Michael Beale and Alex McLeish. Both managers who have been pitched into the biggest jobs of their lives at Rangers midway through the season. Here in part one of a two-part Rangers Review exclusive Iain King finds some startling similarities between the challenge big Eck faced taking over from Dick Advocaat in 2001 to the one Beale encounters now in the wake of Giovanni van Bronckhorst’s departure.

You've just inherited a broken Rangers team from a Dutch manager in the midst of a season of turmoil.

You are languishing in the wake of bitter Glasgow rivals Celtic with your title dreams threatening to disappear over the horizon.

Your team stands accused of playing slow, turgid football that the fans have grown sick of.

Your players have lost their way and stars who once shone brightly are now fading talents.

You are 42 years old, brimming with energy to turn this around and you feel at the peak of your coaching powers.

Your name is…Alex McLeish. Wait, what?

Take a moment and think about that, the uncanny similarities in the situation that faces Michael Beale to the scenario big Eck encountered when he took over from the beleaguered Dick Advocaat almost exactly 21 years ago on December 12, 2001.

McLeish and Beale were even the same age when they landed in the Ibrox hotseat.

Treble-winner Alex knows better than anyone the challenge now facing Giovanni van Bronckhorst’s mid-season successor.

After his loyalty pledge when he turned down Wolverhampton Wanderers and the Premiership, Beale infuriated the Queen’s Park Rangers fans when he said yes to the Ibrox advances.

For McLeish, likewise, there was only going to be one answer when Rangers came calling.

He recalled: “I remember the day David Murray phoned me he said: ‘I bet you never thought you would get this call big yin.’

“I countered with honesty and told him I didn’t because I thought my career would now be down in England.

“I had supported Rangers as a kid but I thought the managerial job would pass me by there and I would have to go south to grow.

“Gers were my boyhood heroes, though, and when the verbal sparring stopped I told him it was a huge honour to get the call.

“I was full of massive energy then and it was the right time for me to go Ibrox.

“I knew the team I was inheriting was full of superstars and Dick had made an agreement with David.

“The chairman had told Dick flat out that he would NOT sack him, he would move him upstairs rather than do that. So he was there as a sounding board.”

As the World Cup careers towards its denouement with van Bronckhorst’s one rollercoaster year in charge of Rangers now in the history books it is bizarre to reflect that it was only seven short months ago that he was on the precipice of legendary status as manager.

Gio’s tactical nous had guided his side to Seville and that gut-wrenching penalty shoot-out defeat against Eintracht Frankfurt in the Europa League Final.

Yet by November, his departure seemed sadly inevitable as he cut an ever more forlorn figure on the sidelines and his injury-battered team foundered.

Alex sees the mirror image of how it was when Advocaat bowed out and he revealed: “We were at a Rangers dinner last year in Glasgow and Dick confessed he had been tired then and he couldn’t do any more.

“He agreed it was time for a younger manager like me to come in and we had previous.

“I had visited Dick in Eindhoven when I signed Mitchell van der Gaag, who is now the Manchester City assistant coach, for Motherwell.

“I loved my visit there, I got to sign an excellent player and watch Advocaat in action on the training ground.

“A few years later that piece of networking paid off, we had forged a relationship, he had watched my work and he recommended me to David for the Rangers job.

“In typical style, though, David has always insisted it was his idea!”

Again like Beale, Alex’s appointment was not greeted with universal approval by the Light Blues legions.

With Michael - after just 22 games in charge of QPR – the fear is he is a managerial rookie.

Big Eck? The truth is the fans just wanted a bigger name. Or maybe they remembered that classic curler beyond Jim Stewart in the 1982 Scottish Cup Final win for Aberdeen and they just couldn’t forgive him.

Alex smiled wryly: “I remember one reporter asking at my Presser if I was disappointed at the lukewarm reception from the fans.

“I just said it was my job to win them over by winning games. That’s Rangers.

“Celtic were dominant and that was my clever answer. Thank God I didn’t say: ‘What are you talking about lukewarm, ya bam!’

“Seriously, I knew I had a job on. I felt the Rangers job wouldn’t ever happen for me and they would go foreign again after Dick because of the magnitude of the club.

“Listen, though, I went into that job feeling at the height of my powers as I am sure Michael does now.”

August 24 this year and Antonio Colak’s goal away at PSV Eindhoven secured Gers’ passage into the Promised Land of the Champions League group stages.

It was painted as the dream ending to the journey back from the banishment to Division Three as the painful penalty for financial irregularities a decade earlier.

It turned into a nightmare that Gers couldn’t wake up from as they sleepwalked through one horror show after another against Ajax, Napoli and Liverpool.

Battered in Europe, brutal to watch at times at home.

That was the sorry truth towards the end as Gio’s team, shorn of all confidence, stumbled through games.

Even when they won it was too often at a pedestrian pace that at first puzzled and then infuriated the fans.

Again, eerie echoes of when McLeish stepped into the fire.

He said: “I’d watched all the videos back then and I felt this was a team who tried to walk the ball into the net.

“There were trying to do it the Dutch way, get to the byeline and cut it back to score after making 53 passes to tire the opposition out!

“It was too slow for me, one thing I always took from my old gaffer Sir Alex Ferguson was his obsession with tempo, the speed of the balls you play, assertive passing.

“I got the analysts to show the Rangers team how slow they looked in possession at times.

