Celtic 5-1 Rangers: Three huge problems for Mark Warburton after Old Firm disaster

We totally fucked up the window

We may have secured two or three excellent young prospects, but in terms of getting a team ready to challenge for this season, we absolutely fucked it. We’ve improved the squad but destroyed the team.

Oh, and the overwhelming problem about last season? We failed to do anything about it. Sure, there were suggestions Mark Warburton missed out on some high-quality centre-back targets, but what was the plan B? Dick around for the whole window before panic-buying a striker and desperately scrabbling around for anyone with legs?

Whether the window was insufficiently planned or insufficiently salvaged from a setback, it’s been a shocker. And that’s just the half of it...

Fuck experience

Joey Barton, Philippe Senderos, Clint Hill, Niko Kranjcar, you all have a lot of explaining to do. All our experienced players look like unnecessary albatrosses, and the fact the albatross might have once had a couple of good games for QPR doesn’t appear to have helped much.

Barton was anonymous today and shouldn’t start the next game. He’s been poor all season and he needs dropped, whatever his name, wage bill, or pre-match shooting skills are. Niko Kranjcar may have some value, but it probably isn’t STARTING HIM AT FUCKING PARKHEAD. Clint Hill should be boiled down for glue, and Philippe Senderos, good god. Thankfully most of these are on one-year deals, but what an outrageous waste of money this could be. This is the real worry. What a huge setback, and a disastrous outcome from a manager who was supposed to value youth, and does, and has made a success of himself at Ibrox so far by doing so.

Mark Warburton got it totally wrong

Nobody would have been enough of a lunatic to pick that tea- well, OK, our own James Black picked exactly that team on Monday, and Mark Warburton probably had better cause to do so with Danny Wilson and Jordan Rossiter unavailable. But come on. What exactly was Kranjcar likely to achieve from the start against Celtic? What was the possible rationale for leaving out Andy Halliday?

Oh, then there’s that substitution. Alright, it probably didn’t exactly cost us the game, but one centre-back and two full-backs IS NOT A FUCKING REAL FORMATION, MARK. It’s a Garth Crooks team of the week. It’s something John fucking Hartson would do. Gordon Strachan did it, which is your first massive fucking alarm bell, and it was shite then. But even he had the fucking sense to do it against Gibraltar. It might hurt, and ultimately we shouldn’t care too much whether it’s 3-1 or 5-1. But there’s a reason we ended the game with no centre-backs on the pitch, and there’s more than one bald guy who very publicly fucked up responsible.