Inside Russell Martin’s 123 days of chaos: Wild swimming while his team sank without a trace, throwing players under the bus and awful man management – CALUM CROWE reveals just how bad it got for ‘Poundland Pep’

The sense of loathing that Russell Martin’s appointment provoked among most Rangers fans was immediately obvious from the moment he was unveiled as manager back on June 5.

Only a few weeks earlier, when Andrew Cavenagh and the 49ers Enterprises had completed their takeover, the mood around Ibrox was one of fevered excitement. Fresh start, big ambitions.

When Martin was then presented as the man to front the revolution and fulfil the American dream, he quickly assumed the role of an unpopular relative at a family dinner.

One whose awkward fussing over the menu about the lack of vegan-friendly options draws looks of disgust from around the table.

Nobody really wanted him there. Nobody was sure why he had even been invited in the first place. Awkward, unloved and resented right from the get-go, everything he did and said stirred feelings of anger within fans.

Martin was under no illusions that he would have to win over the supporters. He was asked about it on the day he took the job.

‘I have a lot to prove,’ said the 39-year-old. ‘But my whole career has been based on proving people wrong. I know some fans probably don’t want me here. It’s up to me to change those feelings.’

Not only did Martin fail to change those initial feelings within the supporters, his disastrous reign — spanning 123 days and 17 matches — only fuelled them even more.

If he was to have any chance of being a success, Martin needed to connect with supporters and show an ability to win games while developing a style of play. On all fronts, he failed spectacularly.

There was no honeymoon period that would typically be afforded to any new manager. In Rangers’ first pre-season friendly against Club Bruges, they were 2-0 down at half-time and booed off the pitch at Ibrox.

By the time they faced the Belgians again a few weeks later in the Champions League qualifiers, a 6-0 thrashing away from home — with Rangers losing 9-1 on aggregate — accelerated his downfall.

Martin could have been sacked there and then. At that point, by failing to win any of the opening three league games, he had already overseen the club’s worst start to a domestic season in 36 years.

Patrick Stewart and Kevin Thelwell, the club’s chief executive and sporting director, were pictured deep in conversation that night at the Jan Breydel Stadion.

Despite the calls from supporters for the manager to be sacked, the official word from Rangers the next day was that Martin’s position was not under immediate threat.

If he was lucky to survive Bruges, then that applied tenfold to the 2-0 home defeat by Hearts in mid-September. That was the moment he ought to have been relieved of his duties.

From that day forward, he was on borrowed time. Rangers have played another five games since then and things have only gotten worse.

There was also a naivety about Martin. Or a lack of care when it came to optics. He revealed his mum was worried about him when things were going wrong, something you couldn’t really imagine the likes of the legendary Walter Smith discussing in public.

Then there was the wild water swimming episode at Loch Lomond. The headlines about sinking without a trace wrote themselves.

Winning on the pitch would, of course, silence those poking fun at Martin and his way. Yet the performances were routinely awful. And despite a determination by the board to stick by him as much as they could, patience eventually ran out on Sunday night.

Calls went back and forth between Stewart, Cavenagh and Thelwell. As the club’s chairman and supreme authority, it was Cavenagh who finally sanctioned and signed off on Martin being sacked.

But, truth be told, the alarm bells had started ringing long before that humiliation in Bruges. The writing was already on the wall for a manager stumbling from one calamity to another.

The failure to beat a terrible Dundee side at Ibrox, surviving by the skin of their teeth after almost blowing a 3-0 lead away at Viktoria Plzen, toiling to overcome part-time Alloa in the Premier Sports Cup. The list is endless.

Even take it as far back as the opening day of the season. When Rangers drew 1-1 away at Motherwell, Martin absolutely slaughtered the players in a remarkable post-match assessment.

He questioned the mentality of his players and told them to ‘drop their ego’. It was a scathing verdict of a squad who had only been under his command for five minutes in the grand scheme of things.

Martin throwing his players under a bus would become a common theme of his time in charge. On Sunday night, after an insipid 1-1 draw at Falkirk, the bus never even turned a wheel.

Fans blocked it from leaving the stadium, with Martin effectively ushered out a side door and bundled into the back of another vehicle as he left via a police escort.

