Philippe Clement has confirmed a key Rangers trio will return to action "in a few weeks".

The Ibrox boss revealed Oscar Cortes, Tom Lawrence and Rabbi Matondo are all nearing comebacks for the first-team.

Ahead of the Europa League match against Nice, Clement explained Cortes took part in training for the first time as he ramps up his efforts to return to action.

However, the Rangers manager stated it would still be a few weeks before Cortes is available for selection.

It is a similar situation for Lawrence and Matondo. The duo are said to be "close" to featuring but are not yet ready for minutes.

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"In that way, positive also. We spoke about that last season, we had big periods with 12 players out, long periods like that so Oscar did his first part of the training today so he will need still a few more weeks to be really ready to play games but it's a positive thing.

"Tom Lawrence is also close, it's in the next couple of weeks he will be back, Rabbi Matondo the same and we want to keep it in that way.

"I think John is a good example in that way also for the past year and he has problems in the past and the way he's performing in the last couple of months, regularly playing all these minutes, it's the first time in his career that he plays so many minutes and we have a few other examples in that way also.

"So that's a positive and we want to keep it that way and we're a lot of times busy with prevention, with the power, with the training, doing the right things and now you start to see the fruits of all the things we've been working on the last couple of months, it's not the work of a few weeks to do that and he's also one proof of that.