Tangled Up in Blue

by Stephen O'Donnell

  Of course Greig wasn’t helped by the fact that he was faced with two geniuses, Ferguson and McLean, in the opposing dugouts of the ‘New Firm’, with both men, in their own inimitable fashion, determined to take the fight to the Glasgow duopoly, as Aberdeen and Dundee United enjoyed the greatest periods in their respective histories, while over at Celtic, according to winger Davie Provan, manager Billy McNeill, in contrast to Greig, ‘had the dressing-room in the palm of his hand and we would have gone through brick walls for him’.

  The 1983/84 season started badly for Rangers and the stress of managing the club was starting to make John Greig physically ill. Once Willie Waddell had stepped down from his day-to-day involvement behind the scenes at Ibrox in September 1979, Greig was on his own and effectively in charge of every aspect of running the club. As well as his often mundane administrative and logistical duties, there was also the problem of trying to put a winning team on the park, not an easy task in these troubled times for the Ibrox club. After a draw with St Mirren in the opening fixture, Rangers were defeated by Celtic, Hearts and latterly by Aberdeen at Ibrox, a game which witnessed an impromptu mass exodus of Rangers fans from the new Copland Road Stand, after Mark McGhee scored two late goals to leave Greig’s side sitting on just one point from four games. The club was in crisis and the manager admitted to being a prisoner in his own home, while the board remained as feckless and ineffectual as ever, prone to squabbling among themselves.

  In Europe, after the fun and games of an 18-0 aggregate win over whipping boys Valletta of Malta in the Cup Winners’ Cup, Rangers were drawn against Porto in the second round. At Ibrox, the home side were enjoying a comfortable first leg lead, 2-0 up and seemingly cruising, but an error from goalkeeper Peter McCloy gave the Portuguese a late, vital away goal.

  Greig would not be around for the return match in Portugal, however, as he quit the Ibrox hot seat a week later. His last league match in charge was a 2-1 home loss to Jock Wallace’s struggling Motherwell, although a few days later Greig managed to secure the club’s progress to the League Cup semi-final with victory over Hearts, before he resigned. With nine games of the season gone, Rangers were languishing seven points behind champions and league leaders Dundee United, who still had a game in hand, and after Greig left, apparently so scarred by his experiences in charge of the club that he quit football altogether, the manager-less Ibrox side, now under the caretaker stewardship of Tommy McLean, lost 3-0 to St Mirren at Love Street and found themselves sitting just one place above the league’s bottom position. The following week, they were knocked out of the Cup Winners’ Cup on away goals by Porto after a 1-0 defeat in Portugal, and as if matters couldn’t get any worse, Celtic then travelled across Glasgow and won 2-1, inflicting a fourth league defeat in a row on the once proud Ibrox club.

  In their search for Greig’s replacement, the Rangers board had drawn up a shortlist of two candidates, namely the New Firm double act of Jim McLean and Alex Ferguson. Ferguson had just won the Cup Winners’ Cup with Aberdeen and was the preferred choice, but after talks with the directors he turned Rangers down, perhaps still harbouring a grudge over his mistreatment by the club as a player back in the late 1960s. Ferguson also consulted with his former manager Scot Symon, who informed him that the boardroom at Ibrox was hideously split, but the Aberdeen boss later revealed the main reason behind his thought process, confiding to Archie Macpherson, ‘How could I go back and not sign Catholics? What would I tell my friends who are Catholics? “You lot aren’t good enough for us?” I just couldn’t do that.’ After rejecting Rangers, Ferguson signed a lucrative new five-year contract at Pittodrie and his side would go on to win the league in both 1984 and 1985, before he eventually moved south to join Manchester United in November 1986.

  Jim McLean, manager and by now also a director of Dundee United and brother of Rangers’ caretaker Tommy, was next to be offered the job and he was reportedly assured by the board that there would be no restrictions on which players he could sign, irrespective of religious background. Clearly tempted, McLean sought the advice of Scotland boss Jock Stein, whom he had an almost reverential respect for after serving as his assistant with the national squad for two years. Stein believed that the move would be good for McLean personally and urged him to accept the offer from Ibrox, as did his assistant at Tannadice, Walter Smith, but evidently tortured with indecision, McLean too eventually spurned Rangers’ advances, apparently changing his mind at the last minute and deciding to stay with the Tayside club ‘for family reasons’.

