Grin and bear it

Michael Grant

Chief football writer

Wednesday 29 February 2012

IT used to be defenders Ally McCoist wanted to get away from, not dilemmas.

Ally McCoist will, like it or not, have some say in which players are released over the coming days. Picture: SNS

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Michael Grant

In the degrees of stress and unpleasantness being visited on Rangers' staff right now McCoist's position is more fortunate than many others, even if it does not feel that way to him. One of the few certainties around this broken club is that they won't be making the manager redundant. The sympathy must be reserved for those members of staff who will be taken into meeting at Ibrox or Murray Park, perhaps as early as today, to be relieved of their jobs. A few things are at risk for McCoist right now – his popularity in the dressing room, his peace of mind, his blood pressure – but not his actual employment.

When he contemplated becoming the manager of Rangers – an ambition which first entered his head during childhood – he wasn't thinking about a day when he would sit down with accountants to help them score red lines through his list of players. If McCoist goes on to survive and prosper in management he will always look back on this as one of the darkest and most depressing periods of his career. It is a hardening, rites-of-passage episode he has no wish to experience, but there's no getting away from it. He's one of the key men Rangers are looking to in the eye of the storm.If he had his way, he would move faster than he's done for years. He'd head for the hills rather than be landed with any contribution to the thumbs up/thumbs down decisions which will consign some of his players to redundancies and give others relief and survival. But he can't run from it. All he can do is publicly distance himself from the process. McCoist has been in regular dialogue with Paul Clark from administrators Duff & Phelps and, although he hasn't revealed what's been discussed, they haven't been talking about the unusually mild weather.McCoist will have been asked by Clark for his views on which players are indispensable and which – however reluctantly – he could live without in the worst-case scenario. Any manager is understandably desperate to avoid all this. Who wants to put even one guy out of work, let alone several? A football coach relies on unity and collective trust, yet McCoist will have been asked to immerse himself in the most brutal of divisions. Even those who survive any cull might look at the manager and wonder how much of a role he played in getting rid of some of their team-mates and pals. Players who come through administration at clubs talk of "survivor guilt". The whole experience is horrible.The reality is McCoist will not be allowed to wash his hands of the dirty work. The best he can do is minimise his involvement. "In any time like this the manager has to have a big say, whether he likes it or not," one football insolvency expert told Herald Sport. "When an administrator comes in he sees the list of players, he sees their costs, the lengths of their contracts, their age, whether they have a resale value and stuff like that. But he can't make full football judgments on whether they should be kept or not. He needs input from the manager; more often than not he'll get it."The cold reality is Rangers need to have their own say, at least to some degree. To pick a couple of players completely at random, let's say Sone Aluko and David Healy were on comparable wages and only one of them could be kept on. A post-administration Rangers squad could not be shaped by Clark just because McCoist found it too hard to make a choice on compassionate grounds. And, callous though it sounds, personal preference could become a factor if all others are equal. "There might be two players of comparable ability, age, length of contract etc, but the manager might fancy one of them but not the other," said the insolvency expert. "If he'd rather not pick one of them in games, maybe because of a bad attitude, that's the guy the administrator would release. But how can the administrator possibly know without input from the manager? He has to say to the manager 'tell me about this guy' and 'tell me about that guy'. Even if the administrator thinks of himself as a football guy he can't know enough to make those sort of decisions without hearing the manager's views."What happens is an administrator gets a list of the footballers, which is provided by the football management. It's perfectly true that for Rangers the decision isn't taken by Ally – legally it's the administrator's decision – but the administrators will expect him to have an input to it. It is understandable every manager tries to distance themselves from it. He has to have an ongoing relationship with the players who are kept on. He can't be seen to have gotten rid of some of their pals."McCoist is one of the most popular guys ever to play in Scotland. In broad terms his appeal hasn't suffered any erosion since he became Rangers' manager last summer. But being in charge brings a requirement to make harsh decisions – telling youth players they haven't made the grade, omitting a loyal servant from a cup-final squad – and not everyone is going to like them.Walter Smith frequently banged the drum about how there was far more to McCoist than his cheeky chappie image. Neither suspected it would be put to the test like this.

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Grin and bear it

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