Michael Beale is confident that Leon King’s time as a first-team player at Rangers will come eventually – but the Ibrox manager does not want to disrupt the team’s current centre-back pairing of Connor Goldson and Ben Davies.
King, a product of the Glasgow club’s academy, made his first-team debut aged 16 and featured during the Champions League this season after injuries to important players left previous manager Giovanni van Bronckhorst short of options at the back.
The 19-year-old centre-half has found game-time hard to come by since summer signing Davies returned to fitness but Beale feels this is simply a case of the defender’s minutes on the pitch reverting to the mean, rather than a criticism of the youngster’s progress.
“If you look at young Leon, he played the most minutes of anyone in the Champions League aged under 21, but he played because of injuries — no Fil Helander, no John Souttar, no Connor Goldson, at times no Ben Davies,” Beale observed.
“That really hurt the club in two competitions this season. In the Champions League and it hurt us in the league for sure.
“Since Ben Davies and Connor Goldson have come back and played together, the team has performed really strongly.
“Leon is training really well every day but he’s an 19-year-old centre-back who is playing for a club where the pressure, the expectation and amount of media coverage is really high.
“He will have taken a lot from those experiences and he’s probably played a lot more than he thought he would this season. Now it’s probably averaging out to where he thought it would be.
“He is now sitting behind three fit, senior centre-halves and pushing them in training. He’s learning from them every day.
“He had his football in a very condensed period and would probably have wanted it over a period of time over the whole year. He’s still one we have high hopes for and one we’re proud to have developed from the academy.”
Rangers host Raith Rovers in the quarter-finals of the Scottish Cup this afternoon and King will be hoping to be afforded an opportunity to impress his manager. Beale expects the teenager to feature between now and the end of the campaign but the Englishman is understandably reluctant to give any player guarantees over their playing time.
“If he deserves it,” Beale added. “Like all of them. We’re trying to put value on the shirt and if you’ve got it, you have to keep it.”
