Rangers: Steve Beaglehole urges Premier League sides to sign £25million Calvin Bassey
Calvin Bassey has added plenty of zeroes to his transfer valuation recently after two standout cup final performances for Rangers.
The 22-year-old Nigerian was supreme in Seville as he almost single-handedly kept Eintracht Frankfurt at arm’s length before Giovanni van Bronckhorst’s side lost on penalties at the Ramon Sanchez Pizjuan.
He then proved again that the Europa League final wasn’t a fluke as he dominated Hampden Park against Hearts in the Scottish Cup final the following weekend.
His former mentor, Steve Beaglehole, believes that if the Light Blues value him at £25million, then Premier League sides should be queuing up to sign him.
“Listen, from what I have seen and how prices are going in the Premier League, if anybody rang me and said ‘we can get him, would you pay £20million or £25million’ then I would say ‘snap their hands off’,” Beaglehole said to the Herald.
“If you can get him for that, that is what I would say. “He is a left-sided centre-back, with his physicality and athleticism, that is only going to get better. The more he plays, he is getting a lot better technically and he is a lot better technically now than when he left us.
“He always had fantastic pace and power and that gets him out of trouble when he makes mistakes, which he will do as he develops in the position. As he matures, he will make fewer mistakes and his pace will be an even greater asset because he will nick things and be breaking out with it.”
Redefining
We have always been able to tell that there are few players in world football as physically apt as Bassey is but we were worried about his technical ability and game knowledge.
Those concerns have been blown out of the water in the second half of this season as he has come on leaps and bounds to be the Scottish Premiership’s most dominant defender.
You can tell that whenever an opposition player realises who they are up against, they start to run away from the Nigerian rather than attacking him and sometimes they even stop and turn around to not get embarrassed by him.
£25million is perhaps not enough for a player who is already this good but also has the potential to grow and become arguably one of the world’s very best in his position and we will regret it if we let him go on the cheap.
At the same time though, that amount of money would allow van Bronckhorst to revolutionise the squad in his image and build a group that would be able to regain the Gers’ Scottish crown from their Glaswegian neighbours.
In other Rangers news, one of the club’s young goalkeepers has penned a new deal where he’ll hope to play a little bit more than he has this season.