Where is he now? International defender dumped by Stevie

0
Where is he now? International defender dumped by Stevie


Rangers and left backs have had a colourful history together.

From the wonderful Arthur Numan and respected but limited Stuart Munro, to the hapless Olivier Bernard and painfully overrated Sasa Papac, the variety of players at the left of defence has made for some good and not so good shirts down the years.

But in 2018, on joining Rangers, one of the first things then-new manager Steven Gerrard did was to sell Wales left back Declan John, a fullback who’d impressed on loan before securing the permanent deal that January and continuing to maintain good form.

We were against this move, and the first-season farce of the-then hopeless Borna Barisic, limited Andy Halliday and mediocre Jon Flannagan rather vindicated this.

Barisic came onto a huge game late last year, but this year that’s gone, and the other two certainly aren’t viable.

But what of John?

What happened to this decent little LB who looked more than capable for us?

As we know, he was sold to Swansea for around £1M, and unfortunately his time in the Championship has been absolutely rinsed by injury. He managed just 10 appearances last season, blighted by all kinds of afflictions, with just one outing this time around. The last we heard he’d been dropped to the club’s U23s, scored an OG, loaned out to Sunderland, and hasn’t played a minute at the Stadium of Light.

It’s a weird one – John was clearly fit at Ibrox – had an excellent 12 months here and looked like his career was ready to really take off.

But something stopped Steven Gerrard having any interest in him and nowadays he’s just trying to get fit and in Sunderland’s first team, well, under normal circumstances anyway.

Gerrard dodged a bullet – he definitely got this one right.

It’s a shame, because John was a very good LB, even winning himself 7 caps for his country.

Arthur Numan he will never be, but he put in a good shift and scored us three goals with three assists.

We’ve had far far worse.

No posts to display