New recruits at Rangers have a great deal to prove

Pedro Caixinha, the Rangers manager, has a job on his hands. Within relatively tight constraints he must somehow refurbish a poor squad, and his spurt of activity in recent days shows he means business. I’m guessing, by the time the summer is up, Caixinha will have brought six or seven new faces to Rangers. The perennial — and worrying — question is: will they be any good?

I’ve found the excitement over Alves’s arrival, for one, a tad overstated. His quality over his career — 89 caps for Portugal — cannot be denied and Alves has been a robust and rugged defender. But he will also be 36 in November. Rangers fans, in this context, are want to cite Davie Weir, a trooper until the age of 41, as a case in point, but Weir grew slower with age and was very much the exception. Players such as Weir and Morten Olsen, the great Danish libero of the 1980s, are rarities as centre backs who stand firm into their late 30s.

There are young, strong centre backs to be bought in England or across Europe, who will have a sell-on value in three years’ time, yet Rangers cannot seem to find them. In Virgil van Dijk, Jozo Simunovic or Erik Sviatchenko, Celtic found three such players in recent years, and there are more out there.

I’ve no doubt Alves may bring a certain menacing ballast to Rangers at the back. He might also be starting to creak. Costing £500,000 and a two-year deal, is this a shrewd piece of investment by the club? I’m surrounded by a stampede of Rangers supporters who are saying “yes, yes, it is!” We shall see.

The problem Rangers have right now is that, for all the promises down the years, they still don’t have a scientific scouting operation in place. This current summer of recruitment will all be down to the whims and contacts of Caixinha, I’ve no doubt aided and abetted by his mate, Pedro Mendes.

It doesn’t look entirely convincing. Somehow, Rangers have to escape the sticking-plaster approach of such signings as Alves, and find good, talented, gettable 25-year-old players who bring both pace and future value to the club.

Rangers are placing a lot of faith in Caixinha, just as they did in Mark Warburton. The club has no choice in the matter, having made such a key appointment. I just hope Caixinha walks as confidently as he talks in the job. This Portuguese coach has much to prove to supporters who have seen quite a number of false dawns in recent years.

McCann’s tough mission
Good luck to Neil McCann, the yes he is, no he isn’t, yes he is again Dundee manager. He finally made up his mind to take the Dens Park job after a fair bit of soul-searching. McCann did brilliantly in keeping Dundee up, and those who wear dark blue scarves will not forget that. But now the hard part: player recruitment, tight budgets, a long season, and keeping grumbling fans at bay. Come mid-November will Dundee be in a trough, toiling in the Ladbrokes Premiership, with McCann getting it in the neck from all and sundry? It is perfectly believable.

If Miller could be reinvented...
With a view to Scotland v England next Saturday at Hampden I chatted yesterday with Willie Miller, “the greatest penalty box defender in the world” according to Sir Alex Ferguson back in 1986. Not for a first time I wish medical science could take guys like Miller, now 62, and Alex McLeish, 58, and re-invent them as their former selves, just for one day. It isn’t just great ships and coal from underground that Scotland has ceased producing. The factory which once produced world-class defenders — piles of them — has long since been mothballed.

Madness of Tiger’s fall fills me with sadness
The tragedy of Tiger Woods, and his life falling apart, is now in real danger of being remembered far more clearly and graphically than any of the feats which brought him to public prominence in the first place.

I felt nothing but abject sorrow when I saw those images coming out of Florida last week, of the once great Woods stumbling about in the dark, his shoes off, his mind in a daze, unable to walk in a straight line after being arrested on a DUI (Driving Under Influence) charge by the police.

There is little need to rehash the details here. No alcohol had been consumed —and Woods was keen to stress this as some sort of minor moral score on his part — but his mental state was such that the most famous golfer on the planet had needed to pull his Mercedes-Benz over to the verge of that highway while falling asleep at the wheel, the engine running and an indicator light flashing.

The decision by the authorities to release the dashboard footage of the incident might be unfortunate, and has been panned by many, but it is a routine process in Florida. You could argue, indeed, that not releasing the film was somehow a way of protecting the rich, with all of that scenario’s dubious implications. I have greatly admired Tiger Woods — he has given me as an eye-witness some of the most thrilling moments of my reporting life — but I know he has been the author of his own downfall. If you look hard enough you can find pulsating accounts of his selfish and voracious extra-marital sex life which was the trigger for his ruin eight years ago. Woods is no case for bleeding-hearted whining or whimpering.

That said, many with his means and power, and dazzling looks, would have explored the same path. Woods was done in by some base human instincts which lurk in all of us. The upshot was that his marriage, his golf game, his career and now his life have all gone to pieces.

That police mugshot of Tiger shows a ruined, dishevelled, confused man who once had it all. In fact, the “all” was just far, far too much. Woods wanted everything without any rules applying. He wanted the world and everything in it, not just fame and success.

His is a modern-day parable about greed and selfishness bringing its own abysmal dissolution. And, for Woods’s various enemies, if all of this isn’t enough, public humiliation has been thrown into the mix as well.