Tangled Up in Blue

by Stephen O'Donnell

  In response, the club started to add a more exotic mix around this period, with the signing of Oleg Kuznetsov from Dynamo Kiev for £1.2m and the spending policy continued with the capture of Peter Huistra from Twente Enschede in Holland and Brian Reid from Morton, while hammer-thrower Terry Hurlock arrived from Millwall. Rangers received some money from the sales of Terry Butcher, who had fallen out with the manager after giving an interview to the banned broadcaster STV, to Coventry for £500,000 and Derek Ferguson to Hearts for £750,000. In total, in just under five years at the club, Souness had spent £15.375m and recouped £6.375m in player sales. It’s easy to be dismissive of such sums, given the eye-watering level of today’s transfer fees, but the amount Souness was spending can be put into context when one considers that the club itself changed hands for a mere £6m in 1988. During roughly the same period, Souness and Rangers had spent more than Alex Ferguson at Manchester United and Kenny Dalglish at Liverpool, but it would just be the start of the journey for the ambitious Ibrox club.

  For Souness, however, it was the end of the road; he left Rangers four weeks before the end of the 1991 season to take over as boss of his former team Liverpool. The Anfield board had identified Souness as the ideal candidate to take up the vacant manager’s position at the Merseyside club, following the unexpected resignation of Kenny Dalglish in late February, but initially the Ibrox man turned down the approach, and reemphasised publicly his long-term commitment to Rangers. Curiously however, Souness seemed to have undergone a change of heart in the six weeks since he was first offered the Liverpool job, and by early April he had accepted the position with his former club. The original intention had been for Souness to see out the remainder of the season with Rangers, but when news of his impending departure broke, David Murray insisted that he leave immediately and told him it was a decision he would come to regret.

  Several theories have since been advanced as to why Souness eventually made up his mind to quit Ibrox. He arrived at Rangers looking to throw his weight about, but by the time he left, he was very much a marked man, complaining that he seemed to have a target on his back almost everywhere he went. During his time as a player, opponents, aware of his short fuse, would constantly try to wind him up, and Souness also claimed that he was targeted by referees, an idea which was publicly supported by his assistant Walter Smith. To be sure, the SFA offered no leniency for his repeated aberrations; by the end of his first year in Scotland, Souness had been hit with a total of three separate suspensions for his various on-field misdemeanours, and at the start of the following season he received his third red card as a Rangers player for a ridiculous lunge at Billy Stark in a match against Celtic at Celtic Park. Stark, who was attempting to retrieve a lost boot at the time of Souness’s challenge, had earlier scored what proved to be the only goal of the game on his Old Firm debut, when he was upended by Souness, who had already been cautioned at the time.

  The player-manager continued to argue with the referee, David Syme, after the game, calling him a ‘big fucking poof’, for which he was issued with a further two technical red cards, resulting in a five-match ban. Very much the author of his own misfortune on this occasion, Souness was apparently so upset by the whole incident that he was threatening to walk out of Scottish football there and then, until David Holmes intervened and talked him round.

  If his disciplinary track record as a player in Scotland was poor, Souness found that his problems were about to get a whole lot worse once he hung up his boots. After a draw against Dundee United at Tannadice in February 1989, the Ibrox manager was called to appear before the SFA’s Disciplinary and Referee Committee, where he was issued with a touchline ban through until the end of the season for abusive language towards a linesman. However, when Rangers met St Johnstone in the Scottish Cup semi-final at Celtic Park in April, Souness was spotted lurking in the dugout area, trying to communicate with his physiotherapist Phil Boersma, and consequently his suspension was extended until the end of the following season.

  In effect, it was a year-long ban, but at times the manager seemed almost casually indifferent to his increasing raft of touchline exclusion orders, and he would often name himself as a substitute in an effort to circumvent the rules. There could be no chicanery however, when, during a televised game between Hearts and Rangers at Ibrox in February 1990, the cameras caught Souness loitering with intent in the tunnel area, while his ban was still very much in effect. Nobody seemed to have noticed the offence, but still images, lifted from the television coverage, of the manager defying his suspension were subsequently published in the Daily Record, and Souness found himself the subject of another ban, this time extending all the way until the end of 1991/92.

