If Cavenagh picks Thelwell as his hill to die on the damage it will do to his credibility is catastrophic

American tycoon must think carefully over next move

- KEITH JACKSON

IF he's not incredibly careful Andrew Cavenagh is about to emerge from his first Rangers crisis with a monumental, potentially irreparable credibility issue.

The American tycoon did himself a big favour last week when he and vice-chairman Paraag Marathe put their names to an open letter to the clubs fans in which they declared their intention to take a hands-on approach to the hunt for Russell Martin’s replacement.

And those same supporters reacted with near unanimous approval when the first call they made led to Steven Gerrard flying from Bahrain to London to open discussions about a possible return to Ibrox.

Some of us, however, struggled from the start to believe that Gerrard was ever fully in the room, even though he agreed to travel 4000 miles just to be there.

Almost nothing - or certainly very little - about the financial or family reasons that ruled him out as a serious candidate in the summer had noticeably altered.

For that reason alone it felt Gerrard was doing nothing much more than paying Cavenagh and Marathe a courtesy visit by agreeing to meet them face to face. He will have been open to having a conversation but it was always likely to take a whopping great cheque and a huge shift in Cavenagh’s strategic approach to the running of the club for Gerrard to be persuaded into taking it further than a convivial cup of tea.

That's why the Philadelphia-based businessman is now straying into the most dangerous of minefields, following Gerrard's decision to cut and run back to the safety of the family mansion in the Persian Gulf.

Purely in terms of the optics, it looks as if Cavenagh isn’t calling the shots after all. And worse still, that he is stubbornly and deliberately standing by a sporting director whose own position ought to be untenable.