I wouldn’t be the CAPTAIN of Rangers if I wasn’t mentally STRONG
TAVERNIER HITS BACK AT THE CRITICS WHO SAY HE LACKS THE STEEL TO LEAD AT IBROX
TRADITIONALLY, the role of a Rangers captain has required strong arms, the better for hoisting large chunks of metal into the air.
The qualities needed to reach the winners’ podium in the first place stretch beyond the physical. From John Greig through to Richard Gough and Barry Ferguson, a steely mentality was an essential part of the package.
No one doubts the physical fortitude of James Tavernier. Described by Steven Gerrard as ‘robust’, the full-back is rarely injured and is a routinely powerful and productive asset on the team’s right flank.
Based on his domestic and European performances, no one would suggest he is anything other than an integral part of the Rangers team. The system favoured by Gerrard asks a lot of its fullbacks and Tavernier’s numbers are excellent — except in one regard.
Two years on from being identified by the incoming manager as officer material, the 28-year-old is yet to lead the team to a trophy.
And when he used his programme notes to confess that Rangers struggled to deal with the pressure of SPFL Premiership teams getting ‘in our face’, many supporters bristled.
Greig would have been embarrassed to make such an admission. Ditto Ferguson. The thought wouldn’t even have crossed Gough’s mind.
The irony is that Tavernier’s opinion was entirely validated on the night as Rangers went out and lost to Hamilton Accies.
Gerrard admitted better diligence from the club’s in-house media team might have kept his skipper’s eye-catchingly blunt comments off the pages of an official publication.
A rare niggle kept Tavernier out of his side’s next league match at Ross County and he then returned to lead the team in the first leg of their Europa League tie against Bayer Leverkusen.
Then lockdown happened — and the whole Tavernier issue was lost amid a pandemic and the club’s wider fight against the Scottish football authorities.
A few weeks back, assistant manager Gary McAllister stated the management team maintain trust in their captain. Pre-season has seen the defender continue to lead the team and, if all goes to plan in the Groupama Stadium this evening, he could well find himself lifting the Veolia Trophy.
Thursday night’s 2-0 victory over the mini tournament’s hosts Olympique Lyonnais offered further evidence of Rangers’ ability to compete against high-class continental opposition, even after Ryan Kent’s red card forced the team to play with ten men.
Tavernier emerged after the game to speak briefly to a few reporters and shrugged off the troubles of last term.
‘It’s just one of those things,’ he said of the heat generated by those programme notes.
‘It didn’t really affect my performance. I’m strong-minded and I don’t think I’d be in the position I am if I wasn’t strong mentally.
‘It’s something that’s in the past. I’m looking to the future and to making myself the best I can, and helping the team the best I can.
‘We’re a good group of boys. We know the demands and we didn’t deliver last season. It got cut short but we didn’t deliver.
‘We know the demands of the club. Playing for this club, the fans demand that we bring silverware to Ibrox. That being said, we have a duty this season to really knuckle down and concentrate on ourselves. We need to go game by game, work hard and take the season that’s ahead.’
With the onus on Rangers to rise to the challenge of Celtic and prevent a historic tenth consecutive title, the coming season will require an ability to handle pressure.
The fact that the season will get under way behind closed doors may ease some of the burden on the players, but they have a manager who will assert his own high standards. Gerrard
may never have won a league title as Liverpool captain but he hoovered up plenty of trophies and near single-handedly drove the club to their Champions League success in Istanbul 15 years ago.
Tavernier knows what is expected, but he is comforted by the back-up he enjoys in the dressing room.
‘We’ve got a good group of senior boys,’ he continued. ‘Me, Jermain Defoe, Scotty Arfield, Jacko (Ryan Jack), Connor Goldson, Steven Davis, Greegsy (Allan McGregor) We can push the other lads to the levels that we need, to meet the expectations and the demand. ‘We know where we need to be at, and as a team we need to demand that from each other every single day.’ That Rangers retain an interest in last season’s Europa League is testament to the quality of the team’s football and the standard of coaching provided at the club’s training ground. As both Kent and first-team coach Michael Beale admitted last term, there is something about Rangers that seems far better suited to the continental arena.
‘It’s just about the games where we didn’t come up to the right level,’ said Tavernier. ‘You saw the European games where we put in top performances, but we’d come into a league game and not deliver the same levels of cutting edge in the final third, stuff like that.
‘We were good in our defensive duties last season, but that can always be improved on, too. And in the final third we need to be more clinical to finish off teams and see games out. If we’re creating chances and not putting them away, it’s going to affect us in the league like it did last season in certain games.
‘We must always apply ourselves in the right way no matter what team we’re playing against, whether it’s Lyon or Hamilton.
‘This summer has been good because we’ve had a lot of time to prepare. The first couple of weeks of pre-season was obviously individual work, but we managed to get the groups together and work on a lot of things that we maybe haven’t had time to in previous seasons.
‘The Lyon game was a great example of us working well as a team and defensively as a unit. We’ve just got to apply ourselves the way we did against Lyon and be even more clinical in front of goal. We could have gone three or four up, so we need to work on that and take it into the league.
‘Hopefully we’ll finish off chances, so there aren’t games like Hamilton at home where we have 26 chances and lose 1-0.’