»ANALYSIS

WITH the big day only a week away now, it’s all beginning to look a lot like an optical illusion.

- BY KEITH JACKSON

Rangers don't appear on face value anything remotely close to genuine title contenders.

And yet here they are, one Tynecastle win away from all their Christmases coming at once before the turn of the year.

In many ways Danny Rohl deserves a great deal of credit for whipping this team into some semblance of shape or, at the very least, finding a way of making these players capable of winning a great deal more games of football than they previously had been.

But - and let’s be brutally honest here - Rangers remain a pretty horrible watch and for that reason alone it's difficult to consider them as serious runners in this season's race to the topflight finishing line.

Even though the numbers are starting to make a very strong argument otherwise.

As a matter of undeniable fact, the stats are actually quite startling. Rangers struggled through eight league games before Rohl was appointed to the position of head coach.

Russell Martin was holding the fort for seven of them, winning only one against Livingston, drawing five and losing the other at home to Hearts. Martin’s big, blue-sky vision was a wretched mess.

He picked up a paltry total of eight points from a possible 21 before being removed from his misery.

‘And, even when he had gone, Rangers dropped another couple of points at Ibrox against Dundee United before Rohl was shoehorned into the position at the end of October.

All of which meant the 36-year-old German was taking over a team which had taken nine points from 24 and was sitting with a win rate of just 12.5 per cent.

Rohl's record is actually quite remarkable by comparison, when it comes to crunching the numbers.

He’ also been in charge for eight league games, winning six of them and drawing the other two.