CONNOR: WE HAVE LOST IT
Bronckhorst watching aghast from the stands, Rangers found themselves three goals down to a Martin Boyle hat-trick before Scott Arfield’s strike briefly threatened an unlikely rescue act.
But Goldson delivered a damning assessment of his side and admitted the arrival of the Dutchman isn’t a moment too soon.
He said: “We know that the new manager was here and you would hope players would want to impress but after that performance we need a change. We need a spark as I don’t want to say this but I feel that we have lost a bit of hunger.
“All of a sudden we are champions and we don’t need to work as hard which is wrong. I feel that it has crept in all season, we haven’t been good enough the whole of the season so far. Hopefully the new manager can come in. and give us a spark.”
Rangers were led by youth coach David McCallum after the departure of Steven Gerrard but Goldson was adamant a lack of touchline experience wasn’t a factor in the embarrassment against the Edinburgh club.
He said: “Not at all. The staff have been brilliant and they have covered everything this week. We have let ourselves down.
“Players don’t follow instructions, the first two goals are from a corner and people are in the wrong positions. We worked on that yesterday and from a throw in there are people in the wrong positions.
“If players don’t want to follow instructions then we can’t blame coaches as they give us the information to do our job and players don’t want to take that on board.
“Then we are two goals down and they score a third and the game is over. We can be inside at halftime and say ‘believe in ourselves’, blah, blah, blah but the game’s over as we are three down and 3-1 down at half-time. It’s nowhere near good enough and nothing to do with them [the coaches].”
Rangers’ scorer Arfield labelled the Hampden defeat “horrific”.
The midfielder said: “It’s a terrible result for everybody – fans, players, staff. You can’t sugarcoat it. We’re in a semi-final and we’re getting beaten 3-0 after 35-40 minutes.
“It’s not good enough, collectively or by individual standards. It’s a horrific day. When you analyse it, the overall feeling is our standards are dropping and for a number of weeks now we’ve not been defending as well as were, as a team.
“If you drop your standards 10 per cent, domestically or in Europe, you get found out and we got exactly what we deserved. There really are no excuses.
“When I was a fan I hated when players came out and tried to sugarcoat it. I’m not going to be that guy – it’s not good enough.”
Shellshocked caretaker boss McCallum last night shouldered the blame.
Asked if the players had let him down, he said: “We let ourselves down.
“It’s very much about ‘we’. We are part of the staff, we are involved in what happened in the game and the players will be frustrated because they know we should be managing those games better. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. They are honest enough to deal with that.
“I keep going back to the goals we lose. You can’t leave yourself with a 3-0 deficit at the beginning of the first half and think it’s going to be easy to get back into it.
“So it’s a group that’s frustrated but also a group that needs to move forward again because there’s a lot still to play for this season, a massive game on Thursday and then back to league business.”