Tav as Rangers CB? What was going on there then?

If there’s one thing we’ve not seen too much mention of, it’s the bizarre setup of the defence for the first 5 minutes of yesterday’s match, and we can’t have been the only fans looking at the lineup and wondering what on earth Gio was doing.

For the first 5 minutes, James Tavernier was partnering Connor Goldson in the middle, while Nathan Patterson was at RB and Calvin Bassey at LB.

In fairness, three of those picks are absolutely fine, but one of them most definitely wasn’t, and we do wonder why on earth we started that way.

Tavernier as a CB would have been a great laugh, don’t get us wrong, but it would probably have cost us the match, because even inside the first 3 minutes he was still bombing forward and putting crosses in, despite the fact he was going through the middle.

The situation was rectified, as Tavernier swiftly went back to RB, Bassey shifted in the middle to CB and Patterson took up the LB slot.

Of course the irony is that in that setup, two of the players are technically ‘out of position’, but in neither case is it a dramatic change, it’s adaptable. Tav as CB? Definitely not.

We don’t know why this started out this way, or what led to the change after 5 minutes, but it was a certain curate’s egg on the afternoon.

Answers on a postcard.