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By GRAEME MACPHERSON Published: 05: 58 AEDT, 4 April 2025 | Updated: 06: 24 AEDT, 4 April 2025 View comments Many football coaches like to tell people there’s no greater feeling than being out on the training field or inside the dressing room. Clearly, however, not all of their peers agree. Offered the chance to become Everton manager in 1997, Andy Gray turned it down to remain in his still lucrative but substantially less stressful role as a football pundit with Sky Sports.   Gray also cited greater job security as one of the other factors in his decision, making it somewhat ironic when he was then sacked by the broadcaster many years later. For the majority of former players, however, there is something about that call to serve on the frontline again that they find almost impossible to turn down. Even within those who have well-established media profiles and could easily see out the rest of their working days from the comforts of a television studio or commentary booth, there resides an irresistible urge to drop everything and run towards whichever crisis-ridden football club needs their help. MCann, above right, is loving life at Rangers with Ferguson since quitting the TV studios  Mc Cann, shown with Cyriel Dessers, has been making his presence felt at Ibrox In Neil Mc Cann’s case, it was Barry Ferguson who performed the Lord Kitchener role, pointing a metaphorical finger in the direction of his former team-mate and asking him to join him in a salvage operation at their old club, Rangers. Mc Cann has coached or managed at Dunfermline, Dundee and, briefly, Inverness Caley Thistle but, most recently, has found regular work as an erudite and respected football analyst on TV.   It would have been quite an acceptable thing for him to say: ‘Thanks, but no thanks’ when approached by Ferguson for a potentially short-term project at Ibrox.   Instead, he reveals that he accepted without hesitation, signing on immediately before preparing to go over the top into battle. Neil Mc Cann makes his point to Ferguson during another tense encounter for Rangers ‘Surprised, ’ was how he remembered feeling when Ferguson made the proposal to join him on the interim coaching staff. ‘I didn’t expect it. And when I got a phone call from the club to ask: “Would you be interested? ” then clearly there’s an excitement there. ‘It’s not an opportunity I thought was going to come, but I couldn’t wait. I literally couldn’t wait to get into work. And it’s been like that since the start. It’s early starts, it’s late finishes, but it’s so good. ‘Listen, this is the coal face. Every footballer will probably tell you (they want to be here). Well, not every footballer, because a lot of people actually don’t want to have a go at this. ‘But I love it. There’s nothing better than being on a touchline or on a training ground preparing for a game. I loved my time at Dundee. I loved my time at Inverness. I love the whole strategy of management. ‘I’ve loved my time already, and being part of Rangers is something I’m very proud of. I was a player here and now I’ve been given the chance to come back and put the badge back on again as part of the coaching team. But, if I need to go back to punditry, then I’ll give that 100 per cent as well. ’ A feeling lingers that this was almost a retro-style appointment. That this quartet of former Rangers players was brought in to restore an old-school steeliness to the squad.   One that was perhaps less evident under former manager Philippe Clement. Ferguson has already said numerous times that he felt the playing group was ‘too nice’. Mc Cann continued along a similar theme, believing application rather than talent has been the biggest hindrance to Rangers of late. ‘What we’ve been charged with is making improvements to the group and to individuals, getting the fans back seeing a team that is showing all the qualities you have to have as a Rangers player. Mc Cann has been better known as a pundit recently before Rangers came calling again Now he is part of the interim coaching team at Rangers with Ferguson and Billy Dodds Barry Ferguson tries to get his message across to the players while Mc Cann looks on ‘It’s not just about being a good footballer. Most of the time players come to this club and they should already be marked as a good player. They should have the right ability to play for Rangers. ‘But there’s a lot more ingredients that go into being a successful Rangers player than just that, and we’re trying to inject that into them. I’ve known Barry for a long time now. He’s trying to bring the character he had as a player, the demand he had as a player. Doddsy (Billy Dodds) is the same, Greegsy (Allan Mc Gregor) too. ‘We all probably share a real fighting Scottish spirit that I think is good. The group got it right away. They understood the message in the first training session. It was very, very clear what we expected. It’s never been let go. ‘It’s relentless in terms of what we expect from them, the work rate and the intensity in training. That’s maybe something that they’ve had to adjust to because we found that, in the first week or two, we were driving them really, really hard. And it was taking a lot out of them. But we felt that we had to hit levels that we expected them to see in order to then face the opposition. ’ Those methods have been successful, if only to a point.   The team landed a derby win away to Celtic and squeezed past Fenerbahce to reach the last eight of the Europa League.   But they also continue to leak goals like a sieve and haven’t kept a single clean sheet in the six matches played under the interim management team.   An in-form Hibs at Ibrox on Saturday will provide another thorough examination of their defensive mettle. Mc Cann is only too aware of this. ‘The difficult thing for us is that, in the short space of time we’ve been in the door, we’ve thrown an unbelievable amount of information at them. We’ve wanted to change shape a number of times, not only from the start of matches against different opposition but during matches when we felt it maybe wasn’t going right. ‘It’s obvious that old coaching habits, maybe things that they’ve been encouraged to do previous to us coming in, still remain as a hard wire. It’s up to us, if we don’t like those, to try and change them. ‘Unfortunately we don’t have a great deal of time before the end of the season but we’re working hard every day in training for them to try and take that information on board. ‘We absolutely have changed how we attack but we’re still conceding goals. As a coaching staff, that’s absolutely something that we’ve got to try and eradicate. You can’t keep on giving the opposition one goal, never mind two goals of a start. ’

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