We might be very positive about what we’re seeing under Michael Beale at Ibrox, but one thing we’re not going to gloss over is the absolutely shocking Rabbi Matondo, who may well be the worst permanent signing this club has made in many, many years. Only Jack Simpson (in a different position) matches Matondo in terms of performances for Rangers and that is a rogue’s gallery no one wants to be part of.

The Welsh (former) international has been unmitigatingly terrible since arriving, having a couple of decent friendlies maybe, and one assist at Hearts. That’s it, in 5+ months.

He cost us £3M from Schalke and the German giants are laughing all the way to the bank with that one, because we’ve rarely seen a less able attacker at Ibrox in many, many seasons.

We all hoped this lad was the right-wing solution we’ve craved for years and years, following the rather unfairly castigated Amad Diallo, who was, incidentally, a million times better than Matondo. But no, he’s been tragic, truly awful.

Now, there’s the ‘contrary’ crew in our support, who just like to disagree with things whatever they are, just for the sake of attention, so we’re sure they’ll leap in to this post and tell us we’re closet jungle jims and Matondo is the best signing we’ve ever made, or ‘give him a chance ffs’, taking a gamble...

They can just leave by the exit thanks, like Matondo can – unlike the Lundstram and Barisic comparisons, Matondo has nothing to fall back on. Lunny was an experienced Premier League player with a value of around £10M, while he also showed 6 weeks of excellent performances under Gerrard early on when he wasn’t paired with Steven Davis. Then there’s Barisic, was outstanding for Osijek, excelled in the Europa League qualifiers for them, and was many times capped for world cup finalists Croatia, demonstrating his quality when he went on international duty during his early troubles at Ibrox.

These guys had CV and/or they’d showed plenty of signs of their attributes.

Matondo has been a complete and total disaster so far, demonstrating next-to-nothing to justify a fee of £500,000, never mind £3M.

He used to be a Wales international, 4 starts in 11 caps – clearly his form used to be a lot better and the NT has now dumped him.

Look, we don’t hate Matondo, he just appears to be at the wrong club at this moment in time – we also invoke the ‘Ryan Kent Fallacy’. Kent, for the first 4 months, was absolutely rotten while on loan – wrong player in the wrong team. But it just clicked for three matches in November 2018 – Rapid and Hearts being the main two – suddenly he showed his quality.

Matondo may still do that, but unlike Kent, we’re way past November and he’s shown literally zero. There’s also another caveat – Kent always played, while Matondo has been barely on the fringes.

So maybe he needs a run in the team?

Either way, he’s running a bit out of time to show anything, with January on its way. But if Kent could turn round a slow start, maybe there is still hope for Matondo?

And yes, technically we’ve contradicted ourselves a little in this one – ‘he can leave’, then ‘maybe there’s hope’. We judge what we’ve seen till now, but we want to be fair where we can too.

We leave it up to Michael Beale.