RANGERS will refuse to sell key players James Tavernier and Alfredo Morelos in the final days of the summer transfer window.
Boss Steven Gerrard has expressed his desire to retain captain Tavernier and top-scorer Morelos in recent weeks as he looks to lead Rangers to the Premiership title this term.
Gerrard admitted he had received no assurances from the Ibrox board over the futures of his most influential players but it is understood that chairman Dave King will grant him his wish and refuse to do any multi-million deals before the close of business on Monday night.
Gerrard said: “I haven’t had any assurance. I have just said the decision myself. None of my best players are going. Because we want to push on, we to keep growing and we want to improve. We want to get better. We don’t want to get weaker.
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“Letting one of our best players go now weakens us seriously. And it is almost impossible now to go and get a player from another club to replace. So I’d be extremely disappointed if the board didn’t back me on that decision. But I’ve had no assurances on it.
“Look, it’s not my club. That’s the brutal answer. It’s not my club.
“But I have got confidence in the board that they want to take this team forward and they want to be successful moving forward.
“I’d be very surprised if I got a phone call or a visit to say: ‘Look, we have had this bid for one of our better players and we are going to accept it.’
“I’d be extremely surprised. But you know and I know that anything can happen in football.”
Morelos proved his worth to Rangers once again on Thursday night as he netted the goal that beat Legia Warsaw to clinch a Europa League group stage berth for the second time.
Rangers will now face Porto, Young Boys and Feyenoord in the coming months as they look to compete at home and abroad this term.
“Possibly,” Gerrard said when asked if qualification for the Europa League had had helped ensure no key players would be leaving.
“I haven’t spoken to the board in terms of if we qualified or not.
“The truth is we haven’t had a fax or a phone call offering a certain amount of money for these players. It hasn’t happened and we don’t want to sell our best players.”
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Gerrard has previously insisted that his pursuit of Ryan Kent was over after Liverpool refused to sanction a loan deal for the winger.
But there could still be business done at Ibrox as Rangers attempt to offload a handful of fringe players.
Gerrard said: “Nothing has changed [on Kent]. Liverpool have got a price. The reason we did our business early was to give ourselves the best chance to qualify for Europe like we did the other night.
“I’m really happy with how the squad’s looking. We need to get two or three up to speed in terms of game minutes. But I’m happy with where we are.
“I don’t want any of my big players to go out. A few of them might go on loan, (Jake) Hastie is a talking to Rotherham, (Eros) Grezda and (Joe) Dodoo have got options, as has (Jason) Holt, and I’m not sure about (Graham) Dorrans as we haven’t heard anything.”
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