The return of Ryan Kent – and Alfredo Morelos – couldn’t have come at a better time with a monumental Champions League tie against PSV Eindhoven just around the corner, having all our best players available will only enhance our chances of making it to the group stages for the first time in more than a decade.
Against Union Saint-Gilloise, the Gers winger managed just a few moments of magic having spent the whole game being man-marked and with two and sometimes three defenders occupying him. It wasn’t until Tom Lawrence and Borna Barisic started to overlap and link up with him that he was able to find a bit more space.
Speaking on Go Radio, via Football Scotland, former Gers skipper Barry Ferguson knows what it takes to compete with Europe’s best and had some sympathy for the 25-year old:
“Ryan Kent wasn’t on the top of the game. But he’s like Jota at Celtic, when he plays he occupies two players.
“They were doubling up all the time and that’s exactly what happened when he received the ball.
“That opens gaps for other players.”
Ferguson is right in that Lawrence was able to find pockets of space centrally and was hugely influential in building our attacks, alongside John Lundstram, he was our best player and looks to finally have found a club where he can best showcase his talents – much of the space he was afforded was down to Union players being pre-occupied with Kent.
Kent will have to get used to this sort of tactic because, when you watch back the highlights of our run to the Europa League final last season, he is involved in almost everything that was good about our attacking play – he might have had a dip in form in terms of goal scoring but his importance to the team was as high as ever.
Against PSV, it is unlikely that they will be sitting in with as defensive a mindset, if they give him the space to do what he does best we could well see another Kent European masterclass.