You have to hand it to Sir David Murray - seriously - because his performance of the past week deserves an alpha-plus in terms of self-defence and sticking up for his rights at Rangers. Having been at football war with Murray for years, in various columns and broadcasting outlets, I found myself totally admiring the Ibrox chairman in recent days as the unseemly rabble gathered around him.

Outside Ibrox on Saturday afternoon a hopeless and pathetic-looking troop of protesters gathered to try to usher the Rangers chairman towards the exit door. Almost as if at a funeral, they stood there, around 200 of them, looking as dumbstruck as sheep, wondering what to think or say.

If Murray wanted to hang in at Ibrox a while longer, it must have warmed his heart looking at this bedraggled lot.

Murray, who owns 90 per cent of Rangers and needs to get around £50 million back on his investment, is to be trusted – yes, trusted – when he says he will “not be hard to deal with over money” when it comes to selling up. That day will come soon enough. Indeed, yesterday, in an interview in Scotland on Sunday, Murray revealed that he came within hours of selling Rangers to a consortium last year, but pulled back at the last minute because he felt it “wasn’t the right deal for Rangers”.

Murray is quite right to resist such deals. Those who are clamoring to have Rangers sold need to think carefully about this: to whom and to what end? Will the new owner be good for the club? Will he (or she) reinvest in the team? Will they understand the place of Rangers as a unique Scottish institution? None of these questions can be treated lightly and those who think Murray should simply be frog-marched out of Ibrox at the point of a bayonet clearly have no sense of the bigger picture.

For sure, Murray has had his media toadies and has manipulated a group such as the Rangers Supporters Trust, and his club’s supporters are increasingly aware of this. But none of that should obscure the fact that what Murray wants is absolutely the best for Rangers in the future. The trouble those protesting Rangers fans have is that not one of them, to the best of our knowledge, has come up with an answer to the question about their club’s future.

Where is the sugar daddy – either in Britain or perhaps in the wider Scottish diaspora who has made his millions in north America – who can take over Rangers? One thing is for sure: the answer to Rangers’ future is not some gaggle of businessmen, with not a lot of money between them, who quite fancy taking over the steering of the club. That would be good for their pining egos but it wouldn’t serve Rangers well in the medium term.

The past week offered a fascinating portrait of a club whose principal figures have refused to be swayed by some of the loud-mouths gathering around them. For instance, there was something utterly refreshing about manager Walter Smith’s almost insouciant attitude towards what one sports reporter – and a good friend of mine – referred to as “the clamour in the streets” over Rangers’ recent problems.

I have to hand it to Smith. Sometimes there is something to be said for being oblivious to the so-called “fever” and “uproar” of fans – especially, in Rangers’ case, among the half-literate frenzies of the internet brigade – when it comes to the job.

We had a marvellous sit-down as usual with the Rangers manager last Friday, at which Smith merely raised one of his eyebrows and reacted wryly to suggestions that some among his club’s fans were foaming at the mouth over recent Rangers setbacks.

“Really?” Smith said. “A ‘clamour in the streets’, eh? Any time I’m out in the streets all I seem to be asked for is my autograph. I don’t see any ‘clamour’ .”

In an age when “the client” is supposed to come first – in football, in commerce, wherever – it is amusing to come upon a man quite unperturbed in this way. Moreover, football fans often complain that they don’t get the same access to clubs as reporters, and claim that, if they did, then they would ask the truly hard questions. But at a recent gathering of Rangers fans at Ibrox, alas, this proved not quite to be the case.

When suddenly confronted by Smith, Murray and Martin Bain – the three Rangers bigwigs – in an open Q and A session last week, it transpired that one or two of the supporters’ representatives found their knees starting to knock while trying to come up with the “hard questions”.

Smith, indeed, referred to the chap from the Rangers Trust as “silly” when he solemnly intoned: “Walter . . . were you disappointed by the Kaunas result?” So this is where sports journalism has gone wrong in this country! If only the rest of us could conjure up such fearlessness.

I’m no David Murray fan, but I admire him for having the guts to stick to his guns. He has ignored, and will continue to ignore, the more intemperate Rangers supporter until the moment is right to hand the club over. Because Murray knows that, unless he makes the call correctly, Rangers could tumble into years of decline.

And another thing... Seagulls overstaying their welcome in Aberdeen

May I ask one of the “hard questions” of sports journalism: are there any good shots in or around the Pittodrie area of Aberdeen who might solve a postmatch problem at Aberdeen FC? Earlier this week I tried to listen to a postmatch interview with Craig Brewster, the Inverness Caledonian Thistle manager, whose team had just beaten Aberdeen 2-0, only for his voice to be drowned out by screeching seagulls.

This wasn’t the first time these coastal pests have interfered at Aberdeen. Scotsport’s coverage used to be disrupted by seagulls swooping down and getting in the way of the camera just as Joe Harper was about to stick one away. If you can get a good signal up to Alex “Candid” Cameron, just ask him about it. Can’t Aberdeen employ somebody with a blunderbuss to take out flocks at a time so that we can enjoy our northeast football in peace?

Red card for the fans

What sheer drivel has been spoken, on the radio phone-ins and elsewhere about refereeing bias in Scotland. First, we had Eddie Smith getting it in the neck at Celtic Park last Sunday for having his “leanings” and then came Ibrox on Saturday where the Heart of Midlothian fans were simpering about Stuart Dougal during their team’s 2-0 defeat.

Neither case for bias held water. In Smith’s case, the penalty he gave to Celtic may have been a 50-50 call, but does anyone think this referee would risk his reputation with endless TV scrutiny of his work? As for bleating Hearts at Ibrox, it was their team’s miserable performance, rather than the excellent Mr Dougal, which did for them.

Gordon Smith, now at the SFA, got it right when he said: “What would we do if someone finally proved that all referees were totally honest? We’d have cartloads of fans being carried off for psychiatric counselling, with no one left to blame . . .”

Levein blows fuse again

Craig Levein remains one of the greatest blokes to be around in the Scottish game. I’ll maintain until I die that one of the finest gasket-blowing performances of any manager I’ve ever witnessed occurred at Ibrox last May when Levein excoriated poor Mike McCurry, a very good referee.

Levein couldn’t have been more animated over Reverend McCurry had he pulled out a blow-torch and aimed it at him. It was impressive rhetoric. The United manager has a faintly menacing habit of smouldering with indignation. We witnessed it again at Tannadice yesterday, when Charlie Richmond, incurred the wrath of Levein by failing to award his team an obvious penalty. It reminded me that I wouldn’t like to get on the Tannadice manager’s wrong side over a game of Scrabble.