Ibrox captain has sights set on trophies

Rangers captain James Tavernier expects to win trophies this season.

And the defender admits nothing less than a title challenge can be deemed a success in the Ladbrokes Premiership.

Rangers have finished in third place for two seasons running since winning promotion and, although they reduced the deficit on Celtic from 39 points to 12 in their second campaign, there was only a three-point improvement in their own performance.

Steven Gerrard’s arrival as manager and another major squad transition have revived optimism among Rangers fans and Tavernier knows they need major improvement to meet those demands.

“We’re playing for Rangers and the expectation is to bring trophies back to the club,” he said. “The fans expect it, we expect it, we have winning mentalities. Our aim is to be in competition in all the trophies we are in.”

When asked what would constitute success, he added: “It would be challenging for the title. We are Rangers, so we always have to be challenging for the title. You can’t expect anything less.

“We want to do well in the cup competitions and we really want to do well in the Europa (League) after what happened last season.”

Rangers have already done better than last season in Europe following their shock defeat by Progres Niederkorn of Luxembourg under Pedro Caixinha.

After a 2-0 first-round win over Macedonian side Shkupi, Rangers went to Croatia last week and won 1-0 in the first leg of the second round tie against Osijek.

The Light Blues have also kept clean sheets in friendly wins over Bury and Wigan and Tavernier feels they will be much stronger in defence this season.

“There’s four new faces if you include Greegsy (Allan McGregor) in goal,” the right-back said.

“We have a new look to the back four and we have worked really hard on it in pre-season, and it has obviously paid off.

“We have five clean sheets in the games we have played and we are getting stronger and stronger as the games are going on.

“We know we are always going to create chances, but we wanted to keep more goals out of our net and I feel the players we have this season have got a good chance of that.

“We have strengthened in midfield and we have players coming back from injury, so I feel the squad as a whole is a lot stronger than before.”

One defender who has moved on is Fabio Cardoso.

Rangers announced the centre-back had agreed a “mutual termination” of his contract.

The Portuguese made 18 appearances, only three of them in 2018.

James Tavernier is ready for the big kick-off.