JOEY Barton has been told to return to "full-time training" now that his six-week suspension at Rangers has come to an end, but an ambiguously-worded statement from the club stopped short of saying the midfielder would be welcomed back into the first-team fold.
The controversial 34-year-old has been absent since a training-ground row with Andy Halliday and manager Mark Warburton in the wake of September's 5-1 loss at Celtic Park.
While the player remained suspended on full pay following a meeting involving both his and the club's lawyers last Thursday, yesterday came the news that he will be expected to fulfil certain training arrangements as part of his contract, which still has more than 18 months to run.
Barton has been linked with a return to his former club Burnley, perhaps as early as January, and the club may suspect that returning him to first-team training sessions could have a destabilising effect.
"The Auchenhowie management team will inform the player of appropriate training arrangements to which he must adhere for as long as he remains a Rangers player," a statement read. "Neither the Club nor the player will comment further."
The latest developments in the Barton saga came on a day when the club's other marquee summer signing, Niko Kranjcar, was down in London, going under the knife with a cruciate knee ligament injury which is likely to keep him out a minimum of six months.
The 32-year-old former Croatia international, another man signed on a two-year deal this summer, has been out of action since mid-October. While this was the worst possible prognosis, manager Mark Warburton insisted that his player had the mental fortitude to fully recover.
"It's an ACL reconstruction which he is doing literally right now with the top knee surgeon in the country, Andy Williams," said Warburton. "It's a blow. There's not point masking that. We knew what he could do. We couldn't predict the timescale it would take for him to get where he wanted but every day he did extra in training. He went back to see his family in Croatia and worked with a fitness coach and produced heart-rate data every single day. He was seeing the fruits of that so to lose that calibre of technical player is a blow," he added. "But from a negative comes a positive and Jordan [Rossiter] is coming back from injury and Matt Crooks is getting fit. Then there's the form of Josh Windass, [Jason] Holt and [Andy] Halliday. Someone's pain is someone's gain."
Another development yesterday was confirmation that Rangers would travel to Germany during the Scottish winter break this January to take on Oliver Burke's Red Bull Leipzig side. Leipzig, who have enjoyed a fairytale start to life in Germany's top tier and currently sit in second place in the Bundesliga, only two points behind leaders Bayern Munich, will host the Ibrox side at the Red Bull Arena on Sunday January 15. A plan to get warm weather training at a tournament in Florida was given consideration, but rejected as the risks involved were too great.
"I’ve got issues with the three week break, so we have to arrange a game," said Warburton. "It will be a tough test but you have to take yourself out of your comfort zones. There was an option of a top quality tournament, but we might have had to have come back on the Tuesday morning with a Scottish Cup tie on the Friday night. Had we been drawn away to Inverness or Aberdeen? Could you imagine the headlines? It would have been Mickey Mouse and the likes. We couldn’t take that risk."
Warburton said the club were already talking to the family of Billy Gilmour, the promising young player who has been starring for Scotland's Under-16 team in the Victory Shield , in an effort to persuade him to commit his long-term future to the club. The 15-year-old, man of the match in the 2-0 win against Northern Ireland at Oriam on Sunday, has been attracting interest from major European clubs including Manchester United, who would be able to take him south of the border for a modest fee due to rules on cross-border transfers.
"The clubs and the scouting networks down south have no doubt," said Warburton. "They know all the best players in Europe. They know all of their situations, their agents, their families, their mum's names, that is how they work. They are all competing for the same few exciting talents. Billy Gilmour is an outstanding talent so of course our job is to persuade him it is good for his future to stay at Rangers. But it is a tough battle, it really is."
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