WE got it wrong. And now it’s our job to fix it.
The words of Rangers moneymen Andrew Cavenagh and Paraag Marathe 24 hours after Russell Martin packed his psycho-babble in a bin bag to be escorted off the premises.
But unless by “fix it” they meant “lead punters up the garden path then dump on them from a great height”, then the Yank tycoons only seem to have taken the mess they created and made it even messier than a week ago.
There surely can’t be a Bluenose out there who believed that was possible.
And yet, if their dreams of Stevie G’s triumphant return turn into the nightmare of the next manager being a guy whose crowning achievement is finishing halfway up England’s second tier?
A guy who, along the way, saw his team take a 4-0 pumping from one led by — and you really couldn’t make this up — Russell Martin?
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Well, the number who celebrate Hallowe’en early by turning up for the Dundee United game on Saturday guising as blue plastic seats will tell its own story.
If the 49ers are to cling to any sort of credibility, they simply MUST get this appointment right.
They simply MUST learn from the flawed process that saw Martin hurled into an environment he was nowhere near qualified to handle and hire a replacement who oozes street-wisdom, who can read the room, but most of all whose record of winning matches stands up to what Rangers need if they’re to challenge for trophies.
Danny Rohl, the 36-year-old German most strongly linked with the job in the wake of the Gerrard fiasco, most certainly has experience of life in the footballing trenches, given that his 89-game career has been spent at Sheffield Wednesday — the basket-case club to end them all.
Had he won them promotion despite the chaos swirling around him, he might even have been worth a punt at somewhere as dysfunctional as Ibrox — but he didn’t, he finished 20th and then 12th.
So if Martin, who DID take a team into the English Premier League, then finds himself so out of his depth when the stakes are raised, what chance Rohl, who in his time at Hillsborough lost 6-0 at Ipswich, 4-0 at home to Millwall and suffered another four 4-0s on the road at Huddersfield, Sunderland, Burnley and Martinland?
How this record must sit with a Rangers support who spent most of last week getting ready to line the streets for the man who won them their 55th title and stopped Celtic doing The Ten was coming back is anybody’s guess.
Fact is, though, they really WERE led up the garden path on this one, not just by Cavenagh and Marathe, but by Gerrard himself.
Fact is, this deal was NEVER going to happen.
The 49ers needed something to pacify the baying hordes.
Gerrard himself needed something that made him relevant again, that made it look less like his career was on the wane and more like he was in so much demand that he could afford to wait until all the stars aligned to create the perfect gig.
Even big Rio Ferdinand got a turn out of it, because his interview with the former Liverpool captain elevated his podcast on to every back page and to the top of every TV and radio newslist.
The only poor saps who got hee-haw were those hopeful hordes of Rangers fans — hee-haw, that is, except for the sorest boot imaginable in the collective stones on Saturday night when word got out that it wasn’t happening after all.
I doubt whether many believed Gerrard would be the silver bullet that shot them back to the top overnight.
But, as more than one pal has told me since it all went pear-shaped, at the very least he would have pulled the place back together, he’d have ended the civil war that’s threatening to tear the place apart.
Instead, they now fear being landed with another project, another guy with a win ratio of just over one in three, who interviewed really well, in the same way they were told Martin had interviewed really well.
I wrote after last week’s sacking about how bizarre it seemed that the 49ers had put so much more faith in how candidates performed across a table from them than how successful they’d been across dugouts from rival gaffers.
You’d think that when they promised to “fix it”, this would be one of the key areas that needed re-thought — are they looking for someone whose emotional intelligence is off the chart or someone who can find a way to win?
If you can source both, you’ve won a watch.
But as the disastrous Martin experiment proved, feeling empathy for a squad who really, really buy into your concept of how football should be played means sod all when they’ve failed to win six of their first seven league games and have lost a Champions League qualifier 9-1 on aggregate.
His 123 days in charge were a classic exercise in smoke and mirrors.
Worryingly for Rangers, the whole Gerrard caper was no different.
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And if they get it wrong over the next few days, the whole shebang might just go up in smoke.
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