This piece is an extract from yesterday's Rangers Insider newsletter, which is emailed out at 5pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Rangers Review team.

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When I sit opposite the Rangers Review's tactical guru Joshua Barrie to talk football, I can often feel a weary, eye-roll coming before I see it. As polite and well-mannered as this son of the manse is, he lets me know his disapproval in his own gentle way. The display normally comes alongside my insistence on some theory that can be best described as 'old school'.

It's not that I don't subscribe to the importance of tactics or data to help comprehend the chaos that arises when 22 bodies clash across 7000 square metres of grass chasing an inflated patch of cow's arse. Of course, it's important, very important, and ever more so as the game continues to professionalise at a rate that makes it look so different to what many of us grew up with. 

For me, that was the glorious 1990s, the era of "the team that drinks together wins together". Such proclamations were held up as wisdom for a while but, of course, we now know better. However, football's sports science and data transformation doesn't mean the game itself has changed radically at its core. It's still 11 men going mano a mano after all.

Walter Smith used to talk to his charges about earning the right to play your football. He'd preach about winning the battle first and then winning the war with superior firepower. Essentially, he found a clever way to illustrate to his players the importance of basics amid the fire and fury of a Scottish Premiership encounter. 

And if you've followed the culture for any more than five minutes, it's the least you expect from a Rangers team, good or bad. Look at the club's greatest-ever player. It's not a flair player of finesse and grace - even though there have been plenty of those - it's John Greig, a no-nonsense defender who played hard to win and never shirked a fight.

The expectation of playing for the jersey, of hard graft and toil for the cause - fans demand that these principles should penetrate the binding of the shirt.

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And that's why it's been so shocking to see another Old Firm where the basics of the game were approached with more vigour and enthusiasm by the opposition. At Hampden, Celtic harried and harassed, they bolted back into position like their lives depended on it. They went the extra mile. 

Rangers lacked the same vim. They didn't seem to want it more. Quality is one thing, and maybe the squad from the East End has more stardust at the moment, but this is about something deeper. Character. Heart. Desire. It sounds anachronistic, and perhaps it wouldn't have been enough, but there's a reason Rangers fans have taken this defeat so badly. It's because the team didn't give them anything to hold onto. It was a performance where they were bested on almost every level, not by much, but enough that it stings.

Michael Beale's mistakes have been pored over in great detail elsewhere but he isn't the first manager to watch these players overpowered when it matters. That's on them and they must be held accountable. The manager talked about some of their futures recently and said that much will depend on how this team ends the season. He knows as well as anyone their use to him is finite if they don't carry the backing of the fans that can phase or raise them.

How that pans out will depend on what remains. Winning the Scottish Cup and staying unbeaten in the Premiership under the new manager would be some consolation. You wouldn't bet on either though unless they can begin to match their main rival's intensity of focus.

They are a thoroughly modern squad, full of decent young men from different cultures and backgrounds. It's time for them to pull together amid the flames licking their feet or, one suspects, be ripped asunder in a summer of squad bloodletting. 

Old school outlook or new age insight, in some ways, the more things change, the more they stay the same.