The current big story around Rangers circles currently centres around Joe Rothwell’s Rangers transfer and his potential arrival at Ibrox eminently, with reports confirming that he has secured a deal to become Rangers’ second summer acquisition. Those reports admittedly have come from Sky Sports, who are pretty reliable in reporting this stuff, so we’d have to say the deal does look done, but time will tell, and we guess we’ll have to wait for an official announcement to confirm one way or the other.
Rothwell was one we were linked to before, as we have discussed previously on Ibrox Noise. Indeed, we reported this to you maybe around 18 months ago to 2 years, so the guy’s been on the radar for quite a long time, and isn’t really anywhere near out of the surprise blue, as many are suggesting.
Yes, he hadn’t been linked this window particularly, but Joe Rothwell’s Rangers transfer was on the agenda, he was there, and that is what tends to happen. Players will be on Rangers’ registry, we will monitor them for potentially years before we then make a move to actually sign. Last time around, it didn’t happen. The attempt failed, and we decided to go different routes.
At that time, of course, Rothwell was barely a Premier League player, he hadn’t touched that level, and was only Championship. He was at Blackburn back then. Today, he is a Leeds-Bournemouth player, on loan at Elland Road last season. Apparently, he did quite well, they say, and those who back the regime and everything that we are doing are trying to tell us how much Leeds fans rated the lad.
We are not going to buy into that notion, of course, because we are Ibrox Noise, and we wait to see with our own eyes, and as important as that is also to do, we research the deep-rooted history of the player as well.
He is 30 years of age, he has 30 Premier League appearances, he has around 200 Championship appearances. That is Kieran Dowell. Kieran Dowell was vast majority Championship, but he managed around 20 Premier League appearances. He wasn’t great, was he? No, Dowell will find his level in the lower levels of England, of the Championship, of League One, and Rothwell, we are not sure, is much better.
He is a bit older than Dowell, but nevertheless, we are not sure that Joe Rothwell is the answer to Rangers’ problems. The issue may actually be that he is being sounded out as a replacement for Raskin or Diomande. To be fair, he certainly would be sufficient for Diomande, who we don’t see as much better than a Championship player anyway, but it’s not really the improvement that we need.
Rangers are looking to get better, we are looking to become champions, we are looking to advance our team back to the levels that it should be at. But unfortunately, like most managers, we are mostly going for the target market of the current manager, and that’s Championship level in England.
So, Rothwell may arrive soon, and may actually surprise us and be a hell of a lot better than we are giving him credit for, but we can’t say we are terribly positive about that.
As usual we hope we’re wrong.