The former Sheffield Wednesday boss can only take so much responsibility for Rangers’ campaign. When he arrived in October to replace Russell Martin, Rangers were, after a significant summer squad overhaul, 13 points behind Hearts and eight off Celtic.<\/p>\n
Improved form up until mid-April had Rangers within a point of Hearts, and in front of Celtic, before those recent losses pulled them back to third. Overall, Rohl has a 2.22 points per league game average, which is higher than Derek McInnes at Hearts (2.11) but short of Martin O’Neill’s 2.5 for the Premiership fixtures he has had in charge of Celtic this season.<\/p>\n
Only a win at Celtic Park on Sunday, combined with a concession of points by Hearts at Motherwell the night before, will give Rangers any hope in the final two games of the season. Defeat on Sunday would consign Rangers to their first third-placed finish since 2018.<\/p>\n
When Rangers won 3-1 at Celtic Park in December, it was the last match of Wilfried Nancy’s short spell in charge of the hosts. Rohl will need to get the better of O’Neill for the first time to secure a second victory at the home of their city rivals this season.<\/p>\n
The German was only a couple of weeks in to the job when he took Rangers to Hampden to face interim boss O’Neill’s Celtic and, despite a valiant recovery with 10 players after Aasgaard’s first-half red card, the Ibrox side lost 3-1 after extra time.<\/p>\n
By the time of their March Scottish Cup quarter-final with Celtic, O’Neill had been back in charge of Celtic since January. Rangers pressed and pressed without end product and Celtic won on penalties after 120 goalless minutes at Ibrox.<\/p>\n
“It’s over when it’s over and it means it’s not over because we have still three games to go,” Rohl said.<\/p>\n
“The last two games bring us in a really difficult situation. We worked so hard to come to this point and then you lose two times, so tight 2-1 and 3-2 and this is not good enough for the moment.<\/p>\n
“What I demand from my group now is show personality and courage for the next three games and this is our job to do.”<\/p>\n
With captain James Tavernier having already announced he will leave this summer, six players coming to the end of their loan spells and the likes of goalkeeper Jack Butland about to enter the final year of their contracts, another significant turnover of players beckons.<\/p>\n
“We will analyse the season – what was right, what was wrong, what we have to improve and then I’m totally convinced from the summer on, we go again,” Rohl, 37, explained.<\/p>\n
“How we make decisions in moments, this is really a part that we really have to improve.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The former Sheffield Wednesday boss can only take so much responsibility for Rangers’ campaign. When he arrived in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":567130,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-567129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=567129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567129\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/567130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=567129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=567129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=567129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}