The Scotland fans amongst the Rangers support will remember how easily Luka Modric dictated play for Croatia in the summer’s European Championships, that the 36-year old playmaker is still doing it for Real Madrid at the sharp end of the Champions League is a true testament to his qualities as a player.
But he could easily have demonstrated his sizeable qualities at Ibrox before heading to the bright lights of the Premier League.
Speaking on Talksport, former Gers gaffer and all round legend, Ally McCoist recalled a story that he has told before when tasked with a scouting mission by the late, great, Walter Smith:
“Dinamo Zagreb were playing Hajduk Split and Walter [Smith] sent me over to watch the game looking at the big boy [Vedran] Corluka.
“So I went over to watch the game, Corluka was fine, I came back and Walter asked me how it all went. I said: ‘Yeah it’s a good team and Corluka is a good player, you’d take him all day’.
“But I also said: ‘I tell you right now, I don’t know how much money we’ve got in the bank account but there was a wee fella playing in the middle of the park, Luka Modric’.
“He just looked light-years ahead of everyone else on the pitch. I said: ‘Go and see him, and if you can get him gaffer he is unbelievable, out of this world’.
“So anyway, Walter picked up the phone and then put it back down. He said: ‘Nah forget it’.
“It was just too much for us, I can’t remember the exact figure but he was too much for us, and of course the rest of history.”
He goes on to explain that the fee was around £3.5million, considering we paid similar for Kyle Lafferty and more for Nikica Jelavic, it kind of puts things into perspective.
Modric is the proverbial Rolls Royce midfielder, capable of protecting his defence just as well as he is of building attacks, genuinely one of the finest of his generation.
The Croatia captain joins a long list of “what might have been” players that were scouted, turned down or that we failed to get work permits for, having said that, I’m not sure he would have got a game ahead of Barry Ferguson or Kevin Thomson anyway….