Philippe Clement is Rangers manager by default but this cannot continue for ever – Keith Jackson

They’d been waiting for this moment to come along ever since leaving Parkhead with their tails tucked between their legs. For weeks now, they’d be hoping it might drop out of the sky and land at their feet.

But when the opportunity presented itself to them at Rugby Park yesterday, Rangers allowed it to pass them by almost as if they were too scared to confront it. And, one full year into the job, that’s becoming the story of Philippe Clement’s tenure.

The Belgian has become the latest in a line of close but no cigar merchants to have allowed standards to be degraded to such an extent that his side is now in serious danger of being considered a bit of an irrelevance where this season’s league title is concerned.

Saturday’s draw between Celtic and Aberdeen ought to have been the trigger point for a monumental reaction. Rangers should have been clambering to get on board the bus down the M77 in the knowledge that the door had suddenly been left blowing in the winds of storm Ashley.

But, rather than gain a bit of ground on the front runners by eating into their lead, Clement and his players actually conspired to fall even further behind, as the five point gap they began the weekend with increased to six thanks to Marley Watkins’ late winner in Ayrshire.

They say, at testing times such as these, that the mentality of some players can become fragile. But not with this Rangers team. They’re no longer suffering from a fragile mindset. On the contrary, it’s already broken and shattered into pieces.

And it was glaringly obvious long before Watkins muscled his way past John Souttar to bag the winner. If Clement was caught by surprise by this concession then he must have been the only man inside the stadium who hadn’t seen it coming