'Rangers just not as good as Celtic': Hibs manager Lee Johnson believes bigger picture was missed with Giovanni van Bronckhorst and says Michael Beale 'markets himself well'

It shouldn’t be Michael Beale who Lee Johnson believes ought to be occupying the technical area alongside that of the Hibs manager at Ibrox on Thursday.

New manager Michael Beale during a Rangers training session at Auchenhowie. (Photo by Craig Williamson / SNS Group)

Not when he feels Giovanni van Bronckhorst produced enough in his Rangers role to warrant longer than a year in it. Johnson takes his team to the Govan ground for the first time in four days for an encounter that has blockbuster potential. It could be no other way when it will mark Beale’s competitive bow since he was appointed successor to the deposed Dutchman almost a fortnight ago. A fact owed to the latest meeting of two clubs whose clashes tend to have more needle than a knitting basket bringing the cinch Premiership season roaring back following the World Cup break. Into this potent mix, though, Johnson doesn’t blanche from adding further to the combustibility. Simply by the 41-year-old being himself in avoiding platitudes and offering meaty opinions - in wholly affable fashion - on subjects others would choose to dance around.

So it is with his stance on the removal of van Bronckhorst by the Ibrox powerbrokers. He dares to suggest that the jettisoning was an inability to recognise the wider implications of champions Celtic currently operating at a level beyond their ancient adversaries. And that in replacing him with Beale, they have gone for a man smart at selling his wares but an unknown quantity with his only frontline management experience amounting to the 22 games he had in charge of Queens Park Rangers before vacating that post he only took on last June. These assertions are hardly extreme when Ange Postecoglou’s men hold a nine-point advantage over Rangers in the top flight. And Beale has been handed a mammoth job even though until last summer his most senior position in the game was right-hand man to Steven Gerrard - the pairing presiding over a stunning unbeaten league success at Rangers in 2020-21. In the feverish Glasgow football world, Johnson’s opinions are likely to be read as slights, not the refreshingly honest, unfiltered takes all too rare in our game. Just as too rare is retaining faith with managers across the board during rough patches, as the Hibs manager petitions should have been the case with van Bronckhorst.

“I’m always an advocate of keeping managers in situ because I think managers are often blamed for the results and normally there’s a bigger picture there,” he said. “I understand the pressure falls on the manager because it’s your name on the door. But I can only speak if I was an owner and it was my money and if I believed I had the right man in place, I would give him an adequate amount of windows to change it round. I would understand recent success, I would look at the context. And I feel that Rangers, maybe the expectation was so high and sometimes you can be a victim of your own success. I think it’s a classic example of that. I suppose we’ll only know that in a year, 18 months depending on how the new regime does. But that’s football. And I think Gio could walk away with his head held high, look himself in the mirror and know he’s done absolutely everything he can. The Champions League adventure didn’t go as well as a club that size would’ve expected but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad job.

Lee Johnson suggests "the jury's out" on the managerial credentials of Michael Beale ahead of the new Rangers manager's competitive bow that will come with hosting his Hibs side as the cinch Premiership resumes on Thursday. Photo by Mark Scates / SNS Group)

“Celtic are a top side and obviously they’re chasing those guys. From my point of view, you look at it from the outside, they’re just not as good. Simple as that. I’m not there to judge, I don’t watch every game. All I see is a good man who’s worked his socks off and lost his job, and a good coaching staff. But, the king is dead, long live the king and good luck to Bealo - after we’ve played them. I don’t know him really well, we’ve bumped into each other at courses and stuff like that. Listen, he’s done well. He markets himself well, he worked really well with Steven Gerrard. He went down to QPR and had a good start. But I’m always one who says: Show me a manager after 200 games. When he’s been through everything. So I think the jury is out on anybody until he’s had 150-200 games and been through the ups and downs that number of games creates.”

Johnson may be projecting here, it must be said. He believes any manager deserves four transfer windows to turn a team around. He has made precious little headway with one, Hibs losing six of their seven league games in the lead up to the break. He curses the club’s goal returns - below the expected, he stresses the data shows - and that he has been bedevilled over availability of forward players. Kevin Nisbet is now ready to make his return after 10 months sidelined, with Aiden McGeady also on the way back. Just as Martin Boyle has been lost for the season.

“Martin Boyle, Nisbet, [Kyle] Magennis, [Harry} McKirdy, McGeady, Mykola [Kukharevych], [Elias] Melkersen, I think there’s a lot of quality there, but for whatever reason we haven’t been fortunate enough to blend them together in the way we’d have liked,” he said. “But that was the challenge initially, can we get a lot of these boys up to top speed as possible? It seems like two steps forward, one back. The two forward are McGeady training more regularly, Nizzy has trained pretty much every day, Magennis we seem to have flushed out any early issues in his comeback after not playing a long time, McKirdy now back to a good stint of full time training. But obviously we lose Boyle. We can’t grumble about it, all clubs have issues. When you’re a club our size it’s important you keep your money on the pitch, your top players are available and firing. It’s a really good squad we’ve got for the resources but what we haven’t been able to do is blend it in the way I expected us to be able to blend it, had I been writing down a team in the summer.”