Steven Gerrard last night shouldered the blame for Rangers’ Betfred Cup exit – and insisted his shot-shy players deserved exactly what they got.

The Ibrox boss was brutally honest in his appraisal of his team’s 1-0 semi-final defeat at the hands of Aberdeen and admitted they sorely missed strikers Alfredo Morelos and Kyle Lafferty who were banned and cup-tied respectively.

Gerrard decided to throw in loan misfit Umar Sadiq for his first start and the Nigerian was booked late in the game for diving when he looked to have rounded Dons keeper Joe Lewis.

Asked if Sadiq could have carried on and scored, Gerrard said: “100 per cent. To be fair to Umar, in the last two or three weeks he had shown signs of improvement. Whether it’s enough, we’ll have to judge that moving forward.

“We can’t point fingers and blame Umar. What I would say to him is if you go around the keeper, stand up and put the ball in the net. Don’t dive or you are going to get a yellow card.

“It’s very tough to take. This one will hurt for a while. It’s Aberdeen’s day, we wish them well. They deserve to go through because they created that bit of magic in the business end of the box and punished us on a set-piece.

“We got what we deserved. The performance was fine, it was quite good up to a certain point. But there was a serious lack of quality and amount of bad decisions in the final bit of our play. We didn’t deserve to score.

“I pick the players, I sign the players, I pick the game plan so I’ll take responsibility for this.

“But what I’ll assure everyone is that won’t be our last semi-final. If it means I have to go and buy better quality players for when we get to this stage, that’s what will happen.

“If the players that we’ve got now don’t improve and start showing the quality we need in the final third, my job is to find the players who will. Otherwise, we are never going to win anything.”

Rangers failed to score for the second match in a row and Gerrard knows that’s the area he has to strengthen.

He said: “We’ve played two 90 minutes without creating a clear-cut chance. We’ve got ourselves to blame. But I give the game plans and tactics, so the buck should stop with me.”

Gerrard admitted Morelos and Lafferty were “sorely missed” and on his decision to play Sadiq, he said: “We’re Rangers, we are a big team and we should play with a centre forward. We will move forward and try to grow and improve.”

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