Mixed Rangers Injury News as 13 Players Return, New Signing Gets Scan Results and Dan Neil Update

Few managers enjoy an international break, and Derek McInnes enjoyed this one less than most. For nearly three weeks the Rangers training ground at Auchenhowie was a quieter, thinner place than he would have liked, with thirteen of his players scattered across the globe on national team duty. On Thursday morning they all reported back, and the news that came with them was, on balance, better than he might have feared. Nobody who travelled came home hurt. There was, however, one genuine setback from the last match before the break, and it concerns a summer signing who has not yet had the chance to make much of an impression.

That signing is Cammy Devlin, the Australian midfielder who joined on a free transfer from Hearts, and the scan results McInnes revealed on Thursday were not the ones anyone at Ibrox was hoping for. Devlin will be out for at least six weeks with a hamstring problem, which means he is unlikely to feature again until after the next international window in November. It is a frustrating blow for a player who has struggled to establish himself in the starting eleven, and a reminder of how quickly a small knock in a big game can turn into a lengthy absence.

The timing of the injury makes it more painful still. Devlin was introduced late in the 1-0 win at Celtic Park, the kind of cameo that a squad player is asked to deliver in a derby when the manager wants to protect a lead. According to McInnes, he was on the pitch for only two or three minutes when he felt something go in his hamstring and signalled to the bench. By then Rangers had used all of their substitutes, so there was nothing to be done except see the game out, with Devlin effectively passenger. Rangers held on, the points were banked, and the cost only became clear once the scans came back.

The initial fear was worse than the eventual diagnosis. McInnes said the club had thought Devlin might need surgery, which would have meant a far longer lay-off, but a consultation earlier this week ruled that out. That is the good part of the news. The less welcome part is that the injury is still serious enough to keep him out for a number of weeks, and the manager was careful to say that six weeks is the minimum, with the picture to be reassessed once that period has passed. Hamstrings are notoriously stubborn, and nobody at Rangers will want to rush him back.

There is a wider context to Devlin’s situation that makes the injury more than a routine fitness bulletin. Rangers signed him as a free agent from Hearts, the club McInnes had just left, and the move was widely read as the new manager bringing in a midfielder he already knew and trusted. Yet in the weeks since, Devlin has found it hard to command a regular place in McInnes’s starting line-up. A player who arrives with that kind of backing and then spends his first autumn in a bit-part role is already in a delicate position, and an injury only complicates the picture.

None of that is to say Devlin is a failure, or that his time at Ibrox will be defined by these early weeks. Midfielders who join a new club mid-transition often take months to find their feet, and a hamstring injury can in some cases be a strange kind of reset, giving a player the time to recover, retrain and return with a clearer sense of his role. But it does mean that for the next six weeks or more, McInnes will have to manage without a squad option he was relying on to provide depth and energy in the middle of the park.

The more encouraging news concerns Dujon Sterling, who was the other player to pick up a hamstring issue at Celtic Park. McInnes described his problem as a little strain and said it had cleared up well. Sterling has been training this week and is available for selection against Kilmarnock. The manager even suggested that the extended break had worked in the defender’s favour. If the pause had lasted only the usual two weeks, he said, Sterling would probably have been fit to play last weekend anyway, but the extra days have given him time to get fully right.

That small observation tells you something about how McInnes views the whole situation. He is not a manager who enjoys finding silver linings in awkward scheduling, and he was open about his frustration at the length of the break. But the one clear benefit is that Rangers’ walking wounded have had longer than usual to recover, and Sterling is the most obvious example. He will go into the weekend as a fit option rather than a doubtful one, which matters for a back line that has been tested more often than it would like this season.

Then there is Dan Neil, whose name featured in the headline of nearly every injury preview this week. Neil took a knock during the win at Celtic Park, and with the midfielder currently serving as stand-in captain, any concern about his fitness carried extra weight. The update could hardly have been simpler. McInnes said Neil is fine, and that he came out of the game without any lasting problem. For a team that depends on his drive and decision-making in the middle of the pitch, that is a significant relief.

Neil’s role at the club has grown quickly this autumn. He has taken on the armband in the absence of the regular captain, and he has been one of the standout performers during the recent winning run, including a brace in the 3-0 League Cup quarter-final victory over Celtic in mid-September. Losing him, even for a few matches, would have been a serious test of Rangers’ midfield depth, especially with Devlin now sidelined as well. Instead, McInnes can pencil him in against Kilmarnock without any hesitation.

