Keith Jackson has confirmed that the next Ibrox boss will be decided by message board.
Not only does the Ibrox club give the most extreme online outlets given full media access to players and management but their reactions are monitored to decide on key appointments.
Giovanni van Bronckhorst and Micky Beale were being cheered to the rafters by sites such as Follow Follow before being measured up for a blazer and brogues and presented to a fawning media. Neither appointment worked out very well.
For the first time John Bennett and James Bisgrove are heading up the appointment of the most important job at the club with neither man having any sort of track record in the front line. Douglas Park, Stewart Robertson and Ross Wilson headed up the last two appointments.
Chairman Bennett has been based in London for decades while sitting on the Ibrox board, until the end of July Bisgrove was plastering the Castore shirt with tacky crypto sponsorship deals.
Recent matches at Ibrox has seen anger turned towards the Directors Box with keeping fans placated the key requirement for a new manager.
Going deep into the search for Beale’s successor, Keith Jackson of the Daily Record reveals:
When they reached out to Frank Lampard last week, and arranged an interview with the former Chelsea and Everton boss in London, they must surely have done so in the belief they were engaging with a highly credible candidate for the position.
Chief executive James Bisgrove seemed particularly keen to fix up a face-to-face and even went to the length of asking Graeme Souness to attend the meeting too, in order to listen to what Lampard had to say.
And yet Rangers dropped the whole idea like a hot potato as soon as Record Sport made it public and the supporters reacted to the news by ramping up from angry to apoplectic.
By Friday evening it was being leaked out from Ibrox the discussions with Lampard would be taken no further, which seemed like an attempt at nothing more than crowd control.
All of which points to a club which is running its managerial recruitment process around what is being posted on online message boards and social media sites.
And, if that’s the case, that would be a truly staggering state of affairs – even if, on this occasion, the supporters probably had a point.
Appointing managers based on their message board approval rating is a very risky business which goes some way to explaining the current mess at Ibrox after they were lured into appointing van Bronckhorst and Beale.
There is no overwhelmingly popular candidate this time around but any mention of Derek McInnes is followed by strong levels of abuse for the Kilmarnock manager.
If Beale and Bisgrove are unable to bring someone in this week the Board may have to consider the unthinkable which is either turning to McInnes or continuing with Steve Davis and Alex Rae until they can find someone accepted by the keyboard warriors.
