Late on Tuesday night the smart money began piling in on Michael Beale being confirmed as the next manager of Rangers. By breakfast time on Wednesday, even those with a tendency to be a bit slower on the uptake had the Englishman’s return nailed down as a fait accompli.
So, unless almost everyone else is wrong and Ross Wilson and Stewart Robertson have some sort of surprise wild card up their sleeve, ready to pull out at the eleventh hour, it does feel inevitable now Beale will be back at Ibrox sooner rather than later.
And most probably before the weekend, in order that he can get preparations under way for Monday morning’s return to training at Auchenhowie. Good luck to the guy. He’s going to need it. Because, having been not much more than five minutes in his first ever managerial position, he is about to walk back into a club which is devoid of any sense of leadership and in desperate need of a root and branch restructuring from the top down.
In normal circumstances, simply trailing Celtic by nine points at the top of the Premiership table would be a crisis big enough for any new man to contend with - let alone a novice with little or no experience of being shoved out front and centre. Beale might think he knows how Steven Gerrard dealt with the ferocious, unforgiving scrutiny of life in Glasgow’s goldfish bowl, having served time as his right hand man during the Scouser’s three and a bit years at the helm.
But Gerrard arrived in Glasgow on the back of a playing career which was among the most high profile of any in the business during his days with Liverpool and England. He was already a polished performer in front of the cameras but, more importantly, completely acclimatised to the pressures of dealing with such a high intensity, demanding public position.
All his years spent in the spotlight allowed him to take to this new role like a duck to water. But, by comparison, Beale is about to be thrown into the deep end where this level of exposure is concerned. He really ought to consider asking Wilson and Robertson for a loan of their armbands before he takes the plunge.
And not just because much more experienced men than him have struggled to keep their heads above the water when attempting to cope with the rivalry which rages through the River Clyde. On the contrary, the legacy of his previous time spent on this side of Glasgow may drag him down like a block of cement.
The widely held assumption behind all of this is surely that the players he left behind will be grateful to see him back. That they had found it too much of a change to accept Giovanni van Bronckhorst as Gerrard’s replacement and they will universally welcome a return to the training ground methods which won them a league title in the first place.
But this may be yet another dangerous miscalculation made by a sporting director whose track record in recruitment has been littered with costly mistakes. If Wilson is not aware that there are players inside that dressing room who were perfectly content to see the back of Gerrard and his entire coaching crew, then he’s not done his due diligence.
Because there were plenty of them. And if he’s banking on Beale instantly reuniting a squad which appeared so divided and disharmonious under Van Bronckhorst, then he could be in for a nasty surprise. If there are some festering sores still inside the camp, Beale’s return could cause those faultlines to run even deeper and become even more destabilising than they were under the Dutchman.
And if that happens then Beale can’t even be guaranteed the much soughtafter ‘new manager bounce’ which Rangers appear to have based this entire decision upon. But, more concerning still, the issues Beale is about to confront won’t be contained within the walls of his dressing room. Because Rangers are blighted by far more fundamental problems and they extend way beyond the parameters of the club’s plush training HQ.
A chairman who refuses to communicate with a fractured, rebellious support. A player trading model which appears to be nothing more strategic than a car boot sale of the club’s only saleable assets. And an overarching culture of poor decision-making running from the boardroom all the way down to the youth academy.
Beale should at least know about most of that, given that Gerrard became so frustrated by it all that he was prepared to put his own blossoming reputation on the line by jumping ship to Birmingham. In retrospect, that hastily arranged escape route to Aston Villa has backfired spectacularly while taking a wrecking ball to his hopes of a direct career path into his dream job at Liverpool.
Beale bailed out before the end by grabbing a lifeline at Queens Park Rangers and many suspected Gerrard’s days would soon be up at Villa from the moment his lieutenant headed south. There were other very prominent characters inside the club’s training ground who were, let’s say, a great deal less upset to see him go it alone.
These differences of opinion occur in almost every working environment and personal disagreements or grudges should not be considered as offering any kind of cast iron proof. The wider consensus is that Beale was the tactical brain behind Gerrard’s entire operation which, of course, is why this rather misty-eyed approach has been made to rush him back across the border as van Bronckhorst’s replacement.
Who knows? It may turn out to be a stroke of genius. In time, Beale might prove himself to be the real deal after all. But right now it all feels like a rather desperate, high tariff gamble made by a board which is perhaps entering its own end of days. For his own sake, Beale had better not be going back into all of this with eyes wide shut.
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