Ian McCall has revealed the excited phone call he got from Lawrence Shankland after he had learned Rangers wanted to sign him.
The Ibrox club took advantage of a clause in the striker's Hearts contract to sign him for free just one year into his three-year Tynecastle contract.
He was announced by Rangers on May 26 and the story first appared in the press on May 23. But it would appear the move had been in the works for a while before that as Shankland had disclosed it to McCall almost two weeks previous.
Speaking on Open Goal, the striker's former Ayr United boss said: "I did the (Partick) Thistle game v Dunfermline, the play-off game, it was the Thursday night. I got a call from Lawrence while I was on air and then a text: 'You need to phone me straight away.'
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"I phoned him after the game and he was like, 'You’ll never guess.' I said I could guess because I got a text from somebody at Hearts that they might need my help with Lawrence again. He just said, 'You’ll never guess who’s in for me.' Putting two and two together, it was Rangers.
"He wasn’t actually looking for advice; he was just looking for me to say, 'You’ve got to go,' and he did. He deserves everything he gets. He’s a fine boy and it is a great story the way he’s come through. It probably should have happened years before.
"See when you see a boy even in League One and then in the Championship going left foot, right foot, movement off the left, movement off the right, pings, curls, chips - he scored a few from 50 yards - you can tell that type of boy is going to score goals."
McCall says not a lot has changed in Shanland as a player over the years - the biggest shift has been in mindset.
Asked for the biggest difference in the 30-year-old, he said: "Psychologically. We didn't do a lot of things that are natural to him, but it was certainly psychological because as much as outwardly he seemed confident, everybody that knows Lawrence well will know this: when he arrived at us, his confidence was gone. He was putting a brave face on it."
