Will Gerrard’s departure help Sparta? Rangers coach leaves team 2 weeks before the all-important duel

Sparta fans and players alike are watching with great interest the news that Steven Gerrard is to become Aston Villa’s new head coach in the Premier League. This means that the summer side will meet the rather unreadable Rangers in 2 weeks time.

In case you haven’t noticed, Steven Gerrard is leaving the coaching bench at the Scottish champions and moving back home to England. Not to Liverpool, where he has spent his entire career, but to Birmingham, where he will coach Aston Villa.

The famous and historic English club, which last year finally had an exciting season. Only this year, it’s been rather a misery. The Villains have lost 5 games in a row and have dropped to 16th in the table with only a two point lead on the relegation places. It was coach Dean Smith who was sacked.

And the management quickly picked their saviours. That would be Steven Gerrard, Liverpool icon and current Rangers coach. Aston Villa have bought him from Glasgow for £3million, the whole transfer should happen in the next few hours, days at most.

And what does this mean for Sparta? It could be a pretty unreadable situation for the management team. The arrival of a new coach is always unpleasant for the opponents because you don’t know what to expect from him.

Moreover, in this case it is not a case of firing with the replacement coach to give the whole team a new impetus. Rangers are doing well, Gerrard just went for a better one. So it is not certain whether the new coach will continue with the Scottish outfit in what he is successful at or try to impose his own style on it.

Moreover, the duel for everything will take place in just two weeks’ time, on Thursday 25 November. Both Sparta and Rangers have 4 points, so the game at Ibrox Park could suggest a lot about who will go from second place to the knockout stages of the Europa League.

But Pavel Vrba and co. will only have one game to trace Rangers’ style of play under their new coach. After the national break, the Scottish side take on Hibernian on November 21, with the next game already against Sparta.

And who could sit on the bench of the Czech Republic’s unpopular team? The English media are talking about two names in particular, Frank Lampard and Giovanni van Bronckhorst.

The latter is a former great defender and 106-time Netherlands international. As a coach, he led Feyenoord from 2015-2019, and from 2020 he will coach the Chinese team Guangzhou R&F.

The former Chelsea midfielder doesn’t need much introduction. After the end of his playing career, Lampard also threw himself into coaching, for one year he led Derby County in the Championship, then returned to Chelsea, where his engagement was not very successful.

So it is not at all certain whether the loss of Gerrard will be a weakening for Rangers or on the contrary the incoming coach will give the team a boost against Czech teams. After all, the Scottish champions faced teams from the Fortuna Liga three times in 2021 and failed to win even once. They drew and lost to Slavia in March and lost to Sparta in the autumn.

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