Philippe Clement impresses again: Rangers fitness questioned, sheet of paper with red marks, 'he knows way I work'

It isn’t difficult to see why Rangers were sold on Philippe Clement across the interview process that bagged the Belgian the club’s managerial vacancy last Sunday.

Across his first week of media duties, the intriguing 49-year-old has exhibited such eloquence and articulation, poetically at times, it can astound that English isn’t his first language. It is a tongue that allows him to produce bon mots effortlessly. His first outing in his new role, which brings Hibs to Ibrox on Saturday afternoon, was one to look forward to after a few days training with his squad, he said, “to see how the little seeds we have planted will grow”. He is hopeful that the club’s fans will see a positive “difference” from a Clement Rangers team. But equally he recognises that “football is a sport of 10 million or 10 billion small details … I see a lot of details they already possess and there are details that need to be better”, only faltering for the right term when cautioning that he was not “Harry Potter with a magic stick”.

Actions and not words are how the fourth Ibrox manager in two years will be judged, of course. And Clement delivered an unequivocal, and unmistakable, message on that front. Sitting with a paper in front of him detailing the fitness status of his squad members, the number marked in red to denote their inability to play a full 90 minutes against the Leith club was simply “too much”. He placed injury returnees Todd Cantwell, Kemar Roofe and Ryan Jack in that bracket. Striker Danilo may be forced to feature in a face mask – a consequence of the compound cheek fracture a month ago – because of the paucity of options, Clement suggested, with Rabbi Matondo, Tom Lawrence and now Jose Cifuentes out. "You guys need to know that I always work in a really good way with the medical staff. I’m on top of that,” he said as he builds towards his stated objective of moulding the strongest team, physically and mentally, in Scotland. “It’s a contact sport. Things can happen,” said the title winner with Genk and Club Brugge, “but in all the places I worked there were not many injuries and availability was above 90 per cent. That’s also one of the things we want to improve over the next couple of months.”

Laying on the line that he will completely overhaul Rangers’ training regime, the question begged was whether he believed the players he inherited are fit enough. Asked directly, it was eyebrow-raising that he not only indirectly answered in the negative, but intimated the managerial instability that has dogged the Ibrox club might not be unrelated to the day-to-day, untailored, programme that players have been following. “There is still a way to go and that is the challenge now with all the games,” he said of ratcheting up the fitness base of his squad. “In the next two weeks we have seven games. So we have to do it in a smart way, without getting players injured, and raise their level from every individual.

Rangers manager Philippe Clement has signalled his intent to overhaul entirely how the Ibrox squad trains on a daily basis. (Photo by Alan Harvey / SNS Group)

"The best way to describe it is this. If you have the best player physically at a high level and the worst player levels below, if you train the same way all the time it’s somewhere in between. The top player doesn’t become any better because he is not challenged, so they will go down. At this mediocre level [those in the middle] will be challenged and they will grow a bit, at the lowest level they will be challenged too much so they become injured again or break. So you lose the weak ones and you don’t make the strong ones any better. We need to reach the highest levels and it will take time. It’s been different club by club, but on the two occasions I had to step in during the season it was also a case of a lot of injured players. But one problem goes hand in hand with the other. It’s also maybe the reason that in sudden moments the club has changed manager.”

In Clement, the Ibrox side appear to have attracted one of those uber-managers who makes his business to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-controlling. Indicated by the fact that even as he talked up his now appointed assistant Stephan van Der Heyden for his capabilities, there was a giveaway in his line that “he knows the way I work”. Revealing too was his response to being asked whether he had been able to devote time in his hectic first week to a game plan for facing a Hibs side who will come at their hosts, or whether he was one of those coaches who concentrated on how they wanted their own team to play. “I look at everything. I focus on everything, that’s sometimes a burden,” he said. “Of course, I have looked at Hibs. We have good analysts here that have given me good information. They will play, normally, yes, but maybe not tomorrow.”

His counterpart Nick Montgomery’s fearless approach might cause Clement to be in for a surprise on that score. Certain to have an Ibrox crowd fully behind him as predecessor Michael Beale rarely did – until, in the past six weeks, they seemed fully on his back – the Rangers manager knows it is a “two-way street” in his determination to keep the support on side with their team, and their manager. “We can’t just expect the fans to be positive,” he said. “We need to show things also on the pitch, that we can go hard and give everything. That we want to play forward and create chances, to be tough in the duels and be brave. So I will try to help on both sides to create a really strong story again together.”