The strange case of Alan Gow’s tattered career at Rangers was nearing its conclusion last night as the attacking midfield player was close to clinching a £250,000 move to Wolverhampton Wanderers after holding talks with the Midlands club.

Gow, who has spent the past four months on loan at Blackpool, has drawn much praise for his performances with the Coca-Cola Championship side, prompting Mick McCarthy, the Wolves manager, to make his move. Barring a hitch over personal terms, Gow looks certain to secure his switch to Molineux over the next 24 hours.

If the transfer goes through, it will mark the end of a disastrous 18-month spell at Rangers for the player, who has made no impact at all on Walter Smith’s first-team plans at Ibrox. The Rangers manager confirmed yesterday that Gow was set to leave.

“The clubs have agreed a fee and Alan has gone to speak to Wolves,” Smith said. “It would be a good move for him — Mick McCarthy has done a terrific job down there. Wolves look to be the favourites to go up to the Premiership, so Alan has an opportunity to join a club on the up.”

The move will leave many Rangers fans scratching their heads and wondering why Gow’s career never got off the ground in Glasgow. The former Falkirk player was one of Smith’s first pre-contract signings after returning to the club as manager in January 2007, and Gow was tipped to make an impact at Ibrox after playing so well for John Hughes’s side. Yet he quickly became the invisible man as a batch of other Smith signings soon overtook him in the manager’s plans.

One theory put about is that Gow annoyed Rangers when he refused to be a makeweight in the club’s £3 million-plus purchase of Kyle Lafferty from Burnley in August. Gow was poised to sign for the Turf Moor club as part of the deal but changed his mind about going. He duly stayed at Rangers for the start of the season but was soon festering again before going to Blackpool on loan in early September.

Gow’s only competitive appearance for Rangers came in a low-key League Cup tie against East Fife last season, but he has always kept his own counsel on why his Ibrox career went awry, except to say: “Obviously, it hasn’t worked out as I would have liked at Rangers, so I need to go and get playing football again.”

Others look set to follow Gow out of the Ibrox door during the January window. Christian Dailly, who has hardly featured for the club this season, looks set to leave, while Madjid Bougherra is also said to be a player that Rangers would sell if a good enough price was offered. DaMarcus Beasley is another whose days at the club may be numbered.

Smith, however, expressed his frustration at the way the January transfer window leads to an outpouring of media speculation. “I keep reading about players coming and going — we now almost have speculation about speculation,” the Rangers manager said.

Csaba Laszlo, the Heart of Midlothian manager, has repeated his desire that players will come and not go from Tynecastle over the next 26 days. Hearts are trying to secure their recent pre-contract signing, Ian Black, on an immediate transfer from Inverness Caledonian Thistle rather than wait until the summer, and Laszlo insisted that others will arrive.

He also enjoyed boasting that many scouts from England had visited Tynecastle on Saturday to watch the likes of Laryea Kingston and Christophe Berra in the Edinburgh derby.

“We are bringing Ian Black to the club from Inverness and I think that shows it is not just sell, sell, sell here,” Laszlo said. “Every day I hear that we are going to sell our big players but here we are bringing in the first player [in January] to any club in Scotland.

“A lot of people have been to games to watch my players but there have been no firm offers. If people want to play for the biggest clubs, they have to be playing well for us.

“The situation at the moment is that the most scouts in the country come to watch Hearts, not another club. They come to look at my young players and I think that is a good motivation or incentive for other young players to come to Hearts — because they know that people will take notice of them.”

Kingston, though, does look set to leave Hearts before the window closes. It is an open secret that the club would like the unfit Ghanaian off their wage bill, and the midfield player is attracting plenty of interest from clubs south of the border. “We are active in the transfer market but will not rush,” Laszlo said. “We will keep our eyes open. OK, maybe some players will leave, maybe they won’t. I would like to bring more players to the club. I think everyone can see that we need to have more power up front.”

Meanwhile, Mantas Fridrikas, the FBK Kaunas defender, will soon arrive to train with Hearts, with a loan deal a possibility.