Rangers manager Steven Gerrard swats away ‘silly’ questions about Newcastle job

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Steven Gerrard swatted away "silly" questions about his interest in the vacant manager's job at Newcastle United as Rangers clinched a vital Europa League win over Brondby.

Rangers beat the Danish side 2-0 at Ibrox to kickstart their campaign, moving up to third in Group A with three points from three games, behind group leaders Lyon on nine points and Sparta Prague with four.

Gerrard has recently been linked with the job at Newcastle following the Saudi takeover of the club and the sacking of Steve Bruce, but he insisted he is happy at the reigning Scottish champions.

"Do I look happy? Do I look settled?" he replied to a question about Newcastle from BT Sport. "Don't ask me silly questions then!"

On the Brondby match, Gerrard rated it as one of the team’s best performances of the season.

“It is certainly up there if you look at the performance over the 90 minutes,” he said. “I thought we deserved the victory, I thought we played with a lot of control and style, we could have maybe got another couple of goals.

“We have played really well for 45 minutes or 60 minutes but for some reason consistently we haven’t found that level where we are churning out 90 after 90 minutes so that is the most pleasing thing for me tonight. We stayed strong, we stayed aggressive in the right way and I thought we managed the game really well towards the end and the subs helped us do that, they brought us energy and quality.

“It kickstarts our Europa League journey. We put pressure on ourselves by not getting results in the first two games but we handled that tonight and now we have to replicate the results and performance in a couple of weeks’ time to give ourselves a better chance.”

Rangers are currently top of the Premiership, leading Hearts by one point, and they travel to in-form St Mirren on Saturday.