Ben Guest
Steven Gerrard has said that he is glad that his Rangers side have an opportunity to quickly react to their Scottish League Cup exit against Aberdeen at the weekend.
Rangers have enjoyed a reasonable start to the Scottish Premiership season as well as sitting at the top of their Europa League group so far. However, they were denied the opportunity of challenging for the first major piece of silverware in a number of years when they slipped to a 1-0 defeat to Aberdeen in this weekend’s League Cup semi-final at Hampden.
However with a home tie against second-placed Kilmarnock tonight at Ibrox, Gerrard is glad that there is little time for The Gers to lick their wounds.
“They are in good form and are sitting second in the league at the moment. They have a really good manager and a manager whom I’ve had experience of working before with,” Gerrard told his pre-match press conference.
“Whether we beat them or not at their place is irrelevant – this is a different game, they are coming in with confidence, so it will be a really good test for us.
“I think our lads are lucky as this game comes round pretty quickly. The worst thing you want after a semi-final loss is a long time to wait to play another game, so I am really looking forward to seeing the reaction from my players.
“It is very important we play well and we start well tomorrow to get the crowd with us, and then we go from there and see what we can do.
“My belief and confidence in the players hasn’t changed because of the weekend. I thought we played really well within the game and got caught with a sucker-punch of a counter-attack.
“We gave them a day off on Monday to clear the heads, have a little bit of family time and to get the result out the system.
“The players look ready and raring to go for tomorrow night. We have analysed [Sunday] and we will speak to individual players and have spoken to the team collectively. We have started the preparation going into Kilmarnock, but there is nothing we can do to change the result at the weekend.
“It was a disappointing one for us, but good players and good teams, they react in the right way and try to get back to winning ways. We have got a good group of lads in there and we have got a good team-spirit in there – lads who are not happy with the result at the weekend and want to go and make the supporters happy again.
“I think we owe it to them in terms of a reaction individually and collectively. We hope that is the case and we send them away tomorrow happy.”