Will visit of Kilmarnock justify Mark Allen on key decision?

As Rangers fans are only too well aware, this January saw a modest £300k bid lodged with Kilmarnock for winger Jordan Jones, which was followed by a bunch of hullaballoo in the press from Killie boss Steve Clarke and striker Kris Boyd.

In the end, the deal did not go through, and Rangers instead elected to stick with the loan services of Brighton’s Jamie Murphy, who had joined a week earlier.

However, unlike the summer’s failure to secure Jamie Walker from Hearts, the saga over Jones has been rather dismissed by most of a Rangers persuasion purely because what we ended up with in the shape of the ex-Motherwell winger has been so incredibly impressive.

Director of Football Mark Allen would not sanction the bid for Jones to be improved, and believed Jamie Murphy was good enough. It seems he was right.

Hence tomorrow’s visit of Clarke’s men to Ibrox could go a long way towards vindicating the Director of Football’s decision not to bid higher, especially if our very own Murphy outshines his Kilmarnock counterpart.

Murphy has been a revelation at Ibrox – a few matches to get up to speed, then has done nothing but impress in pretty much every fixture; even more commendable given his total lack of match sharpness from being out in the cold at Brighton.

His stunning form has even earned him a Scotland call up, while Jones too has been named in Michael O’Neill’s Northern Ireland squad for South Korea.

So there really is a subplot here. While the Walker saga was punctuated by a poor display from the winger at Ibrox during the speculation, we will have a chance to see how impressive the Rugby Park winger is on the Hallowed Turf, but in effect, it maybe does not matter.

We ended up with one of Scotland’s most in-form players in the shape of Murphy, who has been a tremendous acquisition so far, and tomorrow is a great opportunity for him to prove, as much to himself as anything else, that he was the better choice than Jones in the end.

We think he was.