When Rangers beat PSV Eindhoven to qualify for the Champions League, there was an expectation that Giovanni van Bronckhorts – or Ross Wilson – would be given additional funds to make sure that we could compete at that level and not have to play Steven Davis or Scott Arfield every game, and we all know how that turned out.
The manager, post match, against PSV was clearly upbeat about securing such a financial reward and suggested that it would make a big difference to the club at the time.
Now though, after losing to Ajax, Van Bronckhorst has defended the club’s lack of activity in the final week of the transfer window which only raises more questions about what is going on behind the scenes, as reported by BBC Sport:
“I know that the club will do everything to try to build the strongest squad we have.
“I’ve read many stories that the club has struck gold, with so many millions coming in, it’s not true all the figures I see in papers.
“We don’t have that budget to spend. So that’s another thing that also we saw in the beginning, we play Champions League so we now have £40m extra – its not true.
“That creates and expectation that we can buy new players but the way we bought the players this season is to qualify for the Champions League but I don’t think that club will spend millions if the millions aren’t there.”
Our injury list can’t be ignored but, starting against Ajax with a 40-year old goalkeeper, an 18-year old and on-loan central midfielder in defence and a midfield pairing with a combined age of 71 suggests that something isn’t right with our recruitment.
Take the defence on its own. We signed Filip Helander knowing that he was an international-class defender with Serie A experience, however, he was also injury-prone. We’ve then signed John Souttar in the summer, a player of similar quality but with an even worse history in terms of availability. Straight away we were gambling on two of our senior centre-halves doing something that they had rarely down over the last few seasons – staying fit consistently.
That was one reason why James Sands and Leon King had to play together, bad luck to Connor Goldson and Ben Davies being another but having just one senior central defender would have allowed Sands to move into midfield which would have made a massive difference.
When we lost Tom Lawrence, on top of Ianis Hagi’s known unavailability, we lost all central creativity. The weight of expectation was then placed purely on Malik Tillman’s shoulders, a player who had seven senior appearances before he joined the club. He’s talented, but that’s too much to expect. An experienced, and proven number eight should have been signed after beating PSV.
Two transfer mistakes which have cost us domestically and in the Champions League, neither requiring us to break the bank. If I can see it, why couldn’t our sporting director.
The imminent AGM is going to be an interesting one that’s for sure.