Captain repentant as Ally Mccoist’s men falter to shock defeat

He said: “We owed a result to the supporters who turned up and made it another sell-out. We can only apologise to them.

“We’ve got a lot of new players, a lot of young players, acoupleof foreign players who don’t speak English. But that’s all excuses, isn’t it?

“We really need to start picking up points now for

“It’s not acceptable so we are going to have to respond to it”

the supporters as well as ourselves.

“It’s not acceptable so we are going to have to respond to it.

“We owe it to the supporters, we owe it to ourselves, we owe it to the managementandweoweit to everyone at the club.

“Drawing away from homeat a club like Rangers isn’t acceptable and, after getting beaten away from home, hopefully everyone knows now that it can’t happen again.”

Brian Allison grabbed the only goal of the game earlyontohandvictory toa side who had suffered five league defeats in a row.

McCulloch added: “I wouldn’t saywe are embarrassed.

“They worked harder than us and they had one chance and it was a poor goal for us to lose. We are obviously disappointed.

“We wanted it to be the day that we got the away win that we have been looking for since the startof the season and it hasn’t come yet.

“At half-time and fulltime there was anger but there is nothing we can do about it now. It’s in the past now.”

When asked if the result piled the pressure on boss Ally McCoist, the captain replied: “I don’t know about that. We wanted to go out and get that result for him and it wasn’t to be.

“All we can do is go into the next game and try to win that game for him.

“He was the same as the boys - just disappointed.

“I wish we could put our finger on what’s actually wrong. I don’t think it’s attitude. Maybe they just defended a bit better than us so we didn’t get three points.”

Stirling were without manager Greig McDonald in the dug-out because the game clashed with his own wedding.

And their victory was made all the more impressive by revelations from assistant manager Shaun Fagan that goalkeeper Sam Filler playedpartof thefirst half with sight in just one eye after a collision with McCulloch.

He said: “We knew Rangers would have chances and big Sam had some great saves.

“At half-time he told us he couldn’t see out of one eye because of a collision with big Lee. There was blood coming from his mouth so we had to make the change and Mark Peat did a job for us as well.”