SPORTS OPINION Rangers are too caught up in blame game and Clement is set to become latest culture of failure casualty – Hugh Keevins.

Our man criticises the Ibrox club’s response to the Cup final VAR dispute. To sum up Rangers’ chances of winning the league title this season, I’ll need to paraphrase a line of dialogue from a television show seen by nearly twelve million people on Wednesday night. At the end of the day, what if you can’t beat St Mirren? When I coined the expression “A draw’s a disaster, a defeat’s a catastrophe” to sum up the importance of the Old Firm understanding that every game they played was critical, it was admittedly for dramatic effect on the radio.

Philippe Clement’s summary of Sunday’s match at Motherwell is now complete. There was a glimmer of hope, a sense that the tide had shifted in the manager’s favour since the fans at Ibrox had experienced a mood swing and reassessed his coaching talents favourably. However, it now appears that the light at the end of the tunnel was caused by an oncoming train from Paisley. Rangers in general, and Belgians in particular, have cultural challenges. The club is too caught up in a blaming culture away from the pitch, which causes them to play the victim card whenever something goes wrong, such as losing the Premier Sports Cup final against Celtic on December 15.And Clement is on his way to being the next casualty of the park’s failure culture, which has persisted for more than a decade and resulted in a management merry go round at Ibrox.

At the risk of stating the obvious, Scottish football’s appetite for suspicion is, and always has been, insatiable. This has been the year when clubs and supporters stopped talking about football altogether and focused on decisions and the people who make them, exemplified by Rangers’ letter to the SFA in the aftermath of the cup final lost to a penalty shoot-out against Brendan Rodgers’ side.
It spoke of decisions which “benefitted” Celtic. Celtic only benefited from a perfect five penalties out of five in deciding the game’s outcome. Rangers’ suggestion that the VAR team, which was responsible for denying them a legitimate penalty during extra time at Hampden, be reinstated had some merit. But mainly because what is regarded as provocative in the West of Scotland wouldn’t be regarded as being provocative anywhere else in the country. One of the match officials from that day at the National Stadium, Frank Connor,

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