Should Rangers have made move for £2M bargain man?

A few punters are in the press wondering why neither of the Old Firm, in our case of course Rangers, moved for former St Johnstone midfielder Ali McCann.

The 21-year NI international didn’t just get a move from Saints to League Two or One, he got a solid Championship slot with Preston for £1.75M in a respectable 16th place of 24, obviously with ambitions of doing a lot better than that.

We watched him face us many times for Saints, and of course those 6 caps for his country do support his quality.

The lad is a player, and while Rangers are hardly poor for midfielders, instead of McCann, we instead got out-of-form and off-fitness Juninho Bacuna. Now, you’re immediately raising your eyebrow and arguing ‘give him a chance’ re: the Curaçao international, and we’re far from not – it’s just we’d have known exactly what we were getting in McCann, a brilliant young player who’s already an international and knows Steven Davis well.

Bacuna is an unknown quantity.

Yes, again, we know the experts out there are screaming at us that Steven Gerrard has forgotten more about football than we’ll ever know, in Stevie we trust etc.

But on the pure face value of this one, we do wonder why the Curaçao lad was the better choice than McCann, who completely knew the SPL and the gravity of playing for Rangers.

McCann was deemed good enough at 21 to play in the Championship straight from St Johnstone, and he’ll be hoping for a bigger move, maybe PL in the coming years.

If he impresses in the Championship he may just get that, and there will be a sense of why we didn’t make a move for a player we’d have been able to grab.

But then, Rangers didn’t spend a penny in this transfer window, so maybe that was why.