Monday 29 June 2015 17:39, UK
Darren McGregor accepts that Rangers ‘under-performed massively’ last season, which ended with a miserable 6-1 aggregate play-off defeat to Motherwell.
Had the Ibrox club beaten Motherwell over two games last month, they would now be looking forward to a season in the Scottish Premiership.
As it happens, they remain in tier two of Scottish football and McGregor accepts the players will have to wear the tag of ‘failures’ for missing out on promotion last season – despite the club having the second largest budget in Scotland behind Celtic.
However, the 29-year-old defender says it is time to look forward, not back, with Gers opening their Scottish Championship campaign against St Mirren on August 8 under recently appointed manager Mark Warburton.
McGregor said: "It's difficult as a football player to admit that. You never like to admit that you failed.
"But I'm sure if you ask 99.9 per cent of the fans, they will say that the boys who were here were failures because we never got up.
"So that's a tag that we rightly got. Now it's about this season and trying to prove that we are not failures.
"Obviously, it was a disappointment last season so for us it is just about righting the wrongs.
"We know we under-performed massively last season. All the boys who have gone and those who are still here are still bitterly sore about that.
"But we now need to wipe the slate clean. It's a new season, a fresh start under a new manager with new ideas.
"We just need to galvanise the troops and hopefully the guys who are coming in are ready. They look like quality signings already."
And McGregor believes two of the club’s new signings – Danny Wilson and Wigan centre-half Rob Kiernan – should have a positive impact next season.
He added: "I played against Danny when he was at Hearts and he's very good technically as well as a good defender. The big boy Kiernan looks very good in training too.”
