As has been widely reported, Rangers’ training camp has been struck by a sickness bug, and there are reports that one to five key players are likely to miss the weekend visit of St Johnstone.

This is a bit of a problem for Rangers, depending on who these players are, because as we saw against Kilmarnock in the second half, Rangers only need to lose one key player for the performance to go downhill.

We saw it again when Derek McInnes’ bad management saw Ryan Naderi start up front and the omission of Kevin Kelsy in the nine slot.

This meant that although it was a management choice, Rangers were down another key player, and we saw how poor Rangers were up north in Tayside.

Rangers face a potential selection crisis

Consequently, losing potentially up to five key players due to the obligatory winter sickness bug is definitely cause for alarm against a St Johnstone side who will be no pushovers in Govan this afternoon.

St Johnstone themselves are fifth in the table and have been a fairly hardy bunch this season, just as we projected about Dundee.

And of course, we saw how that one worked out.

Rangers’ consistency had been solid over that ten-match winning spree. But that has taken something of a bump in the last two with that flaky win over Kilmarnock and then the draw at Dens.

So losing potentially up to five key personnel would be a huge blow for Rangers.

Which Rangers players could miss out?

The key players in question are, of course, at the moment a bit of a mystery. But clearly one of them is not Nico Raskin.

However, others who have performed that could lose out on this one, and this is just our conjecture, would be James Penrice, Owethu Makhanya, Dujon Sterling and Ryan Naderi.

Naturally, Naderi is a slightly intriguing case because he was abysmal at Dundee. But that was due to how McInnes managed him.

He’s so much more effective in the ten position.

But if he’s unavailable, that creates a whole new dynamic, and we saw the damage him not being in the ten position did to Rangers in the north of Scotland.

Waiting for the Rangers team news

Nevertheless, we will find out around about 2PM who the players are that are not available.

And we sincerely hope that there aren’t too many key players of significant note missing from the matchday squad.