Sometimes the shirt is too big for new Rangers signings, other times they can’t force their way past established stars.
On other occasions, managers simply don’t know how to get the best out of players that they thought they could fix.
When Rangers signed Sam Lammers, for a transfer fee reported to be around £3m, he was arriving having struggled to score goals in recent seasons, but the numbers throughout his career paint a story of what really happened in his time at Ibrox.
The Rangers numbers that paint full Sam Lammers picture
It’s worth remembering what type of player Lammers was when he first rose to prominence at PSV Eindhoven and earned a big money move to Serie A.
Who better than his former coach Kevin Hofland to explain just how good he was:
“I worked with Sam all three seasons he was with PSV. He scored a lot of goals — he could score easily, with both feet and his head.
“In terms of technical ability, I never saw anyone like him. There was no one at PSV who had any doubts that he would have a professional career.
“In the Netherlands, newspapers compared him to Ruud van Nistelrooy.“
So what happened?
Lammers has played roughly 18,000 minutes in his senior career.
Just under 16,000 of these have been as a central striker.
Most of the rest was played as a number 10 – at Rangers.
Add this to his career goal tally of 85 goals off an xG of 82 and it his statistics paint the picture of a number nine.
Why did Michael Beale play him at 10?
Not only had Todd Cantwell proven that the Rangers team should be built around him already but Lammers simply hadn’t played there anywhere near enough to experiment with.
Three reasons why Lammers was equally to blame for poor form
Since moving back to Utrecht where he has just won player of the month, he has reverted to his preferred central striking position and his form has been at the level that got Hofland excited when Lammers was at PSV.
Everything points to the 26-year old being more comfortable as a number nine, however, that doesn’t mean that Philippe Clement should be making him the main man next season.
There are three main reasons why:
- His miss against Servette.
- His miss against Hibs.
- His miss against Celtic.
None of these incidents had anything to do with what position he was playing in.
All of them should have been scored and they are no different to chances that he is scoring at Utrecht now and making them look easy.
Michael Beale didn’t do Rangers or Sam Lammers any favours with how he was utilised in his time at Ibrox, but football fans have eyes.
It will take more than numbers to rewrite what Rangers fans saw in the first half of the season.
