What Rangers players did while waiting for Dundee pitch verdict - and how they turned it into positive

Souttar reveals unexpected opportunity for team bonding was taken for latest trip to St Andrews

Scottish football discourse is rarely burdened with a sense of perspective. The volume of words spoken and written about Dundee’s soggy surface and the inconvenience caused to Rangers in their pursuit of a domestic treble by the midweek postponement has steadily risen from a trickle to a torrent. Never before has the very serious topic of climate change been referenced in such glib fashion.

John Souttar certainly has no desire to add to this litany of first-world problems. The Rangers defender has endured enough real-life hardship to be able to distinguish between a crisis and a drama. Being holed up in a five-star St Andrews hotel awaiting news of a pitch inspection is an inconvenience but, in the bigger picture, hardly troubling. Instead, Souttar saw it as a chance to spend some unexpected additional time bonding with his team-mates ahead of Sunday’s next challenge away to Ross County.

“It’s not like we were going up there and staying in a prison,” he reasoned. “We were in a very nice hotel so I’m not going to complain about going up there and spending a day with the boys. We’re a close-knit group so it’s not like we went up there and spent the time on our own with everyone raging with the game being called off. We’re all close so we went up there and had a good time. It’s a way of bonding as well.

MILNGAVIE, SCOTLAND - APRIL 09: Rangers John Souttar during a Rangers training session at the Rangers Training Centre, on April 09, 2024, in Milngavie, Scotland. (Photo by Alan Harvey / SNS Group)

“Everyone does different things on away trips. A few of us go for coffees, a few play cards, others will be on the PlayStation. It’s good. When you go away to hotels all the staff and all the boys are together. It brings everyone together. And to win things I think that’s important. That’s something we can take away from the stay out there. We wouldn’t have worked on the Ross County game until Thursday anyway. We could sit here and be negative about everything but I prefer to be positive and focus on that.”

Souttar has plenty to be positive about. This has been a restorative season in terms of both form and fitness, one that could yet conclude with the 27-year-old travelling to the European Championships with Scotland. He reveals himself to be quietly satisfied but has learned the hard way to never look too far ahead.

“I’d say so,” he replies to a question about whether he is enjoying the steadiest form of his career. “Consistently anyway. This has got to be close to the most I have played in a season. So I’d probably say it’s close if not the most consistently I’ve played in my career. I think at the end of the season I will look back and focus on it then. Right now I’ve just been training and playing and my body’s feeling good. It’s been really enjoyable playing under the manager and with the boys here. For me, it’s about focusing on the next day and the next game and not looking too far into the future.”