Wilkins: I’d love to help this great club
RAY WILKINS reckons Rangers should enlist the help of a handful of Ibrox legends to guide the club on the road to recovery.
The Gers board have yet to appoint a successor to Pedro Caixinha and former Light Blues midfielder Wilkins said: “I’d love to help a wonderful football club get back on its feet. And I’m sure there’s so many other guys, Big Terry (Butcher) will be listening to this and he’d love to be back in there. We’ve got so many ex-Rangers out there that would love to help this club.
“These are guys who have seen it and done and want to do it again - myself included. I’d love to be involved to try to help this wonderful football club.
“This is an institution, this isn’t just a football club. We need someone at the helm - you’ve got an Alex McLeish, an Ian Durrant, you’ve got the Fergusons, there’s Ally McCoist.”
IN the blue sea of Ibrox, you either sink or swim. Right now, Rangers are struggling to keep their heads above water.
After the highs of wins over Hearts and Partick Thistle, the Gers have plunged to new depths in recent days as they have suffered humiliating defeats to Hamilton and Dundee.
For many fans, Friday night at Dens Park was the tipping point, the match where their patience snapped and their build-up anger and frustration came pouring out.
Graeme Murty’s side were booed off at the end of a 2-1 defeat. The performance was even more embarrassing than the result.
For some members of the Ibrox squad, it was the first time they had felt the wrath of supporters in such a fashion. Life in Light Blue is nothing new for Kenny Miller, however.
“This is a tough place to play when things are not going well, there’s no doubt about that,” Miller said.
“But you need to have that strength of character and that mentality that you need.
“Ultimately we have to find a way of dealing with it. And the team has to find a way to win football matches.
“It can be tough because of the level of expectation. And the level of success the club has had over the last however many years.
“At the moment we’re having a real drought in terms of that kind of success.
“Listen, that’s where we are. This is a place where you can either sink or swim. You find out a lot about yourself and your team-mates when you’re faced with that kind of adversity and scrutiny.
“What we’ve been very fortunate with over the course of the years is that we have had more players than not who are able to deal with it.
“You need to remember, we’re four or five months into a season with a new group which has lots of different nationalities and cultures. It’s still early yet – albeit it feels like a lifestyle, trust me!
“But there is no honeymoon period here. You need to hit the ground running.
“We said that last season when we said he needed to improve. We said we needed to find consistency and all that other nonsense.
“But ultimately this season has taken the same pattern again. It’s something we need to correct.”
A season that started badly has become steadily worse for Rangers as they have followed up the Europa League exit to Progres Niederkorn with a dismal run of Premiership form.
The squad that Pedro Caixinha assembled at significant cost has underperformed and underachieved and the Gers head into the back-to-back fixtures with Aberdeen already six points adrift of their rivals for second spot this term.
Miller returned to Ibrox three years ago with the ambition of helping Rangers back to the top of Scottish football.
But supporters are struggling to see any light at the end of the tunnel as the Ibrox board continue their search for another manager.
MILLER said: “I don’t know what’s going on off the field, but definitely on the field we could have been in a better position.
“I think there is improvement to be had in the group. We can definitely get a lot more out of everybody and collectively we can be a lot better.
“You can’t win anything on your own. You can have special players out there that are not quite working in relation to the team and maybe, at the moment, we’re looking a little bit disjointed.
“Maybe there is a look of a team of individuals rather than a team and I would take a team all day long.
“Murts has been trying hard to get that cohesion. But we have a couple of good ones then it all goes to pot. We had chances against Hamilton to win three or four games but we ended up losing the game