Kemar Roofe constantly delivers for Rangers - Adam Thornton

The unfortunately all too necessary caveat that Rangers fans know is synonymous with more Rangers forwards than we’d like to remember. Sebastian Rozental, Ronald De Boer, Marco Negri, Oleg Salenko.

An element of luck is involved, of course when it comes to player injuries. In the case of Marco Negri, no one could foresee the damage that a rogue squash ball could do on one of the most prolific scorers Rangers had ever had.

Sometimes though, you sign a player who you know has injury problems but quite simply - you realise that this player would be out of your reach if he didn’t have these problems.

Ronald de Boer was one, with Dick Advocaat able to see past these injury concerns and instead focus on the top quality talent the Dutchman could provide to his Rangers team.

According to Transfermarkt, Kemar Roofe has had four separate bouts of injury – mostly related to his calf area - since September 2018. A total of 327 days absence with niggly muscle problems within around a 900-day spell.

Roofe signed for Belgian club Anderlecht from Leeds in the summer of 2019 and scored 5 goals in his first 10 appearances. He would go on to add another 2 goals before succumbing to the second of those calf injuries which ultimately ended his season prematurely on 12th January 2020.

According to press reports, the then 27-year-old had been a player Rangers were tracking for a number of months prior to his move to Anderlecht, therefore we must assume that the club weighed up the pros and cons and decided that the potential for Roofe missing games through injury was ultimately a risk worth taking.

Given that Anderlecht were happy to do business at a noticeably discounted fee, it's perhaps clear that they thought differently.

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For some clubs, it can be worth it depending on their club philosophy and their aims for the season. Rangers had a lot of high potential within the squad such as Ryan Kent, Alfredo Morelos and Ianis Hagi and they had experienced veterans like Steven Davis, Scott Arfield and Jermain Defoe. What they craved in their quest for the league title were ‘win now’ players such as Roofe who were coming into their prime and ready to make a big impact on the first team.

In his first season at the club, Kemar Roofe made just 24 appearances for Rangers in the league, appearing in less than two-thirds of the 38 matches available but still managing to score 14 goals. This is all the more impressive when you consider Roofe only actually played 1614 minutes in the league, which works out at around 18 full 90 minutes. Yet he managed to score a goal in every 115 minutes of football. For context, Morelos made 29 league appearances and weighed in with 12 goals from a total of 2143 minutes.

With Ryan Kent’s role primarily as a dribbler and creator on the left-hand side – and the huge attacking role James Tavernier plays in the final third on the right, there was definitely space for a player who could position themselves higher on the pitch and add another avenue of decisive firepower in dangerous areas.

In a Rangers team that has been hugely reliant on goals from Alfredo Morelos, having another player in the attacking areas who can contribute goals was hugely welcome as this gives the team another dimension to their attack and encourages them to be less predictable in their build-up play.

In the graphic above, we see how invaluable Roofe was to Rangers attacking output last season. The Scoring contribution metric looks to measure the combination of goals and assists each player scored in the league last season.

As you can see, Roofe contributed the most to the Rangers attack by a considerable distance, with Ianis Hagi and Alfredo Morelos the next highest on the list. Both Hagi and Roofe just seem to have a decisive knack in front of goal, whether it’s the lethal instinct to score a half chance that Roofe possesses, or the vision and technical ability that Hagi has to execute the final pass at a crucial moment.

The fantastic output of both players is more commendable when you consider both were not always guaranteed their place within the first XI every week.

Some players need a run in the team to regain match sharpness before we start to see them contributing regularly but this was not the case for Hagi and Roofe which is an often overlooked but fundamentally important benefit to a team like Rangers which needs players who can contribute big moments when called upon.

Note also the contribution of Cedric Itten, a player who most fans would agree hasn’t benefited from a long run on the pitch, yet based on his output had a handy knack of contributing albeit with much more limited minutes.

As you can see from the table above, of all SPFL players who played more than 600 minutes of league football last season, Kemar Roofe had the joint highest output in the division with 0.95 goals + assists per 90 minutes of football.

It is also interesting to note that Roofe was scoring at a rate of 0.78 goals per 90 minutes compared to an xG figure of 0.57 per 90 minutes. Ordinarily, this would indicate that the player is consistently finishing more difficult chances than would be expected and could indicate that this is a trend that is unlikely to continue.

Conversely, and I believe accurately in this case, it can also be argued that great finishers, as Kemar Roofe undoubtedly is, will finish more difficult chances more regularly than other forward, such is the higher level of skill he possesses. In essence, a difficult chance for an inferior player, may not be quite as difficult for someone like Roofe.

Despite the contributions of both Morelos & Roofe when they featured last season, for the most part, Steven Gerrard elected to use one or the other in his starting lineup, but rarely both.

