If James Tavernier isn’t already a Rangers legend, he will be soon | OneFootball

If there’s a Rangers legend we rarely discuss on Ibrox Noise, it’s James Tavernier. Yes, that’s right, we used the word ‘legend’ in reference to him.

We used to be Tav’s biggest critics. Indeed, long ago, back in the days of Martyn Waghorn, we penned a piece about how the pair were finished at Rangers following some miserable form.

Waggy did indeed move on not long later, but Tav stuck in there.

He even went through further form dips – we’ll never forget how he was blamed for Young Boys’ goals in Switzerland, and Steven Gerrard was about the only Rangers man defending his captain.

And yet here he is, 7 years on from joining us and approaching testimonial territory.

This is a player who is completely immune from being dropped but especially in the past three years has earned that right with sheer performances, and we have to point at his utterly incredulous stats both in Europe and domestically particularly during the first half of 55.

He’s kept that form up – even last season it was, for a RB, a stonking array of numbers:

18 goals, 17 assists in 58 appearances. Utterly ridiculous achievements for a defender. And of course, on whoscored’s lucrative ratings system he was POTY for the whole SPL. Even for defensive work he was outstanding, 7th in the league for tackles.

His market value is said to be around £10M, but that’s conversative. It’s more like £30M+ because he’s completely unsellable and Rangers wouldn’t consider it unless a crazy bid arrived.

Tavernier, very much, reminds us what we recall a Gers fan saying 20 years ago about Arthur Numan – underappreciated but we will simply not be able to replace him when he’s gone and we’ll miss him terribly.

Borna has maybe filled some of the Dutchman’s gap but that took pretty much two decades.

Tavernier is a jack of all trades and replacing a player who does as much as he does while leading by example would be impossible.

He’s a player who doesn’t really get the credit he fully deserves, but it is nice to see the abuse he used to take has whittled down to very little.

It’s taken Tav a long time to truly win fans over, but he’s a mainstay now and there’s barely a fan alive who has a bad word to say about him anymore.

Surely that’s qualifying to be a legend?