FEW Rangers fans have spent the summer gazing appreciatively back at their 5-1 Old Firm humbling at Ibrox on Saturday, April 29. This was, after all, the club’s biggest ever reverse on their own patch against their historic rivals, the 39-point chasm between the two sides laid bare as never before. But, according to chairman Dave King, it was also the day when the seeds of the club’s recovery were quietly being sown behind the scenes.

Rather than employ conservative, cagey tactics or batten down the hatches when they went behind early, it was only when Pedro Caixinha left his players exposed in the heat of battle that he gained a full appreciation of the work which had to be done this pre-season.

With five of last season’s men shown the door to date, the Ibrox side will start the 2017/18 campaign with six (soon to be eight) new players, all bankrolled by loans from current directors and investors.

That is why King feels - as he did last season – that Rangers can mount a coherent challenge to land the Ladbrokes Premiership table this season. He doesn’t expect Celtic to be as good again. And he knows the Ibrox side won’t be as bad.

“I will repeat a bit of what I said last year, which didn’t come true,” said King. “That we are going to try to compete with Celtic for the Premiership. I think realistically running Celtic close would be good. They are coming off a high and it will be difficult for them to repeat what they did for obvious reasons. But it was very disappointing the way last season turned out.

“For the resources we had relative to Aberdeen we should have been somewhere in between. If we had been 16 behind Celtic and 16 ahead of them that would be right – in terms of us outspending them. So for us to finish so dismally behind Aberdeen was very disappointing especially as we had made resources available.”

Rangers, of course, spent last season in the throes of a serious summer rebuilding job, undertaken by Mark Warburton and his head of recruitment Frank McParland. But King feels things are night and day this time around. He has delivered upwards of 90% of the players identified by Caixinha.

“If I look at the business Pedro has done, his player plan was very different to Mark Warburton’s,” said King. “This is not a direct criticism of Mark, although it probably is in a certain sense.

“Pedro has been very firm,” he added. “He asked me the question the very first time I met him. He said: ‘Dave, why did you pay the compensation to get me in when you could have waited until the end of May and got it for free?’ I said: ‘the reason we did that is that we will be in Europe, we have a new manager coming in and we need you to come in and assess the quality of the squad for the way you want to play’.

“The importance of that was emphasised by the Celtic 5-1 game. I think that was a very important game for Pedro. If he had gone against what he was trying to achieve, tried to shore it up and get a 1-1 draw, he wouldn’t have learned about the players. He was testing the players in a competitive environment.

“He learned a lot about the ability and character of the players in his squad in those weeks at the end of the season and identified specific players.”

Stewart Robertson, the club’s managing director, insists there has been a step up in the standard of player the club are attracting this summer. “I think you can see the level of player he has brought in this year,” said Robertson. “They either have international experience of have been touted for international recognition. There is a step up in class.”