The only thing braver than Russell Martin’s football is Russell Martin

I watched the Rangers manager lose a fanbase who loved him. Do NOT expect him to look for Plan B

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Adam Clery writes about football tactics for Nutmeg every month. But he writes about football tactics ALL THE TIME on 87 Minutes (subscribe below). And his videos about football tactics are some of the best football content on the internet and you should check them out, too.

Someone once told me that the biggest distance in Scottish football is the 525-mile round trip Peterhead and Stranraer have to navigate to fulfil a fixture against each other. That’s not correct, though. The biggest distance in Scottish football is the one between “any team who get into the Champions League” and “literally everyone else”.

So it was of no minor consequence that Russell Martin’s start to life at Ibrox required him to successfully navigate Panathinaikos; their fellow league runners-up from Super League Greece and, crucially, favourites for the tie.

And they did! Which is good! But ask anybody who sat through both of those fixtures for a recap and they’ll immediately start reaching for phrases like “wasteful Greeks”, “rode their luck”, and “Jack Butland, fucking hell”. So a job done, but given it was followed by a fairly tepid draw with Motherwell you’d excuse Rangers fans for not writing lyric and verse over the notion of Martin-Ball.

Which, incidentally, they can’t really do anyway because Martin Ball was the name of the actor who played Mr Steel, the headmaster in Bernard’s Watch.

Three games is very early — even for something you read on the internet — to start making sweeping assessments of a manager’s style or a team’s long-term chances, but I had to sit and watch Southampton last season so I feel extremely entitled to do it anyway…