THERE was a refreshing candour in the approach of Kris Boyd following the kind of display so sadly lacking since his high-profile return to Rangers in the summer.

For too long at the Ibrox club, substandard performances have been dressed up as something acceptable. Scraping results and winning leagues against part-timers, and doing little of note in the cups, was somehow regarded as adequate compensation for an overall lack of quality.

Already nine points behind Hearts in the SPFL Championship, albeit with a game in hand, the penny finally appears to be dropping.

Attitudes need sharpened and Rangers need to up their game. Against Raith Rovers on Saturday, they most definitely did and much of that had to do with the intelligence and industry brought to the table by Kenny Miller, fit again following a calf problem which had kept him on the sidelines since late August. Boyd looked much, much brighter too. He scored his first league goal of the campaign thanks to the visiting goalkeeper, Ross Laidlaw, letting a perfectly straightforward effort go straight through his gloves, but the Rangers striker played a part in two of his side's other goals and looked a little more like the fellow who completely revitalised his career at Kilmarnock last term.

There was an invention about Rangers at the weekend that has been too often absent. There was clever interplay and ambitious, defence-splitting passes. There were options other than lumping the ball up front in the hope something might happen. It would have been easy for Boyd, as they say, to have focused purely on the positives. He did not. Like everyone else in the ground, he realised the afternoon might have been a little different had Raith been a little more on-the-ball and he made no attempt to sweep that under the carpet.

After Lee McCulloch had opened the scoring from a corner from Lewis Macleod, Raith's Paul Watson missed an absolute sitter at the other end when left unmarked.

With Rangers two goals in front after Boyd played a quick free-kick to Miller, who, in turn, released Nicky Law with a terrific pass, Kevin Moon went one better than Watson at the start of the second half. Mark Stewart set him up directly in front of goal and his weak effort straight at Steve Simonsen was just pitiful.

Even so, Raith did score a couple of minutes later when Martin Scott was left alone to head home a ball nodded back across goal from the back post by Grant Anderson.

Boyd set up Miller for his second of the season with a nice, little pass to make it 3-1 and ended the game as a contest when getting the ball into the net, by hook or by crook, on 63 minutes. He was taken off alongside Miller with 20 minutes to go and his replacement, Jon Daly, completed the rout with two goals in the last five minutes. However, amid the plaudits the 31-year-old felt the need to draw attention to the kind of mistakes that would have been punished by more accomplished opposition.

"We have been performing reasonably well in the majority of games, but there have been silly errors that have cost us dear," said Boyd. "We lost a silly goal again in this one. I lost my man at a corner as well, which they could quite easily have scored from, so we need to cut out the silly things. This could have been a lot more convincing than it was."

Boyd and Miller are expected to lead from the front, in more ways than one, this season. Their very presence should be enough to get Rangers over the finishing line and they offered a tantalising hint of what they might be capable of against Raith.

Like his strike partner, Boyd has been here before. He knows what is expected. "With Boydy coming back to the club, he has bigger pressure on him to find the form he had in his previous spell," remarked Daly.

"When you get a goal like he did, it can give you that lift you need and you will start banging them in. It is probably exactly what he needs at the moment, but he is a top-quality finisher."

The truth is, Boyd was fortunate to be in the team on Saturday. He had looked a shadow of himself recently but Daly, although he would never say it outright, seems relatively content with being an option to be brought in off the substitutes' bench. "With the likes of Nicky Clark and Dean Shiels here, there are five really good strikers who could probably play for most teams in Scotland," said the Irishman.

"I want to prove that I am good enough to get in the team, but it's a squad game. It's been a frustrating couple of months for me because I missed pre-season and I've been playing catch-up, so I was delighted to get on the end of two fantastic balls from Richard Foster and score."