Rangers 2 ( Kiernan, McKay) v Hearts 0 post-match discussion

[JFK-1 1,693]

The only disappointment was that we didn't score more goals

 

Been a problem from day one hasn't it but hopefully that's the next corner to be turned. If the sheep who are crap can hit 5 against Killie we're due nay overdue to give someone a real hammering.

[ian1964 10,724]

Must admit I thoroughly enjoyed the game.

 

The only disappointment was that we didn't score more goals with Miller and Waghorn guilty of missing another four good chances but I can't argue with the overall commitment and quality of every player on the pitch.

 

That's the standard they're capable of and we need to find it in every game - home or away. There is simply no excuse not to deliver the same intensity and work-rate in every game.

 

I've said it before, the very least we should expect is effort and there is no reason for not doing so!, work hard,fight for every ball and the football will follow

[Ser Barristan Selmy 222]

We played well, barely giving Hearts a sniff and were in command throughout. We retained possession well, created some good openings and could easily have scored more.

 

Back to back wins against Aberdeen and Hearts is vital and gives a bit of cause for optimism. Win 2 or 3 more matches and our season's form will start to look a lot better.

 

Any transfer business we do in January will be key. Also, I usually sit in the Broomloan but was in the Club Deck and the view was superb.

[calscot 0]

I've only seen the highlights but it looked to me that Hearts played a totally different game than the last time, under a different manager.

 

I think Cathro did the Warburton thing of only thinking about his own team and how he wants them to play, but unless he has some genius that Warburton doesn't, it's not going to work against a team of better players who while also having a system, seem to have for once adapted it slightly to the opposition.

 

I think Neilson set his team up mostly to take advantage to what we could all see as our weaknesses, and it worked.

 

Looking at how we played there is also the factor that I think separately from the tactics, most of our players just played to a higher standard than last time. Form comes in peaks and troughs and compared to most of the games this season, our passing and control seemed a bit more skillful and accurate.

 

But the real positive for me is that Warburton seems to have learned something from the Hearts defeat, and has changed the tactics to be a bit less rigid and predictable. The players seem more comfortable with the occasional long ball, and it seemed to be effective in attack, as well as reducing the pressure of the high press, which Hearts didn't seem to be able to keep up.

 

Warburton seems to be starting to learn how to play in this league which will hopefully massively improve our points haul in the second half of the season - and possibly give us a bit of a chance of defeating the league leaders at home.

 

Second place was looking like something we'd succeed by a whisker, now it's starting to look like we can possibly do it with a reasonable gap, as long as we can repeat the last two displays as a template for the rest of the games.

 

I think Aberdeen are doing about as well as they can, and if we stop dropping the easy points we can easily distance them as I don't think they will stop doing so. But I can see the possibility of Hearts becoming more consistent against the smaller clubs under a new manager, although to be fair to the previous one, he seemed to be doing a half decent job.

Edited December 12, 2016 by calscot

[JFK-1 1,693]

But I can see the possibility of Hearts becoming more consistent against the smaller clubs under a new manager, although to be fair to the previous one, he seemed to be doing a half decent job.

 

The problem for Hearts managers right now is that after a spell in the SPL with no Rangers then a season in the championship with a Rangers team just coming up from league 1 and in a rebuilding process is that they forgot their place in the scheme of things. They thought that they were a comparable force to Rangers which is total fantasy.

 

Following Saturday many were already calling for the new managers head after just one game and a defeat at a stadium where no visitor has won in over a year. Completely oblivious to the reality that at every succeeding transfer window Rangers will move ever further ahead of them and it wouldn't matter who they put in charge they are never going to be the force against Rangers they were in that championship season.

 

And it's the same thing up in sheep land. McInnes is an idiot and they should be beating Rangers with ease. Entirely forgetting that they haven't beaten Rangers at Ibrox in decades and that in season 2012-13 even with no Rangers in the league they finished 8th and it was McInnes who then came in and gave them a spate of second place finishes albeit with no Rangers in the league.

 

It's apparently going to take both of them time to relearn their natural place in the big picture and that's competing for third at best.

[calscot 0]

I think there's obvious reasons why you can't just leave the pitch and then come on willy-nilly. I think we all must have experienced this when playing in a more casual game where someone leaves say due to an injury and then comes on at an opportune moment when you don't expect it, spoiling an attack or robbing a defender, or intercepting a pass back or whatever. It always seems incredibly unfair when your playing to the team on the pitch and then are left thinking, where did he come from?

[JFK-1 1,693]

I think there's obvious reasons why you can't just leave the pitch and then come on willy-nilly. I think we all must have experienced this when playing in a more casual game where someone leaves say due to an injury and then comes on at an opportune moment when you don't expect it, spoiling an attack or robbing a defender, or intercepting a pass back or whatever. It always seems incredibly unfair when your playing to the team on the pitch and then are left thinking, where did he come from?

 

That's exactly why he was offside with no doubt about it. This is taken from an FA website explaining the ruling.

 

Question: How can an attacking player gain a non-offside advantage when returning to the field of play?

 

Answer: The player could come back onto the field of play without the other team being aware and then receive a pass or make a challenge.

 

And that's exactly what he did.

[calscot 0]

Following Saturday many were already calling for the new managers head after just one game and a defeat at a stadium where no visitor has won in over a year. Completely oblivious to the reality that at every succeeding transfer window Rangers will move ever further ahead of them and it wouldn't matter who they put in charge they are never going to be the force against Rangers they were in that championship season.

