Dreadful, classless, needless- Daily Mail columnist calls out Loyal Michael Beale

Gary Keown has mercilessly put the boot into Micky Beale with his classless PR visit to Ibrox last month to cheer on Gio and the lads against Aberdeen the main source of his attack.

With the current boss under attack from angry fans and QPR flying high Beale’s motives were crystal clear despite Loyal Mick’s denials.

He was never offered the Wolves job, he was offered talks about the job but ran off to his media friends preaching about his loyalty. A very naive move from an inexperienced manager.

A week later with QPR losing on the Friday at Birmingham their manager ignored a full Championship card on the Saturday to preen around Ibrox, drinking in the Lounden Tavern that he had avoided like the plague during his three plus years as Steven Gerrard’s Number 2.

Six days on from van Bronckhorst’s eventual sacking the whole situation is still cloudy, in the Daily Mail Keown spells out the character of the man that is the top target to stop Celtic winning a second consecutive title:

WORD has it that Michael Beale spoke to close confidantes during the week about the optics of leaving QPR for Ibrox so soon into his reign at Loftus Road.

He surely didn’t require much feedback. A blind man can see that they are indescribably awful and point to the 42-year-old being  ill-equipped for a job like the one sitting waiting for him at Rangers — this sad-eyed, bashed-up  Rottweiler in a rescue centre,  capable of licking you to death with affection as easily as eating you alive when you reach out your hand to engage.

Keown added: 

Listen, QPR fans are entitled to be furious with him if he goes to Rangers after all that flannel.

Yet, as much as he has painted himself into a corner, you hear this stuff over and over again. From Brendan Rodgers at Celtic to Beale’s old gaffer Steven Gerrard telling a TV interviewer not to ask silly questions when enquiring about his happiness at Rangers.

Of course he was happy. He could see an escape tunnel to Aston Villa opening up after popping along to prise open the Ibrox  transfer war chest and finding the unbudgeable frame of chairman Douglas Park sitting on the lid and refusing to get off.

Anyone who thinks  integrity and loyalty play significant roles in  professional football probably still believe Holyrood and Westminster are there to make our lives better. Most fans, you like to think, now see it for the mouth music it is.

Where Beale cannot be forgiven so freely is in his conduct when turning up for Rangers’ home game with Aberdeen a week or so later to have a bar-room meet-and-greet with punters — like some kind of returning saviour — before  appearing in the VIP seats at Ibrox.

It was dreadful. It came across as classless. And needless. Giovanni Van Bronckhorst’s job was hanging by a thread and for, all the Dutchman’s faults, he did not deserve that.

He did not deserve a guy already being spoken about in terms of a future return to the club as boss, already talking about it himself in interviews, appearing over his shoulder in the guise of the Grim Reaper.

Beale insists the visit was simply a long overdue trip to say goodbye to friends that had been in the diary for weeks. He went as far as claiming it was great to go back and ‘support Gio and the team’.

If this really was a completely innocent away day to cheer on Van Bronckhorst — and it remains hard to believe a guy with such an eye for self-promotion can be so naive over the impression it gave — that’s arguably even worse than it being part of some Machiavellian scheme to publicly move himself into the boxseat when the inevitable finally happened with the Dutchman.

If Beale really didn’t understand the narrative that turning up in the main stand and being lauded  pre-match in a supporters’ pub would create, when the current manager had large sections of the fanbase demanding his head on a salver, he really cannot be the right man to bring in the door.

Rangers managers ought to set an example. They need to understand that every action has a reaction. Beale looked for all the world, as one pundit put it this week, like a vulture. An opportunist capitalising on another coach’s weak hand. And that is neither good nor clever whatever the motivation may be.

Messaging and communication at Rangers has been calamitous under a board with a silent chairman and an executive that has cultivated the unique talent of infuriating people every time they let their bellies rumble on an in-house TV channel set up to make them look good.

According to Jim White permission to speak hasn’t been given from QPR to the Ibrox head-hunters of Stewart Robertson and Ross Wilson.