Whilst there was a period of justified rotation in the late autumn early winter months due to the hectic league and Europa group stage schedule – and Roofe missing games through injury – there was an opportunity for both players to play together more regularly than they did.

They appeared together in the league for the first time in late November, in a 4-0 win against Aberdeen. Morelos & Roofe then started five of the next eight games together up to and including the 1-0 Celtic win in January in which Roofe picked up a first-half injury.

He would only miss a few weeks with a thigh niggle but the two players wouldn’t share the pitch for another 13 league games, until the last Old Firm derby of the season, in early May.

Given the outstanding league campaign last year, it is tough to be critical of team selections but it is interesting to note certain trends in games where both players play together.

Overall, the two players appeared together on just eight separate occasions and for a total of 560 minutes – the equivalent of six full games – with over a third of those minutes coming during the last three games of the season, in which Rangers emphatically beat Celtic, Livingston and Aberdeen.

In total, during those 560 minutes together the two combined to score 10 goals, with eight of these being scored by Roofe.

Both players can be stylistically similar in some respects, albeit Roofe doesn’t have the physical profile of Morelos, and this bears out when watching them on the pitch.

Both do like to come deep and link play at times, albeit Morelos is much more all-action, preferring to take the ball in with his back to goal and drag defenders with him to create openings in behind.

In his most recent appearance, a 4-2 victory against Ross County, Morelos received the ball on 41 occasions from a teammate - the highest number in his Rangers career to date. In Kemar Roofe's last start, a 5-0 League Cup win against Dunfermline, he received just 17 passes from teammates yet still finished the game with 2 goals to his name.

Roofe has much more of a languid, almost lethargic style outside of the box and the similarities to Mo Johnston during his time at Rangers cannot be ignored. Whilst Roofe is not quite a classic penalty box striker, neither does he contribute hugely in build-up play. What he excels in is his economy of touch and movement, every action feels deliberate and well thought out and he can be utterly clinical when within sight of goal.

The 4-1 victory against Celtic in early May showcases how the two can work together in a 4-3-1-2 formation. Given Morelos, propensity to drop deeper and his natural gravitation towards the right-hand side of the penalty box, this creates the space that Roofe and Ryan Kent crave in the middle of the penalty area. This was evidenced in his first goal of the game, with Roofe barely involved in the build-up play and instead positioning himself intelligently between Stephen Welsh and Greg Taylor in the Celtic defence.

As the attack breaks down and Rangers win the ball back via Kamara to keep the pressure on the Celtic defence by Kent and Kamara, Roofe has remained static in this area waiting for an opportunity to come his way.

The ball eventually finds its way to him in the box and he does literally the only thing possible to get a shot on target, guiding the ball towards goal with his chest. It's this quick thinking and an absolute need to get a shot on target that makes him such an important player for Rangers.

Efficient and Clinical

Goal conversion is a measurement that tracks how many of a player's shots result in a goal.

Of all SPFL players who attempted more than 50 shots on goal in the league last season, Kemar Roofe’s goal conversion rate was 27% which is an outstanding return. For context, the next highest in the league was Motherwell’s Devante Cole (now at Barnsley) at 19% whilst Morelos (15%) and Odsonne Eduoard (13%) could be considered as almost half as efficient as Roofe at turning their shots into goals.

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Efficient and clinical are the two words that sum up Kemar Roofe’s contributions in his time at Rangers and it’s something that shows no sign of letting up.

As you can see from his shot map from last season’s league campaign, there is a high concentration of shots in central areas. Roofe has such a focus on attempting shots from these high-value areas as he knows he has a far greater chance of finding the back of the net. This is of course the fundamental aim of all strikers, but the consistency with which Roofe does this speaks volumes for just how good he is in the penalty area.

Roofe has been unavailable for most of this campaign, not through injury but a mixture of suspension and family illness which has resulted in just three appearances and a total of 128 minutes on the pitch. In those three games, Roofe has attempted just seven shots, yet six of them have been on target scoring three goals in the process. Efficient and clinical.

Having two goalscorers in the team who are still able to contribute very effectively outside of the box is something that could be crucial for Rangers moving forward this season. As mentioned earlier in the article, this only happened eight times in the league with the manager and coaching staff possibly preferring the guile of Ianis Hagi and Joe Aribo when trying to break down stuffy teams, but firepower is always a good thing to have in any team.

It is perhaps unrealistic to expect a player of Roofe’s age and injury history to suddenly become robust and available for selection every week, but if Rangers are able to minimise the damage and rotate him intelligently to ensure availability for certain games, Roofe has proved that more often than not, when the ball drops to him in the box, he’s the one who consistently deliver.