Rangers robbed of remaining dignity as merciless Liverpool dish out annihilation - Keith Jackson's big match verdict

At least this time there were shots fired.

The only trouble was, long before this bruising Battle of Britain beating was over, almost all of them were flying at will beyond Allan McGregor and into the Rangers net. Yes, Rangers made a decent fist of it for 45 minutes. They even took an early lead when Scott Arfield scored their first goal of an otherwise pretty wretched Champions League group campaign. But just when it seemed as if they might salvage some pride from this performance, they were machine gunned in a second-half blitz that robbed them of whatever dignity they had left on their way through Group A’s trapdoor and out of the competition. Roberto Firmino stole the show with an individual display sprinkled with magic dust.

Then Mo Salah came off the bench to finish off the job with a hat-trick in little more than six second-half minutes as a humbling defeat turned into an utter annihilation. Darwin Nunez pinched one in between times and then, in the dying moments, Harvey Elliott helped himself to Liverpool’s seventh. It was brutal. It was merciless. And it completed a campaign of misery for Giovanni van Bronckhorst, who could scarcely believe what he was witnessing as his team were being butchered.

He’d promised a different approach. He’d hinted at big changes to his line-up. And van Bronckhorst was as good as his word even before a ball was kicked at Ibrox. The safety-first back five, which was rolled out at Anfield, was dismantled in favour of a flat back four. But the big news was at the other end of the teamsheet where Antonio Colak, Ryan Kent and Fashion Sakala made up the Dutchman’s attack, with Alfredo Morelos left watching from the bench. And with Jurgen Klopp balancing his own selection against the