Rangers are under serious pressure now to secure Ross McCausland on a long-term deal after it was revealed two Premier League sides are after him and now, at least, two Serie A sides as well.

The Brentford interest in McCausland is well-documented, but Vincent Kompany’s struggling Burnley are looking at him too, and have now been joined by Serie A’s Atalanta and Roma to name just four clubs monitoring the winger’s rapid rise.

To go from fringes of Rangers to a superb cameo v Prague before a start v Livingston and then a quick-fire call-up to his country all in the space of barely 10 days is about as aggressive a rise to the top of the game as we’ve seen in a long time, especially at Rangers, and it’s quickly alerted bigger leagues to McCausland’s situation.

With Atalanta, Roma, Brentford and Burnley alone as credited with interest, the vultures are only going to increase from this point and Rangers need to tie the lad down quickly or will lose him to a more compelling and tempting league.

Of course, the slight silver lining is that if McCausland follows fellow SPL youth to Italy, such as Ferguson, Doig and now-Brentford star Hickey, that will secure Rangers a much bigger fee than the cross-border pennies we’ll get from a Premier League side.

After all, the above three all went to Italy for big money and all of them were young – Rangers could demand at least £5M, more like £10M.

But we want to keep this kid, unless a club on the continent makes an offer Rangers just can’t refuse. But as we say, PL sides will get him for a fraction of that.

This is definitely one to watch.