Birmingham City aim to conclude a deal to buy Kris Boyd within the next 48 hours, with Alex McLeish having already lodged a bid of around £3.5 million to lure the Rangers striker south to the Coca-Cola Championship side.

Sources at Birmingham even brazenly asserted last night that Boyd would be presented as a City player alongside McLeish at St Andrew’s tomorrow, though Rangers will want to do more negotiating before that happens.

The Birmingham bid for Boyd is viewed as an extremely difficult one for Rangers, who need a fresh injection of funds but would have a hard job explaining away the sale of their principal goalscorer. Boyd has been in prodigious form, scoring 69 goals in 75 SPL games for the Ibrox club, and on Sunday took his tally for the season to 20 goals in 21 games.

The striker, however, is understood to be interested in the move, apart from anything else for the fact that Birmingham could virtually double his Ibrox wages overnight. Rangers and Birmingham are expected to continue their dialogue today on the possible transfer of the 25-year-old.

If the deal goes through, it will be the second time that McLeish has signed Boyd, having bought him for Rangers from Kilmarnock in January 2006. Yet there would be recriminations around Ibrox over Boyd’s departure.

The bid by Birmingham is a further headache for Walter Smith, who has made it plain that, while needing to trim his squad, he does not want to sell any of his first-team picks such as Barry Ferguson, the captain, Pedro Mendes or Boyd.

The move may prove another discomfort for Smith, who for quite a time over the past 18 months did not view Boyd as effective enough to be an automatic starter for his club.

Yet Smith knows that there is a degree of financial pressure on Rangers that, in the present climate, can be eased only by the sale of such a player as Boyd. Only on Sunday at Inverness, while disputing reports that Newcastle United had contacted Rangers over Barry Ferguson, Smith admitted: “What football manager today can say that, if somebody comes along and makes a bid for one of your players, you don’t have to consider it? You have to. That is what we did last season with Alan Hutton.”

Meanwhile, it was confirmed yesterday that Alan Gow had left Rangers for Wolverhampton Wanderers in a £250,000 deal. “Alan has agreed terms after talks with the club,” Phil McTaggart, Gow’s agent, said. “He has agreed a 2½-year deal and the move will be completed pending a medical this week. “Alan has been impressed by the ambition of Wolves and is hoping to help them in their bid to win promotion to the Premier League.”

Gow played only two games for Rangers — both cup ties against lower-league opposition — after joining from Falkirk on a free transfer in the summer of 2007. However, he scored five goals in 17 matches in a successful loan spell at Blackpool this season and Mick McCarthy, the Wolves manager, moved quickly to sign him at the second attempt, having had a bid for the former Clydebank and Airdrie forward rejected by Falkirk two years ago.