Ally McCoist blasts Rangers as damning stat v Napoli is revealed
Ally McCoist has put Rangers on blast as a damning statistic from the club’s UEFA Champions League clash v Napoli was revealed on BT Sport.
Rangers slumped to their fifth successive European defeat and were not only convincingly beaten by Napoli but also outfought as well.
McCoist admitted that a stat revealing that Napoli had run more than 4km more than Rangers was “unacceptable” and questioned Gers desire.
“They covered 4.1km more than Rangers. I’ll cut the centre backs and the goalkeeper a bit of slack so basically 8 players are running 500m each more than Rangers – that’s unacceptable for me,” McCoist said on BT Sport on Wednesday night (26 October), as quoted by the Scottish Daily Express.
“You look at the incidents. There was a chance for Scott Wright in first half and he has to come in and just smash a volley but he takes the ball away.
“Then on the other side Tillman and Kent are not getting into the box. Is it a jog? Are they going to get there? If the ball goes down the right hand side, and this is schoolboy stuff, the player on the left isn’t going to score unless he comes in.
“You have to show a desire – a willingness to score a goal.
“When you are a centre forward you have to get into the box. You don’t know exactly where the ball will be but you have to get in there.
“I have no idea why there was less desire in the Rangers team. You saw all night that Napoli had that, especially when they went to win the ball back.”
Slim hope.
Rangers can take some slim arithmetic hope of continuing their European journey into 2023 as Liverpool beat Ajax on Wednesday evening.
The hope is extremely slim however, and Rangers would have to beat Ajax by a 4-0 margin that the Dutch outfit inflicted on them earlier in the group stage.
Giovanni van Bronckhort’s side may be better off being out of European competition this campaign, they’ve looked ill-equipped to deal with Europe’s top teams.
They looked like boys against men in games against Liverpool and Wednesday evening’s clash against Napoli and need to drastically improve moving forward.
Perhaps, Rangers should be thankful they left Naples with a minor deficit to the one Liverpool left them stinging with at Ibrox, but it still wasn’t good enough.
You have to bear in mind that Napoli were without Piotr Zielinski, Hirving Lozano, Victor Osimhen and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia though, things could have been a lot worse for Rangers if they were playing.
In other Rangers news, this Gers star was involved in a “naughty” incident that had a BT Sport pundit talking live on air.