Gary Keown has called on Ibrox Chairman John Bennet to show some leadership and sack Micky Beale.
Who follows on from the Brains Behind Gerrard is an equally important issue and how they get a tune out of a job-lot of summer duds that were personally endorsed by Beale after long and meaningful chats to assess their character.
Regardless of the salary on offer working with Sam Lammers, Cyriel Dessers, Jose Cifuentes and Dujon Sterling isn’t likely to boost your reputation which means that the candidates are likely to come from a small talent pool such as David Martindale, Neil McCann, Kevin Thomson, Duncan Ferguson or Nacho Novo.
Three defeats in seven SPFL matches is exactly the same start as Ange Postecoglou suffered two years ago, that is where the comparisons end.
Celtic had a far tougher fixture list with the new boss piling up some credit with a couple of 6-0 home wins and a definite style of play being delivered. From October 2 through until the end of the season Postecoglou’s side drew four matches and won the rest to take the title.
That excuse was put up for Beale after losing on day one at Kilmarnock, despite having seven months to prepare for the new campaign.
Since Celtic won at Ibrox on September 3 Beale has been a dead man walking, Keown has had his doubts about the Londoner from day one
Opening his heart up over the pain caused by Beale, today in the Daily Mail Keown pleads for decisive action:
NOTE to Rangers chairman John Bennett. Let’s have no more chat from Michael Beale about players’ goals-to-minutes ratios and all sorts of other irrelevant statistics.
Just put the poor fella out of his misery and let everyone get on with life.
Yesterday’s 3-1 home defeat by Aberdeen has to be the final straw. Surely.
It feels cruel to even harp on about this any longer. Rather than counting up xG and all the rest of it, the only calculations the Rangers board should be obsessing over are the severance fees for Beale and his staff and the future bill for finding a proper, experienced manager — and maybe a new director of football — to try to rescue a rapidly disintegrating campaign.
Beale was a lazy appointment. There was nothing to suggest he was ready for a job of this magnitude. And he wasn’t. The guy really needs to go away and find somewhere to learn his trade properly — and learn from his mistakes.
Bennett needs to start learning from the litany of errors that have been made at boardroom level during his time as a director, too.
He has made some progress off the field since taking the reins as chairman from Douglas Park. However, it doesn’t count for much right now with the league title looking like it is already about to disappear over the horizon.
If he doesn’t make the change right now, the boos and venom now a part of the furniture won’t just be directed at the manager and players. They’ll be coming at him.
There wasn’t a peep out of Ibrox last night after the defeat to Aberdeen, no messages sent out by their favoured outlets to pave the way for change.
Graeme Murty is no longer on call. There is no obvious successor with Martindale and Neil Warnock being discussed in detail with Derek McInnes a no-no to the uber bears after he discovered the red flags and pulled out of a move to Ibrox post-Pedro.
The situation post-Beale looks even more horrific which probably explains why Bennet and his side-kick James Bisgrove remain in hiding.
