Jak Alnwick on a proving mission - but only to himself - after lack of opportunity at Rangers

New St Mirren goalkeeper was never given a chance at Ibrox

Jak Alnwick: Caught in the Ibrox ‘managerial churn’. Picture: SNS.

An inability to dislodge Allan McGregor at Rangers hasn’t left Jak Alnwick feeling he will have anything to prove to the supporters of the Ibrox club when they see him with new club St Mirren.

All the product of the Newcastle United academy hopes is that the breaks can favour him in Paisley as they never did over the past two and a half years – the 27-year-old freed by Rangers having spent the past two seasons on loan at Blackpool and Scunthorpe United.

Caught in the managerial churn at Ibrox in being signed by Mark Warburton “and within two weeks he’d gone and all of a sudden you go from Warbs to [Graeme] Murty to [Pedro] Caixinha back to Murty to [Steven] Gerrard all within the space of a couple of years [and] it was tough for the managers to come in and make big changes.”

Alnwick was never given a senior appearance by Gerrard. In clocking up 11 games, his best run came at the end of the 2017-18 before the former England captain took charge, and included a visitors’ man of the match display away to Celtic... in a 5-0 title-settling defeat.

“First and foremost, I want to prove to myself that I can do it,” Alnwick said. “In my time at Rangers, I played a few games and was quite pleased with a lot of them.

“Obviously the [League Cup] semi-final against Motherwell [in October 2017] I was disappointed with but in the quarter-final I got man of the match. That shows when you are not playing every week that you are going to have that inconsistency.

“I’d rather show to my manager at the time – the gaffer here – what I can do and prove it to myself. If Rangers turn round in a year’s time and think ‘yeh, we didn’t really give him his opportunity’ then that’s brilliant. That will mean I’ve done my job properly. It’s not about proving anything.”

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