Rangers 1 - 1 St Mirren: Brave Saints play Rangers at their own game and reap the rewards

RANGERS and Celtic do not exist in isolation. And so, by the conclusion of Saturday’s skirmishing, the most infuriated of the bitter rivals would have been those playing out of Ibrox.

That might sound daft since the Scottish champions are chasing a fourth-straight title and hold a 10-point advantage over their beleaguered adversaries. Yet Rangers supporters will have spent the weekend getting nipped over this: how, when Celtic were 3-0 down with 70 minutes played in the lunchtime kick-off at Rugby Park, and they themselves were winning 1-0 at home to St Mirren with seconds to go, did they not stretch their lead to breaking point for Neil Lennon’s side?

As a nine-game Scottish Premier League winning sequence was ended, what would bother the Ibrox club’s manager and supporters was how little control they had on the flow of proceedings. St Mirren, as Danny Lennon rightly stated, were “brave” in showing composure and confidence to pass Rangers off the park. However, they rarely passed behind them. When that happened in the very last act of the encounter, the home goal was easily breached. A series of crisp passes that started from the goalkeeper resulted in the excellent Paul McGowan picking out David van Zanten with a crossfield ball. The Irish full-back drilled in a diagonal ball that enabled Stephen Thompson to slide in front of his markers and knock the ball past Allan McGregor. The Paisley club had opened up their more illustrious opponents in exactly the way we have become accustomed to seeing Rangers and Celtic doing to others.

And, as well as Motherwell’s second place status, what we can also champion in terms of showing their are intriguing elements to the much-derided Scottish Premier League is that both Glasgow clubs’ unexpected spills were caused by St Mirren and Kilmarnock daring to play progressive football. These weren’t results achieved by sitting in and benefiting from scintillating goalkeeping displays, they were achieved by dispensing with an inferiority complex that sees so many domestic opponents appear to simply wait to fail. The way, indeed, it was for Rangers nine-in-a-row years were recalled by the half-time appearance of Paul Gascoigne to promote his latest book. Saint’s midfielder Kenny McLean has hazy memories of “when Gazza was on the ball, Rangers played” having been taken to Ibrox with his father during that era. On the Ibrox clubs books between the ages of 13 and 14, and a contemporary of Gregg Wylde’s – who, he pointed out he didn’t touch in the foul that brought his booking –Saturday was his first occasion at Ibrox. “It was great to play in and to soak up the atmosphere as well as get a result that was fully deserved,” he said, agreeing it that made a change to administer a late sucker punch having been on the receiving end of so many of them. “It will give us belief we can play wherever we want to play. We showed what we can do.”

And showed others what can be done against Rangers. Ibrox midfielder Lee McCulloch, back in the squad after knee problems, wasn’t wrong in stating that they were punished for “slack defending” but had looked comfortable and had a few chances after Nikica Jelavic scored shortly after the interval. Yet neither was Steven Whittaker in describing his team as “lethargic” and “off the pace”. Now, both don’t normally prove impediments to the Ibrox club racking up the sort of adequate-but-hardly-memorable wins that have won them the past three titles and, indeed, accounted for Celtic’s two league successes before that. To remind Rangers that their functionality is hardly flawless is to recognise that, for all Celtic’s faults, this championship remains a very live issue. As McCulloch said in looking ahead to his club’s next two league encounters at Tynecastle and Pittodrie: “Outwith Celtic, these are probably the hardest places to go and win, and I’d probably throw Motherwell into that as well. We did get a boost from Celtic’s result [at Kilmarnock] but even if we had won I don’t think anyone would have been talking about anything that’s going to happen. It isn’t a big enough gap to get complacent and we have Celtic, Hearts, Aberdeen and Motherwell away in the next quarter. We’ll keep our feet on the ground and concentrate.”

As for his own situation, McCulloch, on the bench in recent weeks as he steps up his recovery, welcomes the visit of Liverpool tomorrow for a friendly encounter. “I would love a bit of game time,” he said. “Personally it has been a stop-start season for me and I keep coming back and breaking down again because of my knee. Any games I’ve played I’ve been a yard off the pace so I need to think about improving my fitness before starting. Mo Edu’s been brilliant this season so I might need to bide my time.” And time, he says, in the form of the seven months before the league fixtures are completed, is why nothing is over. As St Mirren demonstrated, only a couple of seconds are required to noticeably alter a title landscape.