  By now the club’s directors were panicking; although Ibrox grandee Willie Waddell remained associated with Rangers as a director and consultant, the club was being run by chairman Rae Simpson and his deputy, John Paton, who appeared to be out of their depth. Desperately short of options, they seemed reluctant to turn to a man who had walked out on the club five years previously, despite the relative success of his previous tenure at Ibrox. The following week, however, Motherwell were approached about the availability of their manager and a deal was thrashed out to allow Jock Wallace to return to Rangers.

  Wallace, and his impish agent Bill McMurdo, had played hard to get, demanding the same financial package that had been offered to Ferguson and McLean. The feeling was, certainly on Wallace’s part, that he had collected two Trebles in the space of three years and in the period of time since his departure, by contrast, the club had won very little, so he believed that he was still very much the man for the job. Clearly his affection for Rangers was undiminished, despite the somewhat rancorous nature of his previous exit from the club. ‘Managing Rangers is my dream job, the one thing in my life I have always wanted more than any other,’ Wallace told reporters shortly after his reappointment. ‘I know this will bring the obvious question that if I’m so Rangers-daft then why did I leave in 1978, but I’m not prepared to rake over the ashes of that decision. I did what I thought was right at the time and have no regrets.’

  In the end though, overall, Wallace’s second spell at Ibrox turned out to be an extended period of disappointment for the club. He seemed to be living out his childhood fantasy in a Rangers wonderland and the appointment proved to be a retrograde step at a time when those running the club would have preferred to have put a more forward-thinking man in charge. Their options were growing thin, however, after rejection from the New Firm duo and West Ham’s John Lyall, who had also turned Rangers down, and Wallace, struggling badly with his limited Motherwell side, was very much last chance saloon.

  The new manager’s first act after being reappointed team manager was to endure a gruelling 3-0 loss to Aberdeen at Pittodrie, their fifth league defeat in a row, after which Wallace moved to appoint Alex Totten, boss of part-time Falkirk, as his new assistant, replacing Tommy McLean. Wallace’s preference had been to take Frank Connor, his deputy at Motherwell and a former Celtic goalkeeper, to Ibrox but inevitably Connor’s religion was an issue and he was advised against it, principally by McMurdo, his fanatical Rangers-supporting agent. Wallace told his players that they would be given six weeks’ leeway, after which it would be down to them to prove that they were capable of turning the club’s fortunes around, and gradually things started to improve.

  With his last game in charge, Greig’s team had secured their passage through the group to reach the League Cup semi-final, and Wallace finished the job. After a 3-1 aggregate win over Dundee United in the last four, a hat-trick in the final from Ally McCoist, who had clearly bucked up his ideas after Wallace threatened to ship the striker out to Cardiff City on loan, sent Celtic to a 3-2 extra-time defeat, handing the club its first trophy in two years and Wallace’s first since returning as manager.

  Results were encouraging in the league too, and a lengthy unbeaten run included a much improved performance in the New Year against champions-elect Aberdeen, after which Ferguson declared himself happy with a point following a hard-fought draw at Ibrox. But the gap between the teams could not be surmounted and the unbeaten run inevitably came to an end
with a 3-0 defeat at Celtic Park on 2 April. Rangers eventually trailed in fourth once again, behind the New Firm and Celtic, meaning that the club had now gone six years without winning the league.

  The following season, Wallace’s side continued their fondness for the League Cup, retaining the trophy after a 1-0 win over Dundee United in the final, but there was more mediocre fare in the league. In early December, Rangers had slipped seven points behind Aberdeen on the back of a 2-1 loss to the Dons at Ibrox, and in the return match against Ferguson’s side in January, their flickering title hopes were extinguished, as Wallace’s side were beaten 5-1 at Pittodrie, the club’s heaviest league defeat for 20 years.

