'Celtic hold a royal flush, Rangers a pair of twos'

As a lifelong Rangers supporter, John Gilligan’s natural habitat at Ibrox is his seat in the stand watching his team play or operating quietly behind the scenes from where he has contributed time and money to the club over many years.

Facing the media is not really his bag, but as interim chairman in the midst of what his one-time pal Dave King calls a crisis, he felt it was something he needed to do. And he did it on Monday.

It was an honour to be appointed to the role, he said. Nobody could doubt his sincerity for a second, but with that privilege comes pressure and there is no end of that at Ibrox right now.

No chief executive, a stop-gap chairman, a former chairman scorned and creating mischief in the media, a playing squad with considerable holes in it and, at the same time, Celtic full of money and momentum and apparently disappearing over the horizon.

When asked about the gap between Rangers and Celtic, Gilligan said these things happen. "Sometimes we are ahead, sometimes Celtic are ahead."

The reality is that Celtic have won 12 of the last 13 Premierships and are overwhelming favourites to make it 13 out of 14.

Previous chairman John Bennett is a cautionary tale about the stress of life at Rangers at the moment. A man who spent most of his professional career in the unforgiving world of high-finance, he was a senior figure in companies holding investment portfolios in the billions of pounds.

Bennett thrived in asset management but not much of what he learned there readied him for the brutality of being the guardian of Rangers in a time of struggle.

Even before it was announced he was standing down for health reasons, he spoke about the complexity of life in football. It was challenging and all-consuming, especially when things were going wrong and the support was in uproar.

And now Gilligan, another proud Rangers man and another Rangers investor, has put his head above the parapet. Well, somebody had to.

What was the point of his press conference? There was no update on the identity of a new chief executive, there was no clarity on who might be taking over from him as chairman and there was nothing of any substance about fresh financial investment coming into the club.

In the main, it appeared to be a vehicle for him to tell King, his one-time ally, to stop sniping from the sidelines about the club being in crisis and lacking direction. He hit the target repeatedly on that one issue.

King, former chairman and still the club's major shareholder, has been the main character in a footballing pantomime this past week - not for the first time.

In telling him to button it, Gilligan revealed King has not picked up the phone to any current Rangers director to air his views. He called on him to "behave like a proper shareholder" and stop agitating.

King has said publicly that £50m – a somewhat random figure - of new investment is required at the club. King has also said that he, himself, would not be investing. Lest anybody forget, Gilligan reminded us.

Gilligan said there is no appetite among board members for King's return as chairman - or as anything else, it seems. It was a take-down that will, no doubt, draw a withering response from King in a newspaper or on a radio station of his choice any time now.

Of course, as major shareholder, King is entitled to express his views on how the club - and his investment - is being managed. This particular show is not over yet, you sense.

King is right, to an extent. Rangers are in an existential crisis. Celtic's finances are on another planet compared to Rangers. They have spent more money in transfer fees this year than in any other year in their history and they are still showing profit.

They have £77m in the bank with even more Champions League loot to add. They have players of significant value in Scottish football terms. If the Old Firm was a poker game, Celtic are holding a royal flush and Rangers a pair of twos.

How can Rangers live with Celtic's record fiscal position? Some supportive directors throwing in £5m here or there, or issuing soft loans, isn't going to cut it. Player trading? They are barely at the foothills of that project. Champions League qualification? It is only going to get harder.

English football - Premiership, Championship and League One - is now populated heavily by foreign owners, many of them American.

Here is the question for Rangers - if a reputable and genuinely heavy-hitting individual or company made a bid to buy a majority of the club for game-changing amounts of money, would the most significant shareholders - King, Douglas Park, George Taylor, Stuart Gibson and Julian Wolhardt - facilitate the approach and sell up?

Gilligan said on Monday that Rangers would never go back to the days of having one person in command, a la Craig Whyte, or indeed, David Murray, the former owner who sold to Whyte.

The memory of the chronic Mike Ashley era has not faded either. Charles Green, Imran Ahmad, Derek Llambias, Barry Leach, David Somers - all these and more still have the capacity to make some on the current board break out in a cold sweat.

"We get approaches from all over the world from various sources," said Gilligan of would-be investors.

"But it has to be the right people and the right conditions and for the right amount of shares. We don't want one person owning the club."

Rangers’ future is, in part, being determined by their past and their understandable fear of having another ownership cataclysm on their hands.

At the same time, without an influx of major investment from the outside - in other words, revolution with the change of ownership that would come with it - it is hard to see how this financial picture changes dramatically at Ibrox any time soon.

"There is a plan and I am here to bring stability to the enforcement of that plan," said Gilligan, who later added: "We'll be fine…We’re in a strong place."

For all of Gilligan's dedication to duty, there continues to be more questions than answers at Rangers.