Gough hails King's quiet start

Former Rangers captain Richard Gough believes Dave King's first major achievement at Ibrox has been putting the focus back on football.

Chairman King has been trying to renegotiate the club's retail contracts with Sports Direct but most Rangers fans are now focused on Mark Warburton's transformation of their team ahead of the Championship opener against St Mirren on Friday night.

King officially took up his post in late May after a boardroom coup in early March and the club suffered an immediate blow with defeat to Motherwell in the play-offs.

But the power struggle with Mike Ashley has since been relegated as Warburton begins his promotion assault.

Gough, a friend of the South African-based businessman, said: "I think Dave King has been fantastic. He has been very quiet.

"A lot of people have been asking: 'Where's Dave, where's Dave?' He has been quiet, he has been behind the scenes but he is going to put a structure in place that goes a long way to making sure we get back to where we belong.

"What I like about Dave is that the noise level has gone down around Ibrox. The negative press has gone down.

"The last three years you guys have been getting exclusives about what the previous regime have been saying. Now it's about the football, which is good.

"I know Dave most probably had a meeting with Sports Direct, with (Mike) Ashley, last week but that doesn't get publicised. It's all quiet. We have got to talk about football again.''

Gough was speaking after greeting a family who have purchased some of the 32,000 season tickets Rangers have sold this summer. And he claims that Ibrox is generally a much more welcoming place following several years of financial and ownership turmoil.

"Even just walking in the front door,'' he said.

"Obviously I know the security people, I know everyone around the club, I know all the kitchen people.

"That's what Rangers has always been about, it's always been a real family club. You become part of the family here. We were kind of losing that a little bit. It wasn't getting a great place to come to but I definitely get the feeling that's coming back.

"As soon as Dave King, Paul Murray and John Gilligan came in, that brought an optimism.

"There's a structure behind the football management team which unfortunately wasn't there in the previous three years.

"It's going to get put in place slowly, but it has started well.

"It's been three years of the club being taken apart. So it won't be a quick fix but the club is going in the right direction.

"When the guys came in they said it was broken and they are fixing it bit by bit. They are not going to throw £50million at it and all of a sudden everything is going to be okay.

"I like the way that the management team have gone about it. They haven't bought anyone for three or four million. It's like a jigsaw puzzle, putting things together.''

Rangers earlier announced that shareholder Douglas Park was making way for his son, Graeme, on the Ibrox board, because other commitments were preventing him devoting enough time to his task.

Meanwhile, the Rangers First fans' group has announced the purchase of almost 600,000 shares.

The group has added 586,000 shares to take its total to more than 2.6million or 3.2 per cent of the company.