Nervous Rangers return to winning ways with victory over Motherwell

Rangers went some way to banishing memories of their 7-1 midweek defeat against Liverpool with a 2-1 away win at Motherwell on Sunday, their fourth Scottish Premiership victory in a row.

Second half goals from Malik Tillman and John Lundstram appeared to have handed Rangers a comfortable lead at Fir Park, but in the end the result proved to be trickier than expected, as Stuart McKinstry scored from a free-kick for Motherwell on 77 minutes.

Looking suddenly nervous, Rangers nonetheless survived a late Motherwell surge to go two points behind the league leaders, Celtic, in second place.

The Rangers manager Giovanni van Bronckhorst praised his players for brushing aside the psychological blow of their heavy defeat against Liverpool in the Champions League on Wednesday. “We had to bounce back from that midweek game,” he said. “We had a knock to our confidence on Wednesday; that’s why we had to perform well to win this one.

“We had control of the goal until we conceded the free-kick. After that we had to be mentally strong to make sure we got the three points – and we were.”

Van Bronckhorst had made three alterations to the Rangers team from Wednesday’s chastening defeat as Leon King, Tillman and Rabbi Matondo came in for Goldson, Ryan Jack and Fashion Sakala.

Motherwell also made three changes to the side that started the 1-0 defeat at Hibernian the previous weekend as McKinstry, Josh Morris and Ross Tierney replaced Blair Spittal, Connor Shields and Joseph Efford.

The visitors had the first opening of the game after three minutes when Ryan Kent jinked his way into the box from the left, but the winger was crowded out by the Motherwell defence before seeing his deflected shot gathered by goalkeeper Liam Kelly.

Tillman had