Graeme Souness has warned Rangers players to guard against complacency despite a massive turnaround in fortunes.
Derek McInnes’ men go into this weekend’s fixture at Dundee knowing that a seventh straight league win will see them go top of the Premiership and crank up the pressure on leaders Celtic ahead of their clash with Hearts on Sunday afternoon.
A perfect September has flipped the mood at Ibrox following a dismal start to the season that included defeat to Hibernian in McInnes’ first home league match in charge and embarrassing European exits at the hands of Jagiellonia Białystok and Jablonec.
However, former boss Souness insists the standards set in last month’s back-to-back victories over their Old Firm rivals must become the norm, not the exception, if the Light Blues are to contend for silverware this season.
In a wide-ranging interview with This Is Ibrox to promote his new book – My Rangers: How I Changed Scottish Football For Ever – Souness said: ‘We’ve had two really good games against Celtic and we’ve now planted a seed in their head that we’re better than them. But if we lose or draw some stupid games going forward, that seed will disappear.
‘We must continue in the same form, as if we’re playing Celtic every week, with the same attitude, the same willingness to do the hard yards, and being the same aggressive team we were [in those games].
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‘All of a sudden, we looked like a team of men and like we all know what we’re doing. We were first to everything and we were bullying Celtic. Please, do that every week.’
Souness reckons that maintaining those levels will be the biggest challenge the current squad will have to overcome, harking back to his own experiences of facing Manchester United during his Liverpool playing days in the 1980s.
‘We never, ever had an easy game against them,’ he added. ‘They’d beat us, we’d beat them. It was always very tight. But the difference between them and us was we could go to the smaller teams and turn them over for fun. There was no lapse in our attitude when we played them. But Manchester United, they would lose daft games. There was only one year they really challenged us and that was the year Ron Atkinson was in charge.
‘The message, if I was sitting with those [Rangers] players, is you have to be where you’ve been for the last two games against Celtic. Be aggressive, be first to everything, and let the other team know there’s nothing in this game for them.’
Souness led Rangers to three league titles as manager before Liverpool lured him back to Anfield in April 1991.
Reflecting now, he admits he didn’t fully appreciate the expectations that came with the job when he first took charge at Ibrox but is confident that McInnes won’t repeat his mistakes. ‘I made a schoolboy error in my first interview,’ said Souness. ‘I said: “I don’t care if we lose to Celtic every time as long as we win the league”. I quickly realised that that’s unacceptable. We have to win the league and beat them.
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‘It’s an extremely pressurised job, managing Glasgow Rangers. But Derek knew that already. He’s played there under pressure. He knows the club. He knows how the west of Scotland is. There are fewer surprises for him than there were for me.
‘He’s already had to deal with some disappointments. We didn’t make a good start to the season, but he lived with that, he’s rallied the troops, and he’s got them performing.
‘But I keep coming back to it, all we have done is open the door. We now have to be like that every time we cross the white line.
‘Although we’ve turned an enormous corner, don’t be thinking the hard work’s done. The hard work’s still ahead.
‘Rangers players, every time they go out and play, are confronted by a team where it’s their cup final. Always remember that. No game starts easy, but you can make it easy: get a couple of goals, dominate, bully them. That’s what we have to be like.
‘When you’re playing for Rangers, you can’t pick and choose when you’re at 100 per cent. It has to be every single time, so your mentality has to be spot on.’
The full interview with Souness is available to watch now on the This Is Ibrox YouTube channel: youtube.com/thisisibrox
