Michael Beale has a way of getting the best out of players even when they're down - but the Rangers boss can get his players doing the nasty side of the game too.
The former assistant manager to Steven Gerrard is now in the hotseat and started his reign in the Premiership with a 3-2 win over Hibs last week. It doesn't get any easier as they travel away to Aberdeen tonight. Beale has a reputation as an elite coach who puts an emphasis on attacking football play at intensity.
It doesn't always go to plan though for players in preparation for matches, as former number three goalkeeper Andy Firth has revealed. He was taken from Barrow to Rangers by one of his former coaches at Liverpool and tells The Athletic that one of Beale's strengths is his football IQ, on top of holding a Plan B when in need of victory.
Firth said: “Even now if I speak to him he still makes me feel like a kid. I think: ‘I can’t wait to grow up and know what you do’. I think everyone at Rangers felt the same way.
"You just believe he can help you get better so much as he’s massive on individual development. He’s still got that youth coach mentality.
“Bealesy had to pull me into his office once when I was a bag of s*** one day in training. We were doing a shooting session at the end, there were balls flying past me and I hadn’t made a save in about four weeks. It was doing my head in but he pulled me in and said that can’t happen.
“He just sees a different game to anyone I’ve ever met. I think I know football and then I sit and chat to him for five minutes and I realise I know nothing at all. He is a football addict.
"He’s weird. If you dissected his brain there would be footballs flying everywhere. Coaches I’ve worked with at a good level I see as normal people. The way he predicts the game is not normal.
"The one thing he probably doesn’t get credit for is how much he loves the dirty side of football, mastering the dark arts like slowing the game down, cynical fouls and getting under people’s skin. He definitely added that to the Rangers team.
“Before one of the Kilmarnock games in lockdown we turned up to the meeting a couple of days before the game. He said: ‘For 90 minutes, anyone in the back five, all we’re doing is going touch and smash to big Ced (Cedric Itten) up front. I turned to Connor Goldson and said: ‘Who is this because this isn’t Mick Beale’. But he said we’re not conceding, we are going to get a goal and win 1-0.”
READ NEXT
