Have Rangers just paid for a big summer mistake?

As Ibrox Noise brought to you some days ago, yesterday Ovie Ejaria’s exit from Rangers was made official, cut short even before the January window.

It’s hard to know where to begin with this saga, because as out of the blue as it seemed, Ejaria’s exit could have been predicted from the off, and indeed, your friends on the site more than implied it.

On the day Ejaria signed a loan deal at Ibrox, he also signed a new contract at Anfield. In the press release for that deal he confirmed that’s where he wanted his future and where he wanted to establish himself. Not a word about his loan deal to Govan, nothing. It was plain from the off that he wasn’t interested in Rangers.

One look at his face when signing the Liverpool deal compared with posing with the Rangers scarf tells its own story – case in point:

Already, the signs weren’t good. Next was his apathy to the team when he played – quite frankly at no point during his entire time in Glasgow did he ever look remotely content with being here. He didn’t produce significantly impressive football either to offset his glum expressions, and his refusal to get involved with some major goal celebrations (walking off sullenly compared with the glee on his team mates’ faces) said a lot for his lack of both wanting to be here, and team ethic.

As we know now, the excuse we’ve been given is he didn’t settle, and found Scottish football too rough. We also understand he fell out with Gary McAllister too.

But the seeds had been sown from the start. This was a mistake of a signing, a player who didn’t want to be here in the first place, and who had no qualms about expressing it visually, if not verbally.

But… and here is the big nub of the matter – he didn’t fit in to Gerrard’s XI – he was adequate only as a CM and we had plenty of them. He simply didn’t develop as an AM at all, yet kept being selected to play there.

So… we have to question Steven Gerrard’s persistent inclusion of him in the first team.

It’s not that Ejaria was terrible, it’s that he was wrong. Wrong player, wrong club, wrong position. And yet he featured more than many of the more significant signings last summer.

We have to question why. He had all of one assists, and scored twice. A truly poor return for his position.

We need to ditch these loans. It’s been a waste of six months, to the exclusion every time he played of another player we owned, whoever it was.

And lessons must be learned from that.