Rangers administration: Ally McCoist has no qualms about Ibrox challenge

By ANDREW SMITH
Published on Sunday 19 February 2012 00:00

ALLY McCOIST can’t say he wasn’t warned. It is only a couple of weeks since Walter Smith revealed in a radio interview that he cautioned his then Rangers assistant against taking over from him last summer.

Yet as McCoist surveys the wreckage that his club has become across his nine months in charge and braces himself for what possible horrors adminstration could inflict on the team he has supported and served man and boy, he isn’t despairing that he ignored the warnings from Walter.

“I don’t regret taking the job at all, which might seem madness to some,” he said the other day. “I had the advice but, yes, I ignored it. Certainly some people might question my sanity, but I don’t regret it one bit. Walter’s tips, what he was passing on, didn’t fall on deaf ears. He is an intelligent man, very clever, and anything he says is worth listening to. He has always been 100 per cent honest with me. And I’ll tell you something, certainly as a player and assistant manager, he made my mind up for me a couple of times. Before I took over he provided me all the relevant information that he had stacked up but he gave me the decision to make myself. And [regardless of what he said] I think he knew my decision had been made.”

McCoist is maybe thinking like a player in the current situation. Few who are ever sidelined express relief if, without them, their team are receiving almighty beatings. They would rather be in the mire trying to do something to improve the situation. “Circumstances are far from ideal,” he says. “None of us could see it coming to this. We could all make observations on what might happen, but I’m not sure many would have stuck their neck out and said we would go into administration. In saying that, I’d rather attempt to be in control of my future than watch someone else do it.”

Questions are entitled to be asked of anyone involved in Rangers who did not see it coming. As far back as January 2009, club owner David Murray put all of the club’s players up for sale – a band of them bought for almost £9 million in transfer fees only four months earlier – because there was a gaping hole in their finances. The irony is that it was plugged, at least temporarily, because Kris Boyd could not agree personal terms on a £4m move to Birmingham City and so stayed to score the goals that edged Rangers the title and £15m in guaranteed Champions League money.

The hand-to-mouth existence that was continued in the Craig Whyte era of the past ten months always gave rise to the likelihood there would be a point when there would be no scraps to transfer from the hand. Especially with a potential tax bill for £50m hanging over the club.

“Until it happens, you never think it is going to happen,” McCoist said of administration. “I’m not a daft boy, it was always there; I always knew the possibilities were there. But you always think something is going to turn up. Maybe that is because I am involved in football and involved in the football club. Although you read about the distinct possibility it me happen, for me – and I can’t speak for anyone else – you always have hope. Hope is what it is. It’s not naivety. I’m intelligent enough to know about the facts and figures. Although I was aware of the distinct possibility, it did nothing to soften the blow or the shock.”

In the worst of times, you often see the best of people. McCoist believes that is precisely what he has witnessed in the Ibrox dressing room. Others, looking in at how he has handled himself, might contend that the situation has brought out the best of the person in the manager’s office too. The crisis could be the making of him. With the league gone because of the ten-point penalty, there is no pressure on him over on-field results. His role is to rally, to be a figurehead to offer the very hope at his core for those at the club and for those who follow it to believe in. And he can do that to decent effect.

“Footballers sometimes don’t have a great image, or great PR but what has really cheered me is that in all their meetings, either with the adminstrators or together, our dressing room have used the collective ‘we’ to mean the workforce, and not the team or the squad. They were all of the view everyone was in it together and, that’ll do for me,” he said.

“I know you might say it is different for the players who might be £5m assets or whatever than those earning £40-a-week, but whoever you are, you are a human being and everyone has to appreciate that. You can make the argument that the human being on £50-a-week needs the job more, but all I can ask is that every human being has mutual respect and that certainly seems to be the case.”

Whyte’s respect for McCoist could be open to debate. He let him sign Daniel Cousin in a botched move, the player now not even allowed to play because his registration was sought as the club were sliding into adminstration on Tuesday. McCoist says there is no issue over the morality of agreeing £7,500-a-week with the 35-year-old when players might lose their jobs, at least as it stands, because the adminstrators have told him “redundancies are not inevitable, but possible”. The Cousin farce surely highlights serious issues over the club’s football and financial governance.

“I was seriously aware of the financial plight of the club when we had to get rid of our top striker, top scorer [Nikica Jelavic] for a sum of money [£5.5m] and didn’t really feel confident about going to replace him, which is not an atack on Daniel. We looked at other players who would have cost a lot more than the nothing Daniel cost. There was a realisation then we are in a bad, bad way financially. But at the same time, with that realism comes more realism and you have to get out of it. You just have to get out of it. You either sit there and say ‘gee whizz, where are we going...we are going down, and down and down, in a spiral’ or else you try and fight back. And we will fight back.”

To do that, Rangers needs wads as well as words.