By Paul Cooper

After Rangers’ most recent defeat at Kilmarnock on Sunday, disgruntled fans have taken to social media baying for blood, with misfiring striker Cyriel Dessers firmly in their sights. 

Although he scored 22 goals last season (his first in Scotland) across all competitions, the jury was still very much out on Dessers going into this season, this was based on his goals to misses ratio, leaving many fans frustrated and believing he wasn’t the striker to take the club forward.

Lifelong Rangers fan Gary Denver, 20, said:”Look at the goals he scored, on the face it might be a big number, but he could have had easily double that just from the chances he missed alone.”

“It’s the games against Ross County, where he has maybe two, three touches in the full game, then that’s it, the next week he’ll score a double and everybody’s back to saying ‘but he’s scoring goals’, that isn’t the way football works, you need to be involved each week.”

He has started this season in a similar fashion, scoring 5 goals in 14 appearances, including an impressive late equaliser (where he started and finished the move) in Rangers’ European Champions league qualifying match against Dynamo Kiev in Poland.

These numbers would make fans of most provincial teams happy, but when playing as a main striker for one of Glasgow’s big two, the expectation is higher.

Performance Analyst John Walker said;”Dessers needs to hit 35 goals to appease anyone, he needs to start being clinical. 1 chance, 1 goal.

“I think the coaching staff should be simplifying his detail on a 121 analysis basis.”

On his X (formerly Twitter page) John elaborates more on this by highlighting the runs that elite strikers make, he uses this analysis on clips of Dessers play to show how a more direct change to this part of his game could help him get more goals.

On one of the clips, John commented: “Dessers goal tally would rise if he didn’t overthink his movement and just get into the critical areas.”

Gary also said: “I’ve watched him throughout every game and I can tell you he’s just not Rangers quality, he’s missing too many big chances, they are the stats that I care about.”

Pic: Cyriel Dessers in his FC Utrecht days, Credit: Soccer.ru (Wikimedia Commons Cc-3.0)