There has been a surprising beneficiary of the arrival of Derek McInnes. In particular one previous signing. That would be left winger Djeidi Gassama. The Mauritian-born winger has rather poor decision making and his final product could be a heck of a lot better. But his overall game has come on leaps and bounds in the past month. The Djeidi Gassama improvement has been obvious.
It explains why he has started more often than he hasn’t and has become a bit of a mainstay on Rangers’ left. But it’s more than just Derek McInnes’ influence that has seen this boost from the former Sheffield Wednesday attacker. Indeed, it is very much a replication, and a rather unexpected one, of the situation Rangers had last season with Tuur Rommens and Mikey Moore.
Rommens and Moore set the template
Those two absolutely brought the best out of each other. Tuur Rommens shone from having the pace and dribbling ability of the English youth international in front of him, along with the overlaps. Moore brought the best out of Rommens and vice versa. Rommens was a shining light for Rangers in the second half of the season and Moore won Young Player of the Season. It was a marriage made in heaven, per se.
Rommens had been completely flat by comparison this time around. He looked nothing like the player of last term, mainly because, A, he was playing with something of an injury, but B, more tellingly, he didn’t have Moore in front of him. Rommens and Gassama don’t really connect and they don’t really click. But Gassama and James Penrice, Rangers’ brand new signing, absolutely do.
Gassama and Penrice click
There were two or three standout players for Rangers’ victory over St Mirren. They were former AEK Athens man Penrice, former Wednesday attacker Gassama and new signing Badredine Bouanani, brought in, of course, from Stuttgart. But the simple fact that Gassama has shone again, as he has in quite a few matches in this campaign, is heavily down to his understanding with Penrice behind him.
Just like with Rommens and Moore, there is a lot of overlapping support and coherence between the two. It clearly shows there’s an understanding on the left that Rangers had last season with two entirely different players. Gassama’s final shot lacks. He seems very keen on taking the shot and he’s still a bit guilty when it comes to greediness. But he’s been unquestionably better and it has definitely played a part in Rangers’ strong recent run of results.
Penrice makes a major impact
For Djeidi Gassama improvement it helps that behind him is a player who clearly connects with him. Penrice is solid at the back. Very little gets past him and his distribution going forward, as well as his overlaps, very much reminds us of peak Rommens.
It is quite surreal and bizarre that Rangers have managed to do this with two left backs in a row. Both of these came into Rangers and made an immediate impact. Both of whom benefited from the particular relationship they had with the left winger in front of them. It has worked rather well and the former AEK man has taken to Rangers like a duck to water.
Of course, it hugely helps that he is himself a Rangers man. He is a dyed in the wool Bluenose from boyhood. Having that kind of passion at the back definitely doesn’t hurt Rangers’ cause. We had felt like the Rangers man experiment was failing. This was given how badly Rangers’ results were going only two or three weeks ago. But there’s been a huge uplift, even if the performances haven’t quite matched that.
Rangers finally seeing the best of Gassama
But in places, there have been individuals who have excelled and Gassama is evidently benefiting from Penrice. It is good to see the player from Gassama that we’d hoped to get given the hype based on his arrival.
He hadn’t been a particularly popular player for long swathes of his time at Rangers, but this season, especially with the arrival of Penrice, we might just be finally seeing Djeidi Gassama improvement at long last.