Chairman Andrew Cavenagh insists Rangers 'didn't screw up' head coach search
Rangers chairman Andrew Cavenagh claims the board did not "screw up" the search for a new head coach but admits it appeared "clunky" from the outside.
The Ibrox outfit appointed Danny Röhl more than two weeks after they sacked previous boss Russell Martin.
Rangers were close to appointing former manager Steven Gerrard and ex-player Kevin Muscat, only for talks to collapse at a late stage.
Röhl himself initially withdrew from the process before accepting the role on Monday.
Chief executive Patrick Stewart and sporting director Kevin Thelwell have been widely criticised by fans for their perceived roles in the club's poor start to the season, but Cavenagh defended their work in recruiting the next head coach.
Cavenagh said: "I think the misconception that's out there that I'd like to just clarify around the names you mentioned is that somehow Thelwell and Stewart screwed it up.
"I was involved in every single telephone call, every single meeting, every minute with both Gerrard and Muscat.
"And I don't believe that they didn't come because they didn't like Patrick or they didn't want a sporting director.
"Eventually, it didn't work largely due to timing on their part, a little bit on our part with the case of Kevin.
"But, while that was going on, we had obviously reengaged behind the scenes unbeknownst to people with Danny.
"While I'm happy to talk about this, our focus going forward is not on who didn't come, it's on who did come and we're incredibly happy that Danny Rohl is the head coach of Rangers Football Club."
Cavenagh claims some reporting of the managerial search was not true, which led to the idea that the process had several issues.
"There's asymmetric information - what's out in the press versus what is actually happening," he said.
"It looked clunky from the outside perspective. It wasn't at all clunky from our perspective inside the club."
Cavenagh insists there was never one leading candidate, with five different people in the running for the role.
"We interviewed a number of great candidates," he said. "We spoke to a number of other candidates that you've never heard about.
"We left London 10 days ago, having done a whole bunch of meetings and I said to our group how happy I was that we had five candidates - not the three that have been talked about - I was extremely comfortable would be great coaches for Rangers."
"We didn't rank people one, two and three.
"We had 10 days at that point, tops, to get a coach into the building, so we pursued all five simultaneously.
"Was anybody offered the job? The way that it works isn't like that. You don't have a big ceremony and send somebody a letter with a bow on it."
"You're working on a whole bunch of different details at the same time," he added. "The two people you mention are complicated.
"They're halfway around the world, they have families, they'd have to move, they're coming in mid-season.
"So what you're trying to do on every candidate is just constantly try to move the ball forward and figure out, 'can we make this happen'? And again, we're doing that with five different people at once."
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