There’s a part of the Tom Lawrence debate that always gets messy because it stops being about football. I get why people feel strongly, and I’m not here to lecture anyone either. But at some point the constant hatred becomes its own trap, and it rarely helps Rangers move forward.
I’m speaking from a place that’s not theoretical. I was injured by someone driving over the limit, in my case through drugs. It’s more than a year on and I’m still dealing with it. My left elbow is a lot better, but it’s not what it was and I’m still on icepacks four times a day. That sort of thing changes how you see these conversations. You can be angry, you can think someone acted disgracefully, but if you live in that headspace forever it just eats away at you.
Let the justice system deal with the punishment
Lawrence made a bad error in his life. And what he did afterwards was cowardly, in my view. I’m not soft-soaping that. But he’s paid his dues in the way the system decided, and whether we think that was enough or not, it’s not really at our discretion.
Truth is, our justice system can feel like a joke at times. It leaves victims and families sitting with the consequences long after the headlines are gone. That’s exactly why I understand the anger when it flares up again. But if the question is whether Rangers fans should keep re-living it every week, I’m not sure that’s healthy for anyone.
The real Rangers call: does he affect games?
Where I land is this: I wish him well moving forward, but I hope it isn’t at Rangers. And that’s got nothing to do with his past. It’s about what he brings to the team, or more accurately what he doesn’t bring often enough.
At Rangers you need players who can take a match by the scruff of the neck. Not just a tidy touch here and there, but real influence when the game’s stuck, when the tempo drops, when the crowd’s getting edgy. That’s the bar at Ibrox. If you’re a forward-thinking midfielder or an attacker, you’re judged on end product, on moments, on doing it regularly. Too often it feels like Lawrence is around the edges rather than at the heart of it.
So aye, I’d separate the two things. You can condemn the bad decision, and you can still say: from a Rangers point of view, it might be time to move on because he simply doesn’t offer enough.
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