Ibrox_Nights

Good write up by Chris Jack in the times Sam Ricketts with big praise for his performances last season really hope he can make the grade he’s got great attributes.
“IT is on his ability that Greg Docherty will be judged this summer as Steven Gerrard decides whether he has a place in his Rangerssquad.
But Sam Ricketts knows there will be no questions over his attitude as Docherty looks to make the most of his second chance at Ibrox.
Ricketts inherited the 22-year-old when he was appointed as Shrewsbury Town boss in December.
By then, Docherty had already scored six times in League One and had firmly established himself as a fan favourite at New Meadow after leaving Ibrox on loan last summer.
As Shrewsbury battled for their place in the third tier of English football, the midfielder was more than playing his part in the fight.
Come the end of the campaign, it was one that proved successful for Ricketts as relegation was avoided.
Docherty could therefore return north of the border with a sense of satisfaction at a job done. And he has left a last impression in Shropshire.
Ricketts said: “He did really well. I came in halfway through the season and I didn’t really know of Greg before I came in.
“But what he has got is a fantastic attitude in terms of wanting to be a footballer at the highest level and he does everything he can to put himself in the right place to do that. He looks after himself, he does extra work in the gym and he is outside doing extra practice every day.
“That is what I loved about him. On the field, he had an excellent season and to get ten goals and 11 assists is excellent, no matter where you are playing or who you are.
“That is a very good return and I was delighted to work with him on and off the pitch.
“He came away and played a full season of 50 games, which is no mean feat for any player. The exuberance he has to want to do well is brilliant. I never watched him play at Rangers but he came here and worked so hard. It is not just his running, it is excellent, but his goals and all round game were terrific.
“When you have got a player that is willing to put that shift in, that will run you 12km in every game, but also do it at his intensity, that is a major asset to any team.
“With Greg, you have his quality at the end of it and that is what makes him a special player.”
Ricketts may have known little about Docherty when he first arrived at New Meadow but it didn’t take the former Swansea, Hull, Bolton and Wolves defender long to become a keen admirer of the Scot.
Docherty would score another four times in the second half of the campaign. The match minutes were just as important on a personal level as his time away from Ibrox proved more than worthwhile.
“He is very driven and he wants to be as good as he can be and have as good a career as possible,” Ricketts said. “Greg saw coming away to Shrewsbury for a year as an opportunity to impress everyone.
“Most importantly, he bought into what we were doing at the club, certainly since I came into the club. He bought into everything that I asked of him so he wasn’t like a loan player that had half an eye on being back home.
“Obviously he still followed Rangers and he wanted to impress them, but he was fully committed to what we were doing here, which was really important.
“He is a really good lad, a great lad to have around the place and I had no problems with him in that respect. He is very professional, he acts and behaves and looks after himself in the right manner.
“He is level-headed as well, so he doesn’t get carried away when he is scoring goals or assisting goals and he wasn’t off it when things weren’t quite going his way either. That impressed me and is the temperament that you need to be a top player.”
With a full season at Shrewsbury under his belt, Docherty returned to Glasgow this summer determined to impress boss Gerrard.
And Ricketts hopes the former Hamilton Accies star gets his dream chance at Ibrox as Rangers bid for domestic success this season.
He said: “The whole idea of taking lads in on loan is to give them a platform to perform and to improve and I think that is exactly what happened with Doc, which was brilliant.
“I will follow him and I will wish him all the best and I hope that he can go and impress again this season and do well. We are really keen for him to go on and have a great career and then we can say that we helped, that we were a very small part, of helping him achieve that.
“You won’t learn from anyone better because Steven Gerrard was one of the best players that the Premier League has ever seen.
“He was a phenomenal talent but he could get box-to-box, and Doc can do that too. He can score goals, he can assist goals and Doc has not got anyone better to learn from.
“Doc would be of interest to a lot of people and I wish him the best. I hope he goes on and does really well this year. If he was available, then obviously we would be keen. But that doesn’t mean that it would happen. I think he could be out of our reach because he performed that well and he could be beyond us now.”

It’s a loaded question.
I would be complaining like I do every year regardless if we are in the competition or not, Imagine being drawn in a group with Club Brugge, PSV and AEK and having half a chance of progressing out the group stages and in another group you have Juve, Real, Bayern, and PSG all cutting each others throats at an earlier stage.
Instead of any excitement for the smaller clubs we are all left going “I wonder if we’ll get a point” “oh well we can get that Europa league spot”

When it was the European cup it was played for by the champions of each country, now it is the Champions League it is played for by  the team that finishes 4th in some "elite" leagues, go figure. when the league champions of some countries have to jump through all sorts of hazardous preliminary  hoops to get anywhere near the business end where the elite have already got a free pass.

