'It's not good enough' Tavernier addresses Rangers form

Here is everything he had to say.

James, what gives you the confidence you and your team-mates can come round this situation you find yourselves in at the moment? 

Obviously, we had a bad performance and a bad result against Kilmarnock and then we really bounced back with a mid-week game in Europe with a good performance and a good result. So we know as a team that we have the performance levels there, but it's about just being consistent and delivering that performance and obviously results in every single game. 

With your role here being captain, have there been any specific discussions with the manager in terms of where things are at and how they improve? 

We constantly chat throughout the season. As a captain and as a manager, we always have a dialogue with each other all the time, winning, and losing. We always want to improve, but it's important to have that dialogue and have a dialogue with the squad and demand more of each other. 

In moments like this, a manager will always get a lot of criticism. How committed are the players to trying to turn it around for him? How do you feel that's working at the moment? 

The players are obviously fully committed to turning anything around. The lads want to win games. Obviously, the manager is getting criticism, and the team is getting criticism, but that happens when you don't get the results you want. It's down to us as players to improve ourselves and obviously, first and foremost, deliver the results that the club want and the fans want.

The manager has been taking a lot of stick over the last few days, especially since the game at Pittodrie. Do the players have to take a big share of the blame as well for the performance? 

It's us who are on the pitch. We're in it together, collectively, as one team. We all put our hands up and be responsible for when the results are going bad and when the results are going good. It's a collective team performance. It's not just the starting XI, it's the full squad. It's down to us to improve each other, to demand each other and to get what we want out of this season. We've just got to continue to do that.

Is this one of the toughest places you've been in since you've been here? How do you get yourself out of these situations when the performance has dipped so drastically? 

It's obviously not the spot we want to be in at this stage of the season. This stage of the season is still very early in the season, so there are a lot of games to play. It's important this weekend in the cup that we try and get ourselves into the final. That's obviously the first competition you can get your hands on, so it's very important for us to get into the final and try and retain the trophy. That's our aim. In the league, we're nine points behind. It's not good enough for our standards, but we know where we need to improve. We're continuously working hard to where we need to be. In football, you can't continue to dwell on the past because the games come thick and fast and you need to reapply yourself and go out there and get the results. 

How hard is it to hear the criticism and how do you react to it? 

It's part and parcel of football. You're going to get praise and you're going to get criticism. It's how you deal with it. We obviously had the same situation against Kilmarnock with the performance that we put in and then we responded really well, but it's about keeping that performance level and the results where we want it to be. It's just us being consistent and smaller, finer details in the game where we need to be more clinical when we go forward. We need to be more clinical defending as a team. It's small things, but they all add up, so we need to really concentrate on the small things.

If worst case scenario you don't win on Sunday, would it be the right thing to do to stick with the manager? 

Our aim is to win on the weekend. We're not thinking any other way, as a team. We're not going into this weekend thinking about not winning the game. Our focus is on getting into a final, that's all we're thinking about.

You often hear players being told they're playing for their own future. Do you feel you're in a situation now where the players are playing for the manager's future?

  I think everyone plays for everyone's future in every single game.  You start the season off, you have ambitions, you have targets where you want to be. You're training every single day to get to those targets and you're playing every single game to get to those targets so you're always playing for a future.  At a club like Rangers, you have to win things and that's the demand that this club has and us as a team have to back that up. 

Can you understand the fans' anger? 

I totally understand their frustration because all they want to see is us win games. There's frustration among ourselves. We never want to go to a place and drop any points and obviously lose games, so you can understand the frustration. But me as a captain and me as a squad player for Rangers, I'm doing everything possible in my power and I know all the players in the dressing room are going to be doing everything in their power to put in the performances and the results that the fans will be proud of so we've got to continuously work hard every day and obviously we can do all the talking we want, but we've got to do the talking on the pitch. 

One of the things that Philippe Clement said after that game was that it was one of the team's better performances of the season. Do you acknowledge that it was a bad performance? Can you understand why supporters are taking issue with this? 

At the end of the day, you want to walk away from a game with three points. So as a performance side, we didn't have the clinical chances to put away the ball in the back of the net to get the three points. So us being critical on ourselves, maybe over-critical on ourselves, because we demand so much more as a team and as players. We want to perfect what we do on the pitch and when we don't, we're obviously critical on ourselves as players. We'll obviously observe it where our demand is probably more higher or probably the same, but we just really demand high standards in this team. Walking away from Pittodrie not winning the game, it's going to be bad for all of us as a team and we would think that the performance would be bad. 

In the summer, there was a lot of speculation over your future. Then you had that incident with the Rangers supporter at Ibrox after the Celtic game. Has that impacted your performances this season? 

Not at all. I go out every single week, try to play my best, try to play the hardest I can possibly be and try to improve every single day. So no, it wouldn't be the answer to that question.