People don’t fear playing Rangers – Barry Ferguson fumes after St Mirren draw

Barry Ferguson admitted teams no longer fear Rangers after they were held to a 2-2 draw away to St Mirren.

Rangers twice held the lead through goals from Cyriel Dessers and Nicolas Raskin, only to be pegged back each time by Mark O’Hara and Conor McMenamin.

It was a third successive match in which Rangers had failed to beat St Mirren and Ferguson felt that the Ibrox side were no longer viewed as an imposing threat.

The interim head coach said: “The issue I’ve got is people don’t fear playing Rangers now. Whether that’s at home or away, they enjoy coming to Ibrox.

“And then when you go away from home, teams look to see if they can bully you, run hard at you and get in about you.

“That’s something that, again, needs to change going forward. You need to build a strong team domestically.

“I’m sure whoever takes the (manager’s) job will hopefully totally understand that.”

Ferguson had set his players the target of winning all five of their post-split fixtures, and he was frustrated they had failed to collect a victory in their first match.

“I never got the three points which I had demanded,” he added. “You can’t come to a place like St Mirren, lead the game twice and give a couple of sloppy goals away.

“That’s exactly what we’ve done. That’s been our Achilles heel, not just since I’ve come in, that’s been the Achilles heel here for a long time. So yeah, overall I’m really disappointed.”

Buddies boss Stephen Robinson was also frustrated at not winning the match.

“I’m actually disappointed,” he said. “I thought we should have won the game. We scored two great goals and we should have scored two more.

“They should have scored, but they got the chances and that’s what we credit them for. We played really, really well throughout.

“Overall, I thought we were the better team throughout the game and deserved to win.

“I think it should have been nine points (out of nine) against Rangers. It shows how far the football club has come, how far this group of players have come.”