — season that has witnessed the departure of Brendan Rodgers, Nancy and head of football operations Paul Tisdale amid all sorts of madness from the directors box.
Celtic are not playing good football under O’Neill. They are generally getting over the line through strength of will more than anything else. It says much about the motivational qualities of the manager, but it isn’t sustainable longer-term.
The sight of Celtic players celebrating their Scottish Cup win at Ibrox has lowered Rohl’s stock
That’s why that visit to Parkhead post-split is going to be huge for Rohl. If he can’t get the better of a pensioner who looked finished with football and a squad in serious regression in the wake of several botched transfer windows, how is he going to cope when they’ve appointed a proper, modern-day head coach and got their recruitment in order?
Rohl inherited a shambles at Rangers. That much is understood. He has brought greater stability, for sure, and your gut feeling is that the majority of Rangers fans still want him to be given the chance to succeed.
However, he was given £10million-plus to spend in the market in January. A draw at Parkhead in the next Old Firm derby might — just might — keep the wolves at bay, but another loss at the feet of O’Neill and a patched-up squad of short-term loan deals is highly likely to tip him into the realm of the doomed.
Even now, even though we don’t know the date of it yet, that’s shaping up to be the day in which Rohl’s reign really comes under the spotlight. When punters really make their minds up about him. And when those centre-halves he has absolutely hung his hat on will have to prove his confidence in them is not misplaced.
