There are many questions that members of the Rangers support want answered, and justifiably. The key one is surely: how can a team that has been functioning well enough to defeat the likes of Dortmund, Leipzig, Braga, and Red Star in this calendar year suddenly look as if the basics of football elude them?

Make no mistake, these two games and the collapses in both are primarily down to one thing - under-14 boys club style errors.

Now, that's not to say deeper criticism of the club is erroneous or without merit, just that across 180 minutes Rangers' basic rudiments have been jaw-droppingly lacking and that's the core of the issue.

Let's look at the goals conceded:

  • all four Celtic goals have questions over goalkeeping
  • two of the goals at Parkhead came from switching off at restarts
  • goals by David Turnbull and Steven Bergwijn come from catastrophic passes that play in the attacker directly on goal
  • Ajax' first goal comes from a free header at a set-piece
  • Ajax' third goal comes from a poorly contested fifty-fifty

It's a catalogue for despair and we haven't even approached the lack of commitment, energy, aggression and teamwork on display. All elements that positively characterised Rangers play just a short few months ago.

BT Sports caused a stir when they revealed that despite controlling 75 percent of the ball, Ajax still ran an extra six kilometres in the game.

It was a damning statistic because, like the best football data, it allows you to put a fact to what was previously subjective.

Rangers Review: Click to sign up for the Rangers Review newsletterClick to sign up for the Rangers Review newsletter (Image: Rangers Review)

How do you explain such a disparity other than to say the players have let the manager, the support and themselves down with their performances? It's clearly not good enough. So how has this happened?

You can start with the key performer quadrant of James Tavernier, Connor Goldson, John Lundstram and Alfredo Morelos. The spine of any team is its most important area and on paper, that's a very strong core to build around. But each has been missing in action for various reasons.

Tavernier just about gets a pass given he's been playing through an injury but Goldson and Lundstram simply have to step up. The quicker Ben Davies gets settled into position at left centre-back the better and while many will rightly say James Sands' form is currently better than Goldson, the Englishman has proven over time he's capable of much better than he's showing. 

Lundstram hasn't been helped by Giovanni van Bronckhorst's strange midfield decisions of late, including trying to turn Glen Kamara into a different kind of player with little obvious success. Meanwhile, Malik Tillman isn't a natural grafter and is still very inexperienced in men's football, never mind this exalted level. It's left the Scouser with more work than he can handle, swamped with runners against two very good sides known for ability to swamp an opposition.

And that brings us to Morelos. For all his faults, and there are many, he remains the best striker at the club by a distance. It's inexplicable he wasn't brought on for Colak with half an hour to go. Introducing Morelos would have both given him some much-needed minutes and allowed respite for the Croatian. It was an obvious win-win, and that it was not a strategy employed suggests the much-publicised situation over his attitude and application has yet to be fully resolved to the manager's satisfaction.

Another who is underperforming to a spectacular degree is Ryan Kent. There have been various criticisms of the winger over the years, but lack of graft for his team has never been one of them. 

This season? He looks disinterested, like a player very much of a mind to run down his contract. He was partially at fault for two of Celtic goals and it was his inability to look across the line when Leon King pinged a lovely ball from the back that saw Borna Barisic' peach of a strike ruled out by VAR last night. It was a moment that summed up his season so far.

It's a troubling situation for the manager to have so many tangibly talented players look so bereft of confidence, energy and creativity.

A visit to Aberdeen on Saturday is now critical to reducing the sense of panic that appears to be gripping the club. The subsequent fixtures are not kind. After the Dons, it's Napoli, Hearts at Tynecastle, Dundee United and then Anfield. You sense that the fightback must start soon or this season could turn out to be a very long and fractious one indeed.

Ultimately it falls to the manager, it always does. Van Bronckhorst must reverse the torpor or face the ultimate consequences. 

It would be a shocking end to a regime that promised so much in early summer but this is not a club built to accept a succession of defeats of this magnitude.  Nor can it accept a failure to grasp the baseline for a Rangers player - to give their all for the shirt.

Bill Struth said it best: “To be a Ranger is to sense the sacred trust of upholding all that such a name means in this shrine of football. They must be true in their conception of what the Ibrox tradition seeks from them. No true Ranger has ever failed in the tradition set him.”

Some of these players need to look in the mirror and ask themselves if they can still be considered 'true'.

This piece is an extract from today’s Rangers Insider newsletter, which is emailed out at 5pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Rangers Review team.

To receive our full, free newsletter including this analysis straight to your email inbox, click here and tick the box for Top Stories.