STEVEN Gerrard last night admitted Rangers had deserved to lose the first Glasgow derby match of the season and accepted he must share the blame for the 2-0 defeat to Celtic at Ibrox.
Gerrard revealed he will hold a “steward’s inquiry” into what went wrong in the meeting with Neil Lennon’s men, who triumphed thanks to an Odsonne Edouard goal and an injury-time Jonny Hayes strike, in the coming days.
The result saw the Parkhead club, who are chasing a ninth consecutive Scottish title in the 2019/20 campaign, pull three points ahead of their city rivals at the top of the Ladbrokes Premiership.
However, the Liverpool and England great, whose team clinched a place in the Europa League group stages on Thursday, denied the painful home loss is any reason to panic.
“It’s a poor performance all round,” he said. “Look, I’m part of that. We will all analyse yourselves, we will take a bit of criticism for it, which is okay, we are man enough to accept it.
“We had a lot of praise and a lot of credit. So now we are going to have to take a bit of criticism and rightly so because our performance across the board wasn’t good enough to win an Old Firm game or against any good team that comes onto this pitch. In derby games it is about one v ones more often than not and we didn’t win enough of those today.”
Gerrard added: “We will obviously do a steward’s inquiry into why we had so many players – normally trusted players – off it and not at it. We’ll look at our game plan to see where we went right and wrong. That’s what we’ll do. But we got what we deserved today.
“The disappointing thing is that I don’t think we’ve been played off the park. Celtic deserve credit for the win, of course they do, they got what they deserved. But I don’t think we were outplayed or were passed off the pitch.
“We’ve gifted them a goal and then we’ve chased it and then you are open to the second one. They deserved the win. Their game plan has worked and ours hasn’t, but a game plan will never work at Ibrox if you have so many of your trusted players who are not at it.
“I expected a lot more. To win against any good team, especially in the Old Firm, you’ve got to have the majority of players at it. There was really only Jon Flanagan who can be proud of his performance. We can’t expect to beat a good team or win an Old Firm of the majority of players are off.
“But when we analyse where we are big picture we are four points better off than we were last year, we have qualified for Europe, we are still in the League Cup. There is a lot of positives up until a ball was kicked today."
Gerrard started Jermain Defoe up front instead of fans’ favourite Alfredo Morelos and played central midfielder Joe Aribo wide on the left and Rangers failed to trouble the Celtic goal in the first-half.
“I went with freshness,” he said. “I went with Jermain Defoe. I picked the same team, besides Joe Aribo, that did the job so effectively eight weeks ago (in a 2-0 win at Ibrox back in May).
“I understand and get it and accept it if people want to point fingers my way. Of course I’m part of it. But I picked the team I thought could get a stranglehold on the game. I picked good players. The system has worked before. And I expected more from my players but it didn’t come.”
Asked if his team was too narrow in the first-half with Aribo on the wing, Gerrard said: “You could say that. I’ll accept that. But that game plan has worked before. We were narrow twice here and won.
“Even when we made the changes to get more width with Jordan (Jones) and Sheyi (Ojo) on the pitch we didn’t create or have enough quality. Anything that comes my way then I will totally accept it.
“We gifted them a goal which is uncharacteristic in terms of my two centre backs. One (Connor Goldson) has made a mistake, one (Nikola Katic) has tried to play offside. So we actually gifted them the lead at half-time. Then we have obviously got a bigger task and a harder challenge.”
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