Rangers address Steven Gerrard and Kevin Muscat next manager talks and reveal 5 candidates

It was widely reported that Gerrard and Muscat were close to landing the role, only for negotiations to break down as discussions advanced. It has led to criticism of chief executive Patrick Stewart and Kevin Thelwell and questions over how Rangers handled a tumultuous 15-day recruitment process which resulted in Danny Rohl being appointed on Monday afternoon.

Cavenagh revealed that there were five names in the hat to replace Russell Martin and gave a detailed description of the process.

“We interviewed a number of great candidates,” said Cavenagh. “We spoke to the two that you mentioned and to a number of other candidates that you never heard about. From the club’s perspective we have to treat this process with absolute confidentiality, or other coaches won’t want to engage with us in the future.

“That means there is asymmetric information: what is in the press and what is actually happening. So it looked clunky from an outside perspective but it was not at all clunky from our perspective from the club.

“We left London ten 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 just the three who have been talked about, who I was extremely comfortable would be great coaches for Rangers. That gave us great confidence as we embarked on the process.

‘The way it works isn’t like that’

“We didn’t rank people one, two and three. We had ten days at that point, tops, to get a coach into the building and so we pursued all five simultaneously. You do that precisely because of how it played out. You don’t know what will happen. Someone might pull out of the process and if you’ve put all your eggs in one basket you are in a real jam. We are experienced in these searches to know not to put all our eggs in one basket so we simultaneously pursued the coaches.

“Was anyone offered the job? The way it works isn’t like that. You don’t have a sort of big ceremony or send someone a letter with a bow on it. You are working on a whole bunch of different details at the same time. The two people you mentioned were complicated, they are halfway around the world, they have families who would have to move, they are coming in midseason. What you are trying to do is constantly move the ball forward and ask can we make this happen. Again we are doing that with five different people at once.

Pressed further on negotiations with Gerrard and Muscat, Cavenagh continued: “The misconception that’s out there about the names you mentioned [Gerrard and Muscat] is that somehow these guys [Stewart and Thelwell] screwed it up. I was involved in every single telephone call, every single meeting, every minute with both of those candidates. And I don’t believe that they didn’t come because they didn’t like Patrick or they didn’t want a sporting director. They are complicated things and eventually it didn’t work, largely due to timing on their part, a little bit on our part in the case of Kevin [Muscat].

“But while that was going on we had obviously re-engaged behind the scenes with Danny. Our focus going forward is not on who didn’t come but on who did come. We are incredibly happy that Danny Rohl is the head coach at Rangers Football Club.”