Russell Martin: The new Rangers manager

It's all but confirmed, Russell Martin will be the latest manager of Rangers Football Club. Although you probably didn't need me to tell you that, the howls of despair from some will probably have given the game away.

I think from the reaction I've seen on twitter, you'd think that by appointing Russell Martin, Rangers have opened the jaws of hell in the centre of Ibrox Stadium.

It might be the first case of primacy and recency bias occurring at the same time in a large group. Some are clinging onto the fact that Martin had a disappointing spell here as a player, he made 17 forgettable appearances on loan from Norwich in 2018. While others are brandishing his record as Southampton manager in the Premier League last season, 1 win in 16 games.

Quite why people think his ability as a player or his record as a manager with the worst squad in the Premier League (by quite some margin) is relevant to what he will achieve as Rangers manager is beyond me.

I understand feeling underwhelmed if you believed Rangers were going to unearth some foreign gem of a manager, a fresh new name like Davide Ancelotti or maybe an established winner like Jose Mourinho. Many convinced themselves that with the takeover the club would go out and get the most expensive manager available, build the most expensive squad Scotland has ever seen and then win everything immediately.

That was never going to be the case, this kind of restructure as a club takes a long time and is about shrewd long term moves, rather than expensive short term fixes.

Russell Martin is a long term appointment, he's a manager who has a clear style of play and footballing philosophy. He wants his team to play fast, possession-based attacking football, taking risks on the ball to play it forward and beat a press. Off the ball he wants his teams to work hard, press high and win the ball back. This kind of style has proven to be very successful in Scotland.

We've had "Flexible" and "Adaptable" coaches like Gio, Clement and Beale. All 3 were happy to compromise their playing style until they didn't have one anymore and all 3 failed to win a league title. It's not hard to remember us being laughed at and played off the park by vastly inferior teams in recent years, when under the tenure of those managers. I don't know about anyone else, but I'd rather go back to bullying 90% of the teams in Scotland, taking their lunch money and making their lives hell until they move schools.

One of the biggest criticisms we've seen in recent years about Rangers, even under Steven Gerrard's stewardship, is that we keep the handbrake on against smaller teams, especially at home. We play too risk-averse with 2 holding midfielders instead of leaving one player to sit and letting everyone else attack.

That brings me nicely onto Martin's defensive record as a manager, it's poor, his teams concede plenty of goals. Why is that? Well, he sets his teams up with players taking risks in their positioning to break teams down, this leaves them vulnerable to the counter, so they concede more goals as a result. It means we can get used to seeing plenty of exciting games this season, and as long as we end up on the winning side more often than not, I'm not against that.

Every managerial appointment is a risk, I am glad that this time the risk being taken is with a new style of manager rather than making the same mistakes as with previous appointments.

All this talk of Martin's style will fall by the wayside if the new owners don't show us exactly what they are about by gutting this squad completely, binning off players with no future, selling those with high value and using whatever money we have to bring in players that are capable of playing the required style of football.

That's the next test, I won't have any real thoughts on the season ahead until we've seen what kind of moves we make in the upcoming window.

If you want detailed reading on Russell Martin's style of play as a manager, John Walker has done many exceptional breakdowns, such as this one.