Rangers ready for must-win Hearts game - Rohl

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• Published46 minutes ago

Danny Rohl says his Rangers players will be ready for the maelstrom when they visit Tynecastle to play Scottish Premiership leaders Hearts in a must-win contest on Monday evening.

"The atmosphere will be on fire," he said. "They fight for something, they play for a historical season and they go all-in, but we will also be ready for this, we go there and we'll be ready to fight."

Rohl, 37, only has one experience of how tumultuous Tynecastle can be when the home fans have the bit between their teeth - a 2-1 defeat in December - but he has a decent idea on what to expect when the two sides lock horns.

Realistically, Rangers have to win. If they lose they will fall seven points behind Hearts with three games to go.

And Rohl is not hiding away from the hopelessness of that situation should it arise, with Hearts seeking their first top-flight title in 66 years.

"It will be, in some phases of the game, not the nicest one because there will be a lot of 50-50 duels and it is important that everyone on the pitch makes good decisions in both directions," he said.

"It's crucial that we have the focus to bring our best football. We like to play from a hunter position and now we want to hunt, we want to close the gap again.

"We dropped from one point [behind] to four points [behind] - we closed to three, to four, to one and we have four games to go and we can close it again. It's exciting for everyone and we are ready."

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The repetition of that 'ready' mantra is easier to say than to do. Rohl would have thought they were ready for the stiff challenge of playing Motherwell on Sunday but they got blown away in the first half, recovered and then lost in the last minutes.

Hearts have had a remarkable capacity to win games late on this season, a resilience that, in part, explains their place at the top of the league. Rohl pointed out another string to the Hearts' bow that his players need to watch out for.

"Next to us they have the most set-play goals and this is the challenge we have - second ball, long ball, cross ball," the German said. "You have to defend really aggressively and if you do this then you have a great opportunity to take something.

"They are very aggressive. What they do, they're doing in a good way. This is a tough place to go. If an opponent is a long time on top of the table they have to do something right.

"You will have a lot of 50-50 duels that you have to win. You have to move the ball in good areas, you have to be very active, you have to ask for the ball, this is crucial. You have to be well organised, you have to be smart in the duels because if you make stupid fouls in dangerous areas then we give them strength.

"[What we need is] maybe sometimes over 100% to take the points. You cannot just play 95% or just 45 minutes of good football."

That's perhaps a reference to the flakier side of Rangers' personality - a team bad enough to be 2-0 down at Falkirk, going on more than two, and then powerful enough to win the game 6-3, a team that showed character to pull it back to 2-2 against Motherwell only to lose it at the end.

And Rohl repeated his view Rangers have four finals left to play, as his side, Celtic and Hearts battle for the title.

"If you ask them, all three teams will say they can win. What changed is that before the Motherwell game we could do it with just our results, now we need a little bit of help. In general, there is a big, big belief."

How long that belief survives will be determined at Tynecastle on Monday. For Rangers, there is no safety net anymore.

Related topics

• Scottish Premiership
• Rangers
• Football