Michael Beale has given something of an injury update, with confirmation Rangers stars Ryan Jack, Kemar Roofe, Tom Lawrence, Dujon Sterling, Adam Devine, Leon King and Connor Goldson are all ‘recovering’ and while offering timelines on their returns, cannot promise dates, despite giving some anyway.
There was no mention of Leon Balogun.
Beale explained, paraphrasing, that he didn’t want to overload Lawrence and Roofe, so after a ‘hard week’ decided to leave the pair out of Olympiakos in case the poor babies felt a match of football was too much for them. A slight touch of sarcasm there, true, but surely players who’ve barely played any football and have been training all preseason can at least be in the match day squad?
As it is, Beale claimed thus:
“Ryan Jack will be back in the squad as well (as Roofe and Lawrence), Adam Devine trained yesterday, Dujon Sterling will train on Friday, Leon King is back Monday and Connor Goldson will be back next Thursday.”
In short, all of the above players are either recovering, injured, or somewhere in between, and we don’t actually know about Balogun at all.
So it is safe to say there’s a few little injury cases here, potentially including the Nigerian, meaning 8 players are currently questionable at the very least going into the new season.
We don’t trust timelines, not any more since the 7 to 10 days of Mark Warburton then Steven Gerrard, and we know Beale is economical with the truth at the very least.
So that’s the update – who will be travelling to Germany for Hoffenheim? Your guess is currently as good as ours really.