RANGERS v KILMARNOCK

THE last Rangers manager to suffer a barren first season in charge and still enjoy overwhelming success was Scot Symon.

Steven Gerrard refuses to look back in time any further than eight months, never mind to 1954 when Symon arrived at Ibrox from East Fife.

In time, Symon endured to win six league titles, five Scottish Cups, four League Cups and also led his club to European Cup Winners’ Cup finals in 1961 and 1967.

For now, Gerrard wants to lay his hands on just one of those pieces of silverware and as he reflected on his short reign in charge yesterday at the Hummel Centre, nothing was off the table.

He was candid in addressing areas of improvement for himself and his squad in the aftermath of the Scottish Cup exit to Aberdeen on Tuesday night that will all but ensure they end the campaign potless.

They can still make a fist of it in the league but, trailing Celtic by eight points ahead of today’s visit by Kilmarnock and in a campaign in which they have won four games in a row only once, that’s a tall order.

Gerrard spoke warmly of his relationship with director of football Mark Allen, even if in identifying a lack of self-belief in the signings made since last summer it pointed a finger at the club’s recruitment policy.

After all, it was as recently as the club’s agm in November that Dave King praised Allen for undertaking a character audit of all new signings the chairman felt had been badly lacking in previous regimes.