 

I agree, and for me, that Championship season for them was one of those purple patch season's where lots of things went right and clicked. A bit like Leicester in the EP. It doesn't mean that it was sustainable or they could improve on it - and Leicester aren't doing a that good follow up season.

 

All Hearts have really done since is cement their position in the financial hierarchy of things, competing with Aberdeen for the best non-OF team in the league, both with the highest budgets by a margin in that category, with Aberdeen I think having a bit more.

 

Both teams really haven't done more than their relative budgets would predict. And to be completely fair, we are currently doing worse than ours would. I'm hoping the last two games show that we can at least take our place where our financial advantage should minimally take us - although we need to start to also be able to boast about our away form.

 

For me, I think their inconsistency is based on the relative ratio of their wage bills compared to the rest of the league.

 

They are only something like 2 to 4 times more, which is a level for me which suggests you will win most of the games but drop points quite easily if the you don't play so well and the other team does - you'll generally be better but not dominant in taking the points.

 

However, when like Celtic (and previously like us) you have something like 15 to 20 times the budget of the smaller teams, then you should be winning most weeks with the odd banana skin. With Celtic still about 6 to 8 times that of Aberdeen and Hearts, they will have to play badly to drop many points against them. Their biggest problem should be us, at about 2 to 2.5 times the wage - which like Hearts and Aberdeen dropping points to the rest, they have a good chance of dropping some points to us while coming out best overall.

 

So if you look at us, with around 3 times that of the two bests of the rest, then we can expect to drop some points but not many. However, with about 6 to 12 times the rest, we should only be dropping points to them now and again - but we've been playing like a side with 2-3 times their budget and have the points total to reflect that...

 

This is why for me, second place in this league should always have been a foregone conclusion with Rangers for an average SP manager, never mind one who is supposed to be well above average.

 

So if we want to challenge for the title, we either need to match Celtic on the players level by matching the wages, or we need Warburton to be so good, he gets the team playing above their value, while Rogers doesn't.

 

The same goes for McInnes and Cathro if they want to challenge us - if we play averagely to our financial investment.

Edited December 12, 2016 by calscot

[JFK-1 1,693]

I agree, and for me, that Championship season for them was one of those purple patch season's where lots of things went right and clicked. A bit like Leicester in the EP. It doesn't mean that it was sustainable or they could improve on it - and Leicester aren't doing a that good follow up season.

 

All Hearts have really done since is cement their position in the financial hierarchy of things, competing with Aberdeen for the best non-OF team in the league, both with the highest budgets by a margin in that category, with Aberdeen I think having a bit more.

 

Both teams really haven't done more than their relative budgets would predict. And to be completely fair, we are currently doing worse than ours would. I'm hoping the last two games show that we can at least take our place where our financial advantage should minimally take us - although we need to start to also be able to boast about our away form.

 

For me, I think their inconsistency is based on the relative ratio of their wage bills compared to the rest of the league.

 

They are only something like 2 to 4 times more, which is a level for me which suggests you will win most of the games but drop points quite easily if the you don't play so well and the other team does - you'll generally be better but not dominant in taking the points.

 

However, when like Celtic (and previously like us) you have something like 15 to 20 times the budget of the smaller teams, then you should be winning most weeks with the odd banana skin. With Celtic still about 6 to 8 times that of Aberdeen and Hearts, they will have to play badly to drop many points against them. Their biggest problem should be us, at about 2 to 2.5 times the wage - which like Hearts and Aberdeen dropping points to the rest, they have a good chance of dropping some points to us while coming out best overall.

 

So if you look at us, with around 3 times that of the two bests of the rest, then we can expect to drop some points but not many. However, with about 6 to 12 times the rest, we should only be dropping points to them now and again - but we've been playing like a side with 2-3 times their budget and have the points total to reflect that...

 

This is why for me, second place in this league should always have been a foregone conclusion with Rangers for an average SP manager, never mind one who is supposed to be well above average.

 

So if we want to challenge for the title, we either need to match Celtic on players level by matching the wages, or we need Warburton so good, he gets the team playing above their value.

 

The same goes for McInnes and Cathro if they want to challenge us - if we play averagely to our financial investment.

 

Yeah I would agree with all that. Even during the stuttering period earlier in the season I was always confident we would ultimately impose ourselves. On the Hearts forum I looked at after the match amid a sea of total babble there was just one guy who was entirely honest and went as far as to say that no one else had so completely outplayed them all this season.

 

And he further conceded that's just the way it's going to be because they're never going to be financially competing with Rangers or anything near it. Until the rest of their fans learn that or actually relearn it they're going to be nothing but disappointed. We're going to conduct more significant business in the January and Summer windows which will leave them trailing even further in our wake.

 

And if we can qualify for the Europa league group stage we will begin to leave them even further behind. This was always going to be a season of transition and despite that we're still overall looking superior to both Hearts and the sheep. Neither of them have looked anything like as impressive as we did on Saturday and I still think we're going to be even better.

[ian1964 10,724]

Saturday's 2-0 defeat at Ibrox, although Hearts had a goal wrongly ruled out, underlined their defensive deficiencies. Rangers' first goal was an unchallenged header from a free kick. The second featured two failed attempts to cut out a bread-and-butter cross.

 

Rob Maclean(BBC)

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/38289574