Beale’s antics show he’s not the kind of guy Rangers need as boss

WORD has it that Michael Beale spoke to close confidantes during the week about the optics of leaving QPR for Ibrox so soon into his reign at Loftus Road. He surely didn’t require much feedback. A blind man can see that they are indescribably awful and point to the 42-year-old being ill-equipped for a job like the one sitting waiting for him at Rangers — this sad-eyed, bashed-up Rottweiler in a rescue centre, capable of licking you to death with affection as easily as eating you alive when you reach out your hand to engage.

And quite possibly doing both, one after the other, through time.

Many of those acquainted with Beale speak of an open individual with a genuine attachment to the Glasgow club from his previous spell on the staff, a progressive coach who can knock out tactics handbooks the way Ally McCoist used to knock in goals.

This is all well and good. Such qualities, however, cover only a thin slice of what it takes to manage successfully in Govan.

As McCoist would surely tell you from his own exacting time at the helm — the training gear swapped for the politics, pitfalls and power games of the club tie and blazer — the off-field is broadly as important as the on-field at Rangers. It isn’t an easy chasm to bridge.

As boss and public face, you need to be able to see round corners, be conscious of language and projection, and set the agenda by getting the right messages across in the right way. While delivering results all the while.

Beale has certainly made a pig’s ear of every single bit of that in recent weeks and it doesn’t augur well. Concerns expressed over how it looks to walk out on QPR after four months and 22 games no doubt relate to remarks he made when turning down Wolves last month.

You know, all that blabber about integrity and loyalty and why he can’t jump off the ship when he brought in the bosun and crew.

Listen, QPR fans are entitled to be furious with him if he goes to Rangers after all that flannel.

Yet, as much as he has painted himself into a corner, you hear this stuff over and over again. From Brendan Rodgers at Celtic to Beale’s old gaffer Steven Gerrard telling a TV interviewer not to ask silly questions when enquiring about his happiness at Rangers.

Of course he was happy. He could see an escape tunnel to Aston Villa opening up after popping along to prise open the Ibrox transfer war chest and finding the unbudgeable frame of chairman Douglas Park sitting on the lid and refusing to get off.

Anyone who thinks integrity and loyalty play significant roles in professional football probably still believe Holyrood and Westminster are there to make our lives better.

Most fans, you like to think, now see it for the mouth music it is.

Where Beale cannot be forgiven so freely is in his conduct when turning up for Rangers’ home game with Aberdeen a week or so later to have a bar-room meet-and-greet with punters — like some kind of returning saviour — before appearing in the VIP seats at Ibrox. It was dreadful. It came across as classless. And needless. Giovanni Van Bronckhorst’s job was hanging by a thread and for, all the Dutchman’s faults, he did not deserve that.

He did not deserve a guy already being spoken about in terms of a future return to the club as boss, already talking about it himself in interviews, appearing over his shoulder in the guise of the Grim Reaper.

Beale (left) insists the visit was simply a long overdue trip to say goodbye to friends that had been in the diary for weeks. He went as far as claiming it was great to go back and ‘support Gio and the team’.

If this really was a completely innocent away day to cheer on Van Bronckhorst — and it remains hard to believe a guy with such an eye for self-promotion can be so naive over the impression it gave — that’s arguably even worse than it being part of some Machiavellian scheme to publicly move himself into the boxseat when the inevitable finally happened with the Dutchman.

If Beale really didn’t understand the narrative that turning up in the main stand and being lauded pre-match in a supporters’ pub would create, when the current manager had large sections of the fanbase demanding his head on a salver, he really cannot be the right man to bring in the door.

Rangers managers ought to set an example. They need to understand that every action has a reaction. Beale looked for all the world, as one pundit put it this week, like a vulture. An opportunist capitalising on another coach’s weak hand. And that is neither good nor clever whatever the motivation may be. Messaging and communication at Rangers has been calamitous under a board with a silent chairman and an executive that has cultivated the unique talent of infuriating people every time they let their bellies rumble on an in-house TV channel set up to make them look good.

They need new talents who understand how to shape perceptions, play the game, present the club in a positive professional light and win respect.

Not a guy who pitches up for what would have been Van Bronckhorst’s public flogging, were it not for the fact the team found a performance from somewhere, and claims it was just a Jolly Boys’ Outing when everyone knows he’s one of the bookies’ favourites to be poor Gio’s successor.

That the wheels have come off at QPR in the wake of all this seems more than a coincidence, too. Since the night before he pitched up at Ibrox, the west London side have drawn one and lost four.

From cutting a swathe at the top of the Championship, they now sit seventh, 10 points off first.

We all learn how to look for messages within the messages, but it says something that their chief executive Les Ferdinand emerged when news broke of Rangers’ pursuit to say that he wouldn’t fight to keep Beale because ‘I only want people at the football club who want to be here’.

When it comes to reputation management, Beale already has work to do. And that’s before we discuss his credentials for the actual football side of the job.

He describes himself as ‘really friendly with everyone on the board’. Van Bronckhorst cooked his own goose by meekly refusing to shout for Champions League money to be spent on players.

Will Beale make strong demands on that front when required? He is friendly with a lot of the squad, too. Will that be an impediment to ripping up and rebuilding it?

While Celtic are bringing in young players from emerging markets on long-term contracts and preparing to feed their transfer model by selling Josip Juranovic because he can’t agree a deal, it comes as little surprise that Ibrox managing director Stewart Robertson and sporting director Ross Wilson have turned to a bloke they knew from before and are friendly with.

Beale feels like an easy option. The inexperience exposed by his words and actions of late make you worry he will be out of his depth, though. And Rangers already have way too many guys in positions of power whom you can say that about to be able to afford another.