Ally McCoist insists tie is still evenly poised

It is an approach he believes can serve him well as he looks to preserve Rangers' Champions League aspirations in Sweden tonight.

While the vast majority of the club's supporters left Ibrox last Tuesday evening feeling their glass was very much half empty following the first leg of the third qualifying round tie against Malmo, McCoist insists he sees a way in which the 1-0 defeat suffered by his team can work in their favour.

"Dare I say it, but we maybe have a better and clearer mindset going into this game than Malmo do," suggested McCoist as the Scottish champions arrived in the sunny southern tip of Sweden at lunchtime yesterday.

"I would say Malmo maybe have a bit of a problem in terms of how they go about the second leg. Do they sit on their lead or do they go for what they might feel would be a killer second goal?

"That might play on their minds. For us, the situation is more clear-cut in that we have to score and we have to win the game."

Clear-cut in theory perhaps, but far from straightforward in practice as the Rangers manager readily conceded. Even his boundless optimism cannot blind him to the size of the task facing him in his first European tie in the job.

McCoist is by now fully acquainted with the daunting statistic which relays the fact Rangers have never previously managed to overturn a first leg home defeat in their 55-year European history.

But despite the often slipshod and sluggish nature of his team's performance in the first leg, when they found themselves unable to recover from the 18th minute loss of a goal to Malmo dangerman Daniel Larsson, there was sufficient evidence to provide McCoist with hope Rangers can progress to Friday's play-off draw for the lucrative Champions League group stage.

"I've watched the first leg again several times," he said. "We weren't great in the first half and could even have lost another goal. But we could certainly have scored a few goals in the second half.

"Put it this way, I would settle for making the same amount of chances again in this game, because I don't think we will miss them this time around. Nikica Jelavic and Steven Naismith both scored for us at St Johnstone on Saturday and both looked much sharper. It's obviously a key factor for us to have our strikers at the top of their game.

"We have to get the balance right on Wednesday night. If we can score the first goal, we will ask a wee question of Malmo. We know we have to score at least once to stay in the competition, but we don't have to score in the first ten or 15 minutes.As I say, it's an interesting situation.

"I feel the tie is evenly balanced, even though we are a goal down. If we can step up and create chances, then I think we can go through."

McCoist's initial deployment of an attacking 3-5-2 formation in the first leg was in sharp contrast to the 4-1-4-1 or even 5-4-1 systems latterly preferred in Europe by his predecessor and mentor Walter Smith.

Although he cannot afford to proceed with caution for the full 90 minutes in the Swedbank Stadium, there was a hint from McCoist yesterday that he may return to the more prosaic approach developed by Smith.

"Do we have to go for it?," he mused. "Well, at some point in the game we do. I don't know if that sounds like something Walter would say or not, but it's the truth of the matter.

"So at some point we will have to go for it but there's no point going into it all gung-ho and then causing ourselves more problems. We don't need to be going hell for leather from the first five minutes. But what we do have to do is match the opposition and really be in their faces in the first ten to 15 minutes, which we didn't do in the first leg at Ibrox.

"Malmo are a good side. They didn't do anything in the game at Ibrox which shocked or surprised me. They have a couple of lads up front who are lively and they look solid at the back.

"I think it's unfair on Malmo to say we should automatically be beating teams like them. The game isn't played on paper or on reputation, you have to go out there and win. Credit to Malmo, they did that at Ibrox and now we have to do it over here."