Rangers manager Philippe Clement has somewhat backtracked on his Ridvan Yilmaz comments of some days ago by stating now that he won’t talk in transfer terms about any players, individually or collectively, out of respect to the player and other teams.

After previously expressing at length the relative situation of the Turk, which was surprising given his usual stance of never discussing such things, Clement has reverted to type by cold-shouldering any attempt at his presser today to get some information from him.

Of course, there’s technically likely two reasons for this:

1: He realised he said too much re: Ridvan and it was a slip-up on his part to discuss as much as he did to the press about the left back.

2: There’s just nothing for him to actually tell. We’re not close to any incomings, and everything in the press is just clickbait and hearsay.

It is probably a combination of both.

But we can sense he’s a little frustrated. He would surely have been given assurances he’d have something to play with in January, and while there’s 12 days left, the competitive fixtures are back and he had just one new player to take to the Spain camp and integrate.

The idea with the winter window in Scotland is the winter break affords teams a chance to bring players in and integrate them into training before the break ends.

Rangers simply haven’t had any chance to do that, with a complete lack of players arriving in Govan.

We already knew our squad was nowhere near good enough, and while we’re not that far behind Celtic, it’s clear a few key additions are needed to secure a more convincing overall squad we believe can go toe-to-toe with the Parkhead lot.

Clement has to be given the tools though, and so far he hasn’t.

Michael Beale absolutely ransacked the budget, and while we accept that not all his summer additions were a farce, a few were, and certainly didn’t raise the quality of the squad for the £16M+ spent.

Clearly the opposite given who left.

And Clement is dealing with the fallout from that.

Oh to have Colak, Scotty, Kenty, Morelos and Fashion back.

But this is the cards we must deal with.