Tom Lawrence's Rangers return: Why midfielder is 'racing ahead' as he delivers true talking point from Hamburg win

Tom Lawrence made his long-awaited Rangers return after months sidelined by injury.

Not when that Ibrox player was Tom Lawrence, though. Not when this full-blood intervention came within seconds of the attacker’s 78th-minute introduction that ended 11 months sidelined with cruel knee and groin issues. Much as supplying new striker Cyriel Dessers with his first minutes and encouraging showings from Kieran Dowell and Sam Lammers and the reappearance of injury-prone Kemar Roffe will have contented Beale, Lawrence’s availability – the 30-year-old cheered to the rafters as he made his way on – will have been the most encouraging development of a day that delivered a 2-1 victory.

Signed on free last summer, former Derby midfielder Lawrence netted three times and contributed two assists to help Rangers into the Champions League before he was stricken only a month into the season. His return can be akin to enhancing the possibilities Beale has through his – at this point – seven new arrivals.

“It was always going to be towards the end of August when he could really put his foot to the floor and be at the maximum of being back,” said the Rangers manager. “He’s racing ahead. In training, when we’re doing the smaller, tighter stuff he looks fantastic and shows his quality. We know that there’s a step from that to a real game but it’s wonderful to have him back, similar to Kemar, two players that we were robbed of last season.”

James Tavernier celebrates his goal against Hamburg from the penalty spot.

Fusing the shedload of players at his disposal into a fluid team might be Beale’s most onerous task. He spoke of the “interesting” permutations and his deliberate melding of Dessers, Roofe and Lammers in a frontline triangle, in which Lammers was deployed behind the other two. Yet, in a meandering encounter – wherein the once heavyweight Hamburg betrayed that they are about to start their sixth season in the German second tier – it was the old faces who made the telling contributions.

A front three of Abdallah Sima flanked by Fashion Sakala and Rabbi Matondo proved a recipe for chance-missing. Ianis Hagi also got in on that act. All of them passed up some glaring opportunities, Kieran Dowell also drawing a fine block from keeper Daniel Heuer Fernandes. Visiting centre-back Guilherme Ramos seemed to decide his opponents needed more help in crazily attempting to dribble out from the back to end up passing straight to Sakala. The striker then hared forward, Ludovit Reis bouncing off him after a weak challenge, before poking the ball through the keeper’s leg. Ramos, not content with that 38th-minute mishap, then was guilty of another in on the stroke of the interval, becoming a human scythe as he needlessly cleaned out Sakala, for a penalty tucked away by James Tavernier.

The second period seemed to produce a drop intensity – which was never that keen in the first place – as the carousel of substitutions left the contest in a roundabout holding pattern, aave for the glimpses of Lawrence, Roofe and Dessers. In added-time a moment of quality that never seemed as if it would be forthcoming from Hamburg arrived in the form of a tasty curling free-kick from Jun-Luc Dompe that flew into the top left-handed of Jack Butland’s net.