That proved to be the final ignominious chapter for a manager who will go down as the worst in the 153-year history of Rangers Football Club. Bar none, no exceptions.

Not only was he a failure in terms of results and tactics, Martin’s man-management skills also left a lot to be desired.

His relationship with Nico Raskin broke down to the point that the Belgian international midfielder found himself bombed out of the squad.

Prior to a Champions League qualifier away in Plzen in August, Martin had been asked about whether Raskin and Joe Rothwell could play together in the same midfield, or whether it had to be one or the other.

He then started blabbing about how Raskin’s head had been turned by transfer interest from abroad over the summer. It made for great back-page headlines, but it wasn’t really what he had been asked.

Did he really need to divulge that kind of information? A smarter and more experienced manager would have kept it in-house.

Likewise the falling out with Hamza Igamane and the claim that he refused to come on as a substitute against St Mirren, just a couple of days before the Moroccan forward was sold to Lille.

The decision to drop club captain James Tavernier in the early part of the season also proved to be a dud move, given that Max Aarons was in no way an upgrade at right back.

It was Rothwell and Aarons who became the two poster boys for the Martin era; two trusted lieutenants whom he had worked with before and understood his style of play.

But neither of them look remotely equipped to deal with the rigours and demands of Scottish football, something that could be said of several of the players signed in a summer where Rangers’ net spend was £20million.

There was an arrogance to Martin about all of this. He was very dismissive on things such as his signings and tactics. He exuded a feeling that he knew best. That he was always the smartest guy in the room.

Once again on Sunday, he refused to acknowledge any tactical shortcomings, instead blaming the draw at Falkirk on the mentality of his players.

He clearly views himself as a deep thinker and tactically intelligent. However, in reality, his time in charge of Rangers proved him to be little more than a Poundland Pep.

In all competitions, Martin won five of his 17 matches in charge. He leaves Rangers in eighth position in the league table, with one win from their seven league games, and with a negative goal difference.

His win percentage of 29.4 per cent is the lowest of any manager in the club’s history. For context, the much-maligned Michael Beale left with a win ratio of 72 per cent.

Pedro Caixinha’s win rate was 53.8 per cent, whilst Paul Le Guen’s was 51.6 per cent. Even Barry Ferguson last season managed a win rate of 40 per cent.

By every conceivable metric, Martin is the worst manager ever to set foot through the doors of Ibrox. It’s scarcely even a contest.

Not even the sight of Caixinha arguing with supporters while knee-deep in shrubbery after a 2-0 loss to Progres Niederkorn compares to the humiliations served up under Martin.

The fact that he also happens to be the shortest-serving boss the club have ever had, one whose reign was historically and biblically awful, means he leaves as the Liz Truss of Scottish football management.

This whole sorry episode goes down as a big black mark against everyone involved at the top of the club. Cavenagh, Stewart, Thelwell — the whole lot of them.

When it came down to a straight shootout between Martin and Davide Ancelotti back in the summer, the Rangers hierarchy were said to be blown away by how well Martin interviewed.

Hindsight is, of course, 20-20. But that is a horrendous reflection on their judgment and a cause for concern as they now embark on the search for his successor.

Rangers want a new man in place by the time they face Dundee United at Ibrox in a fortnight, following the international break.

The club brought in 14 new players in the summer to fit with the Martin masterplan. Very few of them look up to scratch, but any new manager will have to show an ability to work with them.

Seeking to salvage something from a season which already sees them 11 points behind league leaders Hearts and nine points behind Celtic, it’s not yet a write-off, but it’s not far off it.

Having burned through four managers in three years — Giovanni van Bronckhorst, Beale, Philippe Clement, and now Martin — there’s often a lazy line trotted out about how Rangers can’t keep sacking managers.

But in the case of Martin, they had no other option. Yet another manager bites the dust before the clocks have even gone back.

The Rangers board won’t just want to wind the clocks back by an hour. They must wish they could go back a full four months.

They were suckered in by a manager who completely underestimated the demands of the club, as well as the wider environment of Scottish football.

If only they knew then what they know now…