  Europe too was a painful experience, as Rangers managed to progress past Irish side Bohemians in the UEFA Cup, but only following a 3-2 defeat in Dublin in a match that was marred by crowd trouble. After some Rangers fans tried to scale a wire fence and invade the pitch, Wallace took to the field to try and calm the situation, but he was berated by a section of his own fans, some of whom, by calling him a ‘Fenian bastard’, suggested that they didn’t seem to know who he was. ‘They don’t know how to behave,’ Wallace lamented. ‘They can sing, shout and bawl all they want but they are not entitled to throw coins and break fences. I was scared of these guys. They behaved like crazy men. I was more worried about them than the game.’

  Inter Milan eliminated Rangers in the following round and their season was effectively over when Dundee inflicted a home defeat in the Scottish Cup, after which mounted police had to disperse a few hundred supporters who were protesting outside the ground. The new Ibrox, almost all-seater, with only the bear pit of the old East Enclosure offering space for standing fans, lacked the atmosphere of the old ground and poor performances were increasingly being reflected in dwindling attendance figures, as Rangers, under Wallace, continued to drift along on a tide of apathy and mediocrity. Only 8,424 hardly souls turned up for the club’s next league game, a 3-1 win over Dumbarton, after which Wallace, presumably in exasperation, took his team off on a tour of Iraq, where they lost 4-1 to a Baghdad Select XI.

  Rangers eventually finished fourth for the third year in a row, 21 points behind Aberdeen in a league still operating on a two-points-for-a-win system. At the end of what had turned out to be another disappointing season, chairman John Paton, in a prescient indication of a change of strategy at the club, promised that Rangers were prepared to go deep into debt in order to back Wallace’s ambitions, something which would never have been countenanced when the puritanical Waddell was still running the show.

  The 1985/86 season started brightly as Rangers won their first three games and found themselves top of the league, a position they retained after a 1-1 draw at Celtic Park. But the form soon collapsed, as they exited the UEFA Cup at the hands of Spanish low-flyers Osasuna, the League Cup with a semi-final defeat to Hibs and they were soon knocked off their perch in the league after successive defeats at Ibrox, including a 3-0 mauling at the hands of Aberdeen. Celtic were dispatched 3-0 at Ibrox in November, but once again Rangers couldn’t capitalise, losing their next two games, to Hearts and Dundee, and soon finding themselves back in fifth position. In the new year, Celtic gained a measure of revenge with a 2-0 win at Celtic Park on New Year’s Day, and when Hearts knocked Wallace’s men out of the Scottish Cup later in January, once again Rangers were left floundering, with months of the season still remaining and little to play for.

  Around this time there was a significant change in the club’s boardroom when, after years of infighting behind the scenes, Lawrence Marlborough, grandson of former chairman John Lawrence, acquired enough shares in Rangers to allow him to take a controlling interest in the club. A tax exile based in Nevada, USA, Marlborough then appointed David Holmes, a former joiner from Falkirk, as the club’s new chief executive officer with instructions to run the Ibrox operation from Glasgow, while at the same time there was a boardroom cull, with directors Jim Robinson, Tom Dawson and Rae Simpson all leaving the club. It appeared that Wallace might be the next casualty of the new regime, and the manager was duly sacked on 7 April after a friendly defeat to Spurs at Ibrox and replaced by Graeme Souness, who only had a few games left in the season to run the rule over his squad of players. It would be the start of a new era for Rangers, one that was far more in tune with what was happening in Thatcher’s Britain of the day.

  Jock Wallace, who died of a heart attack in 1996, aged 60, after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease, is a man who still divides opinion to this day. Many have been quick to dismiss him as a one-dimensional dinosaur, who played ugly, physical football, claiming that his outdated methods ultimately led to his downfall, because he failed to rescue a stuttering Rangers side. Others, including many who played under him, maintain that Wallace was an inspirational figure and a great motivator, a man who was shrewd enough to know what to say to players in order to get the best out of them.

