Predicted XI v Bury – five summer signings start

Tonight the world finally gets to see Steven Gerrard’s Rangers in action at our home.

English side Bury come up north to visit Govan in the first ‘serious’ match of Gerrard’s reign, off the back of a promising Rangers win over Welsh giants TNS.

Connor Goldson yesterday dropped a bit of a hint in his presser that Gerrard was likely to play a back four, given he mentioned it in priority before conceding the lads had also tried a three, but the selection of the four against Scott Ruscoe’s men for both halves lent itself strongly to the notion that will be Stevie Ger’s priority.

So what shape and selection tonight?

One thing is clear; every Rangers fan around is feverishly excited about this friendly – don’t read anything into the notion that ‘it’s only a friendly’ and ‘the result doesn’t matter’ – the fact us fans are as excited as we are about a friendly against a lowly League 2 English side (no disrespect to the honourable Bury intended) suggests there will be, rightly or wrongly, a sense of judging tonight.

We can’t help it, it’s our team, and a new era – if the result didn’t matter, it would be a contradiction to be excited to ‘see how the players do’.

So, with that in mind, Gerrard is likely to deploy a 4-3-3 cum 4-4-2 cum 4-4-1-1 and our projection of the starting XI is thus:

Allan McGregor; Jon Flanagan, Connor Goldson, Nikola Katic, Declan John; Greg Docherty, Ross McCrorie, Scott Arfield; Josh Windass, Alfredo Morelos and Daniel Candeias.

Naturally we’ll find out prior to kick off how close this was, but the XI who take the Hallowed Turf will certainly be raring to go and prove their worth.