Rangers current centre-half issue has highlighted a few things, one of them being that a shortage of “home grown” talent restricts us from being able to pick full squad for European competition, Jack Simpson on this occasion having to miss out to prioritise other areas.
According to Transfermarkt, 75.9% of Steven Gerrard’s squad are classed as “foreigners”, unfortunately this includes English and Northern Irish players which means that it is inherently weaker if we suffer a few injuries, in this case, without Connor Goldson and Filip Helander, Calvin Bassey played just his second senior game in the middle of defence against Sparta Prague – the other coming against Falkirk in the league cup last season.
One way to alleviate this problem is by gradually, over time, increasing the number of Scottish players or players that have been developed at Auchenhowie in the first-team squad – the difficulty is doing it without diluting the quality, not every player that comes through the academy will be as good as Nathan Patterson.
They should also meet our transfer model, so, players like John Souttar at Hearts – who will be available on a pre-contract agreement in January – who could easily replace Simpson and not look out of place in a Light Blue shirt in the Scottish Premiership.
Other options include Lewis Ferguson and Josh Doig, young, talented Scottish players who would increase our ratio, Kevin Nisbet is, however, probably out of our price range now.
It’s another reason why I would have liked to have seen us since Ryan Gauld in the summer, he was available for free and was one of the best players in Portugal last season – finding top quality Scottish players is hard, finding them available without having to overpay is even harder.
Our academy does have a lot of good young players, Leon King typifies the current crop, but they are just one or two years away from being ready to make the step up full-time and shouldn’t be rushed – in the mean time, the likes of Souttar should be targeted to re-dress the balance that has seen us hit the panic button this week.