Rangers travel to Belgium carrying the weight of history and the burden of expectation. Trailing 3–1 from the first leg at Ibrox, Russell Martin and his side face not just Brugge, but the ghosts of every Rangers team that has gone before over 153 years of history.
No side in the club’s long European history has ever overturned a first-leg defeat at home. The precedent is bleak: five times it has happened; five times Rangers have been eliminated.
When Ibrox is breached first, the tie is usually gone. That has been the rule, and not even the most decorated of managers could bend it.
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Graeme Souness couldn’t. Steven Gerrard couldn’t. Even Walter Smith, the master of the European night in his second Ibrox spell, never found the formula. Now, in only his first months in charge, Martin is asked to succeed where Rangers greats failed.
The challenge comes against a backdrop that makes the stakes even higher. Domestically, Rangers have stumbled out of the blocks, three successive draws leaving them six points adrift of Celtic before the first Old Firm clash of the season.
For a support conditioned to demand instant standards, that gap is already intolerable. Martin’s honeymoon is not just over; the pressure dial has been turned to full.
Europe, for a brief moment, looked like it might offer refuge. Profligate Panathinaikos were edged out, Plzeň swept aside with an emphatic 3–0 at Ibrox, a performance that hinted at promise.
But the return leg in Prague exposed the same fragilities, and last week against Brugge the mask was torn away completely.
Conceding three goals in the opening 20 minutes, watching Ibrox empty in anger, hearing the boos of those who stayed, it was a humiliation as raw as any of recent years. Danilo’s late strike gives Rangers a faint lifeline, but only that.
This is where history and reality collide. On paper, Rangers’ task borders on impossible. But football has a way of bending logic when pressure and pride collide.
For Martin, the tie is more than just about progression in Europe, it is about authority, belief, and survival. Pull off the unthinkable and he would etch his name into Rangers folklore, sparking not just a turnaround in the tie but potentially in his entire tenure.
Fail, and the whispers of dismissal will grow louder, another manager consumed by the same merciless standards that define the club.
Rangers have never overturned a first-leg home defeat. The record is absolute. The only question now is whether Russell Martin can be the man to rewrite it.