  The SFA admitted that he was testing their disciplinary procedures to the limit and, in the event of any further misconduct, Souness was potentially looking at the prospect of the ultimate sanction, a lifetime ban. He was also copping increasingly hefty fines for his indiscretions, from zero, effectively a warning for a first offence, in December 1987, through to £100 for comments to the referee after a game against Aberdeen in January 1989. Subsequently the level of financial penalty increased to £1,000, then £2,000, for the Dundee United and St Johnstone breaches, and finally £5,000 for his transgression against Hearts.

  Souness was furious about what had transpired at the Hearts game and he vented his anger in particular at Scottish Television, whom he accused of deliberately trying to set him up, after the incriminating shots were included in their edited highlights package on Scotsport. It was an irrational response on Souness’s part, but the Rangers manager refused to cooperate with STV for the remainder of his stay in Scotland, often extending the veto to the entire ITV network in case any interviews or other material should be picked up and shown by the Scottish franchise.

  The late 1980s were a time when the media were far less powerful than they are today, before the money ploughed into football by television companies ensured that they virtually ran the game in Britain, and Souness was able to continue his concerted campaigns against individuals and organisations in the industry with more or less complete impunity. It didn’t take much to upset him, as he was always prickly and sensitive to criticism, and on one occasion he called James Traynor, a reporter who had questioned his tactics against Red Star Belgrade for an article in The Herald, a ‘wee socialist shite’. The journalist later remarked that thereafter the socialism continued in his articles, as did, occasionally, the shite at Rangers. Traynor would later go on to serve as the Ibrox club’s PR chief.

  Souness’s most famous fallout, however, was with a tea lady by the name of Aggie Moffat who worked for St Johnstone. After a dull, midweek draw in Perth in February 1991, so the story goes, the manager was smashing up the away dressing room at Muirton Park in his customary fashion, when in walked ‘wee Aggie’, who clearly wasn’t best pleased to see, amid the mess, one of her favourite jugs in bits on the floor. It was fairly evident who the culprit was, and, in the eyes of Aggie, the Ibrox manager had form for such behaviour after an earlier confrontation between the pair on Rangers’ previous visit to Perth.

  On that occasion, Souness’s mood was not helped by the fact that one of his new signings, Oleg Kuznetsov, had been seriously injured in only his second appearance for the club, ruling him out for the rest of the season and Aggie appeared, to Souness at least, to be somewhat unsympathetic as to the Ukrainian defender’s condition. This time round, the animosity threatened to get physical, and when Aggie picked up the smashed crockery, intending to show it to her chairman Geoff Brown, Souness pursued her up the stairs. The incident ended with Souness, manager and also a director of Rangers Football Club, confronting the St Johnstone chairman and offering him outside.

  Incredibly, Souness admitted in his subsequent autobiography that the incident in Perth, coming at a time when he had already been offered and declined the Liverpool job, played a role in changing his mind and hastening his departure from Ibrox. Fortunately, chairman Brown decided a
gainst taking the matter further, otherwise Souness would have been in more hot water, but the Rangers manager did make disparaging remarks about the referee in his post-match interviews, for which he received another summons to the SFA headquarters at Park Gardens. The media couldn’t resist the Aggie story, but played it down as a ‘storm in a teacup’, and they ignored the coda incident with Brown completely. Nevertheless, perhaps for the first time, Souness appeared to question his own conduct following the whole affair and it played a part in his subsequent decision to reconsider the offer from Anfield.

  But there were other factors in his decision to leave Rangers. At the press conference confirming his departure, Souness cited personal reasons following the break-up of his marriage in 1988, after which his ex-wife had moved to Cheshire with their children. He also claimed, more enigmatically, that he believed he had taken Rangers as far as he would be allowed to go, a reference perhaps to Murray’s recent decision to intervene more regularly in transfer-related business, after the chairman vetoed the signing of Andy Goram from Hibs. Souness then walked out of the press conference, claiming that he was too emotional to take further questions, and leaving Murray to tell the media, ‘He’s making the biggest mistake of his life.’

  Once he was safely out of Scotland, Souness also revealed further clues to his decision-making process, when he admitted he was ‘tired of all the politics and the bigotry associated with football in Scotland’. Whatever his reasons, having eventually made up his mind to join Liverpool, Souness was ushered towards the Ibrox exit door with four games of the season remaining.