“Now here we are 21 years on and we are in a very similar scenario. Gio qualified for the Champions League which was a great feat.

“So the next question has to be: ‘Why did we then get battered by Ajax?’

“We had beaten PSV and I texted my old player Arthur Numan to ask if Ajax were miles better than them.

“I think it was telling that he said: ‘No, they are marginally better than PSV if at all.’

“The problem was in the Ajax games – and that entire Champions League campaign – Rangers looked both mentally drained and short of legs.

“That’s not a recipe for winning games at the top level and then, at key times, more injuries came.

“They went from beating PSV to being thrashed by Ajax, something happened within the squad.

“Mental, physical, confidence lost, energy sapped, you lose all those things and that becomes one giant nightmare.

“I feel for Giovanni, I didn’t know him as a coach but he was a superb player for Rangers.

“He only had a year in that job and he could have gone out having a pop but he left with real class.

“The Liverpool game was a prime example of how it turned, though, when Connor Goldson was injured at 1-1 and Rangers brought on young Leon King and Jurgen Klopp reacted with Mo Salah off the bench.

“I feared for young Leon then. Yes, it is a great learning experience and he didn’t make terrible mistakes - apart from not closing down quicker which he can work on - but he was facing true world class and before you now where you are it is 7-1.”

This afternoon at Ibrox Beale makes his bow as boss in a glamour friendly against German big guns Bayer Leverkusen.

A loss might be excused but he needs a performance. The fans need hope, just as they did when McLeish took over back in 2001 with his side 11 points behind Celtic, two worse off than they are now.

Alex admitted: “The place was just at a low ebb and Dick admitted to me that the players weren’t listening to him anymore.

“He had fallen out with Lorenzo Amoruso and one of the first things I did was call him.

“Lorenzo was back in Italy getting some treatment for an injury in Florence, he recognised my voice right away and said: ‘Hey Boss, congratulations!’ which was nice.

“He admitted he had problems with Dick and I just told him to get fit and get back to Ibrox.

“I went to Florence in mid-winter on a break with my wife Jill and he came and met us in his little car because he liked it for the parking!

“He took us to his restaurant and we had a great time and he smiled when we got back to the little car: ‘Boss, forget this one I have a Ferrari at home.’

“That was a fun memory but that relationship needed to be sorted, he was a big player for us.

“The key, though, was always that tempo. I’m not speaking about launching it, just getting the ball forward quicker so we could use the pace we had in the likes of Peter Lovenkrands.

“Speed, accuracy of passes, one-twos to undo teams, much like Michael Beale is thinking about now.

“Michael has a great reputation as a coach and he will get that refreshment and players will run more than they did under Gio. That’s what happens.”

The new manager bounce, the McLeish Effect. Call it what you like.

If Michael Beale can mastermind the same sort of revival that Alex McLeish pulled off in his first 18 months in charge then this appointment will be lauded as the work of geniuses.

The league was gone when big Eck came in but he won both Cups that first season and he shrugged: “Celtic still won the title by a distance but we won a League Cup semi-final against them thanks to Bert Konterman’s screamer.

“That gave me breathing space to begin to operate with the fans and winning those two Cups that season mirrors what Michael faces now.

“He has tough Cup ties coming up and I was massively aware of that in my time there.

“Look, I know it’s 21 years on but there are so many similarities, right now Celtic look more athletic and they look more confident.

“We had to get that back in my time and now Michael has to get that back. Me? I inherited some unbelievable players.

“Their minds were a little scrambled and we had to refocus them the way Michael has to with the likes of Kent and Morelos now.

“I remember at the time Murray Park was fairly new and I told them to look around, they were in a world-class facility and they were world-class players.

“I constantly wanted them to feel good about themselves and coming into work and I think they did.

“I told them I saw them as fantastic players and I tried to lift them mentally and they began to feel more freedom but I demanded we upped the tempo. That was the key message.”

Alex McLeish’s Rangers won and they won again in those heady first two seasons.

He would leave with seven trophies in four and a half years after 235 games that saw him lose just 36 matches and depart with a 66% win percentage.

In three and a half years Steven Gerrard won one trophy and lost 26 games in 193 in charge for a win percentage of 64.8%

These are figures worth pondering when you reflect on how both men are remembered when pints are raised and memories are recounted.

McLeish confessed: “We won five trophies in a row if you discount that league in 2001 when we started 11 points back and when I look back on my career a Double then a Treble at Rangers is the stuff of dreams.

“We resurrected the spirit of the team and the club, we brought Michael Mols back to a good place and I will always be proud of those things.

“I remember bringing Mikey back into a reserve game at Dumbarton and he chased back 50 yards to regain possession and I thought there was no way I could sell him.

“That was it, I thought then he could be back near his best even if that trademark turn of his would never quite be the same again.

“I had been asked to make a decision if we should let him go and I made my mind up that day at The Rock.

“He scored goals against the Celtic team they said were the best since the Lisbon Lions and that’s a great credit to him after the cruciate ligament injury he had.

“I will watch every one of Michael Beale’s games with interest because he has inherited a season battered by injuries to key players like Tom Lawrence and Goldson and I rate both so highly.

“These are hurtful absences but in Glasgow that gets overlooked, you just have to overcome it all.

“There are so many echoes of my time there in what Michael faces, I wish him well.”

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