Some Rangers fans are this morning bewildered at claims the club is looking at Preston goalkeeper Freddie Woodman, valued at £4M, when the Jack Butland story remains prominent.
Preston’s number one, 25, a former England youth cap, has just four career Premier League appearances, and obviously has never been capped at senior level for his country, and can count the illustrious Aberdeen and Kilmarnock as two of his ex-sides.
Fans are today asking why we’d make a move for a lower-league goalkeeper who’d cost around £4M when Butland, a Premier League stopper with England caps will be completely available for free in the summer.
And we have to agree entirely on that question.
Given the club’s general stinking record in recruitment, it’s no surprise, but it never fails to take us aback that players fans clearly want, who want to come, and who would even be free, get rejected in favour of an unknown from Turkey.
Rangers’ recruitment is badly out of touch, and almost always brings in the option no one wants, rather than the player with an excellent CV, low cost, and popularity among fans.
Simple example is Jon McLaughlin. Rangers were linked with free agent Benjamin Siegrist and then-Fenerbahce star Berke Ozer, both of whom were popular choices for the majority. Instead we signed a rubbish stopper in League One’s McLaugh, and proceeded to use him a lot.
It literally makes no sense, and appears deliberately designed to annoy supporters.
And the apparent interest in Preston’s Woodman, who we’re sure isn’t a bad stopper, over Butland instead, tells us that bewildering logic is set to continue.
Why have cotton when you can have silk, they say, and yet Rangers seem to always choose the cotton path. In fairness we got strong choices Nicolas Raskin and Todd Cantwell, so this could be source mischief-making from the press among other things, but it wouldn’t surprise us following the addition of McLaugh that we’d bring in another lower-league goalie instead of a genuinely good one.
That, sadly, seems to be Rangers Standard these days, more often than not, and boy is that frustrating.