Mikey Moore might be a professional footballer but we’re not entirely sure at Ibrox Noise that we’d trust his judgement on Rangers failure.

He has explained why he didn’t come back to Rangers. It made sense, and it didn’t, but que sera. But it was his comments about success and failure (at Ibrox) which stood out to us here.

He said:

“I think if you’re not ready to accept that responsibility (playing at a big club), then it’s a big problem for you as an individual. You can easily pass the blame onto other people and say that it’s the manager or say that it’s this person. But I’m on a football pitch with 11 players on each side. If I’m not affecting the game, that’s on me. There are things managers can do to help you out with, especially as a young player. But it’s your job to learn your trade, learn how to play men’s football. Obviously there are some tactical things that have an impact but ultimately it comes down to how much you want to run, how much you want to take care of your basics on the pitch.”

We would never be so arrogant to claim we know better than a professional football, but we also take issue with this claim.

Rangers failure

Moore puts all the on-pitch responsibility on the players, saying that while there’s tactics in there, it’s really on the players. By force of logic he’s claiming Rangers’ failures last season were down to the players.

We can’t agree. No professional player worth his salt will put no effort on the pitch. They might not be very good AT some of their basics, as Moore says it, but their desire, for the most part, will be sky high.

There are some exceptions – Emmanuel Fernandez and Thelo Aasgaard are some of the laziest failure players Rangers have suffered in recent years and Mikey Moore played alongside them.

Mikey Moore and Rangers

But in general, teams fail because the manager wasn’t able to impart the right instructions for the players he had. Or for the circumstances.

The buck will always end with the boss. Football teams are in his image, they do what he tells them.

If a player isn’t doing ‘his basics’ right, he gets taken off. It’s pretty basic maths here. If he’s not removed, then that’s on the manager.

Moore may be projecting here. Because he was complete tripe for Rangers until Tuur Rommens arrived. Up till then Moore’s workrate was questionable and his quality very low. It wasn’t till the Belgian arrived that his game picked up substantially.

Either way Moore is entitled to his view like anyone else.

We just don’t agree with this one!