Some Rangers fans think Shankland can be a 40-goal striker | OneFootball

With Rangers fans toiling and struggling to choose between Lawrence Shankland, Abdallah Sima, Bojan Miovski and Cyriel Dessers as Rangers’ prime number 9 for next season, Ibrox Noise would like to hastily remind the support of something:

If Dessers ‘took’ all the chances that he misses, he’d be on 40+ for the season and he’d already be one of Europe’s top strikers. Rangers sure wouldn’t have got him for £6M from relegated Cremonese.

If Sima was the complete article Brighton thought he could be, they wouldn’t have put him in loan hell – he’d have been shipped off to a Premier League side with lots of cash for £50M+.

If Shankland was the super striker many Rangers fans seem to think he is, he wouldn’t be peaking at 28 and missing as many as he does. He wouldn’t be in the SPL at this point in his career for a club as modest as Hearts.

And if Miovski was the clinical foreign striker some Rangers fans hint that he is, he wouldn’t be in the SPL at 24 playing for bottom side Aberdeen with Rangers reportedly rivalling a Championship side in Ipswich for his signature.

We look at the best strikers we’ve had in the past decade+ post-2012, and the two to stick out the most are surely Alfredo Morelos and Antonio Colak.

One stood out in the dismal Finnish league, and aside one season at Rangers was not mega prolific in 7 attempts. There’s a reason he couldn’t get a good gig after us. While the other was a nomad, at no big clubs until Rangers, aside a loan spell at Malmo. If you want to call them big.

Our point?

Rangers can’t get the strikers fans seem to want – it generally has to be scouting an unearthed gem who just lucks out and scores a lot in Scotland.

Any striker scoring upwards of 20+ a season in a credible league isn’t going to join the SPL, even to Rangers.

This isn’t the old days where we could attract a Jelavic or Prso, nowadays we’re having to rely on different means of bringing in strikers.

And fans who are frustrated at Dessers’ misses are missing the point – if he was scoring the lot or even most of them, he’d never have had the nomadic career he’s had and we wouldn’t have been able to get him.

He’d be Harry Kane or Erling Haaland.

The currency of strikers is goals, and for Rangers to get a guy who scores a lot of goals, guaranteed, is going to be hard.

In relatively recent seasons in the SPL only three men have scored 27 or more – Commons, Griffiths and Kyogo.

You have to go back to 2001 and a different world entirely for the last time someone scored the kind of goal numbers Rangers fans expect from Dessers – 35, Larsson.

These days it’s not happening. Not for £6M.

Shankland himself may hit 25, he’s at 21 with 5 matches to go, and Tav is at 17, but if Rangers supporters want Dessers (or Shanks) to score every chance they get, or every good chance, then that’s a 40+ striker and that type is impossible to find at the numbers Rangers can offer.

Or more to the point, impossible to sign at Rangers.

We do need to slightly temper our expectations – the days of Super Ally regularly battering in 35 a season are probably gone, sadly.