Star signing Yilmaz’s absence is baffling

RIDVAN YILMAZ arrived at Rangers in a deal that could end up being worth as much as £5million having won a league title with Besiktas, played in the Champions League and earned six full caps for Turkey.

To listen to the high heid yins at Rangers as they continue their perplexing round of interviews with organisations happy to let them warble on unchallenged, you’d think he’d only been playing for the school team and being run to and from the games by his mammy before he arrived in Glasgow.

The tone is clear. He’ll be judged over five years rather than five weeks. He’s a young player. He needs time to settle. There was the same noise over Calvin Bassey.

There is no comparison. Bassey arrived at Rangers with no first-team experience at all. He cost buttons. Yilmaz (right) is 21 with silverware and caps already in the bank. He was the star signing of the summer.

There is no ‘noise’ around Yilmaz, no criticism. Because no one has seen him. The fact we are now in October and he still isn’t anywhere near the team can’t be waved away as something perfectly normal. Particularly when Rangers invested a massive chunk of what we now know was a surprisingly limited summer budget on him. People with connections are now talking about Yilmaz not being tall enough or physical enough. That cannot possibly be a genuine concern within

Ibrox, though. He’s the same stature he was when he was scouted.

You can’t rewrite the rules in football. Big summer signings are expected to play. They are expected to hit the ground running.

Hearing manager Giovanni van Bronckhorst admit, though, that John Souttar arrived from Hearts carrying the ankle injury that now requires surgery and will keep him out until next year just makes you wonder all the more about what exactly has been — and is — going on in there.