Philippe Clement called for unity in the stands after a schism in the support revealed itself at Ibrox during Rangers’ 3-1 win over bottom side St Johnstone.
The Union Bears, the club’s ultras-style supporters group, initiated a walkout in the 55th minute in protest against the board for publicly backing their boss in the wake of the 1-1 draw against Dundee on Thursday night.
However, many of those Gers fans that stayed behind booed the fans’ group, who had mostly stayed silent during the afternoon, while intermittently parading anti-board banners.
Three goals in a nine-minute spell in the first half from Hamza Igamane, Vaclav Cerny and Mohamed Diomande effectively settled the contest, with Saints defender Jack Sanders reducing the deficit just before the walkout.
The game continued on in a strange, subdued atmosphere, ending with Rangers 15 points behind William Hill Premiership leaders Celtic and the title all-but gone.
Clement said: “I want everybody to be united. Simple.
“You can see it as a positive that still a lot of people are behind everything.
“But I want to have everybody united. So, that’s what I wanted last year when I came in, and it was also totally not the case at that moment.
“But it has to do with performance, and that’s normal. We want consistency, I want consistency, and fans want consistency to get better results. We have the consistency in the home games.
“We have now 31 points out of 33, I think. We have consistency in our European season, but we didn’t have consistency away at home. So, those are things to work on with all the squads.”
Clement claimed after the Dundee game that he had “200 per cent” backing of the board and thus was obviously not surprised by new chief executive Patrick Stewart’s confirmation on Saturday.
He said “I know that, and I have already spoken with Patrick a lot. He’s not long in the building, but I’m very happy that he’s here.
“I’ve been six, seven months sometimes feeling alone in the desert and addressing things to make better in the club.
“That will help me, that will help the football department, but it will help everything inside the club. So I’m happy that we can have really open and sometimes critical discussions about it.”
Sorry St Johnstone have gone nine games without a win and are nine points behind second-bottom Hearts.
Boss Simo Valakari is pleased at taking a break from a “catastrophic” league position to face Motherwell in the Scottish Cup next week.
He said: “I want to move very quickly from here. You can call me crazy, but I know this club and this team, and I can feel it’s starting to turn. There is no better time than the cup this week.
“For seven days we don’t need to think about the catastrophic position in the league. Now it’s the cup and it doesn’t matter how badly we have played in the league or what has happened.
“It’s the Scottish Cup and we have exactly the same possibility to win as Rangers or anyone else has.”
