Never judge a book by it’s cover. An old adage, but sometimes the old ones are the best. Many people already had Dan Neil’s story mapped out at Rangers after just a handful of games under Derek McInnes. This weekend, he took a massive step to rewrite his own narrative.
In some quarters, on the face of it, fans had seen this signing before. Only 12 months before, Joe Rothwell had made the journey north with an impressive reputation as a useful player in the second tier in England and was deemed a ‘midfield general’ for Blackburn and Leeds United, amongst others.
Despite early promising signs, it became abundantly clear to anybody lucky enough to be blessed with sight that Rothwell was ‘never a Rangers player’. For some then, Neil’s arrival from Sunderland was another volume in this collection of English Football League midfielders that cross the border ready to ‘run the league’ only to return humbled before the ink was dry on their contract.
As such, many refused to get their hopes up given how recently they had been burned. Unfair and unjust? Probably. However, the court of public opinion on the terraces can be very had to turn when the tide starts moving in a certain direction. Only performances on the park can do that.
Internally, the reaction towards Neil’s arrival was much more optimistic. On the week that he penned his Ibrox deal, there was a point where it looked like for all the world he would end up hundreds of miles away on the South coast playing for Southampton instead.
This was a key juncture in the career of the 24-year-old and one he admitted that he had to ‘take his time over’. Rangers were on the precipice of missing out on the midfielder for the second time in six months after he had chosen to spend the second half of the season on-loan at promotion chasing (and eventually winning) Ipswich despite the Light Blues’ interest.
That didn’t put Rangers off though and the admiring glances continued towards the summer. It was understandable then that it would have felt like a major victory to secure his services over suitors in the English pyramid. The comparisons with Rothwell, a player at the end of his career, were never fair; here was Neil running after the challenge of Ibrox entering his peak years when the comfortable option would've been to remain in England.
On the park, Neil’s qualities were there for all to see during Sunday’s demolition of Celtic to send his side through the Premier Sports Cup semi-final. His two exquisite goals the cherries on the cake of a performance that saw him run the match from the centre circle and earned comparisons to perhaps the most iconic number 6 in the club’s history – Barry Ferguson.
One of the main attributes that was a selling point for snapping up the former Sunderland skipper though was what he brings to the party off the park. He was handed the armband of his hometown club and led the side up the steps at Wembley to lift the playoff trophy when they won promotion to the English Premier League in 2025. But for stand out performances from Granit Xhaka and Noah Sadiki, there is a world in which Neil is plying his trade in the richest league in the world.
After Sunday’s win he admitted that Rangers is a different animal but the intensity was one of the reason’s that he made the switch saying:
“The emotions up here are a little bit more up and down than at Sunderland but that's just a testament to how big of a club it is and how much people care about it and I think that's the main thing I was looking for.”
For too long, Rangers have had players that were more eager to shirk the challenge rather than run towards it. Neil appears to have the temperament that will face the fire head-on and not let his game suffer under the scrutiny.
As recently as Wednesday when he was named sponsor’s man of the match in a 1-0 over St Mirren there were audible groans of discontent when his name was read out with the game poised at 0-0, before Bojan Miovski’s late winner changed the mood music around Govan.
Fast forward three days and Neil puffed his chest out with the Rangers captaincy bestowed upon him for his Old Firm derby debut and produced a performance for the ages. Pressure? That’s for tyres.
Add to this his reaction at the full time whistle where he was measured in the post match celebrations. While he would have been perhaps the most vindicated of any players to get lost in the moment, it was Neil who was reminded his teammates that it was only one win, an important win, but one win in a long season of challenges.
Read more:
- The Rangers lesson Dan Neil has learned that Sunderland doesn't match
- The bold Rangers plan that explains their dominant Old Firm performance
This is not to say that Neil is the finished article, far from it. He himself said as much reminding everyone that although the side have ‘worked very hard on the training pitch to rectify what we've been doing wrong’ there are still ‘loads of things that we need to improve on, in my opinion as well as everyone else's’.
Neil knows that this is a high water mark in what will be a long process for not just the team but for him more specifically. What Sunday proved though is that Neil is not a cardboard cutout of those that have come and failed before him, he is his own man, ready to write his own chapter in Rangers history.
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