THE humiliations still hurt Rangers, even if they now come under an anaesthetic.

There have been so many humbling results over the last couple of seasons that supporters have been numbed to them. Losing to Forfar would once have been a sensation. Now? Not so much. Rather than standing out in stark relief like Berwick 1967 or Hamilton 1987, the indignities now join a long and growing list.

Last season Annan Athletic and Peterhead won at Ibrox. Stirling Albion, bottom of Scotland's bottom division at the time, beat Rangers while their manager took the day off to get married. On the face of it, those are even worse results than losing at SPFL League One Forfar. What was so depressing for the Rangers support yesterday was being the butt of the joke again, at the start of a season in which they thought all of that had been left behind. It hurt them, too, to have their ambition of mounting a challenge in the cups held up to ridicule in the season's infancy.

Ally McCoist's language immediately after the match was an astonishing insight into the Rangers circus. When two figures on the same payroll, supposedly pulling in the same direction, openly trade threats and insults it is a sign of a club pulling itself apart. Charles Green has been absent for a couple of months but don't worry, he hadn't fallen out of love with the sound of his own voice. "He knows he has to win the league and, in my opinion, he has to win a cup as well," Green had said about McCoist in an interview published on the morning of the Forfar game. "If he doesn't do that he has a problem." Green is back on the scene as a consultant, one of his responsibilities laughably being "to promote the interests of Rangers". His return confirms that a fault line runs through the Ibrox boardroom. This wasn't what McCoist had in mind when he recently talked of the need for Rangers to be cleansed.

Before Green was forced out of the club after the internal inquiry about alleged links to Craig Whyte, he was planning to undermine McCoist by getting rid of coaches Kenny McDowall and Ian Durrant. He didn't rate McCoist either and the manager knew it. That's why McCoist called him "devious", and an "embarrassment", and said his latest remarks amounted to contempt for Rangers' players, the club, and Scottish football as a whole. Either Green will not be around for long in any meaningful role at Rangers, or McCoist won't be. They cannot co-exist because there is no potential for a trusting relationship after what's been said, and nor can the club be taken seriously if it claims to be united in a common purpose.

Turning a flamethrower on Green was a useful distraction inside Station Park at tea-time on Saturday, of course. All the managers try that one after a calamitous result. McCoist successfully redrew the agenda and made it about Green rather than about a dreadful result. None of the eight summer signings was eligible to be fielded as a trialist, so of course McCoist's options were limited, but Lee McCulloch, Lee Wallace, Ian Black, David Templeton and Andy Little all played nearly the entire 120 minutes. So did Sebastian Faure, Chris Hegarty and Lewis Macleod, who between them appeared in 75 first-team games last season. Only Scott Gallacher, Andy Mitchell and Robbie Crawford could be classed as both young and inexperienced. Rangers, even this reduced Rangers, should not lose to part-time Forfar.

McCoist has had 20 games in the Champions League, Europa League, Scottish Cup, League Cup and Ramsdens Cup and won only 10 of them. They've lost in the cups to Dundee United (twice), Malmo, Maribor, Queen of the South, Falkirk, Inverness Caledonian Thistle and now Forfar.

Throw in 11 stumbles while winning Division Three last season and his managerial record has too many poor results. Too few signings have delivered so far and often the football has been laboured. It's been clear for nearly a year that there are question marks about whether McCoist has what it takes to ever be a Premiership-winning manager for Rangers.

Green is no expert when it comes to what makes a good manager. His application of pressure on McCoist had more to do with personal issues between them, rather than any technical critique of his coaching abilities. Nor would it be surprising if Green looked coldly at McCoist's lucrative salary and felt Rangers could employ someone on far less and get results which were just as good and probably better. You wouldn't put it past Green to have smirked when the final whistle went at Station Park, knowing what it meant for McCoist.

The inescapable reality for McCoist is that a club with 34,000 season-ticket holders, which pays the second best wages in the country, cherry-picks players from the top flight and prepares its squad in a £14m training complex is entitled to feel it has equipped its manager for far better cup results than he has delivered. Plenty of knowledgeable, fair-minded Rangers supporters think he has had long enough and should be replaced.

But he will get, and he will deserve, more time, and not only because dismissing him would destabilise the club yet again. Green is the largest individual shareholder but does not - yet - control the majority of the board. Unless he does, sacking McCoist should not be a live issue until the time comes when Rangers are in a league and don't look like winning it.