WHAT is said in the dressing room stays in the dressing room. Most of the time.

Since he landed on these shores, Steven Gerrard has not been the type to offer up a ‘no comment’ to any question put to him. The Rangers manager, in fact, has more often than not offered up what in this trade is known as ‘the line’ before any of us rather feeble newspaper folk have thought to ask him about the subject of the day.

And when Gerrard has given his players a good old fashioned row, which he’s had to do on occasion, within five minutes he’s happy to admit in public what had just happened within the inner sanctum.

His philosophy is that he will be utterly honest to his players to their faces and then will tell the world what he’d just said to the team. It’s an admirable trait.

Gerrard happily, well perhaps not happily, revealed on Sunday at Perth that he had gone through the players after a fairly dismal first-half against a much brighter St Johnstone. There is no manager-speak, it’s exactly the opposite of being two-faced.

“I think with anything I have done in my career I prefer honesty whether that be one on one with a manager or a team-mate,” said Gerrard. “The healthiest environments are the ones where you can be honest with each other and that is them back to me as well.

“We do have that open floor where people can say what they want. But there is no point me trying to sugar coat for them and try to tell them at half-time on Sunday everything was fine. I think you could hear from our supporters they were unhappy. And rightly so. This is a top club that expects better performances and standards.

“I don’t think they were harsh words. I think they were fair. They were certainly firm and honest. It wasn’t aggressive or loud. It was just clear and honest because the first half performance wasn’t good enough.

“We were second best and we deserved to be in the position we were in. That is credit to St Johnstone as they made us look second best.

“But, credit to them in the second half. We got a reaction and they came out like a team with belief and purpose. We have only been together a short space of time and we are not good enough to take out foot off the gas and think we can just turn up and beat teams.”

There an argument to be made that some slack could be cut because not one of these Rangers players have experienced such a schedule, which continues today at home against Hibernian. A game which promises to be quite something.

“Possibly,” said Gerrard when this point was put to him. “We have praised them a lot and taken into consideration the schedule and the effects it has had on them. But, that doesn’t matter. St Johnstone are just important as Hibs and Celtic and I could see clearly there wasn’t enough going into the performance.

“It is my job to let them know and that’s what I did.

“But, they deserve all the praise for turning it around. If we didn’t have good players and weren’t a good team we wouldn’t have been able to do that. This wasn’t a belittling job or digging people out individually. This was telling them as a group they were not good enough.”

And before we move on. Gerrard had something to say about his suppose disrespect towards Tommy Wright because he had the audacity to suggest that Rangers should be winning away to St Johnstone.

Oh the horror.

Gerrard said: “I didn’t mean to disrespect St Johnstone or Tommy Wright, I spoke to Tommy last night and said some of my quotes have been taken the wrong way or maybe I’ve got one wrong and if I have I apologise.

“But we’ve got nothing but respect for St Johnstone and the manager. They were much better than us for certainly the first half and parts of the second half yesterday so in no way did I mean to disrespect him or anyone in the middle or the bottom of the league.

“He gave me a wonderful welcome here when I turned up, Tommy, and I like the way his team plays. I think after the Celtic game they went right or nine unbeaten so the last thing I’m going to disrespect that.”

Gerrard’s team are a point behind Celtic, who they play on Saturday and a game nobody is thinking about yet. Honest.

Before that, it is Neil Lennon and his dangerous if unpredictable side at Ibrox and should there be a home win this afternoon and at the weekend, Rangers will go into 2019 top of the Premiership.

The manager admitted: “It is a lovely thought but there is a lot of hard work and big individual and collective performances needed to achieve it. For us right now we focus on Hibernian. We had a tough game against them last week, but performed very well.

“That’s the level of performance I will be looking for at Ibrox. We need to everything we can to get three points and that will set up for a wonderful game to finish the first half of the season off. It is two tough games, six big points available and we need to give everything we can.”

“It is 100 per cent we need to keep focussed on Hibs. It would be very naïve of us to think about the Old Firm right now.

“We know Neil Lennon will be desperate to come here with his team and get a result.

“Our respect for Hibs is clear and our players should know they can’t be naïve and think about the Old Firm or we won’t get out of it what we need.”

Of course, if the players don’t do their job then they will soon hear about from the gaffer.

And then so will we.