IT appeared to be a simple enough requirement for Rangers.

Hammer a few goals past Alloa Athletic, slash the gap on Hearts to just one point ahead of their evening trip to Falkirk and watch them fold under the pressure, just in time for Saturday's SPFL Championship showdown.

Except Rangers colossally cocked it up and succeeded only in giving Hearts an enormous confidence boost before the top-of-the-table Tynecastle encounter.

Ally McCoist surely couldn't have been too disappointed when his board ordered him to play this league tie with the Clackmannanshire club. Everything was in Rangers' favour. Scotland manager Gordon Strachan had even granted permission to allow the campaign's outstanding performer Lewis Macleod to skip international duty to play.

The only players missing, though, were the erratic Bilel Mohsni, who has been demoted to the bench anyway recently and the lesser-spotted Arnold Peralta who was probably closer to the Rangers first team by being in Japan to play for Honduras in the Kirin Cup than he would have been had he remained in Govan.

However, an injury to Lee Wallace robbed Rangers of one of their main attacking weapons and he was to prove a big loss to a strangely lethargic Ibrox side.

Rangers had an early Kenny Miller strike disallowed for offside before Kris Boyd and David Templeton missed first-half sitters. It set the tone for a miserable afternoon for the vast majority of the sub-30,000 crowd.

Those two summed up Rangers' afternoon. Boyd's miss was the kind he snapped up so often last season for Kilmarnock and the three half- chances he missed after that would probably have been tucked away last term for the Ayrshire side too. It was an act of mercy when McCoist replaced him with Jon Daly in the second half.

Templeton, too, is wildly frustrating. So often he can make a game-changing impact when brought off the bench, but start him - as McCoist has done only five times in the league this season - and he can cut a forlorn figure devoid of the confidence he so clearly needs to enable him to take players on.

Of course, those two weren't the only off-form players in the Rangers line-up. Very few received pass marks in a sluggish Rangers side who were lacking in attacking guile, creativity and desperately lacking in zip and pace. Then there's the sheer predictability and inflexibility of just how Rangers go about changing things.

No chance of a switch in formation, an additional striker or maybe moving to three at the back. Nothing like that. You could set your watch by McCoist's substitutions. In five out of the last six league games, we have had that same Daly for Boyd change between the 59th and 70th minutes.

Yet it looked like they had somehow gained the three points they so desperately needed with 18 minutes left when captain Lee McCulloch lashed the ball home after a Macleod corner had fallen to him but, inexplicably and almost impossibly, Rangers somehow managed to actually play worse after that.

When Liam Buchanan smacked in the rebound after a Kevin Cawley shot had been saved by Steve Simonsen, there was almost a sense of inevitability felt by the home fans, who were far from amused at what they were witnessing. To put it very mildly.

Any kind of a repeat performance at Tynecastle will certainly see Rangers fall an alarming nine points behind the Edinburgh side and McCulloch accepted they have to substantially improve.

"Next week is a massive, massive game for us," he said. "We know the importance of it. We're disappointed and that makes next week a little bit more important than what it already was. It's a game we are going to need to be prepared for and one we are going to look forward to. Tynecastle is always a hard place to go and we are going to have to be ready for that. It's going to be a good atmosphere, we're playing against a good Hearts team who are very organised. We're looking forward to the game and it's a chance to put this performance right.

"I honestly don't know what happened. We were scoring goals freely and had a great clean sheet record. I honestly don't know. I thought at times we passed the ball all right. We created chances in the first half and we didn't take them, it was as simple as that. Just one moment of madness after we had scored our goal cost us and we couldn't get back into the game."

Barry Smith, the Alloa manager, implored the media after the game to praise his team rather than point out the many faults of the home side.

While it's impossible to gloss over Rangers' ineptitude, Alloa deserve many plaudits after holding the Ibrox side to a draw for the second time this season.

They played some more than decent football and instead of folding at the loss of a goal, it actually added to their steely determination to take back a point with them, which they achieved.

If Rangers had shown as much desire and determination as their guests, then maybe they wouldn't be facing a trip to the Capital next week under so much pressure.