THE Armourdillo

Straight shooting from Clement and Gilligan keeps lid on summit... yet you can't help but feel they were human shields for those bearing far more responsibility for the club's troubles

- ANDY NEWPORT

EVEN after watching his side put the boot into Kilmarnock the night before, Philippe Clement must have turned up for Rangers' agm fearing a shareholder shoeing.

Instead, what transpired at the Armadillo on the River Clyde was an 89-minute sitdown in which he had the fans eating out of his palm.

"I promise you I didn't ask the players to give me more effort because I had the agm the next day," joked the big Belgian at one point.

The fact the under-pressure gaffer could afford to crack jokes tells you a lot about the mood on the day.

The Ibrox faithful can be a strange bunch when it comes to these annual stakeholder summits.

No matter the crises affecting the wider support there's always someone ready to push the masses aside and have a personal grumble about the fact they missed out in the ticket ballot or some other self-serving gripe.

Yesterday was different. There was no mention of cold Broxi burgers or groans about James Bisgrove's money-grabbing MyGers scheme.

Yet it was hardly the feeding frenzy either that some among the 1800 attendees had assumed would gobble up the club's beleaguered board.

The directors were certainly in the dock. But the line of questioning was cold and forensic, more prosecutorial than piqued with frothing fury.

To be honest, you'd find it hard to spit and rant at interim chairman John Gilligan.

The former Tennent's brewery boss only returned to the club he loves out of duty when the strain of handling the fall-out from the calamitous Copland] construction cock-up began to take a toll on the health of his friend and previous chairman John Bennett.