LIVINGSTUN

Shock Menga winner adds to Gers’ woes on the road

RANGERS boss Steven Gerrard insists there won’t be a title race if the Light Blues continue to lose games.

Gerrard’s men slumped to a shock defeat against Livingston on plastic at the Tony Macaroni Arena courtesy of Angolan hitman Dolly Menga’s first ever goal for the club.

It was Gerrard’s side second loss in seven Premiership matches which saw the Ibrox men slip eight points behind league leaders Hearts.

The capital club travel to Govan next weekend in a match which Gerrard has already labelled a must-win clash.

Gerrard said: “Hearts was a must-win game whether we won, drew or lost today. They are the team to chase right now, they have come out of the blocks flying.

“It is still early on in the season so we can recover from a result like this, like we recovered from the Old Firm loss.but this can’t keep happening.

“When we come and play teams like

Livingston we have to try and take maximum points otherwise we won’t be in the title race. I said to the players before the game that we need to show how good we are and how serious we are.

“All the teams around and above us won so with that comes with a bit of pressure and we haven’t responded.” Gerrard offered no excuses for his sides failure but insisted their fragility away from home is fast becoming a problem.

He said: “I think if we play like we did today the problem will be away from home because we were nowhere near good enough.

“We weren’t Rangers, we weren’t exciting. There was just nothing in the final third. We didn’t deserve to score. I’d like to give Livingston a lot of credit for the way they defended and they maybe deserve credit but at the same time we didn’t deserve to score.

“Livingston deserved to beat us. If we showed that quality on grass Livingston would have beaten us on grass today. We’re not going to start blaming the pitch. We were excellent at Kilmarnock. I wouldn’t blame the pitch.

“We’re very disappointed in terms of the result. That’s three big points dropped. We have to take responsibility for that.

“We could be playing for another 180 minutes and we wouldn’t look like scoring.”