Sign up now! Sign up now! Sign up now? Sign up now!
Back in September, when the Rangers website revealed the club “were thrilled to announce” the signing of a Portuguese striker from Everton for £8m, the reaction from fans could only have been more downbeat if the player in question had been Beto. On Reddit, one overwrought supporter described the deal to bring Youssef Chermiti to Ibrox as being “everything that is wrong with football”, noting that the 21-year-old had “rocked up” in Glasgow with nothing to show for his short time in the game except a £5,000 Van Cleef & Arpels bracelet and “teeth straight out of a designer dentist”. (At this point it is probably also worth noting that Football Daily has been knocking around since before Youssef was even a mischievous gleam in his father’s eye and has achieved so little that we’d never even heard of the high-end jewellers until we read the disparaging post in question.)
Before Sunday, apart from scoring twice in a win over Celtic in January, Chermiti had done little to justify what, by fitba standards, is an enormous price tag and has recently underwhelmed to such an extent that many Rangers fans felt he shouldn’t have been let within an ass’s roar of the pitch for the visit of Scottish Premiership leaders Hearts. Luckily for them, head coach Danny Röhl knew better and Chermiti left the field threatening to blind his many detractors with the glare from his pearly whites after scoring a crucial hat-trick to help Rangers come from behind to beat the Jambos 4-2. “Let’s not speak until the end of the season about the mentality of this group,” roared Röhl, before speaking about his group’s mentality. “Because we have a lot of mentality. We fully deserved over 90 minutes to win, we gave them two presents today.”
