RANGERS could find a new appreciation for the Glebe Park hedge this afternoon.

The famous foliage has been an iconic feature of Brechin City's home ground for decades but it also forms a barrier between games of football and the outside world, a barricade which the Ibrox side might have found handy this week as they were pummelled during another round of uncomfortable off-field matters.

Most of the punchlines have found their target. Craig Mather departed as chief executive after discerning he had no future at the club regardless of the outcome of a forthcoming annual meeting. Meanwhile, a King seems to draw closer to a return and a NOMAD roams between boardroom crises.

Ally McCoist also wandered yesterday, although that was so the Rangers manager could attend a funeral. He would remain conspicuous, since a media briefing intended nominally for this afternoon's league visit to Brechin instead became an opportunity for those who work around him to reaffirm the significance of McCoist's role at Ibrox.

Any discussion about league duty has only been heard faintly since Rangers arrived in the lower leagues - "This is going to be a tough, tough game . . ." began Kenny McDowall, his assistant, yesterday - but McCoist has also been working to make himself heard above the tumult during the chaotic reigns of Craig Whyte and Charles Green. He has been a coach, but a spokesperson too.

Not every word has resounded, though, and it jarred earlier in the campaign when McCoist discussed an intention to add further to a squad which is capable of picking up a second successive league title without too much heavy lifting. The first eight league matches of the campaign have been marked by 34 goals, with the two conceded of almost negligible consequence. Rangers expect to be without both Lee Wallace and Dean Shiels against Brechin today, but it is the continued presence of the club's manager which McDowall considers to be cardinal to his side's sense of progress.

"Being manager of Rangers is tough enough [but] Ally has been trying to do everybody's job here for the last two years," said the Rangers assistant manager. "What he's done has been kind of overlooked, because tomorrow's paper will have something else, probably. There hasn't been the time to say: 'By the way, he's doing a not bad job there'. I suppose the time to do it is at the end of a season, if you've achieved. Nobody is looking for pats on the back eight games into a league campaign."

The vagaries of an unsettled shareholding, the intentions of the Easdale brothers and the power struggle in the Ibrox boardroom can seem complicated to the uninitiated; McDowall preferred instead to tend to a squad which will attempt to avoid becoming entangled by Brechin. "Ally knows what is going on at the club," he added. "But what he's more concerned about is Rangers getting back to where we should be. That's what he can control; we can't control everything else that is going on. It's imperative that we get the football bit right.

"We've not really had a war chest. We've been promised I don't know how many. It's like hide and seek here, there are war chests sprinkled about Murray Park. We keep looking with our shovels but we can't find any. It's imperative that we keep going, step by step, and get back to the top flight."

There will be times when it will seem as though they are stuck on the scenic route, with some of the sights likely to prove arresting to members of the Ibrox squad. The likes of Nicky Law, Jon Daly and Bilel Mohsni have perhaps not surprisingly proven to be unperturbed by SPFL League 1, but Arnold Peralta might be forgiven should he suspect the Glebe Park hedge of containing some hallucinogenic shrubbery. The Honduran has returned from international duty in time to face Brechin, having played in the final few minutes of a match against Jamaica earlier this week which confirmed his country's place at the World Cup in Brazil next summer.

"I'm not sure [what I will say to him before today's game] . . . he's just qualified for the World Cup and now he's playing in front of a hedge," said Lee McCulloch, the Rangers defender. "As players it is just all about forgetting everything else going on and go out and play football and put on a show for the fans."