Michael Beale has plotted a pre-season to make Rangers robust for everything ahead.
Giovanni van Bronckhorst’s group had an injury crisis through the early months of last season. It caught up with them in the thick of their Champions League flop of the autumn. Central defence was the worst hit as John Souttar, Ben Davies and Connor Goldson were all unavailable for spells, in addition to Filip Helander’s continued troubles. Beale has taken his squad to a training camp in Germany to prepare for friendlies then the Euro qualifiers.
And several Ibrox stalwarts will already be familiar with the tough programme. Beale is putting them through a schedule similar to the one used regularly when he was a main man on Steven Gerrard’s staff. He said: “Pre-season is important. It sets you up for the season. It was the one thing, when I came back to the club, I was unaware of what had happened in pre-season because I wasn’t there.
“We had a lot of injuries coming out of it and it’s safe to say that we can’t have the problems we had at centre-back last year and expect to be successful. We can’t have the mistakes in goals or lack of form up front either.
“They’re really key positions in any team – the spine. If you look back to the games against Saint-Gilloise and PSV, they looked alright last year. What’s important, though, is that we’re doing a pre-season a lot of the guys know. For the guys who’ve already been in, it’s exactly the same as we’d run it the two or three years before. I’ve a lot of trust in that training regime.”
Beale has identified the return of Dr Mark Waller as Director of Medical and Performance as key. Dr Waller left in July last year, after four seasons, to join Leicester but has been brought back by the manager.
“One of the biggest bits of recruitment we’ve done this summer is to bring Dr Mark Waller back,” Beale added. "He’s a guy I really trust and that I’ve been on a journey with here at Rangers previously. I’ve a lot of faith in him overseeing the medical and sports science department. Ifeel like I’ve really got a strong person in beside me to run that area for us.”
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