The reason Neil is wearing the armband at all is the long-term absence of Lawrence Shankland, the club’s regular captain, who is still recovering from hamstring surgery. Shankland came off early in the 1-0 win over Motherwell at Ibrox on 5 September, and the scan revealed a significant tear that required an operation. The club’s earlier forecast was an absence of up to four months, and the Scotland striker has said he is making progress, having come off crutches and being four weeks on from his surgery. Reports suggest he could be out until the new year, although he has been careful not to put a firm date on his return.

Shankland’s absence is the largest single issue in the Rangers treatment room, and it is the backdrop against which every other injury update has to be read. A club that loses its captain and leading striker in the opening weeks of the season, and still strings together a run of consecutive wins, is showing more resilience than many expected. But the margin for error is thinner than it looks, and each additional injury, particularly in midfield, makes it harder for McInnes to keep rotating without weakening the side.

The full injury list ahead of Saturday’s game at Ibrox is a mixed one. Daisuke Yokota, the Japanese winger, is out with a groin problem and will miss a number of weeks. Shankland, as noted, remains sidelined. Tuur Rommens, the Belgian left-back who has been absent since suffering a groin injury in the defeat to Hibs back in August, is in line to return to the squad, which would give McInnes another option in defence. On the other side of the ledger, Bailey Rice, the young Rangers player on loan at Kilmarnock, is ineligible to face his parent club

Add Devlin to that list and the picture becomes clearer. Rangers are not facing an injury crisis in the sense of a squad stripped bare, but they are carrying several absences that limit McInnes’s options in specific areas. Midfield cover is thinner than it was a week ago, the attacking line is without both its captain and a creative wide player, and the manager will be hoping that the returning internationals can plug the gaps without any further disruption.

Which brings us to the thirteen players who came back from international duty, and the bigger story behind the injury news. Among them were the goalkeeper Ivor Pandur, the South African defender Olwethu Makhanya, the midfielder Nicolas Raskin and the South Korean international Minsu Kim, as well as Ryan Naderi, who made his debut for the Czech Republic and started in the match against England at Wembley. For a club that has spent the last several seasons losing key men to knocks on international trips, the fact that all thirteen returned unscathed is a genuine piece of good fortune.

McInnes was quick to acknowledge that luck played a part. He said there is always an element of risk and concern when players travel, and that the experience was a mixed one for the group, with some enjoying game time and success while others endured disappointment. Some of them had made long journeys across multiple time zones, he noted, and the staff will take that into account when deciding how hard to push them in training. The squad trained indoors on Thursday, and the plan is for everyone to be available for a full session on Friday.

The manager’s real irritation, though, was with the break itself. McInnes called it too long and said there are no two ways about it. The disruption comes from a change to the international calendar following this summer’s World Cup, which has condensed the usual separate autumn windows into a single three-week block containing four games, with a shorter two-game window to follow in November. As a result, the domestic season was put on ice for twenty days, and by the time Rangers play on Saturday it will have been nineteen days since the match at Celtic Park.

McInnes did not pretend to be neutral about the experiment. He admitted a lot of nervousness about having so many of his players away with different federations, working with different staff and travelling around the world for four games. He pointed out that nineteen days is longer than many national teams spend at an entire tournament, and said he is not a fan of the arrangement, even though he accepts it is set in stone for the next few seasons. It is, he added, his first experience of this format, and what he has seen so far has not convinced him.

His objections are not purely emotional. The practical effect on training is considerable. With thirteen first-team players away, McInnes said he was left working with only eight or nine senior players, topped up by youngsters who had their own fixtures and obligations. Staging a proper eleven-versus-eleven session became difficult, and the club had to arrange a friendly game at the weekend simply to give the remaining players some competitive minutes. He was keen to stress that none of this is an excuse, but it is an obstacle that other clubs, with fewer players away, simply did not face to the same degree.

That is an important piece of context for anyone trying to judge how Rangers will look against Kilmarnock. The team goes into the match with high morale, having won five or six games in a row depending on how the run is counted, including the two victories over Celtic. But momentum can be fragile after a long pause, and the players need to rediscover their rhythm quickly. The first half hour at Ibrox on Saturday may tell us more about the effect of the break than any amount of pre-match comment.

