DMAA

As my avatar suggest I absolutely love the man. My favourite goals are his header at Elland road, his back post header vs Celtic when he did the high knees celebration (can't remember year?) and his 1998 header at Parkhead. A rare talent. 49 goals in 51 games at his peak in 92-93.

I noticed after the final whistle the headline for our game was initially something very negative sounding like “Rangers win as Feyenerood spurn glorious late chance”. So basically Rangers win due to a blunder from the opposition. By the time I refreshed this was changed to something much more positive but I can’t help but wonder what is going on at PQ.

And Charles Green. How on earth you can get away with signing deals which so emphatically and explicitly injure your own company and benefit the other company is a mystery to me. There is no chance he had no personal financial incentive for signing the deals he did with Mike Ashley.

It’s ok, the SFA have been inspired by UEFA’s tough stance on fan behaviour remember

Lyndon Dykes is a good player and one to watch, very tall for a forward and can run with the ball. Livingston have started well but in all honesty this should be bread and butter stuff for us. An increasingly rare Saturday afernoon home game too! It's a bit of a funny one though because we find ourselves with questions marks over the lineup and more rotation than we'd normally be comfortable with. Barisic comes back in with Flanagan out. Centre back is anyone's guess after the OF. Jack who has been an ever present probably drops out, Aribo has played on Tuesday and travelled from Kiev so might not be at his freshest, Kamara probably does come in having not played much for us and Kent is possibly forced to start as he finds surprisingly little competition for the spot with only Ojo really challenging for it. I'm wary of Goldson becoming a scapegoat but I'd be happy for Helander to get his chance and to come in for him. In the forward areas I wish we could fit in more attacking players really as we could do with more goalscorers starting and less neat and tidy possession players.

A really strange link from the off that made no sense at all. We've already got 8 centre mids if you include Halliday and Polster. And he can have all the flair in the world but given the fact he hasn't played regular football in years I'm not sure you'd want him in the trenches of the Scottish game with you in a tough physical away tie. I think we've learned from Kranjcar.

To be honest he's had a serious injury in each of the past 4-5 seasons. He made 9 appearances last season and they were mostly subs before being injured. If true it's a roll of the dice.

That's actually not very many players at all with their contracts expiring this season. This will probably be the end of the road for Halliday and Foderingham.

Far from it Bill. The route to the groups isn’t that hard, barring a very unlucky draw. Look at Celic’s route the few times they made it in the past 6-7 years, best team they beat was an Astana or Rosenberg. And then look at the years they didn’t, teams who put them out were of a similar level and had smaller budgets than both Rangers and Celtic. UCL qualification is still very possible as things stand.

No the winner of the league targets the UCL groups. It’s a huge financial reward and Rangers’ best chance at overtaking Celtic. Celtic have been relying on it and it’s why they’ve had to cut the cloth when they haven’t qualified.

The biggest thing that affects this is Champions League Group qualification, the income from that is a game changer for Rangers and Celtic but we can't keep relying on them messing up. This is the biggest potential prize from winning our league at the moment. Player sales are big too and we continue to lag them in that department too. We're lucky that at the moment their expenditure is huge otherwise their advantage over us could be bigger.

I’ve never heard of this before, it is being reported and a standard sell on? If it is a standard sell on we’d only make a profit if sold for more than £9m. But like Bill I think this is very much about this season and signing a player who can hit the ground running and doesn’t need time to adjust to British football and settle in to Glasgow. And at his age you have to assume the business case was that it’s £7.5m for a player who could be here for 6-7 seasons.

Saw that a Leeds source had apparently said that they bid £7m for Kent earlier in the window but they walked away during negotations and moved onto other targets. That would maybe explain why the price was so high, if there hadn't been any offers I'd have expected the price do be a good bit lower.

It's just that it's possibly the strongest position on the pitch for us with Morelos and Defoe both starting the season scoring freely. Compare that to Jones/Ojo/Barker at LAM, Flanagan/Barisic at LB. I felt at the beginning of the transfer window that the Kent position would be our priority and after a few league games we still seemed to be lacking a bit of quality there. When Barisic seemed frozen out I thought left back was our new priority but then we found out on Thursday that he was anything but frozen out.

Does this even apply to Tavernier Bill? ? ?

My thoughts exactly. Gerrard has shown faith in Flanagan and Barisic here.

Yeh I saw that, I had made a comment yesterday about Ojo looking like he's struggling with the physical side of the game a bit too. But that doesn't take away the fact that he's shown he can create and score goals. As I say he can learn a bit from the way Kent approaches the game (with aggression), and Kent can maybe learn a bit from him and Jones too and get the ball in the box earlier sometimes.

Not until we win the league and do well in Europe. We haven't even won a cup yet.

I hope my comments aren't being misinterpreted. I've defended him from the start saying he at least scores and assists even if his general play isn't always great. I didn't think the OF game was suited to his style and I found his Legia performances particularly poor. However he clearly has plenty to offer and can learn during his spell here. He can learn from Kent's work rate and from how he gets stuck into the opposition. The Ibrox crowd doesn't take well to players who seem to be going into challenges half hearted.

Converted to a 4-3-2-1 it would look like this, I've removed duplicates for clarity and struck out injured players. It's a huge squad. I really thought Grezda would find a move but the only transfer windows still open are Israel and Czech Republic.

Maybe not the best word Well they are described as "achieveable" so they are both true in a sense which explains why different fees are being reported

That's makes sense, both £6.5m and £7.5m are true hence why both figures are being used. Tannochside Bear's point was that it was that we were paying a finished product price for a player who was work in progress last season and he needed to be consistent now. You responded saying essentially you can't get that for £6-7m and I just pointed out that we have up until now. I think the problem is probably that we don't agree on how "inconsistent" or "work in progress" he was in comparison to our other players last season. I'd say so. There aren't many players who you can get such varied opinions on. On the one hand you've got lots of fans who were crying out for us to spend our full budget on him and how we would sell him on for £20m to the EPL. I haven't heard so much exaggeration about a Rangers player before tbh. A good minority have always decried his poor end product and most comments on here from the regulars a month or so ago were along those lines. He's our player now so we move on but I think it's been clear from early on that people have always responded very differently to his contribution. Edit: before I get misinterpreted he is a good player and improves the current team I hope it's enough. It's the same team with a stronger bench and one good addition to the 11. But we always knew that those 6-7 games couldn't be taken too seriously and we would need more to do the same over the course of a full season. I hope the depth provides that but I'm definitely a bit nervous about it.

That's the starting 11 for me, surprised anyone is replacing Arfield with Ojo! I thought at the end of last season that we needed quality over quantity and that 3 quality signings who walk into the first 11 would take us where we needed to be. We went for quantity and only have 1 new player in the our starting 11 which I find quite worrying. I hope it's enough.

Hmm, I don't think so. To put the transfer fee in perspective it's more than the rest of our starting 11 combined. In fact if you put Edmundson on the bench instead of Helander it would be more than the rest of the 16 man squad combined by my count. So we have signed a lot of good players for not very much up until now. The fees reported have been £7m and £7.5m I haven't heard £6.5m. There are a lot of positives from this signing and he will give us a boost on the field but a fee like that was always going to cause a bit of concern for some of us given he's a pretty divisive player and has only returned the starting 11 to exactly where it was last season except maybe Aribo stepping in for Kamara ?

Where did you see that? It was only an article I got the 25% from so not an authoritative source but a sell on fee of some kind has been widely reported.