Rangers Left Paying for Bad Calls in Big Moments

Rangers are being criticised for letting another title opportunity slip, with the manager’s selections and substitutions questioned. The worry now is whether the squad has the nerve and direction for next season.

Rangers’ biggest concern is not just that we have somehow managed, yet again, to throw away a clear shot at the SPFL title and the riches that could have come with it. The bigger worry is next year, and whether we are learning anything at all.

The fear is the pressure moments

Celtic will be preparing to bring in a whole new management team and then a whole new squad of players. That should be a serious challenge for Rangers, but the feeling here is they will be laughing at our attempts as soon as the pressure is on.

They have money. They will win the Scottish Cup and we will win nothing yet again. That itself will ease the pain if Hearts win, but it does not change the bigger point: Celtic have been very poor for large parts of the season, yet Rangers have still managed to do nothing to them when it mattered.

Selection and substitutions have backfired

For me, Danny Rohl has been clueless about winning the big moments. Last week, he bowed to fans who knew Gassama and Aasgaard should have been taken off much earlier. This week, he brought the same two on again, and then played Olsen for 70 minutes when he has not been any good for five minutes. It was an awful decision, and it is becoming a worrying pattern.

We had cash spent, a new manager, and what looked like a promising young team. We watched Celtic wobble under their own situation and still we did not take advantage properly, even with fixtures you would expect Rangers to handle.

Better options ignored

It is hard to take when we already had players like Antman and Bajrami, both a far better bet than Olsen in my view. Bajrami celebrated every Rangers goal from the bench and was in rapture when we scored against Celtic, yet he was never played properly. Antman was the guy needed at Tynecastle, but he was ignored completely.

Instead, we saw the same two players come on after offering absolutely nothing only a week earlier. That was the solution: bring on the pair who did nothing for the team, even after being given 70 minutes at a bouncing Ibrox with 50k fans willing them to do something, anything, to win the game. They failed miserably, and the manager did too by keeping them on and leaving other options sitting there.

Miovski, Tavernier and the wider standards

Then came another decision that made little sense to me: bringing young Connor on as a holding defensive midfielder, while an attacking option sat beside him. The same goes for Miovski. You cannot keep dropping a poacher, giving him half a game, then dropping him again. If you do not play to a poacher’s strengths, you might as well not play him, but it feels like we see Miovski in and out while we struggle to win the moments that decide seasons.

Now Celtic might win the league again. The claim is we do not have any bottle, and even Tavernier is being singled out. There is frustration at him being in, then out, then in again, then out, and at the constant message that we will learn from this.

I have no idea if Rohl gets next season because he does not look like he knows how to change anything. I believe change is required already, and I hate saying that, but when the clear chance was there, we played the wrong team and made the wrong substitutions again and again. The call here is to act quickly, bring in people who love the club, and avoid staring down years of regret.

Written by Tomthumb1212 May 6 2026 19:16:04