We had to raise an eyebrow at the BBC’s chief verbal diarrhoea writer Tom England ‘blaming’ Lawrence Shankland for Scotland’s demise in Holland yesterday.

We know Shanks isn’t our player, but he is one of us, and would give all of his teeth to sign for us, and the targeting of him seemed, flawed, as much as English’s content usually is.

The main bit that stuck out for us was this:

“All season you could have blindfolded him, spun him around three times and still he would have put away that chance. Different stage, though. Different planet.”

And yet who’s number one in the SPL for missed shots? Bingo, Shankland, with 42 – Sima is second with 33 and he’s been out for 3 months.

Shankland missing glaring chances is nothing new – it’s just not something Rangers fans see a 20th as much with Shankland because, well, we’re not watching him every match. Instead it’s Dessers we see, and of course, we pick up his errors more easily.

For what it’s worth, he’s only missed the target 22 times, a lot more efficient than Shankland. And he’s done a lot better on the international break than his Scottish counterpart did.

But no, let’s attribute a false positive trait to Shankland, as English has done, and apply that fiction to criticise him with the national team.

It’s some weird ignorant knowledge, and while we can forgive Rangers fans for peddling the mistaken narrative that Shankland is efficient and a clinical striker (he isn’t) English is the one with the BBC platform and millions of readers and his words will reach them.

In short, wee Boab down the pub can make the error that Shanks is efficient, but it’s English’s job to be accurate.

And he’s failed miserably.

Shankland is extremely wasteful, missing more shots than anyone in the SPL, even Dessers and Sima. By a mile.

There is far from any guarantee he’d score at any given moment, but it probably makes more entertaining ‘journalism’ to suggest otherwise.