STEPHEN McGOWAN: Rangers at risk of becoming Espanyol to Celtic’s Barcelona after week from hell

The new football season has only just begun. And for Rangers it can’t end soon enough.

The Ibrox hierarchy have endured the week from hell. A £40m windfall was buried six feet under the ground after the death of another Champions League campaign. A £4m life insurance premium went up in smoke when they failed to make the play-off round.

As they moved through the five stages of grief, supporters moved from denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance to apathy.

How apathetic will be shown when a team with little quality kicks off against St Johnstone in Saturday night’s televised Premier Sports Cup match at Hampden. If the crowd is more than 20,000, they should replace the half-time cakes with medals for bravery.

Many people voted with their feet on Tuesday night during the grim Champions League elimination against Dynamo Kiev.

For any club, losing £40m to reach the group stage would be as painful as picking a scab from a festering wound.

When the club in question pays rent to the SFA for the use of Hampden because they took an unnecessary gamble on imported steel from China, sells players to fund new ones and debates the terms of a legal settlement of a kit deal in the Court of Session, it is like flushing a winning ticket down the toilet. Even a hand around the U-turn won’t bring it back.

An undeserved red card for Jefte early in the second half was a poor decision, but should not obscure the fact that with 11 men, let alone 10, Rangers posed little threat to Dynamo keeper Georgiy Bushchan.

Philippe Clement’s lack of a clear plan was compounded by the manager’s failure to see the signs of danger when Jefte was shown a yellow card in the first half, only to be given a hard look by the Italian referee for another foul a few minutes later.

Hindsight is easy for management. But if Vaclav Cerny wasn’t fit to start the game, is it fair to ask why he was fit to come on at half-time? Or, for that matter, why he replaced Ross McCausland instead of the booked Jefte?

Cerny was the main man against Motherwell, and was perhaps the man to lift the strange old atmosphere of the first half against Dynamo. It’s academic now.

After sharply addressing the referee on the pitch as time ran out, Clement also ignored reports of a video showing striker Danilo limping onto the Hampden bench, looking – to the rest of the world – like a player towing a caravan. If the Brazilian walks like that when he’s fit, you wouldn’t want to see him strutting around in a moon boot.

In a new twist to Glasgow’s soggy summer, the brown stuff continued to fall from the sky. New club marketing consultant Blaine McConnell was shown the door after unfortunate footage emerged providing compelling evidence that he was in fact Celtic-dumb and prone to reckless outbursts on social media.

While McConnell can console himself with a seat at Parkhead for the first derby of the season on September 1, true Rangers supporters will be left out. Again.

Just when it seemed that calm had been restored and an agreement had been reached to restore the allocation of away tickets for this season, Celtic announced that they did not trust their city rivals to complete the work required to fulfil their side of the bargain ahead of the Ibrox Old Firm match on January 2.

With left-back Ridvan Yilmaz out for six weeks, Rangers fans will only be able to watch the game through their fingers.

Some have had enough. A statement from the Rangers Supporters Association has accused the club’s hierarchy of incompetence and demanded they immediately improve their game.

All in all, it wasn’t a great week.

There’s a new word being coined among fans of both Celtic and Rangers to sum up the current rift between the two clubs. And it’s one you won’t find in the New Oxford Dictionary.

‘Espanyolification’ paints a scenario in which Rangers become the Espanyol to Celtic’s Barcelona.

Rival clubs in the same city, divided by politics, finances and therefore also by profits on the field.

Since Dave King took charge of Rangers in 2015, they have had six permanent managers and five caretakers. While Celtic have won 21 trophies, including five Trebles, their rivals have only won three silverware.

They have no general manager, no youth academy director, they have been forced to leave their own stadium, the player exchange model is behind schedule and the squad is no longer up to the standard it used to be.

It’s all well and good that chairman John Bennett is giving Clement a contract extension, promising to break the cycle of ‘repeat and repeat’ and promising better times ahead.

The problem is that Rangers dropped two points to Hearts on the opening day, they are out of the Champions League and, if they lose to Celtic in a fortnight, all those promises of a spectacle tomorrow will do little to protect the manager and chairman from a long-lasting bitter taste.

Cautionary tale of two VERY different strikers

In the summer of 2022, Aberdeen signed two new attackers from overseas. And what different paths they have taken.

Bojan Miovski played two years in the Granite City and was a model pro who managed to secure a lucrative move to one of the best leagues in the world.

Luis “Duk” Lopes, on the other hand, started out like a runaway train before landing head first in the buffers. He now spends his days at home brooding, with toys strewn across the floor and, inexplicably, that’s by choice.

This week, Miovski rightly joined Girona, the third-best team in La Liga, for a club record fee of £6.8 million. Blessed with a deadly eye for goals, the North Macedonian was a £3 million target for Espanyol and even when that was turned down, there were no grumblings, hysterics or tantrums. He kept his head down and left Aberdeen for Spain, wiping tears from his eyes, a modern-day folk hero.

You’d pay a lot of money for Duk’s thoughts on the matter. From day one, the Cape Verdean striker looked the more explosive of the two, with 18 goals. Even when the well dried up before Christmas, he was receiving bids from clubs in the Netherlands and Spain. Both failed to meet Aberdeen’s valuation and by the time pre-season training began last month, Duk had gone AWOL. Left with no other option, the Dons took disciplinary action.

Miovski used the Premier League as a platform to propel his career to new heights, leaving for the highest fee ever paid for a non-Old Firm outfield player in Scottish football history.

Duk used the Premiership as a platform to show his moodiness and sense of entitlement. Foolish enough to take bad advice, he is now persona non grata, his reputation torn. Dumb boy hardly covers it.