Derek McInnes has taken a wrecking ball to the Rangers squad he inherited, deciding it was damaged beyond repair, and now three consecutive wins suggest his own rebuilding project is beginning to take shape.
The demolition work has been completed, allowing McInnes to remove the hard hat and focus on construction. During his first 83 days in charge, he has been ruthless—but, more importantly, he has been right. Having guided his old club Hearts to third place last season, he already had a solid understanding of the deficiencies within the group he inherited in the summer.
It is also likely that when he returned to Ibrox as manager in June and inspected the players up close for the first time, he was shocked by the true extent of the decay and the scale of the task he had taken on.
A familiar danger zone
What is currently unfolding at Leicester City will send a shiver down the spine of a Rangers support still traumatised by Russell Martin's attempts to oversee a similar reconstruction 12 months ago. Martin's botched job left Rangers structurally unsafe, and something very familiar is now happening in the Midlands, where Martin is dragging his new club into the same sort of danger zone.
The similarities are stark. After only five games in League One, Leicester have already dropped 10 points from the first 15. Five games into last season's top-flight campaign, Martin's Rangers side had allowed 11 league points to crumble into dust.
This legacy has been two-fold for McInnes. First, Martin's slapdash efforts had to be entirely dismantled—rather than building on those foundations, a wrecking ball approach was required. Second, McInnes has had to rip it all up and start again knowing that the supporters are still deeply scarred by what was done to their club while Martin was at the wheel.
Patience wearing thin
Patience was always likely to be thin on the ground, and it gave way to alarm and panic when Rangers were eliminated from two European competitions in quick succession over three chaotic weeks in August. Throughout, McInnes understood the environment in which he was operating. He knew he was on shaky ground with the fans and made no attempt to bend the truth or talk his way out of trouble.
But three wins on the spin—culminating in Saturday's warmly received display at home to Motherwell—have gone a long way to underpinning the early stages of his reconstruction. McInnes is now five league games into the job, having dropped just five points from 15. While that is five more than he would have wanted, it compares very favourably with Martin's error-strewn efforts last season and this.
Those Rangers fans who were initially spooked into suspecting the worst-case scenario was unfolding again can now breathe a little easier and perhaps stand more firmly behind this bricks-and-mortar overhaul. If McInnes can claim another victory on Wednesday night, when early-season high flyers St Mirren make the short trip to Ibrox, he will have cobbled together four league wins in a row. To put it in perspective, Rangers achieved that just twice last season, and only after Martin had been replaced by Danny Rohl.
Shankland blow and Kelsy arrival
McInnes will need some good fortune along the way, and right now he must be wondering what he has done to offend Lady Luck so badly. When Lawrence Shankland hobbled off clutching a hamstring after just seven minutes of Saturday's 1-0 win over Motherwell, the ghosts of last season came visiting.
It was when Shankland pulled up with the same injury during a Scottish Cup defeat at home to Falkirk on January 17 that Hearts began to wobble at the top of the Premiership table. Shankland missed a total of eight top-flight games over nine weeks of rehabilitation. Hearts won only four of them without their talismanic skipper and dropped 11 points along the way. They still took the title fight to a final-day shootout at Celtic Park, where Shankland opened the scoring.
But McInnes must be haunted by a bunch of what-might-have-beens, and seeing it happen again at the weekend will have felt like a horrible flashback—especially after Shankland had only just pulled his shooting boots back on. It was the striker's goals which made the difference and secured away wins at Pittodrie and Falkirk, providing Rangers and their new manager with a more solid platform for the rest of the campaign.
Now McInnes will have to manage without him once more, most probably for a similar length of time. Last week's £9m arrival of Kevin Kelsy in the final throes of the transfer window has thrown McInnes a lifeline in that regard. The big Venezuelan, who made his debut from the bench at the weekend, might be an unknown quantity for the time being, but if his talents match the size of his transfer fee, then perhaps McInnes might be spared another punishing run while Shankland is recuperating.
Had that investment not been made on securing the 22-year-old, McInnes would be attempting to keep his team engaged in a title fight armed with only Ryan Naderi and Bojan Miovski in attack—two of the few survivors from the squad demolition. Especially with back-to-back Old Firm derbies on the horizon in the shape of Sunday's Premier Sports Cup quarter-final and a league visit across the Clyde seven days later.
It is more than likely, then, that Kelsy will be given the chance to fire his way into that double header when St Mirren arrive at Ibrox on Wednesday night. McInnes will hope that amidst the rubble of a chaotic summer, his luck is finally starting to turn.
