To condemn Russell Martin for having the temerity to organise a team-bonding day feels a little like castigating a bank robber for the standard of their parallel parking.
If the Rangers manager wasn’t already aware that his popularity rating among supporters is now at an all-time low, the reaction to Monday’s excursion to the great outdoors will have left him in absolutely no doubt.
With the flames of fury still licking his boots on the back of last Saturday’s latest humiliation against Hearts, Martin showed himself to be nothing if not his own man by eschewing a hard day’s graft on the grass at Auchenhowie in favour of a dip and some fresh air.
For a squad that’s in complete free-fall, a spot of wild swimming on the Bonnie Banks followed by a hike up Conic Hill was deemed to be the panacea to their many ills.
With the team sitting 10th in the Premiership and without a league win in five matches, the response from all quarters was predictably incendiary.
Barry Ferguson, interim manager prior to Martin being appointed in June, was preaching to the converted when he stated that he’d have had the team back on the training pitch as opposed to going ‘skinny dipping’ ahead of the Premier Sports Cup tie against Hibs.
Russell Martin takes training on Friday, no doubt hoping his squad has been boosted by their team-bonding session
The Rangers squad braved the cold water of Loch Lomond earlier in the week
Supporters had been left unhappy, to say the least, by Rangers’ start to the season
On radio phone-ins and online forums, the pile-on left the embattled manager without a name.
Taken in isolation, however, the tsunami of criticism that’s washed over Martin since grainy pictures of the trip surfaced does feel a little excessive.
Rangers had no midweek game. Whatever they have been doing on the training ground to this point in his reign clearly hasn’t been working. If they fail to progress to the semi-final at Hibs’ expense, it will not be because they opted to try to clear their heads five days previously.
Martin is not the first manager to do something a little different as he seeks a reset and a change of fortune.
Remember Gary Caldwell’s unorthodox attempt to turn around Partick Thistle’s dismal form a few years back?
He arranged for the team to spend a day with the British Army’s Parachute Regiment at Garelochhead.
After carrying logs, water and stretchers through the countryside, the exhausted Jags squad were told to jump in the back of a van on the promise of being taken for food.
‘Five minutes later, bang, bang, the doors opened and guys with masks rag-dolled us out, head-locked us and flipped us on the floor,’ recalled former striker Kris Doolan.
‘We were blindfolded with earmuffs on. They were rough with us. They were dragging us about the rooms, bouncing us off walls in total darkness.
‘Brice Ntambwe got out and ran away. It took four SAS to put him down. Jack Storer was crying at one point.’
Former Hearts defender Robbie Neilson revealed this week how a go-karting day designed to bring the Tynecastle players closer together ended in a punch-up with goalkeeper Craig Gordon.
‘I cut him up to be honest with you, I put him into the barriers,’ Neilson told the BBC’s Scottish Football Podcast. ‘He threw his helmet at me, I threw a punch, he threw a punch and then we all started fighting.’
Not every attempt to revive a side’s flagging fortunes with a left-field bonding session has ended in fisticuffs, mass kidnapping, assault and a mental breakdown.
With Bournemouth struggling in the lower leagues in his early days in the dug-out, Eddie Howe organised a game of cricket.
Ian Holloway famously took his Queen’s Park Rangers side to ballet classes and water parks. With boozy sessions down the local no longer getting past the beady eye of sport scientists, paintballing has become the fall-back option for any struggling boss.
While Rangers manager Martin is hardly alone in seeking to remedy an increasingly bleak situation with a little out-of-the box thinking, it might have been better if the chosen activity had taken place away from the public’s glare.
When you are looking up at nine teams in the Premiership table, few supporters care what the view from the summit of Conic Hill looks like. There was just a whiff of desperation about the whole thing.
It remains to be seen if Russell Martin can turn things around before he is shown the door
It will certainly take more than a few hours spent in the tranquillity of the Trossachs for Martin to change this situation for the better.
With a couple of notable exceptions, the welter of signings he made in the summer just don’t look up to the task.
None of the players he inherited have kicked on. A lingering fall-out with Nico Raskin has deprived the team of its best player in recent weeks.
The high-tempo, high-intensity brand of possession-based football the supporters were promised has been conspicuous by its absence in all except one of the 12 games to date. The team look weak and vulnerable at both ends of the pitch. And it’s only getting worse.
The reluctance of the club’s new American owners to hold their hands up and admit they got this key appointment horribly wrong is understandable – to a point
The sporting institution they bought over three months ago have been going through managers so quickly they’d be better writing their names above the door in chalk.
Since Steven Gerrard left four years ago this coming November, they’ve churned through Giovanni van Bronckhorst (one year and three days), Michael Beale (307 days), Philippe Clement (one year, 131 days) and Ferguson (83 days).
Since the financial implosion of 2012, Rangers have had 14 different men in charge, including caretakers. They’re fast becoming the Watford of the north.
A paltry trophy haul of three major honours in that period says much for what comes of being in a constant state of flux. The reasons behind the hierarchy standing by Martin when the flak began to fly in his direction were therefore apparent.
But there comes a point when loyalty just becomes stubbornness and decisions are based on blind faith rather than logic.
The manager who was said to have ticked each box for the club’s powerbrokers when he was interviewed has fallen miles short in every conceivable measure.
The Rangers players certainly need a pick-me-up after their poor run of form of late
Many Rangers fans may now concede that they were too quick to hound Van Bronckhorst out the door a few months after he took the team to a European final. But the demands for Martin’s head, which will culminate in a protest before the Hibs game, are perfectly understandable.
Hopes of returning to the Champions League this season were dashed in humiliating circumstances when Club Brugge won 9-1 on aggregate.
Not only do the team already trail Celtic by nine points in the Premiership, Hearts are also in danger of becoming a dot on the horizon.
Even a scuffed victory over the Easter Road outfit to take the team back to Hampden would leave many Rangers supporters feeling compromised.
After all Martin’s talk of a lack of harmony, and his insistence that criticism of his charges only came from a place of love, the fans don’t want to hear about the benefits of inhaling clean air. After witnessing such a cataclysmic failure, they only now long for a fresh start.
