Davis: Rangers ‘will be a force’ if they stick to their guns

Steven Davis insists Rangers will stick to their principles as they bid to get back to top form.

The Scottish champions have not had the best start to the season and after being knocked out of the Champions League by Malmo, the Gers could only scrape through their Europa League play-off against Alashkert with a 1-0 aggregate win, following a unimpressive goalless draw in Armenia on Thursday.

As a reward, the Govan club were drawn alongside Lyon, Sparta Prague and Brondby in Europa League Group A but before that is the first and keenly-awaited Old Firm game of the season against Ange Postecoglou’s rejuvenated Celtic at Ibrox on Sunday.

Davis acknowledged the dip in performances at the Govan club but the 36-year-old Northern Ireland midfielder said: “The thing in football is you are going to go through little spells when you are not hitting your best form.

“We even had them last season but it maybe wasn’t looked into as much because of the way things were going.

“You have to always stick to your principles and we have a really good foundation here.

“We don’t always get as much time on the pitch to practise what we want to do with the number of games we have but we have enough players in this squad who have been here long enough to know exactly what the manager wants from us.

“And obviously within that could be doing different things and whether things go bad or well you are always looking to improve.

“Of course, we will admit that maybe things haven’t been as smooth as we would have liked to this point but we are searching for that form and when we get that we will be a force.”