There is more to home and away for Christian Dailly than the particulars of the fixture list. The loan signing from West Ham has a post-match routine that involves a flight back to Essex to see his wife and four children.

Dailly, who has proved his worth in Rangers' backlog of fixtures, admitted his family situation was the major factor when he was considering joining Rangers during the January transfer window.

"I had to think about it because I have four kids who are down the road," he said of the offer from Rangers. "There is the purely physical aspect of how you sort out running them all to different places - schools etc - when you are not there. There was also the aspect of how I would travel up and down.

I had been approached about other things and I had to weigh up what I was going to do."

He has no regrets about deciding to come to Rangers.

It has worked out for the children, too.

"The kids are switched on," he said. "The good thing is that all the games are on TV so they get to see me all the time. They are loving it. I have the balance about right. I get back for the odd day or two when I can." This normally involves leaving after a game and doing his recovery work either with West Ham or at a gym.

He has had much to recover from this term, but Dailly, who is relishing his spell at Rangers, was measured in his response to the controversy over the length of the season.

"Everybody loves playing but, ideally, there is a happy medium," he said. "There is the odd time when you could do with a week to get people back fit and get a good week's training in."

He admitted the amount of games was taking a toll. "The boys have been working their socks off since last June and there is always a slight mental and physical aspect involved in that," admitted Dailly.

"I don't think anybody has ever experienced the number of games that we have had, so it has been a great experience and a great learning experience about how to cope with the demands of that. We just can't train as hard as we normally would and recover as well."

He added: "Whatever games we have to play, we will play them. If we had to play every day, we could do it. But whether you can play well every day is another matter. That is more the issue. The statement has been put out by the club by Sir David Murray and I think that is on behalf on anybody at Rangers."

Rangers will play Zenit St Petersburg four days after playing Dundee United this Saturday, and Dailly said: "In an ideal world, you would have a week where you would be able to do a full week's preparation. We just accept that we will not have that. The UEFA Cup final is the biggest game of our career, but the other games are like cup finals, too. We can't think one bit about the game until after Saturday."

He added quickly of the final: "It doesn't mean we will not win."