2 things Philippe Clement said at Rangers AGM tell you all you need to know about where he really stands with fans

Even after watching his side put the boot in to Kilmarnock the night before, Philippe Clement must have turned up for the Rangers AGM fearing a shareholder shoeing.

Instead what transpired at the Clyde Auditorium was an 89 minute sit-down in which the big Belgian had the fans eating out of his palm. “I promise you I didn’t ask the players to give me more more effort because I had the AGM the next day,” he joked at one point. The fact the under-pressure gaffer could afford to crack jokes tells you a lot about the mood on the day.

The Ibrox faithful can be a strangely bunch when it comes to these annual stakeholder summits. No matter the crises affecting the wider support, there’s always someone ready to push the masses aside and have a personal grumble about the fact they missed out in the ticket ballot or some other self-serving gripe. Thursday was different. There were no mention of cold Broxi burgers or groans about James Bisgrove’s money-grabbing MyGers scheme. Yet it was hardly the feeding frenzy either that some among the 1800 attendees had assumed would gobble up the club’s beleaguered board.

The directors were certainly in the dock. But the line of questioning was cold and forensic, more prosecutorial than piqued with frothing fury.

To be honest, you’d find it hard to spit and rant at interim chairman John Gilligan. The former Tennent’s Brewery boss only returned to the club he loves out of duty when the strain of handling the fall-out from the calamitous Copland construction cock-up began to take a toll on the health of his friend and previous chairman John Bennett.

He offered the apologies, several in fact When one supporter suggested it was time for the current custodians to sell up and go having allowed