When Rangers fans argue about James Tavernier, it often gets boiled down to one blunt question: can he defend? But that’s not really the full point. The bigger issue is what Rangers managers have actually asked him to do, and how that shapes what you’re watching week to week.
The reality is Tavernier has been used, for years, as an attacking full-back. That’s not a controversial take. It’s been obvious in the role he’s been handed: high starting positions, licence to overlap, constant delivery into the box, and a lot of Rangers’ right-sided threat funnelled through him. If you’re instructed to play on the front foot, you’re going to be caught on the turn sometimes. That’s the trade-off.
He’s not been picked to be a stay-at-home full-back
This is where the “he can’t defend” line needs a bit of care. It’s not that defending doesn’t matter, it clearly does. But if a player keeps getting selected season after season, making the volume of appearances he has, then it tells you something about what the coaching staff value from him.
They’ve wanted the output going forward. They’ve wanted that extra man in attack. And they’ve accepted, at times, that there’s risk attached. You can criticise that balance, absolutely. But you can’t pretend it happened by accident.
Stats without context can be a trap
This is where the “lost possession” stuff comes in. SofaScore and similar sites are all-encompassing in how they record actions, and that can inflate numbers in a way that doesn’t match what your eyes are telling you.
A corner that gets headed clear by a defender can go down as a loss of possession. A clean pass that a team-mate miscontrols can still get pinned on the passer in some databases. Before you know it, a high figure is getting shared around like it’s a smoking gun, when it might just be describing the nature of a high-volume, high-risk role.
That’s why comparing like-for-like roles matters too. Using someone like Fernandes as a comparator isn’t about saying they’re the same player, it’s about giving people a reference point for how attacking players rack up these totals.
Even elite players cough it up plenty
It’s also worth remembering that even top-level full-backs lose the ball a lot, especially the ones asked to create. The example given is Trent Alexander-Arnold being recorded by SofaScore as losing possession more than 45 times last season across three games, while playing for the English champions. That doesn’t make him poor. It reflects the amount of involvement and the difficulty of what he attempts.
And that’s the key. If you want to say Tavernier’s time is up, fair enough. Plenty of fans are at that point. But if we’re going to use numbers as the basis, they need context, or we’re just arguing with half the picture.
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