Tangled Up in Blue

by Stephen O'Donnell

  Like so many others who have played a key role in Rangers’ history, Wallace was not a west of Scotland man, hailing instead from the village of Wallyford, to the east of Edinburgh. As a coach, he placed a great deal of emphasis on physical fitness, training his players to the point of sickness and exhaustion in pre-season on the sand dunes of Gullane Beach, a few miles further up the East Lothian coast from his home. The brawn behind Waddell’s brain, his strengths were considered to be on the motivational, rather than the tactical, side of the game and he was very much a traditional Rangers type, who loved the club and bought into the culture fully over the course of his association, and he emphasised the values of discipline and strength in the traditional Rangers manner.

  The new season opened with defeat to Hibs at Easter Road in the semi-final of the Drybrough Cup, a short-lived pre-season tournament between the four top-scoring teams in the first and second divisions. The game witnessed further ugly scenes involving Rangers supporters and, coming so soon after the disgrace of Barcelona, Waddell, in his new role as the club’s general manager, didn’t mince his words when he addressed the ‘tykes, hooligans, louts and drunkards who have no respect for society’. For a club which in more recent years has so often been on the defensive over their fans’ behaviour, Waddell deserves credit for the unequivocal tone of his condemnation, ‘The name of Rangers has been smeared all over the world by an unruly mob who spread destruction and terror. Unfortunately the stain sticks to every decent Rangers fan. We want no part of those who cause destruction to public property, throw bottles, fight and spread viciousness with party songs and foul and obscene language. It is because of your gutter rat behaviour that we are being publicly tarred and feathered.’

  On the field, the club’s fortunes took a while to improve in the early days of Wallace’s reign. Perhaps trying too hard to assert his authority after his unexpected promotion, the new manager fell out with several important players, including Willie Johnston and Alfie Conn, although in the case of Conn, manager and player were eventually reconciled. There were embarrassing defeats to Second Division sides St Mirren, 4-1, and Stenhousemuir, 2-1, both at Ibrox in the League Cup, although the latter came on the back of a 5-0 win at Ochilview in the first leg, and Rangers eventually progressed to the semi-final of the competition.

  In the league too, they struggled initially, and there were early losses to Ayr United, Celtic and Kilmarnock, all by the end of September. Results slowly began to improve, however, as Wallace gradually began to grow into his new role. The turning point came when the languid Dave Smith was injured just before Christmas and the manager decided to move the tough-tackling midfielder Tom Forsyth, later nicknamed ‘Jaws’, whom he had signed from Motherwell in October, into central defence alongside the still teenage Derek Johnstone. Smith, a gambling addict who was jailed in 1983 for embezzlement, was not a particularly physical defender, relying more on his ability to read the game, and in fact he had never been booked and was prone to congratulating opponents who got the better of him. He eventually left Rangers for Arbroath in November 1974, fed up with Wallace’s persistent instruction that he should leather opponents.

  The Barcelona squad was starting to break up, as Wallace began to shape the team which he had inherited. Jackson and Smith were no longer first picks and the temperamental strike partnership of Colin Stein and the pacy Willie Johnston, who had recently been banned for nine matches, was dismantled with both players transferred south, to Coventry and West Brom respectively. Wallace dismissed the departing pair as ‘prima donnas’ and they were later followed by Alfie Conn, who moved to Spurs, before returning to Glasgow after a short spell in north London to play for Jock Stein’s Celtic. Wallace’s team finally discovered their form around the turn of the year, and in the second half of the season Rangers embarked on a 29-match unbeaten run all the way to the cup final, including in January their first win over Celtic since the 1970 League Cup Final.

