When Morgan Rogers handed Ollie Watkins the ball, the Holte End chanted the striker’s name.

Seconds after his weak penalty was saved by Bologna’s Lukasz Skorupski, Watkins’ name was again chanted in support.

The England striker is enduring a 10-game goal drought for club and country at a time when Villa need him at his sharpest, despite Thursday’s Europa League win.

His nine games without scoring in the club shirt is the joint longest he has gone without a goal in his Villa career, having previously had nine-game dry spells in 2020-21 and 2022-23.

His second-half spot kick was the ideal chance to end that but the scuffed strike lacked confidence and allowed Skorupski to save with his legs.

Watkins has now failed to score three of his last five penalties for Villa, including missing in the Champions League against Celtic last season.

Ultimately – thanks to Marco Bizot’s late save from Martin Vitik – it mattered little as Villa earned their first win of the season thanks to John McGinn’s early strike.

It allowed boss Unai Emery to relax after victory and assert with confidence that Watkins will end his drought.

“He didn’t score, okay, it doesn’t matter, the goal is coming through the work he did today,” Emery said.

“I am happy because he played doing his task. He worked, this is the most important.

“He pressed, he was getting in duels, he got chances, he got a penalty, he missed but the most important [thing] is how he played in 30 minutes doing his task and he did a fantastic job.

“He has to feel after each match like I am feeling now, be happy because he did his work. He has to feel the same and if he is scoring he is going to feel better.

“The most important thing is how he is working in his tasks for the team. Today he played a good match, not enough because he didn’t score but he played good. This is the first step.”

Watkins’ struggles can be charted back to the second half of last season when he scored just four times in Villa’s final 19 games.

The 29-year-old started 13 of those but was left out of the starting line ups for their Champions League quarter-final defeat by Paris St-Germain, playing just 25 minutes across both legs.

This season he has missed all five of his big chances, has managed just 40 touches in the opposition’s box across his nine appearances and is averaging less than one shot on target per game.

With an expected goals return of 2.2 it is clear he is falling short.

Yet this is Villa’s record Premier League goalscorer. His strike against Bournemouth in May put him on 75 goals, one ahead of Gabby Agbonlahor from 133 fewer games.

He has 87 goals in 229 appearances for Villa and five in 19 caps for England, including a debut international strike against San Marino in 2021.

That came during a first season at Villa where he scored 16 goals, adapting instantly to the Premier League following a £28m move from Brentford.

His first top-flight goals came with a hat-trick in Villa’s stunning 7-2 demolition of Liverpool in October 2020.

Watkins has not dropped below double figures in his five years in the Premier League, including the 19 goals he scored in 2023-24 to help fire Villa into the Champions League, and there is belief he will return to his best.

McGinn told TNT Sport: “He’s a top-class striker. He’s not in the England squad for nothing. He’s shown over the years how good he is.

“If he’s not scoring, that’s fine. You’ve seen the effort he puts in for the team. We don’t need to put any pressure on him and add to any external noise. He’s been brilliant for us and has got nothing to prove to us.”

There’s no end of flak that can be flung at Russell Martin for the epic fail that is his project at Rangers.

But watching his reaction when Mohamed Diomande got a deserved red card four minutes before half-time at Ibrox made you feel for the man.

Rangers had been second best. Fitful at the back, wasteful in possession, headless chickens in too many areas. Again.

Even before the red, it looked likely that Martin’s period of calm after Saturday’s League Cup win over Hibernian was about to come to a shuddering and noisy end.

In losing the plot, Diomande more or less ensured that Rangers were losing this Europa League opener against Genk, currently Belgium’s 14th best team.

In lunging in on Zakaria El Ouahdi, Diomande left his team-mates in a terrible lurch, already struggling with 11 and now sitting ducks with 10.

The lack of self-control was unforgivable, the look of confused innocence on his face in the aftermath a complete nonsense.

Diomande, who on his very best days looks like a player worthy of the jersey, has been nowhere near it this season. Too often he’s been lazy in his work and now he was ridiculous in his discipline.

And so Martin was left, once again, to reap the whirlwind of those Rangers supporters who remained until the end.

Around 12,000 tickets went unsold – a reflection of a deepening apathy. The boos, now as much a part of the match-day experience as Broxi Bear, were heard again.

The chants demanding the manager’s head were cranked up for the umpteenth time. It was grim. The cameras panned to the directors’ box, where chairman Andrew Cavenagh and chief executive Patrick Stewart stood stony-faced.

A penny for Cavenagh’s thoughts. The Rangers fans would cough up a lot more than that for an audience with the man, for a chance to air their views by way of a venting of the spleen.

Cavenagh has made it known that he’s behind his manager, but it’s just not credible to think that he has no doubts about what he’s seeing. And it’s unimaginable that he has no concerns about the way his – and other people’s – money has been spent.

Is any single part of Rangers’ operation working? Not really. Quality of play, results, recruitment, relationship with supporters – nothing is functioning.

Rangers were, and are, a hard, hard watch. They were, and are, pedestrian and predictable. Laborious. Tiresome. Everything looked so slow, so difficult, so unthreatening, save for the odd moment of energy from Djeidi Gassama on the left.

Genk missed a sitter at 0-0, then hit a post, then missed a penalty, or rather had it saved by Jack Butland. All of those moments happened before the break when the score was level.

Diomande’s act of foolishness just put the tin hat on it. It gave Martin an excuse, and in his news conference later he took it.

But there was not a lot of positivity in Rangers’ performance before that and there was no reason to believe that it would have been any better had Diomande not taken himself out of the game.

Genk are in the midst of a poor run themselves, with one win in five coming into this. This was their first clean sheet in 11 games, which is the kind of thing that happens when your goalkeeper doesn’t have a save to make.

Like Rangers, they were under pressure. Like Rangers, they had cause to be anxious and negative, playing it tight and hoping for the best.

But they weren’t. They were ambitious on the ball. They attacked the game, while Rangers flailed wildly. Their intensity, away from home, was impressive.

Whatever their coach Thorsten Fink said to them beforehand, they looked full of belief, a stark contrast to their hosts.

The lack of incisiveness in Martin’s team is remarkable for a set of players put together for a relative king’s ransom.

We’re told that Rangers’ net spend this summer has been £21m, including transfer fees and loan payments. You could put a dot between the 2 and the 1 and still wonder if they’ve got value.

They had Youssef Chermiti up front, a 21-year-old brought in from Everton at a cost of £8m.

It’s easy to bash the young striker, but he didn’t lack hunger or work-rate. What he lacked was a modicum of a chance, a sniff at goal. Just one.

The life of a Rangers centre-forward is a lonely existence right now. Isolated and joyless. They’re on their own up there. Sink or sink would appear to be the range of their options.

Diomande’s moment of madness was the last thing Martin needed, but it was Martin who picked him and it was Martin who picked others who struggled to make passes.

It was Martin, again, whose management of this team produced very little threat while giving up big chances even when it was 11 versus 11.

His midfielder let him down on Thursday, and on other days and nights it was others who let him down, didn’t show enough leadership, failed to make a difference.

The cast of characters on that front is long and thunderously unimpressive.

Martin gets filleted but the Rangers players can’t escape censure here. A lot of this mess is down to the manager, but not all of it.

He said the red changed the game and he was correct, but there’s always something – players being anxious, a red card, a penalty not given, another decision given in error. There’s a fatalism about all of this.

And on Sunday they have a trip to Livingston. Plastic pitch, canny manager, physical team motivated to the high heavens. A gauntlet awaits this meek Rangers outfit.