I SINCERELY hope, both for his sake and that of Scottish football, that the Paul Le Guen revolution at Rangers is still intact a year from now. The Frenchman has a persuasive football pedigree and not for nothing has been viewed as one of the coming men of the European game for the past three years.

Le Guen is affable, urbane, a studious football thinker. He is a man, moreover, whose charm has previously not got in the way of him landing trophies. His three championships at Lyon and exciting journeys to the last eight of the Champions League do not imply any genius, but they do suggest that Rangers had good cause to pursue this Frenchman as Alex McLeish's successor at Ibrox.

The fact remains, though, that Le Guen is lurching towards a crisis. Rangers' 1-0 loss at home to Inverness Caley Thistle on Saturday was embarrassing for the club - leaving only four wins from 10 league games so far under their manager - and inflicted yet another setback on Le Guen. Increasingly, he will need to do something in the European arena to shore up his reputation because any hope of landing the title is receding at pace.

If it came to it, my impression of Le Guen is that he is the sort of single-minded man who would walk away from Ibrox if his reign continues to falter. He has that individualism and clear-sightedness which would make him cut his ties and leave Scottish football if the experiment doesn't improve.

In today's football climate managers don't resign, they are pushed, but if such a moment comes I can see Le Guen saying: "It is no shame on me, and no shame on Rangers, but it hasn't worked and so I am leaving. Au revoir."After just one quarter of his first season in Glasgow, this would be no time to be acting in such fashion, yet Le Guen has provided enough evidence to those of us who regularly meet him to know that he isn't one of life's ditherers.

He is being undone at Rangers by self-inflicted wounds. Worthy of respect as Le Guen is, I have maintained since the first weeks of his reign that he has bought particularly poorly. I believe the Frenchman misjudged the quality of Scottish football, thinking that the bar was lower than it is, and that, for example, a callow Swede such as Karl Svensson would be fine to be plucked from Gothenburg and put straight into the Rangers starting XI.

Other players of the Le Guen signing policy such as Libor Sionko and Filip Sebo - both seeming in possession of somewhat questionable football potential - are further evidence of his misreading of the Scottish scene.

On radio recently, I heard from one media colleague what I think might be the most preposterous diagnosis of Le Guen's problems. "He is too sophisticated for Scottish football, " it was claimed.

Quite how anyone could be too sophisticated or clever for any football league is hard to fathom. But in Le Guen's case, this is a man who was a physically imposing defender. His nickname as a player was - La Patate de Pencran, the cannonball shot from Pencran, the Brittany village from where Le Guen hails - does not suggest a man who is too prissy to survive a more primitive football climate.

Le Guen is a self advocate who acts on his own instincts, and not necessarily - if at all - those of the wider consensus.

In France, indeed, there remains widespread incredulity that he came to Rangers in the first place, with newspaper columns and fans' forums overwhelmingly suggesting that he took leave of his senses in coming to Glasgow.

Somewhat enigmatically, when Le Guen left Lyon to take a year out in May, 2005, and then began to appear regularly on Canal+ as a football analyst, the French newspaper Le Monde ran a famous article entitled The Mystery Of Paul Le Guen.

Le Guen is his own man. He left Lyon for his own reasons, but not least because his relationship with Jean-Michel Aulus, the club chairman, was disintegrating. And he came to Rangers because he felt it was "a great challenge", very much in the face of French football opinion which held that the mysterious Breton was making a mistake.

In short, he is a man of strong decision-making, especially when it comes to his own fate. That is why, if things do not pick up at Rangers, Le Guen will simply leave. Everything about his character points to him being in charge of his own destiny.

Rangers could very easily transform their fortunes under Le Guen and the place to do that may be in the UEFA Cup, just so long as the Frenchman and his teething team can negotiate their group.

This week's trip to Tuscany to face Livorno will be no jolly for the Ibrox club, and yet Le Guen desperately needs a good performance.

Long-term failure at Rangers would be unpalatable to this coach. Indeed, he would sacrifice himself before it could happen.

SCOTTISH FOOTBALL'S UNLIKELIEST RESULT: PAUL LE GUEN. .0, DARREN DODS. .1

Paul Le Guen: Once more the Frenchman looked on aghast as Rangers lost 1-0 to Charlie Christie's upstart Highlanders. . .

Darren Dods: Caley Thistle's unedifyingly clomping and giraffe-like centre-back kept Filip Sebo and Dado Prso at bay at Ibrox. . .