Rangers appear to have given up on the club’s pursuit of Josh Doig after the Hellas Verona star reportedly changed his mind on a potential switch back home to Scotland and is said to now be interested in England or other clubs in Italy.

The 21-year-old left back, yet to represent his country at national level, has been the topic of rampant speculation following Verona’s interest in Ridvan Yilmaz, and it had been mooted a swap deal with the ex-Hibs man was on the table.

Unfortunately for Rangers it appears Doig isn’t interested in the move to Govan, and sees his career going to the next stage by getting a bigger side in Italy or getting a move to the Championship in England.

He is said to be talking to both Leeds and Bologna.

This means two things for Rangers:

We will be paid full cash for Ridvan to the tune of between £4M-£6M for the Turk, assuming he makes the permanent switch to the Italians, and our interest in Twente’s Gijs Smal ramps up, with the 26-year-old experienced LB out of contract in the summer.

And quite honestly, from what we’re learning of the Dutch LB, he’s an absolutely excellent player who looks top top quality and is ready to truly hit the heights in football, with his being on the precipice of a call up to the national side.

This may just be a blessing in disguise, and the more we see about Smal, the more we’d actually pick him in a choice between he and Doig.

With a market value of around £6M, Smal is a fine LB who will interest a lot of clubs over the next year – Rangers making a move now to snap him up is a very shrewd piece of scouting, and while we’d never heard of him before the link, the more we catch on to him, the more he looks like the perfect hybrid of both Barisic and Ridvan, while being technically superior to both.

So we’ll just see what manifests from all this… but if we get Smals, Barisic will 100% no longer be close to first choice under Clement.

Mind you, we said that when Rangers signed Yilmaz…