Russell Martin’s greatest sin? Blaming his players for everything

I will not have seen a miracle in Scottish football like it if Russell Martin somehow manages to transform Rangers and hold on to his job.

It is impossible to imagine. Martin is too far gone: too idealistic, too out of his depth, too lacking in understanding of the job at hand. And maybe most of all: too flawed in his judgment of a player. He is doomed.

It is painful to watch. No decent person enjoys seeing a man lampooned and harangued in the way Martin was by the Ibrox crowd last Saturday after the defeat to Hearts. To his great credit, that experience alone would have broken others.

There is a temptation to hang fire – to ‘go the extra mile for him’ as Sir David Murray once said famously of Paul Le Guen. Consider Rangers’ opponents in the League Cup this weekend.

Were Hibernian not in equally dire straits 10 months ago, when David Gray was widely held to be a goner? There was a point in the late autumn of 2024 when it seemed only a matter of hours before the manager was sacked. Yet he hung on, witnessed a 96th-minute equaliser against Aberdeen at home – just seconds from the tin tack – and his team suddenly soared.

Could the same happen to Martin over these next few days or weeks? Might he somehow pull off the near-impossible? No, he won’t.

This Rangers appointment has proved a fiasco. Even if Rangers win against Hibs at Ibrox on Saturday, it will surely only muddy the waters for a few more weeks.

The Ibrox stands are in uproar at Martin’s failings, and 50,000 people’s universal derision for him is a reminder of Abraham Lincoln’s famous adage: ‘You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.’

I was like a lot of observers when Martin first arrived at Rangers. I wanted to give the guy a chance. Just 12 months earlier he had heroically hoisted Southampton back into the English Premier League and, prior to this, his work at MK Dons and at Swansea had been interesting. He had something, he was articulate, and Rangers were seeking something fresh and different.

How absurd that context looks today. We now know there could be no more ill-fitting Rangers manager had even Martin O’Neill been handed the task. Russell Martin is left clawing in the dark, casting around for answers, and taking his players swimming in Loch Lomond. The poet, Stevie Smith, observing that scene, would have said: ‘He’s not waving but drowning.’

Has there ever been a Rangers manager who so regularly and routinely heaped the blame onto his players? This, for me, is Martin’s greatest sin. I find it borderline offensive.

He is forever quoting the ‘anxiety’ or ‘nervousness’ of his players. Every game, every defeat, the players are ‘anxious’ or ‘feeling the tension’ and their manager is constantly urging them to cope with the Ibrox environment.

‘We started the game so tense,’ Martin said of the 2-0 home defeat to Hearts.

‘They [the players] made decisions on the pitch which were not what we worked on, it wasn’t the game-plan,’ he said after the 3-1 home defeat to Club Brugge. ‘It was the players’ anxiety and desperation.’

There is a common Russell Martin theme here: it’s not me, Guv. Not my plans. Not my tactics. Not my doing. It’s the players, they’re so nervous.

In all my years covering Scottish football I’ve never known a manager to so regularly apportion blame to his players. It is most unbecoming.

He could easily be gone by now, yet Martin has three games in which to try to pull off the miracle. Following Hibs this weekend, his team will face Genk at home on Thursday in the Europa League and then Livingston away next Sunday.

None of these games should be beyond Rangers. In fact, a traditional Rangers fan of years’ standing might say: ‘That should be three wins.’ Yet I’m wondering if next Sunday in West Lothian might be Russell Martin’s death-knell. He must be dreading the fixture.

The Rangers support want him gone. And Patrick Stewart, the Rangers CEO, must be feeling enormous heat. Because the choice he made for Rangers manager in May now looks a foolish one.

Just a footnote. The last time this Rangers crowd turned on their own like this – and I was there – was in 1985 when the Copland Road end viciously rounded on a still-young Ally McCoist – just 23 at the time – during a dire home defeat to Dundee. McCoist, suffering terrible form at the time and shorn of confidence, sclaffed chance after chance.

Years later, when I interviewed the now-garlanded McCoist at Ibrox, he told me of the queues of autograph hunters he regularly greets outside the stadium. ‘But I look at each one of them,’ McCoist said, ‘and I wonder: “Were you one of the guys that was telling me where to go that day against Dundee”? I’ll never forget the abuse I took that day.’

McCoist turned it all around for himself at Rangers in the weeks and months that followed. Can Russell Martin repeat the feat?

I would say, no chance.