Dundee United manager Micky Mellon insists there will be no excuses after he had to squeeze preparations for the visit of Rangers into two days.

Mellon emerged from a self-isolation period on Friday and his assistant Stephen Frail remains absent as he battles Covid-19.

The United boss had to watch last weekend’s defeat by Livingston from home and United will only have some of the nine players who were instructed to self-isolate back ahead of Sunday’s Tannadice clash.

Speaking about the disruption, the former Tranmere boss said: “It wouldn’t have helped. I can’t say it’s going to make us any stronger.

“But we’re footballers, football people. And what we are trained to do is adjust and adapt to anything. Because if you turn up in the wind, you have to adjust and adapt to playing in the wind along with all the other things you need to adapt to.

“We will try and use our experience to microwave probably a week’s worth of work into two days and get some detail into the boys.

“But we will be fine, there will be no excuses, we are not looking for any excuses. We believe we will be able to go out there and be the best version of ourselves and hopefully that’s enough to cause Rangers problems.”

United’s defeat in West Lothian was their first in eight matches and they kept five clean sheets during that unbeaten run.

Mellon therefore believes his team can find a way to frustrate the Scottish Premiership leaders, who have already scored 73 goals this season and secured top spot in their Europa League group in midweek.

“It’s a challenge but it’s exciting,” he said. “I love football and football is all about a challenge.

“I will let you into a little secret, none of us really know how a game is going to go. Trust me. Even the ones who are perceived to be the best managers of all time.

“We have an idea, we guess about how we think and history tells us how this game will go. We have a way that we think the game against Rangers will go and we’ll set the tactics to try and overcome that.

“We know we are going to have to get an awful lot of that right. And on top of that we have to bring some sort of threat to them.

“We understand that outside of Dundee United, because we always believe we will get something, people will think our chances are small.

“We have to make sure we do the things necessary to make our chance bigger. We work hard on that and if we go along and get things right, the chance becomes bigger and we keep believing we can get a positive result.

“We understand it’s going to be a big challenge but why not want to be involved in games like this?”