Rangers manager Philippe Clement has moved to assuage supporters’ fears that Jack Butland has been struck down by injury ahead of a busy festive period.
The first-choice Ibrox goalkeeper dropped out of the starting XI just before kick-off of the 1-0 win over Dundee and was replaced by Liam Kelly. Initially the assumption was that the Englishman had injured himself in the warm-up. However, Clement was quick to confirm that this wasn’t the case. He provided no further information in terms of the circumstances other than Butland had been called away urgently for personal reasons.
“People don’t need to worry about Jack,” the Rangers manager said after the match, which was settled by Vaclav Cerny’s 10th goal of the season at the start of the second half. “It’s because of private reasons that he had to leave very suddenly. So he will be back for the next game.
Kelly did not have an awful lot to do as he made his belated debut for the Ibrox side having returned to Rangers for a second spell in the summer. He initially joined them when he was just ten-years old. It’s expected Butland will be back in place for the Ibrox side’s next game against St Mirren. Rangers have another game against Motherwell before hosting Celtic on 2 January.
Clement’s side have now four league games in a row to take advantage of Aberdeen’s mini-collapse. Rangers’ latest victory takes them above Jimmy Thelin’s side into second place. Cerny’s solo goal two minutes after the re-start, when he showed great composure to round Dundee ‘keeper Trevor Carson, was enough to seal all three points against Dundee, although Rangers did endure some nervy moments towards the end.
Even Cerny’s winner was the subject of some debate. Far-side linesman Alastair Mather flagged for offside after Danilo sought to take advantage of a high Dundee backline to play in Cerny. A VAR check overturned the decision and Ibrox revelled in a positive intervention from Clydesdale House. Clement stressed that last weekend’s League Cup final penalty controversy against Celtic was not still playing on minds.
“I don’t like excuses,” he said. “I spoke in the beginning of the week with the team about that, it’s about looking forward now. So it’s about that and taking the three points. We could have scored, we should have scored more goals and now to look forward to our next game against St Mirren.
Clement addressed Rangers moving into second place but claimed it was not an important detail at this stage of the season. “It (second place) is not a target,” he said. “I told you guys and maybe you don’t believe me, but it’s about us, what we do. I’m convinced that we can make a good season in that way if we focus on ourselves and not be focused on other teams … and it’s about us taking the points and not looking at other teams.
So we will continue in that way and making the team better and progress and taking more points than we did in the first couple of months because it was not enough. We all know that, we all knew that. We want to make a better second part of the season.”
Clement’s eyes are clearly still on first place, although Celtic, who play against Dundee United at Tannadice tomorrow, are still eight points ahead. The gap could be back to eleven points by the end of the weekend.
Clement was simply content to return to winning ways although failure to kill off Dundee was a frustration for the Rangers manager, as was the limited entertainment on offer on an afternoon when the 125th anniversary of Ibrox was being celebrated.
“The opponent stays in the game until the last second because something can fall out of the sky and you concede a goal because that can always happen in football,” he said. “But the positive thing is that we didn’t give away real chances. Liam Kelly didn’t have to make one real save today but we should have scored the second and third goal to kill the belief. So that’s what you want and we wanted to entertain the fans also more than we did with scoring more goals.
