NafisaDerek McInnes was left searching for answers after Rangers suffered another painful European collapse, this time crashing out of the Conference League qualifiers in Czechia.
The Light Blues travelled to face Jablonec with a 1-0 advantage from the first leg at Ibrox, knowing that a professional performance would have been enough to take them into the next stage.
Instead, Rangers produced a display that left their travelling supporters furious.
Vakhtang Chanturishvili’s goal with 15 minutes remaining cancelled out the advantage Rangers had worked so hard to establish in Glasgow.
Jablonec then continued to threaten during extra time, while Rangers struggled to produce the attacking response required to save their European campaign.
The tie eventually went to penalties, but there was to be no happy ending for McInnes.
Findlay Curtis and James Penrice missed their efforts from the spot, leaving Rangers eliminated and without European football for the remainder of the season.
It is the first time since 2017 that Rangers have failed to reach a European league phase, making the result particularly damaging given the money invested into the squad during the summer.
And after the final whistle, McInnes made no attempt to hide his feelings.
“I am mortified and ashamed”:
The Rangers boss was brutally honest when assessing what had happened in Czechia, accepting responsibility rather than attempting to hide behind the penalty shoot-out or the significant turnover of players at Ibrox.
“I’m embarrassed with the performance. It wasn’t a good performance at any stretch of the imagination,” McInnes said.
“Then you think you might just get through… But it shouldn’t have come down to two boys, James Penrice and Findlay Curtis, in tears for missing a penalty kick. It shouldn’t have come down to that.”
McInnes then made his position on responsibility crystal clear.
“I’m not going to sit here and make any excuses whatsoever. It wasn’t good enough. Yes, there’s been a big turnover of players.
“Yes, we looked very inexperienced at times. But the responsibility is mine to make sure that we are better than what we served up tonight. And we were miles short.”
The manager’s admission inevitably raises the question of whether he could consider his own position.
There is, however, no indication in his comments that McInnes has decided to resign or that he has offered his resignation to Rangers chairman Andrew Cavenagh.
Instead, his immediate message was that he intends to take responsibility and find a way forward.
“I’m mortified by the performance. I know you can lose games of football, but we should have enough in the building to take care of that tonight,” he added.
“I’ll take responsibility for the result, but the responsibility is shared. The players have got to be better than that.
“It’s my job to help the players, but they’ve got to help themselves as well.”
Those words will now be closely examined by the Rangers hierarchy.
McInnes has inherited a team undergoing significant change, but the expectation at Ibrox remains enormous. European football was one of the major objectives and Rangers have now fallen short despite having two opportunities to reach a league phase.
The manager knows the performance itself was the bigger concern.
He apologised to Rangers supporters:
The travelling support made the long journey to Czechia expecting to watch their side finish the job.
Instead, they watched Rangers fail to register the performance required against a team that finished fifth in the Czech league last season.
McInnes acknowledged that the supporters deserved considerably more.
“I’m embarrassed with the result. I’m gutted for the supporters because they’ve come here,” he said.
“We come over on a charter flight, we stay in a nice hotel, we get all the preparation, and they come here whatever way they can. They’ll still make their way to Aberdeen on Sunday.
“They don’t always need to see their team perform brilliantly, but they do deserve to see their team perform way better than that. For that, it’s not good enough.”
That final admission could be particularly important for the manager.
Rangers now have no European safety net and will have to concentrate entirely on domestic football.
But McInnes also admitted that his team currently lack a clear identity.
“You’ve got to be proactive and do more with the ball when you get it,” he said.
“I look at us now and I’m thinking, well, we’re no great as a possession-based team at the minute.
“We’re not a counter-attacking team enough, or effectively enough, at times. We don’t look like a team who are happy when we go direct.”
That is a significant admission from a manager whose team has already endured a frustrating start.
McInnes knows the solution cannot simply be blaming individual players.
“And teams need to be something. It’s my job to try and find the answers on the pitch because what was happening wasn’t working,” he continued.
The Rangers manager also refused to blame Nico Raskin’s absence for the defeat, despite acknowledging that his team could have benefited from the Belgian’s experience in midfield.
“There have been no offers for Nico. It’s just been quite a few conversations, so I don’t know where that was. Certainly not today, ahead of the game—I hadn’t heard anything. So, I don’t know where that’s at. That may well change.”
“But I did think we lacked a bit of experience in the middle of the pitch at times. I think any team would miss somebody like Nico, but I need to say that’s not the reason why we’ve lost tonight. We should still have enough in the building, as I said.”
So, despite the resignation talk that will inevitably surround such a catastrophic result, McInnes has not indicated that he is preparing to walk away from Rangers.
His message was instead one of responsibility.
The manager knows he has fallen miles short of the standard expected, knows the supporters are angry and knows the Rangers hierarchy will demand a response.
Now comes the difficult part.
With European football gone, McInnes has no choice but to make Rangers’ domestic campaign count.
The question is whether his apology and promise to find the answers will be enough to convince Cavenagh and the Rangers hierarchy that he remains the man capable of fixing it.
Nafisa
