Michael Beale left a busted Rangers flush and sacked boss is counting cost of expensive duffers - Keith Jackson

If these were ordinary circumstances - in a more stable, less frenzied environment - then Michael Beale might reasonably have expected to survive in his role as Rangers manager.

After all, just seven games into a new league season hardly feels like an appropriate moment to pull triggers or plunge down on panic buttons. Especially not when a Europa League campaign has got off to a flying start and the first domestic silverware of the season is now only two short trips to Hampden away.

But that’s exactly what happened last night when he met his inevitable end. In truth, it would have been a dereliction of duty had John Bennett and his board not acted to remove him from the firing line as an act of kindness. Somewhere inside his own mind Beale might be wondering why it had to come to this, even despite his through-gritted-teeth concession in the immediate aftermath of Saturday’s defeat to Aberdeen, that he deserved to feel some heat on the back of another ‘horrible’ performance.

With his next breath, he also aimed a volley at the Ibrox support for not doing more to help his team, which was a rookie mistake uttered from the mouth of a manager who’s only been in the business for five minutes but very much enjoys talking a good game. It was both stupid and naive on his part.

And yet Beale’s inexperience was only part of the problem, albeit a considerable one. In times of trouble, such as he was drowning in, the Londoner had very few previous learnings to draw down on. Nor, for that matter, any back catalogue of work to provide irrefutable proof that he might still have been able to scramble his way out of it.

Which is why the art of perception was ultimately what ended him. When he convinced Bennett to back him to the