Rangers have been hit with massive injury issues for St Mirren after a further five were added to Connor Goldson as absences for the weekend.
Ridvan Yilmaz, Ryan Kent, Ryan Jack, Antonio Colak, and Scott Wright will also be unavailable amounting to a brand-new injury crisis hitting the side at quite frankly the only time that is actually ‘tolerable’, with the league all but gone and time for recovering before the semi-final.
This means the all-new injury list and unavailables seems currently to be:
Robby McCrorie, Ridvan Yilmaz, Connor Goldson, Filip Helander, Leon King, Ryan Jack, Steven Davis, Scott Wright, Ryan Kent, Ianis Hagi, Alex Lowry, Rabbi Matondo, Kemar Roofe, Tom Lawrence and Antonio Colak.
So just when we thought we’d resolved a great deal of the injury blight, a whole raft of them comes back in and denies us a further glut of players ruling out 15 players for the weekend, leaving Michael Beale with potentially just 17 or so for the weekend.
Now King, Hagi and Matondo did play a portion of a bounce match this week v Chelsea reserves, so they’re ‘on the mend’ but none of these players are remotely near match fitness and it means Rangers’ current options are diabolical.
It’s never ideal but if there was a ‘least bad’ time for it to happen it’s ‘end of the season’ when the title is clearly long gone and there’s a good two+ weeks to get some of them back for the Hampden clash with Celtic.
But end of the day, Rangers still want to keep winning in the league against the rest at the very least and the less players we have fit to do so with the less easy it becomes.
Hearts and Aberdeen might be long off second place but they’ll both have designs on closing the gap and Rangers need to keep our guard up to ward off that happening.
And that’s made a bit harder by half the Ibrox squad now being unavailable. Enough to beat St Mirren? We’d hope so, but there’s a lot of change happening off the pitch at Rangers and it could be a distraction.
We’ll see.