Rangers board should heed Walter Smith's advice and IGNORE the fans in hunt for next boss - Keith Jackson

There's a very simple solution to begin untangling the unfathomable mess Rangers have managed to make of themselves.

Those in charge of handling the Ibrox club’s affairs only have to ask themselves one question whenever they are tasked with making the kind of decisions which might make the situation even more desperate than it is already. What would Walter Smith have done? And if they don’t know the answer then, by process of elimination, they should be able to work out how the great man would most certainly not have gone about it.

For starters, Smith may have been a Rangers diehard all of his life but he also held a healthy disregard for the opinions of his fellow supporters. Throughout his trophy-laden two stints in charge he realised while they doted on him one week, they would demand his head on a plate the next. As a result, while caring deeply about them, he learned to cope with their fickleness largely by ignoring them completely.

What Smith would most certainly never do was make a decision based upon how it might impact his popularity with the people in the stands. Which is precisely why the Rangers board ought to be taking a leaf out of his book as they hum and haw over how to replace Michael Beale and with whom.

When they reached out to Frank Lampard last week, and arranged an interview with the former Chelsea and Everton boss in London, they must surely have done so in the belief they were engaging with a highly credible candidate for the position.

Chief executive James Bisgrove seemed particularly keen to fix up a face-to-face and even went to the length of asking Graeme Souness to attend the meeting too, in order to listen to what Lampard had to say. And yet Rangers dropped the whole idea like a hot potato