Rangers vs Dundee Match Preview

Both Rangers and Dundee, had an opening day to forget with Dundee being beat 2-1, by Hibernian, whilst Rangers were held to a 1-1 draw by Motherwell. Both sides will be keen to get a first win on the board but who will come out triumphant?

Dundee have had a patchy start to their season with them loosing their first two competitive games in the League Cup, before going on to win the next two. Ultimately it wasn’t enough and they lost out to Ranger’s next domestic opponents, Alloa, before that opening defeat.

Rangers, on the other hand have had a much brighter start to the competitive games with us easing past Panathinaikos with a win and a draw, before demolishing Czech side, Vicotria Plzen. What most Rangers fans will be looking for, is to see if the Motherwell game was an outlier, or if it will be another season of European success, balanced against domestic struggles.

Manager, Russel Martin, lambasted his side following the Motherwell game, claiming that players weren’t listening or following instruction. This saw several players dropped for the crunch European game but Martin was rewarded for his changes with a dominant display, which Czech midfielder, Lukas Cerv, described as Rangers “stripping his team naked.”

Strangely, the Plzen game saw us take less shots than we did in the Motherwell game, however the quality of said shots was the difference. We made significantly less shots across the 90mins, however the shots we did take were of higher quality, than when we faced Motherwell, resulting in the extra two goals.

Heading into the game vs Dundee, there is no real change on the injury front with ongoing absences for Thelo Aasgaard and Hamza Igamane the only concerns. Unfortunately the complexities of signing under 18 players means Mikey Moore also misses out on this one. On the plus side, Russel Martin confirmed in his presser that Max Aarons will be available for this game, despite a dead leg in the Plzen game.

Since the competitive stuff began, Rangers have been pretty welded to the 4-3-3 formation that Martin prefers, with the only deviation being the Panathinaikos 2nd Leg where we reverted to 4-1-4-1 to see out that game. Despite practising other formations, you would expect to see us line up in the same 4-3-3 system for Dundee.

Looking at a likely team sheet there is already a pretty clear “strongest team” so we can probably guess the vast majority of the lineup, however there will be the odd change here and there, to rest players with a frantic fixture list coming up with European Group Football, now guaranteed.

Starting from the back, our options here are fairly limited. In goals I think we would all expect to see Butland continue as No1. He hasn’t done much wrong since the season started and it’s his jersey to lose.

At fullback, I think Aarons has played a fair bit of football recently and with him going off with a dead leg midweek, I think Martin may elect to rest him, despite him being fit. On the other side, Jefte showed us how much better the play flows with a natural left back in that position and he deserves to continue.

In the middle our options are pretty limited and the only option from what I’ve picked would be Fernandez but he seems to be very much the development player and Souttar and Djiga are starting to form a decent partnership. I think it would be crazy to break that up at this point.

Another who has played a lot of minutes is Rothwell and given Raskins showing when he came on in that role, I think it could be a good chance to rest him as well. Slightly further forward I expect Cameron to continue, after a really strong showing midweek and Diomande is likely to be preferred to Barron or Bajrami in the other advanced midfield role.

On the wings, I expect the Gassama / Antman partnership to start again. They looked like they had been playing together for years vs Plzen and like most of the fanbase, I’m genuinely excited to see what they bring once they really do form a strong partnership.

Now for the elephant in the room, up front. Danilo started the preseason games and was on fire but when the competitive stuff started he appeared isolated and ineffective. Now being completely fair, he had Dowell to his right, rather than Antman and the service he received was not great. We have to be honest about Dessers though, he more than took his chance when it came, setting up Gassama for the first and scoring his penalty.

Cyriel Dessers – Passing vs Plzen | Danilo – Passing vs Panathinaikos

As you can see above, Dessers was much more involved, even outside the goal and assist and on this basis, deserves to keep the shirt for the Dundee game.

That leaves me only my prediction, which for this game is Rangers 4-1 Dundee!