Managing the Old Firm can be a bit like a game of snakes and ladders, a job where you’re never more than one wrong roll of the dice away from taking a slide.
That’s the position Michael Beale now finds himself as he sets about remodelling his Rangers team ahead of their long climb back to the top. The Ibrox boss was this week asked to ponder whether the gulf between the Light Blues side he inherited from Gio van Bronckhorst and Celtic was as big as the one he found when he first moved to Glasgow to partner Steven Gerrard in 2018.
Then, with Brendan Rodgers’s Hoops on the top rung, Gers were starting out at the bottom after the previous season’s humiliations under Pedro Caixinha and Graeme Murty. By the time Beale had followed Gerrard to Aston Villa three and a bit years later, Rangers were the team looking down on their bitter rivals.
