Rangers have made Michael Beale’s first summer signing with a confirmed impending precontract for Norwich City’s Kieran Dowell, in a move which doesn’t excite Ibrox Noise all that much.

The £1.5M-rated 25-year-old attacking midfielder decided to dump Carrow Road in favour of Ibrox, and last night passed his medical to make the move north this summer.

With just 21 appearances in the Premier League, he falls a bit short of the level Ibrox Noise believes we need to move forward, having spent the bulk of his career in the Championship, and for an attacking midfielder we can’t say 44 goals in 218 outings and 24 assists really fills us with confidence.

It’s not rubbish, he’s decent, but the CV of former team mate Todd Cantwell he isn’t, and where Rangers’ star man was once valued at £50M, Dowell never got higher than £2M.

We also don’t know what it currently means – Cantwell has that slot sown up, but we will concede we need some depth and competition there, with none of the other options matching up at present.

Beale has set his stall out with this one. He’s signed an above average playmaker, who doesn’t actually make many plays, but who did have 16 caps at U21 level for his country which is definitely impressive.

He just fell short rather of making the step up to senior.

Now Ibrox Noise is on record saying we need PL-level players, not Championship ones, in order to improve – his record in the Premier League is one assist and one goal in those 21 outings. It’s not sizzling by any manner of means, but if it was, he wouldn’t still be at Norwich.

Now you could say the same about Cantwell, but Villa tried to sign him at around £30M but it fell through, and Cantwell fell away a little in the Championship when the Canaries got relegated.

We can’t really see big money or reputation around Dowell.

We’re not going to come out with the blind ‘In Beale We Trust’ because we absolutely don’t, but we do admit his January work was very good.

So if Dowell surprises us and turns out a good ‘un for the club, we’ll happily hold our hands up on this one and say we were wrong and Beale was right.

But we do hope we’re not just going to hoover up Championship dregs going forward in our attempt to usurp Celtic…