Jack Butland insists pressure and demand to win at Rangers keeps him motivated
Jack Butland suffered along with the everyone else at Rangers following last week’s shock Scottish Gas Scottish Cup defeat by Queen’s Park but insisted he would not be anywhere else.
The 31-year-old goalkeeper was rested for the fifth-round tie against the Spiders but felt the pain of the 1-0 defeat at Ibrox, which was one of the biggest embarrassments in the Govan club’s history, and which left boss Philippe Clement under intense pressure and the team also in the firing line.
Butland was reinstated for the William Hill Premiership clash against Hearts at Tynecastle on Sunday and turned in a terrific performance in the 3-1 win and afterwards he reflected on a difficult week.
The former Birmingham, Stoke and Crystal Palace number one said: “I’ve been at clubs where the intensity and demand to win every week is not quite the same and I can tell you that this is much more fulfilling than that, knowing that every game is a game that needs to be won.
“And it’s the end of the world if you don’t and it’s the top of it, well sometimes not even half, if you do win, but that’s the standard.
“For me, if you don’t enjoy this and you don’t enjoy being part of this challenge, then I don’t know what you’ll enjoy.
“It’s an incredible place to play – it still is – and I’m focused and the group’s focused on bringing consistent winning to this club and that’s what it deserves, fans deserve it too.
“It is the same as every week. You need to enjoy things when they’re good. You need to feel it when it’s not.
“You need to understand what that is. Boys need to feel it. So there’s a few harsh words here and there and people need to hear things.
“And that’s important, you need to have that in a group. So it was a difficult week, there was no day where you’re not reminded of the week before.
“Whether it be friends, family, fans you meet in public, around the training ground, it doesn’t get away from you.
“So the biggest thing for the group is trying to pick people up, trying to remind people of the good things that people have been doing, the good things that they’re capable of doing.
“But that’s not easy after a game like that. So the messages in the recent days were about Hearts, have been about the fact that they might have smelled blood and thought ‘we can do one here’ and that can’t be the case.
“So that was the message before the game, that there’s no way that they can feel because of last week that they can turn us over and we went there and got the result.”
It was a nightmare afternoon for Hearts defender Jamie McCart who scored the first of two own goals after 20 minutes when Ianis Hagi’s cross which was pushed on to his legs by Jambos goalkeeper Craig Gordon.
Defender Michael Steinwender levelled just after the break but Czech winger Vaclav Cerny restored the visitors’ lead in the 61st minute, while McCart put into his own net again as Rangers returned to 13 points behind league leaders Celtic.
While the Light Blues will almost certainly end the season without a domestic trophy, Butland insisted there was still plenty to play for in the final months.
He said: “There’s everything, always everything to play for.
“No friendlies here, there’s no free hits, there’s no games that you can toss aside as if it doesn’t matter, there isn’t that.
“Because no matter the game, if you don’t get the right result, the reactions are the same.
“That’s what this group is going to have to expect and as a result of that, the focus is to win every game.
“It’s what the standard is and it’s what the fans need now, it’s what the club needs, some real positivity, some performances that they can see progress in.
“But ultimately they need to see results and that’s what we need to focus on, one game at a time between now and the end of the season.”