  It was a relentless, but ultimately vain pursuit of the champions, who collected their eighth consecutive title by the margin of a single point. However, the Parkhead men were overcome in the 1973 Scottish Cup Final, the centenary of the old competition and one of the great Old Firm occasions, when Forsyth scored the winner in a five-goal thriller, squeezing the ball home from all of six inches to give Wallace his first trophy since taking charge of the club on a memorable day at Hampden. After the match, with the victorious manager being interviewed on Grandstand, Wallace appeared increasingly distracted during the course of the live broadcast. His boss Willie Waddell was gesticulating furiously at him, and when Wallace was finally prised away from the cameras, the general manager issued him with a very public dressing down before they left the field. Waddell had been a boyhood hero to Wallace as a young Rangers fan, but already it was becoming clear that the professional relationship between the pair was growing fractious, with the irritable Waddell apparently unwilling to see his manager taking the credit for the team’s achievements.

  The expected momentum evaporated early the following season, as Wallace’s side contrived to lose three of their opening five matches in the championship and, by the end of September, found themselves sitting just a point off the foot of the table. A few weeks later, after they were beaten 1-0 at home by lowly East Fife, Rangers still hadn’t managed to score a single goal at Ibrox in any of their four league games and the team were jeered from the field by their supporters. To make matters worse, they then lost the League Cup semi-final to Celtic and were eliminated from Europe by Borussia Mönchengladbach, a 5-3 aggregate defeat putting paid to the prospect of another run in the Cup Winners’ Cup and a repeat of the heroics of two seasons previous.

  The club didn’t have their troubles to seek and, after losing to lowly Arbroath for the first time, 3-2 at Ibrox in February, Derek Johnstone was stripped of the captaincy. Off the field, there was more crowd trouble at a friendly against Manchester United in March, after which a local senior policeman stated, ‘It’s about time Glasgow Rangers fans were kept in Scotland.’ In the Sunday Mail, correspondent ‘Judge’ wrote, ‘Rangers supporters lived up to their hooligan reputation in Manchester, confirming beyond reasonable doubt that they remain the most antisocial element in modern day European football.’ Bob Patience in the Daily Record put the problem down to religious bigotry, ‘For me, that’s the driving force which incites these fanatics to the extremes, and which has made them the scourge of Europe.’ Jock Wallace though was having none of it; he used to send his players out on to the field with the loyalist battle-cry ‘No Surrender!’ ringing in their ears and there was no appetite within the dressing room for the club to end its Protestants-only employment policy.

  Rangers’ form eventually recovered towards the turn of the year, as the Ibrox men climbed the league to second place, but at Celtic Park a Bobby Lennox goal settled the Ne’erday derby and Celtic’s ninth title in a row was all but confirmed. The club’s fans by now were voting with their feet, and by the last home game of the season there were only an estimated 6,000 hardy supporters at Ibrox to witness a 3-1 win over Dumbarton.

  In the end, Rangers were beaten to second place by Hibs on the final day of the season and, having missed out on the Scottish Cup with a 3-0 home defeat to Dundee in February, then managed by former Ibrox boss Davie White, they failed to qualify for Europe for the first time since 1965.

  Wallace, however, about to enter the final year of his three-year contract, was determined to remain positive. ‘The atmosphere is right and we now have the men who are playing for each other, and playing for Rangers,’ he announced. ‘We will be a better team next season. We were winning games this season but things just weren’t right. I’m not afraid of the new season – I feel no pressure. I have neither fear for the future of this club nor my own future. The feeling is right – and the music is good!’

  The upbeat approach clearly worked because, in 1975, Rangers finally won their first championship since Scott Symon’s Baxter-inspired Treble winners of 1964 a
nd in the process they put paid to Celtic’s aspirations of claiming a tenth consecutive title. Caldow and Shearer, grainy black and white footage, Jimmy McGrory still plodding on manfully with his dismal Celtic side; in reality little more than a decade had passed, but to those who had followed Rangers over the intervening years, 1964 must have seemed like the remote and distant past in comparison with the changed world of the mid-1970s.

  The season started positively when, in September, Rangers came from behind to win 2-1 at Parkhead, their first league victory over Celtic in the east end of Glasgow for six years. This precipitated a surge in confidence, which was reflected in subsequent results, capped by six-goal splurges against weaker opponents Kilmarnock and Dunfermline. By the turn of the year Celtic were again leading the way, but they were comprehensively defeated at Ibrox, 3-0, meaning that Rangers had completed the double over Celtic in the final season of the old 18-team First Division. The ten-team Premier League, in which sides would face each other four times a year, would be introduced for the following campaign, meaning that there were very few meaningless fixtures in the run-in, with mid-table teams fighting to remain in the newly formatted top flight.

