Stuart McCall comments on brief spell as Rangers manager

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McCall spent around four months in charge of Glasgow Rangers before the club appointed Mark Warburton.

Stuart McCall has insisted that he has no regrets about his decision to take over as Rangers boss in 2015, even after claiming that the club were in complete disarray when he took over, the Daily Mail reports.

The former Gers midfielder returned to Murray Park following the end of Kenny McDowall’s 81 day tenure. And while the side were a long way adrift of Scottish Championship winners Hearts, McCall did lead the Light Blues into the play-offs off the back of a run of just one defeat in 11 league games.

Former Rangers manager Stuart McCall

But after victories over Queen of the South and Hibernian booked them a place in the final against Motherwell, the wheels came off in spectacular fashion as Well claimed a 6-1 aggregate win to remain in the top flight.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, McCall’s contract was not extended in the summer as the Rangers hierarchy instead opted to appoint Mark Warburton and David Weir as manager and assistant respectively.

But while the side’s promotion last season would suggest that the board’s decision was vindicated, McCall explained how he felt that he deserved more time, especially given the situation the Gers were in when he arrived in March.

“People said: ‘Do you know what you’re going into? You’ve only got a couple of months, you can’t change players. You can only change the mentality’. It was the worst environment I’ve entered into in my history in football. The players, staff, they’d been through so much,” he said, as reported by the Mail.

“The job was to change the mood and get people believing again. We got full houses back. We beat Hearts, beat Hibs. Take the play-off game out of it and I was more than happy. I never regretted it for a second. Yet there’s always that bit in you that thinks: If only I had the chance to bring our own players in and have our own philosophy. We had no time for that.”

While it is impossible to know whether McCall would have delivered the same success that Warburton led his side to, the fact that he has done so well at Bradford since his appointment in the summer would suggest that he perhaps could have also achieved the main objective last term in guiding the side to the top flight.