FORMER Rangers striker Billy Dodds has labelled his old club a shambles from top to bottom, and slammed the Ibrox board for “using and abusing” manager Graeme Murty.

Dodds believes that the club’s treatment of Murty – by releasing a statement undermining their manager in the build-up to the William Hill

Scottish Cup semi-final for example – has given the Rangers players the green light to disrespect their boss.

Read more: Graeme Murty steps down as Rangers manager

And he doubts that Murty has a future at Ibrox in any capacity, struggling to see how the 43-year-old could go back to his old job as head coach of the under-20s after the way he has been treated.

“They haven’t even given any recognition to Graeme Murty for the job he’s done,” said Dodds. “They’ve just said ‘we’ve used you, we’ve abused you, now off you pop.’

“I’m not saying that he can’t go back to being the youth coach, but it’s going to be harder for Graeme now to go back there. I don’t think that if I had been treated like that twice and these statements come out and the way the club have handled it – he might be different – but I couldn’t personally go back into that 20s role.

“You’re trying to help out and they just bin you?”

The lack of cohesion at the club from the boardroom to the dugout and everywhere in between is a recipe for disaster according to Dodds.

He couldn’t believe director Alastair Johnston’s recent claims that Rangers are currently “ahead of the curve”, and he thinks that someone at the club should have stepped in and advised him over the timing of such a statement.

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“As someone who’s worked with chairmen, if everyone is on the same page then you have a better chance of succeeding,” he said. “But where is the chairman? Where is the manager?

Oh, they’ve thrown him under a bus. Where is the director of football? Where is the press officer? The club isn’t functioning properly so they’re not ahead of the curve.

“What they need to do is strip it all back and have a smooth-running operation. Do that and they’ll be better placed to have a go. Appoint the new manager and give him some backing, even if they don’t get there. But if the club isn’t running smoothly you’ll move two steps forward and three

steps back.

“If they had been running smoothly they’d be a comfortable second, but the confusion at the club has held back the playing side. When you look at the budgets of the top sides, they’re in danger of coming fourth in a two-horse race – and then Johnston makes that statement.

“If Rangers had a good press officer then they would have told him it wasn’t the right time to put that out. It should have been pulled and the approach for Steven Gerrard should have been kept quiet until after the game at Parkhead; that would have been good judgment.”

Dodds has watched on in dismay at the lack of respect shown to Murty, with the infamous Andy Halliday reaction to being substituted a particularly unsavoury incident.

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“The players should be more dignified than that,” he said. “Of course, we all got angry with our managers when he took us off but to just walk off like that isn’t right and, for me, the board gave the players the licence to do that with the timing of the statements before the games against Celtic and what they said in them about the manager.

“After that the players would be thinking: ‘Well, he’s not going to be here for long and I’m not going to have to answer to him.’ It’s the worst thing the board could have done to the manager.”

That’s not to say that Dodds absolves the Rangers players from responsibility in terms of how they have treated Murty, and how they have applied themselves on the field too.

“They need to look at themselves for the way they’ve played,” he continued.

“To go down the way they did in that semi-final and then go to the Rangers fans before the kick-off at Parkhead . . .

I thought: ‘Oh aye, they’re up for it!’ and then they go out and deliver that performance.

“I’d have been doing a bit of soul searching after I’d just given the fans the big one and then not kicked a ball.”

Billy Dodds was speaking at the

inaugural Kris Boyd Charity Golf day at Trump Turnberry.

The charity aims to raise awareness of mental health and support those in need.