  The title was eventually claimed with a draw at Easter Road, after nine-in-a-row champions Celtic faded badly towards the end, losing three games in succession over late February and early March and eventually finishing behind Hibs in third position, 11 points off the pace. Rangers’ all-important equalising goal against Hibs had come from Colin Stein, the first in his second spell with the club, after Wallace had re-signed the striker from Coventry City only weeks earlier, with the explicit purpose of propelling an understandably nervous Rangers over the line in the title race. In the end, the Ibrox men were comfortable winners, taking their first title in 11 years with four games to spare.

  More was to come from Wallace’s Rangers, as the following season the manager led the club to a remarkable Treble. With the new streamlined ten-team league in place, Celtic were determined to regain the title, but the Parkhead club suffered a traumatic setback when manager Jock Stein was involved in a serious car crash and spent almost the entire season recovering in hospital. Under caretaker Sean Fallon, Celtic were leading the way in the championship as late as March, but once again they finished the season poorly and allowed their rivals to claim the honours. Having already defeated the Parkhead side 1-0 in the League Cup Final, Rangers completed a clean sweep by beating Hearts 3-0 in the Scottish Cup Final.

  It was a remarkable achievement, given that, by the standards of previous years, this was not a great Rangers team. They had struggled badly at times during the season, at one point slipping into the bottom half of the table after only one win in seven games during the early autumn. In addition, Wallace’s side exited the European Cup with barely a whimper, losing home and away to classy French outfit St Etienne in the second round. The overall strength of Scottish football seemed to have dipped, certainly in regard to Rangers’ domestic opponents, with Celtic falling well below the standards they had set during the early Stein years and the previously strong challenge of Hibernian was also fading, while Aberdeen and Dundee United were not yet the forces which they would become. But Rangers had shown the necessary staying power and the Treble was a noted success, especially as the club had not collected more than one trophy in a season since 1964.

  Celtic, with a fit-again Jock Stein restored at the helm, regained the title and won the Double in 1977 in a poor season for Rangers, during which it took the Ibrox side four games to see off First Division Clydebank in the League Cup. Having eventually managed to reach the semi-final, they were promptly thrashed 5-1 by Aberdeen. In Europe, Wallace’s men were eliminated at the first hurdle by unexceptional Swiss outfit FC Zurich, after which one commentator noted, ‘The Rangers players – Tommy McLean apart – lacked class. We just don’t have it in Scotland any more. In our desperation to find new idols to replace immortals like Morton, Baxter and Meiklejohn, we glorify players who wouldn’t have been allowed to carry a hamper into Ibrox 20 years ago.’

  Rangers then found themselves in further trouble off the field when Wallace took his team down to Birmingham for a friendly against Aston Villa in October. After the home team took a two-goal lead, the match had to be abandoned early in the second half when rioting broke out among the travelling fans and, in one of the worst and most sustained outbreaks of hooliganism ever seen at that point, dozens of people, including several policemen, were subsequently left seriously injured. Willie Waddell seemed at a total loss, stating, ‘These louts are killing us, it’s a bloody disgrace. The best thing for clubs to do is not to ask us to face them in a challenge match, which is a tragedy. We are crucified within Britain.’

  Curiously, however, when the SFA threatened to intervene, after more trouble at a match against Motherwell in February 1978, Waddell bristled. He took to the field at Ibrox during the next home game to declare, ‘No way will we accept that they [the SFA] will crucify the club for the actions of five per cent or less of our support.’

