What Rangers are saying about Annan Athletic's synthetic pitch

Rangers manager Giovanni van Bronckhorst insists the artificial playing surface at Annan Athletic’s 2500-capacity Galabank Stadium won’t influence his team selection for Saturday’s Scottish Cup fifth round tie.

Annan Athletic's Galabank ground will play host to Rangers in the Scottish Cup fifth round on Saturday. (Photo by Rob Casey/SNS Group).

The Premiership champions face their League 2 opponents five days before taking on Bundesliga giants Borussia Dortmund at the 81,000-capacity Westfalen Stadium in the first leg of their Europa League knockout round play-off tie in Germany.

But van Bronckhorst has no fears about potential injury issues for his players on the 3G pitch in Annan as he bids to ensure Rangers book their place in the quarter-finals of the blue riband domestic cup competition which the Ibrox club have not won since 2009.

"No-one in the squad has told me that they don’t want to play on artificial grass,” said van Bronckhorst. “We know which surface we are playing on. At this time of year, it is maybe better to play on artificial grass than a really bad pitch due to the circumstances weather wise. I think we can play our normal game. Of course it is different than grass but we should be okay.

"It is different than we are used to but it is also the circumstances that we have to deal with. It is still a pitch, still eleven versus eleven and one ball, so that is no different. For me, it doesn’t matter if you play in front of a full stadium of 50,000 or at a small stadium with 2,500.

"At the end, we want to go into the next round and we have to be focused and respect the opponent that we are facing and make sure we get a good performance.

"We are a club who were champions last year and we want to compete for every prize in every competition that we are in. The Scottish Cup this year, we want to be winning the cup. That is our aim, that is our goal. That is what we want to achieve.

"There won’t be complacency from our side. We are there to win the game and go to the next round but upsets are always there in cup competitions.

“If we just play our level from the last games, we should win the game. That’s our obligation and also our aim.”

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