Rangers hit new low in humiliating Europa League exit

Rangers suffered the most embarrassing defeat in their proud history on Tuesday when they went down 2-0 to part-time Luxembourg outfit Progres Niederkorn.

The result saw the 54-times Scottish champions crash out of the Europa League after the first-round qualifying tie.

To put the result in context: in 13 previous European ties Progres had never won a match and scored only one goal in the process, against Glentoran in a 1981 European Cup tie.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Yet they found the famous Glasgow side much more to their liking, overturning the 1-0 deficit from last week's first leg at Ibrox with second-half goals from Emmanuel Francoise and Sebastian Thill.

Niko Kranjcar, Josh Windass and Kenny Miller rattled the woodwork for Rangers as they threw everything at their opponents in the final desperate few minutes, but Progres held on.

The team who finished a respectable fourth in their league last season now go on to play Limassol in the second round while Rangers must face up to the most humiliating night in their history.

After six years out of European competition, Rangers were expected to stroll past Progres - who at 436th in the UEFA rankings are 168 places beneath Rangers - but their failure to score more than once in last week's home tie came back to haunt them.

Those Rangers fans who had made the trip to Luxembourg expressed their rage as the team boarded their bus outside the stadium, hurling abuse at the players and more particularly manager Pedro Caixinha. The Portuguese took charge of the club in March and the eight players he signed in recent weeks were supposed to herald a new era at Ibrox.

But this morning Caixinha must contemplate a new low in the turbulent recent history of Rangers, what the Daily Record describes as "a horror situation...and another hammer blow for Scottish football’s European co-efficient".

Asked for his reaction to the defeat, Caixinha told Rangers TV: "I assume all the responsibility. We could not do what we were here to do and that's win the game. It's a thing that happens once in a lifetime that happens to us today. That's football."