Cyriel Dessers on ‘scapegoat’ status, ‘tough months’ & Rangers cup hopes

Dessers has not been the dead-eye striker Rangers needed, but the flak seems particularly heavy. Understandable, but harsh.

Again, you can twist those stats, but he has had more all-competition goal involvements this season than Celtic’s Kyogo Furuhashi, a better shots to goal ratio in the league than Aberdeen’s Bojan Miovski.

“Now you tell me this thing and then I think I’m not the worst player ever at Rangers,” he reflects.

“You’re not even fully settled down and people already want to get rid of you or are actively hating on you, especially when it’s from your own fans, it’s really hard.

“If it’s the press, it doesn’t bother me too much. But if it’s your own fans, it hurts you. You’re a human being.

“Strikers, they’re like a special kind of personality. They’re at their best with love. Not one player in the world is better when you whistle him off the pitch.

“Once you’re getting these little bits of love, you start to grow as a player and you become better and better. There were months that were really tough for me.”

You don’t normally hear footballers talking about their feelings like this, but Dessers is a bit different.

He says there’s no point in trotting out the same old rhetoric in an interview. Better to be honest and reveal some of his personality than to put up a shield and pretend everything has been wonderful.

He set himself a loose target of 25 goals plus assists at the start of the season and prior to the big one at Hampden he’s on 29. Nobody needs to tell him about the ones he’s missed. He knows more about those than anybody else.

“I can create a lot of chances by good movement in the box and when you create a lot of chances it’s basic maths that you also miss more chances,” he explains.

“I don’t want to miss those chances. This season, I missed a few big chances that in the nine years before I never missed.

“I’m not really worrying about that because I know next season when you have a little bit more luck then all these balls will go in and then your numbers will be even better. I look at the Champions League, the highest level, and these strikers missed chances as well.

“The microscope is a lot on these missed chances and on me as a person. I’m a person in life who likes to look at what I have and be happy with that instead of focusing on the things I don’t have.

“That can be a good lesson, not only for football fans but for everybody in life.”