AROUND two hundred Rangers fans demonstrated against the club's chairman, David Murray, at Ibrox last night.
The group of dissenters gathered around the front door of the stadium chanting "Murray out" and "Sack the board" as the club lurched further into crisis.
Murray has borne the brunt of criticism for a perceived lack of investment since eradicating the club's crippling debts. He has recently hinted at selling his stake to anyone "with Rangers' best interests at heart" and a section of the supporters have demanded he finance a spending spree in January or make way for fresh investment.
Paul Le Guen, the beleaguered manager, apologised to the fans for his team's performance. The manager insisted he would not walk away, but was less than emphatic on his long-term prospects.
"I will try to carry on, " he said when asked if he contemplated leaving after the latest defeat. "I'm the manager and it is up to me to cope with the situation. I will not walk away. The only way is to stay together."
He admitted the loss was one of the most profound of his professional career, one that inflicted yet more damage to a reputation derived from three successive championships with Lyon. However, he vowed to continue until told otherwise by Murray.
"I have lost many games before but this is one of the worst, " he said. "It [his future] is not up to me to decide, it is up to him [Murray]. I am very disappointed and I apologise to our supporters because the performance was so poor. We had a correct 30 minutes and after that the organisation was lost. It is my job to be worried about that."
Steven Milne's double consigned Rangers to their first defeat to lower league opposition at Ibrox in their cup history. It compounds a run of results that has left Rangers 15 points behind the defending champions, Celtic, in the Bank of Scotland Premierleague.
Though the focus of the fans' fury was the chairman, Le Guen is not immune to the criticism. He acknowledged the defensive frailty which has been shown almost on a weekly basis but is at a loss to explain the disparity between domestic and European success with the same players.
"Yes, I am aware of the problem but it is not the only one, " he said. "When you lose a game like that you have to react. We have to try our best and carry on but I realise it was so poor."
Owen Coyle, the St Johnstone manager, expressed his sympathy for the stricken Rangers manager but celebrated the vindication of his high-risk strategy of attacking Rangers.
He said: "You don't win three titles in France unless you are a good manager.
"I said before the game that we would give it a go and while by doing so we risked losing by four or five, we showed the first division has good players and good teams."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article