Finally subbing Sam Lammers was an act of mercy – sarcastic cheers from Rangers fans must’ve made him CRUMBLE

IT WAS more than just a substitution.

It was a message to the entire squad: Get your levels up or get down the tunnel.

2

It was Todd Cantwell who felt the wrath of taskmaster Philippe Clement as he took the long walk ten minutes before half-time.

But you get the feeling this won’t be the last time the Belgian runs out of patience long before the queues start forming at the pie stalls.

Anyone who’s been asked about life under his regimes says the same thing – that he demands the highest standards of fitness and commitment and that anyone who falls short won’t be playing.

Last night, Cantwell gave the ball away cheaply for the goal that tipped Rangers from thinking about winning this group to worrying about going out of Europe altogether.

Within five minutes, young Ross McCausland was stripped for action and one of the previous boss’s highest-profile signings was trudging off with a face like thunder.

Message received, loud and clear.

Mind you, the message from the fans to the manager right then was even louder – if he was going to hook anyone that early, they wanted it to be Sam Lammers, the £3.5million Dutchman who plays like he’s just washed his feet and can’t do a thing with them.

Boos rang round the stands as they realised he was staying out there, thousands of little clouds of angry steam evaporating into the freezing Govan air.

When within another three minutes he tried to find the sub with a simple pass and skewed it out for a shy, the steam was coming out of their ears.

By the time he finally got the shout, two minutes before the hour, it almost felt like an act of mercy. Even if that walk to the bench with sarcastic cheers ringing in his ears must have made the lad crumble inside.

Bottom line, though?

You could have taken your pick of Rangers players to haul off last night, because this was miles from the standard of performance Clement has made it clear he demands.

Jose Cifuentes, the man Beale described as ‘a proper game-changer’, once again failed to change the game to any positive extent.

Up top, Danilo put in a busy shift without ever looking a patch on either of Limassol’s excellent front two of jet-heeled Shavy Bickara and Russian bad-boy Alex Kokorin.

And when the second of that pair fed the first to round Jack Butland and tap home the opener just before the half hour, stand-in centre-backs Ben Davies and John Souttar looked as disconnected as first-choice partnership Connor Goldson and Leon Balogun had in conceding at Pittodrie on Sunday.

All this in the context of an occasion when it felt like anything close to the type of home European display these fans have become so used to would have cemented them as Scotland’s only post-Christmas flag-bearers with something to spare.

Instead, it took an excellent finish from McCausland just after the break to dig them out of the kind of bother that could quite conceivably have seen them finish bottom of the group by a fortnight from now.

Now, the worst they can do is come third and drop into the Conference League knockout stages – and although that’s a fate their arch-rivals from across the city would bite your hand off for, they really shouldn’t be in the position of even contemplating it.

Before that draw with Aberdeen on Sunday, it felt like Clement was doing what few fancied him to do, by getting a proper tune out of a squad Beale had assembled without any real plan in mind.

After it, doubts set in. After this, those doubts are magnified.

In his pre-match press conference, Clement was asked if he was thinking about going into the market come January.

His reply was that he’d had five weeks to assess his squad; the implication was that his squad now had five more weeks to convince him they should be here to stay.

Well, this was no way for most of them to go about it. This was back to the levels they’d churned out under Beale, levels that saw him emptied with the abuse of the fed-up fsithful ringing in his ears.

The reaction at time-up here wasn’t close to the toxicity of his home losses to Celtic and Aberdeen.

It wasn’t far off it, though.

They were raging when the Cypriots waltzed through for that opening goal.

They were apoplectic that if anyone had to be sacrificed early, it wasn’t Lammers.

Then, on the final whistle, they jeered and whistled and booked their disapproval at what had been a gigantic anti-climax.

As the players took a half-hearted lap of what might be loosely described as honour, there were maybe only 10,000 left in the stands.

Of those, plenty hung over the barriers to let their feelings be known on what they’d seen.

You get the feeling Clement wouldn’t have been far behind them once the dressing room door slammed shut.

Keep up to date with ALL the latest news and transfers at the Scottish Sun football page