After a week of absurdity at Rangers, one thing is clear…Derek McInnes needs to adapt before this job eats him alive

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. That’s what chairman Andrew Cavenagh told a meeting of Rangers shareholders in a moment of profundity akin to Pedro Caixinha’s solemn revelation that dogs bark while caravans move on.

Right now, though, the only thing the culture and strategy currently in place at Ibrox look like eating for breakfast is the manager, a bloke looking progressively more tired, frustrated, vulnerable and ground-down with a job that has barely even started yet.

Derek McInnes, of course, has to take his own share of the responsibility for a week of absurdity on and off the park that has left anyone trying to work out the direction of travel at Rangers utterly discombobulated.

That second half against the unremarkable Jagiellonia Bialystok in tumbling out of the Europa League qualifiers on Thursday was as unfathomable as it was abysmal.

McInnes, hampered by injury to Tuur Rommens, had stated pre-match that he started with a back three because he didn’t want to put a right-footed player at left-back as a result of the Poles’ playing style. And a goal up at the break, things were going OK.

Yet, from the moment he replaced the ineffective Thelo Aasgaard at half-time and, erm, went to a back four with right-footed substitute Ross McCrorie on the left, it all went predictably pear-shaped.

McInnes had his reasons for the shake-up. It was to get Daisuke Yokota and Djeidi Gassama higher up the park. However, it flopped spectacularly.

It really was quite something watching McCrorie, on one foray upfield, actually cross the ball into the box with the outside of his right boot before being shifted out to his normal side later on as the shape changed again.

Following the visitors’ equaliser, McInnes took off Dan Neil and Nico Raskin to go with a central midfield of Cammy Devlin and Vanja Dragojevic. It only highlighted the alarming lack of variety in that area of the pitch in spite of the number of bodies signed to play there.

Raskin is working on his fitness but the removal of Neil was a surprise. Perhaps this is an unpopular view, but he seemed to be doing all right. At least he tried to play the ball forward at times. Devlin and Dragojevic were largely anonymous.

Amid all this, there is the mystery of why Yokota stayed on for 90 minutes. He looked knackered in the second 45. He was one of several players at fault for a Jagiellonia goal that stretched across the park and was rightly described by McInnes as ‘inexplicable’.

Lots of what is going on at Rangers is inexplicable, though. Not just the fact they keep losing stupid goals as a result of switched-off players not doing the basics. Getting things organised was what most of us felt McInnes was brought in for, but the team has been all over the shop in his first four, winless, games in charge.

Fundamental errors are not restricted purely to the field of play, though, and add to the growing concern that the American consortium in charge really don’t know what end is up any longer – an issue trickling down through all echelons of the operation.

It has certainly been a week of nonsense at Rangers, a club that appears to have mastered little other than the unique feat of spending tens of millions, over and over again, only to somehow get worse.

It’s hard to know where to start with it all, really. There was CEO Jim Gillespie likening McInnes to Jurgen Klopp at that shareholders’ pow-wow – only for his side to fold like a pack of cards against Jagiellonia.

That’s going to be dragged up by fans of all kinds of clubs for as long as things stay the way they are, which looks like it might be a while. It was the last thing McInnes needed. As was the £7million move for PSV winger Couhaib Driouech falling apart.

The fella was in the stand for that Bialystok balls-up and, before you know it, the deal’s off because he’s got an injury. Claim and counter-claim over how severe that issue actually is have since made the whole thing clear as mud.

Rangers have spent £60million on transfer fees since last summer. A total of 26 – yes, 26 – players, on loans and permanent deals, have come through the doors and, yet, they still need to bring in four or five starters.

It’s mindboggling. McInnes’ assertion the squad isn’t ready for the Europa League just draws attention to how ridiculously bad recruitment has been.

With little sign of Cavenagh’s ‘pro-Scottish bias’ in signings, the actual recruitment set-up seems vague and messy too. It involves an army of people in management roles. Cavenagh insisted at that shareholders’ meeting that it even involves physios.

He also stated: ‘What’s dangerous is making it personal because not one individual has authority to sign a player on his own. Pick on the club, not the individual.’

Sorry, but that just sounds like a cop-out, a deliberate spreading-around of responsibility so that no one takes the rap when the next big thing at £6million-plus turns out to be as bad as Ryan Naderi.

Or when you get a bid from Galatasaray for Youssef Chermiti that offers more than 100 per cent profit on a player who has done next to nothing and you turn it down days before he does his cruciate in a home loss to Hibs.

Technical director Dan Purdy was former sporting director Kevin Thelwell’s man. Why he and others such as Thelwell’s son Robbie didn’t ship out when the one-time Wolves and Everton director of football bit the dust remains a mystery too.

As does the way this entire window has panned out. Not so long ago, credible people were stating that a most improbable move for Lewis Ferguson of Bologna was being explored. He’s barely mentioned now.

Ferguson’s father, and ex-Rangers midfielder, Derek offered a withering assessment of the whole, puzzling affair earlier this week that just makes you wonder all the more if Rangers have any real idea of what they are doing in the market.

‘See the thing with Lewis, was that not a waste of f****** time?’ Ferguson told the Open Goal podcast. ‘A waste of time having the conversations and all that, because they must have known the price was between 15-20m euros.

‘Rangers can’t go that far for a player, so why did they f****** go down that route?’

Now, McInnes is reduced to pleading for new arrivals, warning those tasked with putting deals together ahead that they are ‘playing with fire’ – while placed in front of red stickers arranged in no particular order behind his head at his pre-Jagiellonia presser, asking stayaway punters to ‘Secure Your Seats’ and offering the reminder ‘Tickets Still Available.’

That’s a small thing, really, but it looked amateurish. A badly-executed marketing ploy devoid of any big-club energy.

Maybe those red rectangles – the kind of thing the Union Bears might stick on a postbox – can remain in place as some kind of messaging service as the season goes on, mind you. Ideas for what they might say include: ‘Don’t listen to Lewis Ferguson’s Da’, ‘Naderi’s yours if you want him’, ‘Driouech wiz hurt, byraway’ and ‘Get Murty on the batphone’.

Look, Rangers are on something like their eighth manager in five years. Wider, ongoing failings need addressed before McInnes comes under the microscope, but his own words on the day he was unveiled tell you why he needs to earn breathing space by beating St Mirren in the League Cup on Sunday and Czechs Jablonec in the Conference League qualifiers.

‘I’m not kidded, I know if we don’t win trophies it’ll be somebody else sitting here before too long,’ he said, ‘but I come here with the confidence that, with the resource we’ve got, with the infrastructure in place and the support I’ve got from the people above us, that this should be a winning Rangers team and this is a club that should be winning.’

They’re not winning, though. And even if McInnes somehow retains faith in the infrastructure around him, the reaction at Ibrox on Thursday suggested the punters don’t. Should they turn completely so early in the campaign, no one can be sure their head won’t end up on a plate.