Dessers on 'scapegoat' status, 'tough months' & Rangers cup hopes
When Cyriel Dessers says at times during Rangers’ season he has felt like a "scapegoat" you get a sense of the rocky terrain the striker has had to travel this term.
"I only came in in the summer, but suddenly it felt like everything that happened inside the club or on the pitch was only my fault," he says about his early months at the club under former manager Michael Beale, when the flak flew around Ibrox like a plastic bag in a storm.
Two days prior to the Scottish Cup final against Celtic - his double in the semi-final got Rangers there - Dessers talks candidly about being one of the great imponderables of the season, a 22-goal man who is constantly criticised for the chances he misses rather than the ones he puts away.
Statistics can do anything you want them to do, but here’s the reality. In the past 20 years - excluding their time in the lower leagues - only James Tavernier, Alfredo Morelos, Kris Boyd and Nacho Novo have scored more goals for Rangers than Dessers has in a single season.
If you take penalties out of it - Dessers has just one from the spot - then Tavernier and Novo disappear from that list.
Remove those spot-kicks and Boyd, one of the most prolific Rangers goalscorers of modern times, has bettered Dessers' total only once, in 2008-09.
Tavernier has scored 15 penalties this season. Imagine how different the Dessers picture might look if he was the one on penalty duty and not his captain.
"Yeah, I feel in some moments I was the scapegoat," he says. "These are hard things because I was just moving to a country, trying to adapt to a new club, a new league.
"I was still putting up my Ikea furniture or working out the settings on my television and people were already trying to write me out of the club, saying 'you’re the worst player who ever played for Rangers and all these things."
'Strikers are at best with love'
Dessers has not been the dead-eye striker Rangers needed, but the flak seems particularly heavy. Understandable, but harsh.
Again, you can twist those stats, but he has had more all-competition goal involvements this season than Celtic's Kyogo Furuhashi, a better shots to goal ratio in the league than Aberdeen's Bojan Miovski.
"Now you tell me this thing and then I think I'm not the worst player ever at Rangers," he reflects.
"You're not even fully settled down and people already want to get rid of you or are actively hating on you, especially when it's from your own fans, it's really hard.
"If it's the press, it doesn't bother me too much. But if it's your own fans, it hurts you. You're a human being.
"Strikers, they’re like a special kind of personality. They’re at their best with love. Not one player in the world is better when you whistle him off the pitch.
"Once you're getting these little bits of love, you start to grow as a player and you become better and better. There were months that were really tough for me.”
You don’t normally hear footballers talking about their feelings like this, but Dessers is a bit different.
He says there's no point in trotting out the same old rhetoric in an interview. Better to be honest and reveal some of his personality than to put up a shield and pretend everything has been wonderful.
He set himself a loose target of 25 goals plus assists at the start of the season and prior to the big one at Hampden he's on 29. Nobody needs to tell him about the ones he’s missed. He knows more about those than anybody else.
"I can create a lot of chances by good movement in the box and when you create a lot of chances it's basic maths that you also miss more chances," he explains.
"I don't want to miss those chances. This season, I missed a few big chances that in the nine years before I never missed.
"I'm not really worrying about that because I know next season when you have a little bit more luck then all these balls will go in and then your numbers will be even better. I look at the Champions League, the highest level, and these strikers missed chances as well.
"The microscope is a lot on these missed chances and on me as a person. I'm a person in life who likes to look at what I have and be happy with that instead of focusing on the things I don't have.
"That can be a good lesson, not only for football fans but for everybody in life."
'We've shown we can hurt Celtic'
Hampden has been a happy place for Dessers this season - three appearances, three victories, two goals. None of those, of course, were against Celtic. He's had four cracks at them and the best Rangers have done is a draw, along with three losses.
He has one Old Firm goal and another disallowed. The thing he clings to for Saturday is, despite going 2-0 down in three of the four games and having a man sent off in two of them, the defeats have all been by one goal.
A crumb of optimism, perhaps, but he’s feasting on it.
"In this final, if we can finally strike first and take our key moments we've got a good chance," Dessers says.
"We showed we can hurt them and they could feel it as well, but now we need to show it from the beginning and for 90 minutes.
"We need a full performance from beginning to end. They won more head-to-heads this season, so we don't have to talk too much right now. We have to show it on the pitch."
Rangers fans are still not sold on him, despite his goals tally, but he knows how to put that right, for now and for all time.
He’s been a Hampden hero before. The time to be a hero again is upon him.
