I will try to be as impartial as I can be on Tuesday night at Palmerston Park when Queen of the South take on Rangers in the Ramsdens Cup quarter-finals, but I have to admit I would love to be in the technical area rather than on media duty.

I am really enjoying being back in the game in a coaching role alongside Jim McIntyre and Gerry McCabe at Queens and much as I have to prioritise my main job, the best place to be on the night of a game is at the coalface.

People will say it is only the Challenge Cup, but I know Rangers are desperate to win every competition they enter and they will be desperate for a bit of revenge after Queens beat them at this stage of the same competition at Ibrox last year.

Ally McCoist knows how it works at Rangers - lose and people will start asking questions again. He wants to put all that stuff about the cup competitions behind him and they don't want a repeat of last year.

It would be a hammer blow for Rangers if they did go out - precisely because they have been looking so strong these last few weeks, doing things the way people felt they would last season.

That is why I am sure Ally and his players will not be under- estimating us. First and foremost, we are the cup holders. We proved last season we can beat anyone on our day, and proved that description still applies this time round when we knocked St Mirren out of the Scottish Communities League Cup.

Having said that, I can't help feeling we have been unlucky. Because the fixture falls after the lifting of Rangers' registration embargo, we will be getting them at their strongest for a while.

The match was originally scheduled for last Saturday, but was postponed because Rangers had players away on international duty. It will certainly have suited them to have the tie pushed back because they have already shown, up at Forfar when they were knocked out of the League Cup, that if they revert to the personnel they had last season they can struggle.

Now all their new signings have had game time and it won't even be their first game together as a group. Ally seems to have got the right types in, guys such as Jon Daly, Nicky Law and even Nicky Clark, who, even if they are not playing their best, will still do their jobs properly. When you look at what happened last season, at times I had to question whether they had that kind of player then.

Ally is the first to admit that some of his early cup results weren't good enough, but his players are at Rangers because they are supposed to be decent players. I don't think they will feel pressure - they will come to Dumfries expecting to win - but they will know we are a really good Championship team. The match will be played on our plastic pitch and we have started the season well.

A player coming back to his old club always makes for a good story so we will have to watch Nicky Clark really closely. A couple of years ago he wasn't always a regular in the Queen of the South team and I love a success story like Nicky's, because he is someone who has had to work for everything he has.

He will do all right at Rangers, but just hopefully not against us. We have got some good players too and a great spirit. We might be getting Rangers at their strongest point for some time, but we are still expecting to give them a right good game.

I RAVED about Macedonia in last week's column and said Scotland would be happy with a draw, but in Skopje on Tuesday night we got a whole lot more than that: a result and a performance. But without wanting to put a spanner in the works, while Macedonia are a good team, looking at it again I maybe over-estimated how good they were.

They may be one of those teams who are better away than at home because as soon as they had to open, up and the onus was on them to try to beat us it really didn't suit them. Well done to our boys, though, because they denied them space.

As for Ikechi Anya, the media and Scotland fans need to be careful. He was exceptional on the night, but I am not going to call him the next big thing. We have done this before with the likes of Jordan Rhodes and with wee Chris Burke years ago. Anya is the type of player who is going to be inconsistent. He is going to come up against better players and better teams than Macedonia and he might not play so well. So let's not build him up just to knock him down again.

ONCE Ian Black admitted he had bet against his own team, he had to be punished. Some have argued the Scottish Football Association have been lenient, but if you believe in punishment fitting the crime then I think a three-match ban - with another seven matches suspended - and £7500 fine was just about right.

There was only a small amount of money involved in these bets. If it had been thousands I would have been the first to say he shouldn't kick a ball again. He has maybe got off a bit lightly - I don't think anyone would have complained if he got half-a-dozen games - but if the SFA are censuring Black for betting on other football matches, they are going to have to censure maybe 95% of all Scottish players.