Analysis Corner: What's causing Rangers defensive woes
By Dougie Wright (@dougie_wright)
It’s been a funny 12 months for Rangers. At the same stage of the season this time last year, the Ibrox side were sitting with 55 points after 32 games.
New coach Pedro Caixinha was unbeaten in his first four games as Rangers manager, with eight scored and one conceded
Since then, a lot has changed.
Caixinha left in October, Graeme Murty came back in, fourteen first team players were signed and fifteen first team players left.
They’ve scored seventeen more goals more than they had at this stage last year, but they’ve also conceded four more.
And yet, despite all of this turbulence, the Ibrox side are just four points better off where they were in April 2017. They’re still locked in a fight for second with Aberdeen (and now Hibs). They’re still looking at a significant summer recruitment drive. They’re still pretty much underachieving given the amount of resources at their disposal.
So what do they need to fix?
Looking at the above stats, it seems like the biggest thing holding them back is their worsening defence.
Stability
No team in the league has scored more than Rangers this season. However, no team in the top six has either conceded more, or gone behind more than the Ibrox side.
Five centre halves have been used by Rangers for most of the season: Bruno Alves, Russel Martin, Fabio Cardoso, David Bates and Danny Wilson.
It doesn’t take a long investigation to figure out the problem here.
For Alves, Cardoso and Martin, this is their first season in Scottish football. This time last year, David Bates hadn’t even made his top flight debut. Meanwhile, Danny Wilson is long gone, having moved to the MLS in January.
As a result, you have this mishmash of centre halves who aren’t used to the club, the league, or each other.
Defending is the most structured part of football. It’s not like in attack where you can afford to have a maverick who does nothing for the whole game then pulls out a moment of brilliance.
Good defences are built on teamwork and communication. It’s about knowing your team-mates’ game inside out. Will the midfielders track runners all the way into the box? Are we going to play an offside trap? If I step out to win a header, will my other centre back know to cover me?
Looking at the foundation of Motherwell’s goals on Saturday, it’s plain to see that this is lacking at Rangers right now. Both goals involved a midfield runner coming from deep who wasn’t picked up and both goals involved Russel Martin stepping out to challenge Ryan Bowman, leaving Bruno Alves isolated in the centre. This is a problem of organisation above anything else.
As such, the situation that Rangers have found themselves in is far from ideal. They are lacking stability in the area of the pitch where they need it the most.
Unfortunately for them, there doesn’t appear to be a quick fix here. Ross McCrorie may be coming back from injury, but the academy product appears to be preferred as a midfielder by Murty. As such, it looks like the club are going to have to grin and bear it in the hope that Alves and Martin develop a sufficient understanding until the end of the season.
Tactics
In Jamie Murphy, Daniel Candeias, Alfredo Morelos and Josh Windass, you have a group of players who will provide goals. Indeed, just ten Rangers league goals this season have not been scored or set up by that quartet of players.
Their pace, power and skill has made their team the highest scorers in the division. Yet, it also has indirectly led to more goals being conceded.
These players have started most games since January. On the ball, they have plenty of movement, swap positions and link up with each other fairly well. Off the ball, they will harry the opposition defenders. So far, so good.
However, the problems emerge when teams get past that first line of pressure into the Rangers midfield. None of these players really track back, and when you have a centre back pairing who like to stay relatively deep (Alves and Martin have a combined age of 67), it leaves a giant hole in the middle of the park to be covered by two central midfielders.
In the middle of the field, Kilmarnock, Hibs and Celtic all stay very compact. They will never have fewer than three players in that central area.
It’s no coincidence that all three have beaten Rangers since the winter break, each scoring goals where they were able to move up the pitch very quickly.
Therefore, Graeme Murty has a dilemma. The obvious solution is to move from a 4-2-3-1 to a 4-5-1/4-3-3 when Ross McCrorie is fit again. That would allow Rangers to go with three in the middle, while McCrorie staying in the defensive midfield position would even allow Greg Docherty and Graeme Dorrans to push higher up.
Yet this would involve dropping one of Windass, Morelos, Murphy and Candeias. Of the four, Windass would seem to be the natural choice given his position. Yet, once you change something in the team, it affects everything else. Murty must therefore make his next move pretty carefully.
So where can they go from here?
With such a glaring weakness in defence, Rangers can’t be too comfortable going into the split. They can make tactical adjustments, but need to do so in the hope that it doesn’t blunt an otherwise effective attacking force.
Nevertheless, it seems that Rangers biggest priority during the summer transfer window will be solving this centre back problem. Of the five mentioned earlier in the article, Wilson is already gone, Martin and Bates only have a contract until the end of the season, and Bruno Alves will be another year older.
Over to Mark Allen...
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