With James Tavernier being the longest serving current contract player at Glasgow Rangers, we at IN have done some digging, to see who on the Rangers payroll had been at Rangers from the very first day we were demoted.

Our captain Tavernier signed for Rangers on the 20th of July 2015, when we splashed out £200,000 for his services. That was five times more than we paid for Kamara.

He also joined the club from Wigan, alongside his Wigan teammate, Martyn Waghorn

The captain of Rangers in 2015 was of course our Lee Wallace, who had been at Rangers since 2011. Lee Wallace wasn’t the only senior player to stay with Rangers, when we famously had to play through the lower league with our youth team – Neil Alexander, Lee McCulloch and a few others hung back as well.

The other players at Rangers from the time of the big drop were Barrie McKay, Fraser Aird, Robbie Crawford, Calum Gallagher, and Luca Gasparotto, who were all graduates of our youth team.

So, is Tavernier is the only current player surviving in our team who knew players from the big drop?

Well no, Allan McGregor and Steven Davis do too, albeit of course the pair of them left at the time and then returned.

Furthermore Wallace was with us until 2019, which is when we already had the core of our current team – Connor Goldson, Nikola Katić, Borna Barišić, Ryan Jack, Ryan Kent, Andy Halliday (yeh he has since left, but he is still a Rangers player in my mind), Glen Kamara, Scott Arfield, Jermain Defoe, and Alfredo Morelos (who couldn’t speak a word of English then).

So, this team knows even by proxy what Rangers went through. They have met the players, the fans, the staff, and the Coisty.

Yeh, Coisty would have told them what we went through.

Stevie himself admitted yesterday the staff and the legends like McCoist have instilled on the players (and himself) the devastation we went through, and while not all of them were there, they get it, they do.

Now Rangers are back…and after everything we’ve been through there is no way we’re stopping at 55.