By Eck, he has to be the obvious pick for Rangers

IF Alex McLeish craves a Rangers return then there’s only one question. What are they waiting for? To say so shouldn’t be construed as some old pals’ act. McLeish has been away from Scotland for 11 years now. There are sports writers who hardly know the man now and, outwith the odd text message, this is one of them. Many Rangers fans want to climb off the ex-player treadmill. They crave a new adventure, a change to the menu, a fresh start for their club. But that was the sales pitch the day Mark Warburton pitched up as manager. And look how that ended. Left to clear up the mess left by a bad appointment, the board now favour a director of football. Possibly an interim manager until the end of the season. At a stroke, this rules out any chance of Derek McInnes or Tommy Wright being considered. Aside from any compensation issues, they don’t fit the model. The same can’t necessarily be said of McLeish. Grapevine chat suggests Rangers favour a technical director in the mould of Southampton’s Ross Wilson. Discussions have already started. But one of the reasons Craig Levein works so well at Hearts is often overlooked. Levein is an old hand of the Scottish game. Like McLeish, he managed the national team and still bears the scars. He gets Hearts and he knows what it takes to survive in a harsh Scottish environment McLeish has been away for over a decade, of course. By the end of his last spell at Rangers he looked a haunted, exhausted figure. But it’s hardly a bad thing to have a working knowledge of just how brutal life at Ibrox can be. Walter Smith left Ibrox knackered in 1998 before staging a triumphant return nine years later. If McLeish lacks the requisite skill-set, fine. But if a safe pair of hands is needed — even in the short term — he’s the obvious pick. Fans of Rangers — and Celtic — now exhibit a new snobbery where Scottish managers and players are concerned. If ‘Alexei Mikaleiski’ instead of Alex McLeish was the frontrunner, they’d be standing on the steps of Ibrox with open arms. Even if they’d never heard of him. Why should Big Eck’s tried and tested experience of winning trophies be discarded with a sniffy derision?