Former Aston Villa striker Ross McCormack has disclosed that he was on the verge of quitting the team to rejoin Rangers north of the border before traveling to Australia to test his luck in the A-League, but the Glasgow team turned down his agent’s calls. During the hectic first transfer window of the Dr. Tony Xia regime, McCormack signed a contract with Villa from Fulham.
As part of a transfer frenzy that cost Villa more than £60 million and extended into the January transfer window, McCormack came from Fulham for £12 million. Under Roberto Di Matteo, the forward had a successful start to the season with goals against Nottingham Forest and Huddersfield, but under Steve Bruce, things started to go wrong for him.
Bruce notoriously dug McCormack out, accusing him of not showing up for training when one morning the automatic gates outside his house wouldn’t open. Upon joining Villa, he signed a four-year contract, however he left the team in January 2017 and went on a number of loan adventures outside of B6.
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.
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