In a homage to ex-manager Giovanni van Bronckhorst, Michael Beale’s assistant Neil Banfield took the pre-Morton presser and answered everything by saying absolutely nothing.
The number one beside the manager was on press conference duty to deal with the hacks before Rangers hopefully deal with Morton, but it was in what he didn’t say rather than what he did that got our attention.
As we know, the styles of Gio and Beale couldn’t contrast more – Gio with his vague utterances and refusal to give direct answers and penchant for cryptic, Beale with quite the opposite in saying too much, blabbering and generally offering more information than needed.
But Banfield is very much in the style of Gio, by offering absolutely no information at all in this presser, with extremely vague comments and generalised cliches in a return to the old manager where all cards were kept close to the chest.
The only snippets we could even vaguely take was the claim that we ‘think there’s only about one injury’ and ‘it’s nice to have away fans’ and lastly that Beale will not be ‘giving anyone a chance’ v Morton and it’s a strong team for a must-win game.
This was as close to any information Banfield would offer, and even the Englishman himself conceded he was offering a cliché at one point.
Did we like this? Well, there was no information for us Rangers groups to chew on, no juicy morsels to delve into, to over-analyse the truth or otherwise of them.
Just a dry conference with little information imparted. So we guess he gave us lot less to feed on, less to dissect, a bit like Gio himself did once upon a time.
But we guess the big question might actually be… where indeed was Michael Beale, given his love for chatting to the media…
Answers on a postcard.