6 Philippe Clement Rangers presser takeaways on exit links, Cortes injury and transfers
Philippe Clement and Rangers are in Sweden as they prepare to take on Malmo tomorrow evening.
Some of the highlights of the Belgian's early days at Ibrox, aside from winning the League Cup, were in the Europa League. There was a heroic win over Real Betis to ensure qualification from the groups and he will hope to keep the fans on side with more success this time round.
It won't be easy and Gers fans will remember Malmo knocking them out of the Champions League with a certain Antonio Colak doing the damage. Clement has been previewing the game and there was more than just the action to talk about, with his own future a hot topic.
READ MORE: Philippe Clement addresses Anderlecht job link as Rangers boss makes stance clear
Here, Football Scotland picks out six takeaways from the presser.
Anderlecht job links
I made it really clear - I have engaged myself for the long term at Rangers last month (when he signed the contract extension). Whatever team comes I’m not going away. I'm really clear, I want this project for the club and to make it really successful for the future. "We all know we need time for that, we need a few transfer windows to do that and that is what I want to do. I love the city, I love the club, I love the dynamic with the fans at Ibrox so I’m here to stay.
Oscar Cortes injury
We lost one player with Oscar (Cortes) in the training. In a tackle he got a bad knock and he will be out for several weeks so that is a disappointment. Because he was growing back to his best level and showing the player that he was, is and will be in the future. The rest of the squad stays the same.
Concern about repeated injuries? No, it's duels. It's part of football, you have lucky and unlucky moments. It was not a crazy tackle but you have duels in football and things can happen and he has been really unlucky in the last couple of months with those things. I hope the bad luck for him stops now after this and the rest of his career will be the luck side but it is part of football.
Recruitment was not easy and January plans
It’s important and it's necessary. It was not easy in the summer, we talked about that, maybe the people in the club will talk about that later on, in the next couple of months also, about that situation. Of course, as a manager you hope to get more funds in to do the right thing for the club, but with the resources that were there, I think everybody is starting to see that a lot of good things have been made. And it's now interesting to work with that and to focus on that. And then, of course, to plan towards January, what we are doing already, and to plan towards next summer. We're also busy with that, but that's our job and with recruitment to do. It's important to have also money to do the right things for the club.
Gilligan taking over talking about off-field matters
I don't really need that, but, of course, as a manager you want to talk about football and about the things you are doing. And we had too many talks in the last couple of months about non-football things, where I didn't have any single influence or any single say. So I hope we can stop this spirit also, and nobody needs to talk about those things anymore in the future; that we can focus on football because that's the most important thing for the club.
Malmo
It’s a very interesting game. I saw the stats from Rangers in the last couple of years against Malmo, and they are not really good. We have a fight with history in that way. It's interesting to do that. The team is very motivated to show a good face, and to grow again, like they've been growing the last couple of weeks, to make the next step. We need to find some solutions, of course, because of the suspension of Jefte, and also because Ridvan Yilmaz is not available yet, so that will change some things that we didn't have much time to train on, but that we did the last couple of days. It's about going full in this game against a good opponent, a very good opponent who plays good offensive football, who are top of the league, who have a lot of experience in Europe with a lot of players, so everybody's excited to play this game.
New Europa League format
It's going to be interesting to see. I think with the draw we didn't get any presents, that's really clear if you compare it with other groups. So we have a really, really tough group to qualify out of, so that's a little bit the strange thing also about that, you have teams in your group who play against other teams than you are playing against, so in that way it's a little bit of a weird situation. But we're going to just focus on ourselves, game by game, going full to take the three points, and then see what this format brings. It will be a challenge to do better than last season, but we are ambitious, we always want to do better than we did before. Every month we want to do better, and that's the exciting thing about the project now.