Walter Smith demands final push as Rangers target domestic treble

Amid the teething grind of the January transfer window, Walter Smith at least has the clarity of a football match to look forward to tonight when Rangers face Heart of Midlothian in the CIS Insurance Cup semi-final at Hampden Park.

You almost get the impression the Ibrox manager hasn’t particularly enjoyed the Fifa-inspired wheeze of doing business in January, and yesterday certainly proved a chaotic day for Rangers.

Daniel Cousin’s move to Fulham was abruptly outlawed by Fifa due to the two-club rule, leaving Smith with a surfeit of strikers, and still to do significant business in the January window with two days left to go. With Alan Hutton on the verge of signing for Tottenham last night, it was almost a relief for the Rangers manager to have tonight’s cup semi-final to look forward to.

Smith is the first Rangers manager in five years to have the genuine whiff of a domestic treble in his nostrils and he openly admitted yesterday how much he is looking forward to tonight’s match. A rejuvenated Hearts team, with recent wins over Hibernian and Aberdeen to boast of, only promises to make this a game to savour.
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“I don’t think anyone would dispute the fact that Hearts have the capability to beat the best teams, as they’ve already shown this season,” Smith, whose side actually lost 4-2 to Hearts during one of the Tynecastle side’s fits of excellence back in September, said. “It is not ability that they lacked, it was stability, but they seem to have sorted that aspect.”

Smith puts tonight’s match in the context of one more step in his rebuilding of Rangers as a force in Scotland.

“We’re just delighted to be in a semi-final - this is my first opportunity since I came back to Rangers to get to a final,” he said. “Right now we’ve got ourselves in a reasonable position to go for three cups, and this will be the first real chance we get to turn that into the possibility of winning one of them. We know if we win we’ll be in the final, and it is a game all of us are really looking forward to.

“But Hearts will have a big moti-vation. If they can get to the final themselves they can look back over the start of the season and dismiss it as an inconsistency on their part. So I think it should be a really good game at Hampden and we know we’ll have to be at our best.”

Hearts were buoyed themselves after the news yesterday that care-taker manager, Stevie Frail, had won his appeal to the SFA to have a two-match touchline ban quashed. Frail, unusually for him, has now seen his team win two games on the bounce, ironically without Laryea Kingston, arguably Hearts’ best player, who is on duty at the African Cup of Nations.

Christophe Berra, the Hearts captain, said yesterday that his team felt positive following their recent form. “I think we’re getting our confidence back and there is a determination about us now - maybe we were lacking that attitude earlier in the season but it has changed over the last few weeks,” Berra said.

“Any victory is going to give the boys confidence and we’ll be high going in against Rangers now. We know we’ve already beaten them at Tynecastle, and we went close to taking a point off them at Ibrox. We know on our day we can beat them, but it depends which Hearts turns up at Hampden Park tomorrow night.”

Taken from timesonline.co.uk