THE Rangers performance against Celtic in the Scottish Cup semi-final was so bad that former captain Barry Ferguson didn’t even get angry while watching the game. He was just sad to see what had become of the team he loves.

Then he watched on in dismay at the catastrophic fallout from the fixture that led to club captain Lee Wallace and vice-captain Kenny Miller being suspended. Ferguson didn’t have to try too hard to imagine what it would be like to be in their boots given his own infamous bust-up with Paul Le Guen that led to him being temporarily ostracised from the rest of the Rangers squad, and his gut feeling is that any outburst came from the same place that sparked his own grievance back in 2006; a refusal to accept a dropping of standards at Rangers.

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“I don’t think anybody would accept that sort of performance,” Ferguson said. “I wasn’t even angry when I watched it, it was a sad watch for me.

“Rangers do have some good players, but what they need to get in is proper leaders and guys who can make sure that in the build up to games they let these guys know what it means, not just for who is in the dressing room but for people who pay hard-earned money to go and watch.

“In the Rangers teams that I played in, if we got a heavy defeat against Celtic or lost to Caley Thistle, when you went into the dressing room there would be words exchanged. There would be barneys going on and at times, fisticuffs. But I’ve no problem with that. It shows that people care and are passionate about it.

“We don’t know what happened in the dressing room at Hampden, but I’d be worried if there was nothing happening. That would be a concern for me. But these people are a probably a dying breed. I had hard taskmasters who were tough on me when I was younger.

“It’s going to be difficult, mentally hard for Kenny and Lee because they will want the truth to come out. Everyone is saying it was directed at the manager, but I would find that hard to believe.

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“I don’t know Lee Wallace but I’ve spoken to a lot of people who have played with him since this happened and everyone says he’s a great professional who is pretty quiet but accepts the responsibility of being captain.

“He’ll come in and say his piece and I’ve known Kenny a long time and he’s outspoken, and what comes out of his mouth is honesty.

“I’m sure Kenny would have said a few harsh words, but I don’t believe it would have been directed at the manager and rather the group as a whole.

“But I’d be worried if I walked into that dressing room and people were sitting and accepting that. Heads should have been rolling.”

Two heads, of course, were offered up on a stick after the shambolic showing at Hampden, and 11 days down the line neither Wallace nor Miller are any clearer on the specific reasons behind their suspensions.

For Ferguson, the whole episode has an eerily familiar feeling, and after suffering in silence during his own period of banishment from Ibrox, he knows only too well how frustrating the whole episode will be for Wthe players concerned as the speculation continues to fly around their part in what happened at Hampden.

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“If I’m being honest I’m not surprised at the length of time it is taking to resolve the situation with Kenny Miller and Lee Wallace because that’s Rangers at this moment in time,” he said.

“You’d think after a couple of days of them being suspended it would come out but almost two weeks down the line we’re still waiting on the outcome of the internal investigation.

“At some stage someone has to come out and let us know what is happening and then everyone can make up their own minds over who was right and wrong.

“Everyone wants to know and while this situation continues people just guess and jump to their own conclusions about what happened in that dressing room.

“I’ve been in a similar situation myself. I wasn’t suspended during the Paul Le Guen thing. I was just told to stay away and people put two and two together and came up with five.

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“I had it with Paul le Guen. People said I undermined him and all this rubbish. That’s crap. All I was guilty of was being passionate about my team.

“I couldn’t handle a guy keep telling us to stick together when we were sitting fifth in the league and we were getting beaten off teams who – no disrespect – should never be beating us. That’s the only thing I did wrong – but I probably should have done it earlier.

“I let it build up and it happened after they Caley Thistle game up there when they beat us 2-1. But I never got suspended or fined for it because I never did anything wrong. I just had to stay away until what happened – the manager left.

“But it was frustrating because when I came back Walter [Smith] came in as manager and I was straight back in the next game. I wanted to come out and tell people, but I had to brush it under the carpet.

“I had to get back playing and it wasn’t about me, I had to think about my teammates and getting us back up the league and challenging. I was asked to leave it for a long time and it got left for a long time. But it was hard because people thought I had done something in the dressing room, which was bollocks. Absolute bollocks.”

*Barry Ferguson was speaking at Knoxland Primary School in Dumbarton yesterday, where he was supporting the Tesco Bank Football Challenge.