  It seemed that there was a curious dichotomy in the reaction from Rangers, under Waddell, to their troubles at this time; in the face of mounting criticism, the general manager was happy to issue conciliatory, apparently heartfelt statements of regret in order to try and pacify the media, but at the same time he wouldn’t tolerate a word of condemnation towards the club from the footballing authorities. If his remorseful announcements were an attempt to mollify the press however, he appeared to have failed when, after the incident in Birmingham, decorated journalist Ian Archer, a Scot who had grown up in England and therefore perhaps had a broader perspective and a less indulgent attitude towards the whole Rangers phenomenon, appeared to arrive at the apex of media criticism towards the Ibrox club at this time when he wrote in The Herald, ‘As a Scottish football club, they are a permanent embarrassment and an occasional disgrace. This country would be a better place if Rangers did not exist.’

  By the end of the season, after Rangers lost the Scottish Cup Final to Celtic in a game settled by an Andy Lynch penalty, awarded following a handball on the goal line by Derek Johnstone, it seemed that the Ibrox club was in turmoil. Sandy Jardine, a stalwart of the side for much of the decade and the only Rangers player to have been selected by Scotland manager Willie Ormond for his 1974 World Cup squad, refused the offer of a new contract and was left behind as the club embarked on an end-of-season tour of Sweden. Meanwhile, veteran skipper John Greig was contemplating retirement, telling the club that if he was dropped from the team the following season, he wouldn’t hang around on the sidelines and accept charity.

  The pressure began to ease once the new season was under way however, as the underperforming team of 1976/77 was strengthened by the addition of striker Gordon Smith from Kilmarnock, the emergence of promising youngster Bobby Russell, who was brought to the club from Junior side Shettleston, and the acquisition of legendary winger Davie Cooper, who was signed from Clydebank. The campaign started slowly, and when an opening day defeat at Pittodrie was followed by a 2-0 home loss to Hibernian, there were fans outside Ibrox calling for Wallace’s head. Celtic also made a stuttering start to the season, however, following the departure of star player Kenny Dalglish, who had left Glasgow to join Liverpool over the summer. After defeat at Ibrox in the first Old Firm game of the season, when Rangers retrieved a 2-0 half-time deficit to win 3-2, the rudderless Parkhead side found themselves at the foot of the table with only one point from four matches.

  Rangers’ own sluggish opening to the season was compounded by an early exit from the Cup Winners’ Cup at the hands of the unheralded Dutch outfit Twente Enschede, who bamboozled the Ibrox side with the intelligence and fluidity of their movement and passing, marshalled by Frans Thijssen and Arnold Mühren in midfield, resulting in a thoroughly merited 3-0 aggregate win. Domestically, however, Rangers recovered to win the newly formatted League Cup, now a straight knockout competition with the final in March, after a 2-1 extra-time win over Celtic at Hampden;
the Scottish Cup, defeating Aberdeen in the final by the same scoreline; and the league, completing a second, this time far more convincing Treble in the space of three years. The mood music at Ibrox had totally changed over the course of the season, as evidenced by the decision of John Greig, who had been threatening to pack it all in only 12 months earlier, to sign a new contact at the club, with the captain declaring, ‘I’ll be back at Ibrox next season looking for more medals.’

  Wallace himself reflected that he considered this Treble to be the sweetest of them all and his achievement is highlighted by the fact that no Rangers manager, before or since, has won two domestic clean sweeps. Celtic could only finish fifth, losing as many games as they won in 1978, a season which brought to an end the remarkable tenure of Jock Stein at Parkhead. But just as one ‘Big Jock’ was stepping down in Glasgow, so the other was doing the same. Just 17 days after the cup final, Wallace announced that he was quitting Rangers following a terminal breakdown in the relationship with his nominal boss Willie Waddell.

  Seven and a half years on from the Ibrox disaster, the club had acquired the funds, chiefly through the popular Rangers Pools, to begin work on the reconstruction of Ibrox Park. The meticulous Waddell, who had been named vice-chairman in September 1975 after the death of Matt Taylor, had done the sums and he knew that Rangers would have to run a tight ship over the next few years if the renovations were to be completed both on schedule and without the club going into debt, something he was determined to avoid at all costs. Wallace, however, wanted money to be spent on the team; he knew that the earlier Treble, of 1976, had been followed by a barren season and to avoid a repeat he was insisting that the club should break its wage structure in order to compete with sides from England to acquire the best Scottish talent.