Fantastic Mr Fox or Basil Brush? – What Should Have Been

This week – the fox in the box, Francis Jeffers…

Jeffers may very well be one of England’s most confusing players. A player who holds the joint-top scoring record at England Under 21 level with Alan Shearer, and looked so good at Everton when he broke through that Arsene Wenger spent £8m on him at a time when you didn’t have to have English players in your squad and he had guys like Henry to call upon, yet somehow his career is remembered more for his failure to score goals than anything else.

For Rangers, Jeffers only played around 14 games, a loan deal from Charlton on transfer deadline day, back when we used to just sign anyone to make sure our fans felt involved in that circus (he was signed on the same day as Olivier Bernard and Filippo Maniero – has there been a day we’ve signed multiple players who contributed so little before or since?). We’d all known how much he’d struggled since moving to Arsenal, but it was Scottish football he was coming to – surely anyone who was once worth £8m would stroll it?

A big deal seemed to be made of his goal in a closed-doors match against Hamilton just after he signed, and that led to his debut, which was in the Champions League, a home game against Porto. He worked hard, missed a great chance and looked like he had decent link up play, and we all thought he just lacked that bit of match sharpness to really get going. In truth, that was as good as it got.

It’s worth noting that we were very poor that season, aside from in the Champions League. Maybe none of our players showed the best of themselves in that squad. However, we would find ourselves getting excited by the news that Jeffers had scored in a reserve game, all the while contributing nothing in that regard to the first team. He’d be defended by some as working hard and improving our overall play, but we were really just looking for positives that didn’t exist. At the age of 24, he’d somehow went from Fantastic Mr. Fox to Basil Brush, and there were no goals for the first team and what was only a 5-month loan deal was cut short and in December he went back to Charlton. I don’t believe he played once for them that season.

If you look at Jeffers goalscoring record over the course of his career, for a player who made his name through getting goals, he never once hit double figures in a season. His best was 7 goals in a couple of seasons he was with Everton, and after leaving Rangers, he had a brief highlight of 5 goals over a year then never beat 3. He wasn’t completely done with Scottish football after his time at Ibrox, as he played around 14 games for Motherwell and scored a couple of goals five years later. His career did go in a downward trajectory from the moment he signed for Arsenal, though.

I’m not even sure how fondly he’ll remember his one cap for England, a friendly against Australia where he scored after coming off the bench, but England lost the game 3-1. He came on at half-time that day next to Wayne Rooney, another Everton graduate who was not far from making a big move, but their careers couldn’t have gone any differently. From a Rangers perspective, it’s worth noting on that night that he replaced James Beattie, who’ll probably have one of these pieces in the near future as he struggled with us as well. At one point, we signed English internationalists who were pretty much world class in the likes of Woods, Butcher, and Steven – funny how quickly things can change…

With all of that in mind, can it be claimed that Jeffers should have been better for us? Surely the point of these articles is to highlight players who never gave us what they offered elsewhere or hinted at so much more? That’s probably fair, but it’s clear that Jeffers had ability at a young age, and whilst injuries certainly hampered him at Arsenal, his move to Rangers should have been a catalyst for better – a lower standard of football at a big club, a real opportunity to show he wasn’t a failure as he’d already been tagged. For that reason, he makes the list because he simply reinforced what many believed. The fox who ran across the park before the Six Nations game against England made a bigger impact on British sport than the Fox in the Box really managed over the course of his career, and will certainly be remembered with more fondness.

Any good Jeffers memories? Tweet us @rangersnewsuk with your thoughts!