Was Ally McCoist right all along?

As you’ll have seen from our earlier entry, we’re having a little look at history today, and having already examined the failed promotion attempt from 2015, now we’re looking at the biggest fallacy of the entire Journey: ‘the youth ship sailed’.

Many blame Ally McCoist for wasting a chance to ‘rebuild Rangers’ by calling on the youth reserves, and we admit that back in 2012/2013 we too were critical of the fact he signed ageing mercenaries like Kevin Kyle and Ian Black rather than letting our Auchenhowie youth have a go.

But there’s a huge caveat – they just weren’t good enough.

Was it that Ally was right all along, and that he didn’t trust the youth to deliver, plus acknowledging the weight of the Rangers shirt was too heavy for them?

After all, Barrie McKay and Lewis Macleod did break through and were huge successes, so it’s not like McCoist ignored the academy.

But the litmus test for the quality of the youth back then is the careers the class of 2012/2014 had after Rangers. And frankly none of them do.

Only McKay and Macleod had something resembling one, and the rest all sank without trace.

Guys like McAusland, Aird, Gallagher, Gasparotto, Murdoch, Cole, Perry, Crawford, Hutton, Hemmings etc all pretty much had nothing careers after Rangers, and if they failed to excel at modest teams like the League Ones and Twos they mostly ended up at, can we imagine how painfully these kids would have sunk at Ibrox.

Ally McCoist made a judgement call in 2012. He looked at what was available at Auchenhowie and realised it wasn’t good enough and it wouldn’t be able to handle the shirt either.

We saw how awful some of these guys were, Cole and Perry were agony – but as fans we elevated them to ‘Rangers class’ because we wanted them to be that good.

But the truth is the quality wasn’t there, and history has borne McCoist out as correct.

The harsh reality is that ship didn’t sail – the ship wasn’t there in the first place.