GARY KEOWN: AGM silence means we may never find out what Rangers’ longest-serving board member has done to justify his role… other than being the son of Douglas Park

Nine years as a director and not a dicky bird. You’d get more chaff out of Mr Bean. And by the looks of things, much wiser guidance on how to run a football club.

Graeme Park, son and heir to former chairman Douglas, is now the longest-serving board member at Rangers. He’s overseen everything there over the last decade. The good, the bad and the 50 shades of abominable.

He was part of the sub-team that somehow identified Pedro Caixinha as boss. According to the club website, he also represented the board on the committee for the 150th anniversary celebrations in 2022 — the biggest non-event since the Millennium Bug, as it turned out.

He has no doubt been involved in all sorts of other stuff too. It’s just, erm, no one outside the tent has the faintest idea what that might be.

Park was back at the top table, of course, at the club AGM on Thursday, looking on as the absolute mess the place has descended into was picked over by questioners from the floor and splattered all over the display behind him in facts and figures.

If anyone should be able to offer some insight into how things have been allowed to get as bad as this, it’s him. Instead, a 72-year-old man turned deflector shield in John Gilligan, just back in the door as interim chairman and with no involvement in the disasters of recent years having ended his previous stint on the board in 2017, was left to do almost all the talking.

But then, just over quarter-of-an-hour into the Q&A session staged at the Clyde Auditorium, a hush fell across the land. No, not that bit where it was confirmed that the combined sales of Connor Goldson, Todd Cantwell, Sam Lammers, Scott Wright and Robby McCrorie only raised half of the £1.6million Motherwell got up front from Auxerre for Theo Bair. That raised audible gasps of astonishment.

No, no. This part involved someone from long-forgotten fan group Club 1872 — yes, it still exists, somewhere out there, a remnant of the past like Imran Ahmad or Dalcio — stepping up to the mic and asking specifically for the other members of the board present to speak individually about lessons learned and the best route forward.

This was it. This, after all these years of longing, was the moment. The chance to luxuriate in the dulcet tones of Park junior and discover what it is that has justified the boardroom role he has held since August 2015 other than the fact his dad is the second-biggest shareholder.

But, no. Alastair Johnston jumped in, waffled on about all manner of irrelevances, and, then, Gilligan reappeared to move things on. Park could have spoken. Should have spoken. But he didn’t — and, with that, offered all the more ammunition to those who are already gunning for him and his old man.

It’s only a month or so since banners were flown, which featured the clear message ‘Park And Co — Time To Go’. If ever there was a time for the family to show they just can’t carry on sitting in silence as the club slides towards becoming eternal bridesmaids to Celtic, losing £17.2m despite £88.3m of revenue, it was Thursday.

But, no. The lack of communication goes on. The refusal to talk, to offer ideas, to bat some stuff about. To even offer some kind of mea culpa. And, so, the enmity from that section of the fanbase will go on, too.

So many of Rangers’ current problems date back to Douglas Park’s time in charge. There’s the failure to back Steven Gerrard and build on ‘55’. The failure to bolster Giovanni van Bronckhorst’s reign after he’d qualified for the Champions League.

But more tellingly, the appalling decision to hand Michael Beale the manager’s job and then give him free rein to spend fortunes on salaries and fees in the summer of 2023 after sporting director Ross Wilson had bailed out.

That pitiful return for Goldson, Lammers, Cantwell, Wright and McCrorie was all about just trying to get a ridiculous wage bill under control.

Don’t forget Borna Barisic, a Croatia international who should have been sold for big profits years ago, and John Lundstram walked for free too. And there were rumours Ianis Hagi, a bloke in his peak years who spent the summer playing at Euro 2024 with Romania, would have gone for buttons as well had anyone been willing to take on his salary.

A matter of months on, Hagi is now a star man after renegotiating his terms and conditions. A saga that has just made manager Philippe Clement — who wrote him off earlier in the season, claiming he wouldn’t play as a result of Nedim Bajrami’s arrival rather than any contract clauses — look even less in control at a club that doesn’t know what it’s doing. And hasn’t for a long time.

When Johnston allowed Park junior to give speaking about what he has been involved in over the last nine years the bodyswerve, it only raised further questions about why he is there too.

Johnston, a former chairman, did try to sound the warning bell when Sir David Murray was handing over Oldco to Craig Whyte back in the day. However, his offerings at the AGM had little to do with the immediate present.

He was talking about Bobby Shearer and started going on about how the SPFL TV deal should be better. True, but it is waaaay down the list in terms of what Rangers have to be getting on with.

