Rangers already look better off without Steven Gerrard - Jonny McFarlane

But here goes - Rangers look better without Steven Gerrard at the helm.

There. I said it.

Without Michael Beale’s tactical nous, without Gary Mac bringing a buzz about the place, without Tom Culshaw’s set-pieces - Rangers look improved.

It’s would have been hard to imagine these words could tumble from my jumbled brain onto the page but here we are.

It’s the van Bronckhorst effect folks.

Now, when a new manager comes into any club there is often a bounce as players up their game to impress.

But what we are seeing so far at Rangers seems more profound. This is less of a bounce and more of a slingshot into the far distance.

And Rangers are not only registering better results, but they are also performing better in almost every metric.

Look at the two radars below, the first is Rangers' attacking play when Gerrard was the manager this season, the second under Giovanni van Bronckhorst.

Under Gerrard this season

Under GVB this season

The players look genuinely liberated. It’s hard to pick anyone (with the possible exception of Ianis Hagi) who hasn’t looked more at home in the tactics of the new regime.

While Bealeball was complex and dense to the extent that players needed months to acclimatise, particularly in midfield, the GVB philosophy is much more about common sense. He has stripped back the convolution and asked players to do what they are good at.

Joe Aribo, Scott Arfield, Alfredo Morelos and Ryan Kent all look like new, much better players and are playing with an alacrity of purpose that has transformed their seasons.

None of this is to denigrate the excellent job that Gerrard and his coaches did in turning Rangers from a team that couldn’t usurp Derek McInnes’ functional Aberdeen to second place into title winners.

That was achieved against a better-resourced rival across the city and with no end of style in going through last season undefeated.

READ MORE: How Rangers’ ‘big pitch’ space raiders caused carnage at Tynecastle

And yet, this season it had undoubtedly gone a touch stale.

Rangers looked a boring team, bereft of attacking ideas with players who were starting to look like they might rather be elsewhere.

And it wasn’t as if Gerrard didn’t know a malaise could grip his men.

In pre-season he talked about the need to change the system and pose new challenges to Premiership managers now well versed in the strategies needed to foil his 4-3-2-1. Bizarrely, these adjustments never came.

While improvement did seem to be in the offing towards the end of the Gerrard era, the spark we are seeing now is something different.

Rangers look lively again. It’s still early days, and the wheels can always come off spectacularly, but there is scant evidence to suggest any doomsday scenarios.

With three home games in a row to come, the new management team have an opportunity to make an acceleration towards the title that can define the race.

And where home games had no longer become something to take for granted under the old regime this season, you get the sense that under the new one, there will be few such fears.