Lawrence Shankland has one damning word for Rangers humiliation and he doesn’t even need to say it out loud
Lawrence Shankland’s start to life at Rangers has been a strange one — arriving as a marquee, manager-endorsed signing and instant captain, only to spend much of his opening weeks watching from the bench.
Shankland followed Derek McInnes to Ibrox from Hearts in the summer, taking the captaincy immediately despite being a brand-new signing — a decision McInnes defended at the time by pointing to a lack of established leadership in the existing squad. It hasn’t translated into automatic selection, though. McInnes left him out of the starting eleven for the Europa League qualifying defeat to Jagiellonia Bialystok, starting Youssef Chermiti instead and using the full 90 minutes there before Shankland got just five minutes off the bench, replacing Ross McCrorie in the 85th minute. talkSPORT’s Alan Brazil discussed the decision without directly criticizing it, while still backing Shankland to eventually become Rangers’ regular scoring threat.
The pattern repeated days later. For the 5-1 League Cup win over St Mirren — Rangers’ best performance of the season at that point — Shankland was again among the substitutes, with Ryan Naderi leading the line and scoring, and Nico Raskin wearing the armband in his absence.
Rather than any tension from Shankland’s side, it’s been McInnes doing the explaining. Ahead of the Jablonec tie, he addressed the situation directly: being club captain “does not guarantee anything,” he said, adding that he’d had that exact conversation with Shankland, who accepted it without complaint. McInnes has been consistently complimentary, calling him a “brilliant captain and a brilliant boy,” insisting he’s “too good not to score regularly” given his return of 22 goals for Hearts last season, and arguing people can “overemphasise” his lack of starts, since the best strikers thrive on having their instincts trusted rather than being forced into a rigid system.
Shankland’s only goal for Rangers so far has come from the penalty spot, in the Jagiellonia defeat
Whatever frustration Shankland may privately feel about his role, his public comments have gone in the opposite direction from confrontation. Speaking after the Jablonec exit, he was open about how damaging the result was, admitting it’s “embarrassing” for a club of Rangers’ stature to be without European football, and that “there’s nothing to hide behind” given the evidence of the performance. Rather than pointing at team selection or management decisions, he’s called for accountability from the players themselves, telling supporters the squad owes them an apology for the display in the Czech Republic.
If anything, the real story here is a captain caught in an awkward early-season limbo — trusted enough to be handed the armband on arrival, but not yet trusted enough for a guaranteed starting spot, with a manager publicly talking up his qualities while simultaneously choosing other options up front. That’s a genuinely uncomfortable dynamic for a new captain to navigate, but nothing in the reporting suggests it’s spilled into public criticism of McInnes from Shankland’s side. If a specific quote or story along those lines exists, I haven’t been able to locate it — happy to look again with more detail if you have a source or outlet in mind.