The opposition, it should be said, are far from the most intimidating test. Kilmarnock, managed by Neil McCann, sit bottom of the Premiership table and have conceded fifteen goals, more than any other side in the division. They have shown signs of life recently, drawing with Hearts and Aberdeen and securing their first league win of the season with a 1-0 victory away at Hibs a little more than three weeks ago. McCann’s side will be organised and probably dangerous on the counter, but the gap in quality and confidence between the teams is significant.

The stakes for Rangers are also unusually clear. Because Celtic do not play until Sunday, when they travel to Motherwell, a win for Rangers would take them to the top of the table, at least for twenty-four hours. They enter the weekend two points behind their rivals, and McInnes will know that a slip against the league’s bottom club would be a costly way to waste the momentum built up over the last month. For a manager in his first season, with a title challenge taking shape, the margin for error is smaller than it appears.

It is worth noting how much has changed in a short time. When McInnes took over in the summer, he arrived at a club that had endured a difficult spell and was in need of stability. The last few weeks, including the manager of the month award he collected for September, have shown that he is capable of delivering it. The injuries are real, and the schedule has not helped, but the squad has handled both with more composure than many outside observers predicted.

That composure will be tested again in the coming weeks. With Devlin out until at least mid-November, Shankland not expected back until the new year and Yokota still on the sidelines, the margin for further misfortune is narrow. McInnes will be hoping that the returning players stay fit, that Rommens can return to the squad without a setback, and that Neil continues to grow into his temporary role as captain. If those things fall into place, Rangers have a genuine chance of staying close to Celtic throughout the autumn.

For the supporters, the message from Thursday’s press conference is a reassuring one. The injury news is mixed, as the headlines said, but it is not alarming. One player, Devlin, is out for six weeks or more. One, Sterling, is back. One, Neil, is fit. And thirteen internationalists have returned without a scratch. In the context of a long season, and a long break, it could have been a lot worse.

What the update also shows, perhaps more than any individual fitness story, is how closely Rangers’ season is tied to the health of a small group of players. Neil, Makhanya, Raskin and the others have been central to the winning run, and the squad’s depth is being tested in a way that will only intensify as fixtures pile up. McInnes is clearly aware of the risk, and his frustration with the international break is partly an expression of that awareness. A manager who has built momentum does not want to see it interrupted, however briefly.

There is also a human side to the week that sits slightly apart from the medical bulletins. On Tuesday, Sir Alex Ferguson dropped in at Auchenhowie for lunch with McInnes and his staff, a visit that came together after a message on Monday and was, by the manager’s account, a welcome lift. Ferguson was in Glasgow dealing with family matters and used the chance to catch up, and he left McInnes with a reminder about his own slow start at Manchester United: what matters is how a season ends rather than how it begins. In a week dominated by hamstrings and travel schedules, that was a useful piece of perspective for a squad that has started well but still has most of the campaign ahead of it.

It also helps explain the tone of McInnes’s remarks on Thursday. He was frank about the problems, from the length of the break to the loss of Devlin, but there was no sense of panic in what he said. The mood around the club is that of a team that has earned some credit and knows it must keep earning it. Makhanya, the three-million-pound signing from Philadelphia Union, was named the league’s Player of the Month for September, and McInnes has spoken warmly about how quickly he has settled. Having him come back from international duty in one piece is arguably as important as anything else in the injury update.

Squad depth will be the quiet theme of the next two months. Rangers have a dozen or so players who are genuinely first-choice, and a longer tail of squad members who are still finding their level. Devlin, Rommens and the younger players being brought into training sessions all fall into the second group, and the manager’s ability to extract value from them while the main group is stretched will shape the season as much as any tactical tweak. The six weeks without Devlin are, in that sense, an opportunity for someone else to claim a role and make it their own.

Nobody should pretend the picture is entirely comfortable. A long absence for the captain, a groin problem for a creative winger and a hamstring injury for a midfield option are not the kind of problems a title-chasing side wants in October. But they are manageable problems, and the news that all thirteen returning players are healthy means McInnes goes into the weekend with more choices than he feared. That is as much as any manager can ask after a break he did not want and a schedule he did not choose.

On Saturday afternoon at Ibrox, those concerns will be put aside for ninety minutes. Rangers will take the field with a largely fit squad, a captain in waiting and a chance to go top of the table. Kilmarnock will arrive hoping to spoil the party. If the long break has dulled the hosts’ edge, it will show quickly. If not, the early signs suggest this is a team that has learned how to win under pressure, and one that will not need long to rediscover its stride.