Yahoo News I almost left Aston Villa to join Steven Gerrard but Rangers ignored my phone calls
Former Aston Villa striker Ross McCormack has revealed that he came closing to leaving the club to return north of the border and join Rangers, prior to heading Down Under and trying his hand in Australia's A-League - but the Glasgow club ignored his agent's calls.
McCormack signed for Villa from Fulham, during the manic first transfer window of the Dr Tony Xia era. McCormack cost £12m from Fulham, as part of a transfer spree which cost Villa north of £60m and which continued into the January transfer window. Things began well for the forward under Roberto Di Matteo, with goals against Huddersfield and Nottingham Forest, but things began to turn awry for him under Steve Bruce.
McCormack infamously was dug out by Bruce, who accused him of failing to attend training after the electric gates outside of his house one morning refused to open. He signed a four-year contract upon arriving at Villa but didn't play for the club again after January 2017 and embarked on a series of loan ventures away from B6.
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The first was at nearby Nottingham Forest, while the following season he headed to Australia and excelled in the A-League, netting 14 goals for Melbourne City. Returning to Villa in 2018, still under Bruce's management and having missed out on promotion - and, because of Xia, in deep trouble before NSWE swooped in - McCormack would eventually return to Oz, with Central Coast Mariners.
He has now claimed that, in that summer, he was all set to join new manager Steven Gerrard at Ibrox - he had just replaced Graeme Murty as manager of the Gers and was making changes to his inherited squad. McCormack was ready to leave Villa again, only Rangers ghosted him and his agent and the move never materialised.
"A bit of both," he explained to the Open Goal channel, when asked if leaving for Australia was due to a lack of UK offers or to get away from his surroundings at the time. "The only other move at that period of time was I was going to go to Rangers on a season-long loan with Steven Gerrard and then the day I was meant to go and do the medical and sign, they just stopped answering the phone to my agent.
"I don't know [why]. I've got an idea but I'll probably keep it to myself. I was literally going into Aston Villa to train with the under-16s or whatever it was and then up to Glasgow to do a medical, but then they didn't answer the phone."
Although McCormack, who did eventually move back to Scotland on loan, in 2019, with Motherwell, and who hung up his boots after a short spell with Aldershot Town in 2020, signed for Di Matteo in the summer of '16, he admits he didn't have a particular rapport with the Italian, who had four years earlier guided Chelsea to Champions League glory.
"He was one of those, I've got nothing good or bad to say about him," McCormack reflected. "We just didn't really have a connection. Steve Clarke was his assistant manager, so he basically took most of the training and Di Matteo would come in every now and then, if he had to say something.
"He was probably leaning towards an attacking manager. We played a lot of good football, our problem was that we just conceded a lot of late goals, either to become a draw or become a defeat. He was there for eight or nine games, and then he was gone."
Still, despite the less than satisfactory way in which things might've unfolded for McCormack at Villa, he spoke especially highly of their home.
"It's pristine, see inside of it? When you're in the lounges, and even in the tunnel," he added. "You feel like it must get a makeover every three weeks, it's that pristine. The only pressure at Villa when I got there was that I was looking at the squad thinking 'we have got to get promoted', but we were never really anywhere near it, to be honest."