Probably because the competition is tilted massively in favour of the bigger clubs from the bigger leagues, the seeding system and the way the draw is fixed so that teams from the same country have a reduced chance of being drawn together is a joke.
The tournament is corrupt and that’s why people take the huff.
They should re brand it ‘The rigged money grabbing bastards league’ 

It's a disgrace what UEFA have done to European competitions, all to pander to the 'big' leagues. For me the knockout stages (and most of the CL group stage games) of these competitions are getting so boring, seeing the same teams playing each other year after year. Last season Ajax brought back the magic and showed what European football should be, shame it's such a rarity. 

The nearly champions league 

Champions League ? 
They need a name change

DC missed the penalty and they ran up and equalised in the 95th minute. They only had ten men as well.
Disastrous reign a d can't quite believe he was appointed. Disgusting decision 

So many highlights under him
I really liked losing the 25 year unbeaten home record against the sheep or the game against Killie I think it was when we were winning and then right at the end we thought actually we don't want to win lol

He needs to be the box to box scoring midfielder we lack, or compete with big Joe if that's what he is. I don't think he'll cut it being a utility player when we have better players in other midfield positions plus Halliday who the gaffer loves as that utility option.

Great to see Docherty on the score sheet. I've always had hope for him and seen glimpses in his first spell of a good midfielder.

Really happy for the kid but I still don't think we do enough to implement our own youth into the first team. Will be interested to see if one of the 5 that went to Portugal stick around with the first team this season. Imo, Stephen Kelly is ready.

He really is one mad sad cunt. 

Goldson and Katic on the field with Edmundson as back up is hopefully going to be better than Goldson and Worrall on the field with Katic as back up. 
Hastie can play wide right or in the middle and gives something different to Candeias being left footed and able to take on shots from outside the box. Actually quite fancy him more central.
Jones will probably be on the bench a fair amount, and honestly if Kent doesn't come back it's a toss up over him and Murphy over who will end up starting for me. 
I see your points, it will depend on if Edmundson proves to be more reliable than Worrall was but I do think Hastie offers us something different. He's basically taking the back up spot which would be for Dorrans, Halliday or McCrorie usually and in that case I think he'll be an improvement. Or if he plays out wide then him and Candeias are very different players. 

I’d look to loan him out to a club like Hearts.
McCrorie has a lot to offer but he isn’t Gerard’s type of midfielder - we’ve known this for a while now.
He also isn’t as poor on the ball as made out.

I think given we’ve signed 7 players already though, there is some justification.  
Many fans thought the squad was already too big and expected us to get rid of 6 or 7 of the deadwood. Then to see us properly kick on, many expected us (as MA and SG both strongly intimated/said in May) to sign 3-4 players that could walk straight into the 11. 
Now, the ridding of deadwood will still likely, and must, happen. But in terms of those who have actually come in, it hasn’t made too much sense or tallied with what was said in May.

Neither happy or sad, I think for the money we've spent we have probably improved the squad without really improving the starting 11 but its hard to say without a baw being kicked.
 

The ones we know are dug meat. 
The rest are unknown.
Aribo aside (and even that’s a maybe) there’s no one that’s an immediate upgrade on last seasons best 11 - that finished 9 behind the filth and didn’t reach a final. 
No pleased to be honest. Not buying into the narrative that the filth are weaker and we’re on the up. It was clear we needed 3/4 players to better last years first 11. Instead we’ve just further bloated the squad with mostly SPL players that aren’t even the best of the diddy clubs they came from. 

Disappointed so far tbh, we really needed to add more quality in the attacking areas but all we’ve done is add more mediocre squad players in those areas, these were the positions I expected to see real money spent on players who could make a difference, we got Jordan Jones and Gregg Stewart.

Mate, I lay the blame at his door for our shite start to January. His fuck up at Kilmarnock keeps annoying the fuck out of me. 

Bowyer doesn’t give a flying fuck about his career, he is fuming Charlton don’t have the extra money to improve their squad. That’s the truth of it 
 

fuck sake. threads in tatters already man.

Get well soon Lee Bowyer x