  Perhaps there is a degree of truth in both points of view. Some at least were prepared to indulge his ostentatious affection for Rangers and forgive the way he appeared to embrace some of the more unwholesome aspects of the club’s history, including veteran broadcaster Archie Macpherson, who opined, ‘Wallace’s trumpeting of his Protestantism always seemed to me to have a strong element of theatricality to it… Wallace was in fact a warm-hearted, genuinely kindly man, lumbered by the traditions he adhered to without a shred of bitterness as a result of the intense bigotry which he supposedly espoused.’

  That’s fine, but it’s doubtful whether Macpherson would have been quite so sanguine if it was racist, rather than sectarian values, which Wallace seemed to spend much of his life wallowing in so ironically.

  The last word on Wallace goes to Robert Prytz, the 50-times capped Swedish international midfielder who played for Rangers between 1982 and 1985, appearing in 77 matches for the Ibrox club. ‘My style of football was always the sort that is played on the ground, and that wasn’t always the case in my time at Rangers,’ Prytz admitted, while maintaining a certain admiration for Wallace. ‘Jock was a tremendous manager: tough and strict and honest. I think he quite liked me because he used to punch me in the stomach every morning when I came in for training.’

  7

  BIGOTRY IN THE MODERN ERA

  FOR half a century or more, following the clandestine, sealed agreement between Rangers and the Belfast-based shipbuilding firm Harland and Wolff in the early part of the 20th century, the Ibrox club’s exclusionary employment practices had gone largely uncommented upon in polite society. Gradually, however, over the course of several decades or more and despite the lack of appetite within the club itself for things to change, isolated murmurings of disapproval and occasionally even outright criticism of Rangers’ stance had begun to appear in the popular press and elsewhere, usually in association with rioting fans in Birmingham, Manchester, Barcelona and various other locations.

  It was implicit at first; matchday programmes, when introducing Rangers as the visiting team would hint at issues peripheral to the club, which everyone with a stake in Scottish football already seemed to know about but few were prepared to openly acknowledge. A Kilmarnock programme from 3 September 1966, announcing Rangers as the home team’s opponents for a sectional League Cup tie, mentions the controversy over two recent expensive signings who had failed to settle at Ibrox, as well as the negative headlines surrounding the club’s outdated training methods. More enigmatically, the programme editorial then states, ‘But controversy and Rangers have walked hand in hand for a long time now.’ It may not sound like much, but in terms of Scottish football’s attitude towards Rangers and the club’s continuing policies at the time, here at last was the suggestion at least that the worm was beginning to turn.

  An early voice of disapproval was the journalist Cyril Horne, who worked for The Herald for many years and was the paper’s chief football correspondent through to the early 1960s. Somewhat ironically, given The Herald’s own rigid no-Catholics stance, Horne was an early criti
c of the exclusionary policy and of Rangers’ physical style of play. Often writing anonymously, but fearless and persistent nonetheless, he aimed his barbs in particular at the perennial ineptitude and complacency of the Rangers directors, who continued to oversee and maintain the club’s policies and traditions. As academic Tom Gallagher notes in his book Glasgow, The Uneasy Peace, ‘It was middle-class businessmen with masonic loyalties who (as directors and shareholders) ensured that Rangers football club still retained an all-protestant image.’

  In 1965, former Rangers striker Ralph Brand criticised the club in a polemic series of interviews published in the News of the World under the by-line ‘The lid off Ibrox’. Brand, by then playing in England for Manchester City, had used the Scottish edition of the newspaper to voice his invective, lamenting the outdated training methods and selection policies at Ibrox as well as, briefly, censuring the club over its exclusionary signing policy. Scottish sports journalism had never seen anything like it, week after week the criticisms of the Ibrox regime kept coming, with Brand not fazed in any way by the inevitably ferocious backlash which his articles provoked from the fans, the press and the club itself. But while the Ibrox hierarchy, for the most part, fumed in silence at the outrage committed by one of the club’s former players, their friends in the media were not so reticent. In an excoriating riposte for the Sunday Mail, Allan Herron lambasted Brand for, ‘castigating the very heritage of Rangers F.C. in a manner no other player in the history of this great club has ever done before.’ As well as his own personal relationship with the player having effectively ended as a result of his transgression, Herron also maintained that, ‘the doors of Ibrox have now been slammed for all time on Brand.’