There was then something about going for dinner in Nice recently and vague chat about possibly linking up with Manchester United. That’s fine, but Celtic don’t seem to be looking down the lines of becoming a feeder club for anyone and, in any case, Rangers fans have had enough pie-in-the-sky stuff to last a lifetime.

Johnston is now 76. It is not clear what he has delivered since returning to the board in 2017. Or what role he will play going forward.

Gilligan stated that plans are in place to create a new team of directors that will be largely Scotland-based. It is easy to see why convening board meetings might be tricky when Johnston is in the USA with investor John Halsted and George Taylor and Julian Wolhardt have their bases in Hong Kong.

Halsted, Wolhardt and Taylor weren’t present on Thursday, but there is no hiding for anyone in the corridors of power at Ibrox any longer.

The Rangers board need to be judged on words and actions. Some don’t seem keen on talking at all while a little — largely ignored — vignette just ahead of the AGM spoke volumes about how they really appear to regard interaction with their customer base.

The in-house Fan Advisory Board stated their disappointment that minutes of a meeting with chief financial officer James Taylor on November 5 over the club’s disastrous annual accounts were not made available ahead of the shareholder gathering ‘despite repeated requests’.

‘Delays in publishing minutes to our meetings are completely unacceptable,’ said a statement.

This is the same organisation, of course, that was told at a meeting in June that ‘everything was going to plan’ with construction work on the Copland Stand — three days before the club conceded it wasn’t, and that the season would be starting at Hampden.

As discussed, this is a board that has to be judged on its actions. Do you think they are treating you with respect, Rangers fans? Do you feel part of the loop? Do you think all these guys should stay in position and carry on regardless?

It looks a pretty open-and-shut case from here.

Women’s game needs a shake after latest low

On the field, Scotland’s women’s team are falling off the face of the map. Off it, the same old inertia continues.

Head coach Pedro Martinez Losa says he sees no reason to go anywhere despite a second straight failure to make it to a major finals, losing another play-off to lower-ranked opposition.

The likes of Caroline Weir and others came out after the oh-so-predictable Euro 2025 play-off loss to Finland and said they couldn’t have given any more and they’ll just have to pick themselves up and go again.

Elsewhere, there’s precious little in the way of meaningful analysis, a proper post-mortem, from important figures. And that just feeds into a general feeling that it doesn’t really matter that much.

Take national captain Rachel Corsie, currently out injured, and former national team player Leanne Crichton. They used their ‘Behind The Goals’ podcast on the BBC to pick over the disaster in Helsinki. God, talk about 23 minutes of your life you won’t get back.

No real chat about what went wrong, why a team with players from Chelsea, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich carry so little threat under Martinez Losa, how on earth the SFA have managed to make such an utter mess of things after the incredible platform of the 2019 World Cup and national TV audiences of millions.

Crichton said she didn’t expect Corsie to speculate on Martinez Losa’s future, a dead man walking if ever there was one, and wasn’t terribly keen on doing so herself.

Sorry? If you’re taking licence-fee payers’ money to be a talking head, surely the least you can do is offer an opinion.

Yet, that’s been a problem around women’s football. No proper drilling-down when it goes wrong. No real insight to key issues. Silence. Secrecy. Old pals protecting each other or folk too close to the inside for comfort.

That’s where Gemma Fay, the former national keeper, came in like a ray of light. On radio in the immediate aftermath, she spoke well. The manager’s key performance indicator of qualifying wasn’t met, these players are not punching their weight, it hasn’t been good enough, we’re falling behind.

Women’s football in Scotland goes nowhere unless the national team is winning hearts and influencing people. Missing three major tournaments is a catastrophe.

The whole set-up needs a shake with a new manager and some old faces from the squad bowing out.

Fay has been making progress of late in lifting standards with the women’s rugby team. Maybe the usual suspects at Hampden should give her a call for some ideas.

Miller’s plan to reach the top is worthy of admiration

How warming to hear Lee Miller state during the week that his son Lennon won’t just be jumping at the biggest deal or the biggest club when it comes to agreeing a move away from Motherwell.

There’s a determination to make sure the 18-year-old goes somewhere the ethos is right, where the style is right, where the manager is right.

More important than anything, though, is that his family and advisors want to pick somewhere he will play.

Normally, you don’t grudge a young player jumping purely at life-changing money, even if, as often tends to happen, it ends up with potential eventually left unfulfilled.

Miller is different, though. He can become a terrific midfielder with real top-level qualities in time.

His people are determined to put his career development before everything else and that’s great to hear when it relates to a talent who is just so exciting.