  Sadly, David Murray’s prediction would be proved essentially correct and Souness’s time back on Merseyside turned out to be something of a fiasco. At Liverpool, he went for the tried and trusted method of shelling out massive transfer fees for supposedly star players, but his signings didn’t work out and overall opposing teams in England were far harder to bully and intimidate into submission and were less impressed by the publicity and hype surrounding his transfer dealings than had been the case in Scotland. In the process, Souness’s iconoclastic tendencies, such an essential part of his success at Rangers, proved disastrous at Anfield, as his dictatorial approach and his drive to modernise effectively destroyed the culture of the Anfield boot room, the modest sanctuary where, since the days of Bill Shankly, the Liverpool coaching staff would retire to commune over pertinent issues, scheming and plotting the success behind the whole football operation at the club. Just to emphasise the point, the directors at Anfield had the boot room demolished to make way for a new media centre.

  On the field, Souness’s new team struggled, playing an unpopular brand of football that was not considered to be in the Liverpool tradition, but his gravest offence, which led to ruinous unpopularity in the eyes of the Anfield club’s supporters, stemmed from his relationship with Margaret Thatcher’s favourite newspaper, The Sun. The Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid was despised on Merseyside, after the paper’s biased and politically motivated coverage of the Hillsborough disaster, when it had wrongly blamed Liverpool supporters for being the main cause of the accident, falsely accusing the Scousers of being overwhelmingly drunk on the day, of fighting with the brave cops and of robbing and pissing on the dead. Subsequently, there had been campaigns on Merseyside to stop people from buying the paper and its circulation in the area soon plummeted. The Sun had always been a favourite of Souness’s however, and he decided to give the paper the inside story of his triple heart by-pass operation, which was published, along with a picture of the manager in a flagrant embrace with his new girlfriend, the model Karen Levy, with appalling timing on the third anniversary of the disaster.

  Souness was suffering from health problems, in all probability brought on by the stress and over-exertion which typified his lifestyle and his approach to his work, combined with his total inability to unwind. He had, his doctors reckoned, already suffered a heart attack without even realising and, still not yet 40 years of age, three of his main arteries were so clogged up that he required immediate surgery. The operation involved inserting tubes around the damaged arteries to do the job of taking the flow of blood away from the heart and circulating it to the main organs of the body, and, showing a remarkable degree of insensitivity, Souness had agreed to give the exclusive story of his condition to the proscribed right-wing tabloid, a decision which provoked a furious backlash from Liverpool supporters. Speaking recently of how he would describe his current relations with the city and with fans of the club he served with such distinction as a player, he lamented, ‘Permanently damaged. I think I’ll remain unpopular there and that’s the price I’ll have to pay. I made an error of judgement but I can only apologise so many times. I’m just going to have to live with that.’

  Souness went on to manage other big clubs after three years of relative failure at Liverpool, but his obnoxious style had been found out and he was at best only a qualified success in his short spells at Galatasaray and Benfica. At Southampton, he kept the club in the Premier League, which was a considerable achievement, and later he had decent spells at Blackburn, leading them to promotion, and Newcastle, before quitting football management altogether. Souness’s list of honours away from Rangers comprises three cups, one each at Liverpool, Blackburn and in Turkey with Galatasaray, where his confrontational tendencies were soon evident again. After defeating great rivals Fenerbahçe in the two-legged Turkish Cup Final, Souness ran on to the field and planted a huge Galatasaray flag in the centre circle of the away ground, almost provoking a riot in the stadium. He was soon fired.

  David Murray’s prediction about Souness coming to regret his decision to leave Ibrox was based on the owner’s conceit that Rangers were the biggest club in Britain, rather than shrewd footballing analysis, something which remained beyond the businessman, despite the length of time he spent in the game. Souness later admitted, however, that his friend had been essentially correct, and Rangers remain the highlight of Graeme Souness’s managerial career.

  ‘Some say he is evil,’ observed Ron Atkinson, while Jack Charlton suggested he had a ‘nasty streak’. Even Murray admitted that Souness was an ‘acquired taste’ and ‘not everyone’s cup of tea’, while Aggie Moffat, the St Johnstone tea lady, described him more succinctly as a ‘plonker’.

  In fairness, Souness has mellowed in recent years, perhaps as a result of his health scare – wisdom coming too late perhaps for Scottish football – and he can frequently be heard castigating himself in interviews for his naivety and arrogance during his spell at Rangers, while particular contrition is reserved for the upset caused on Merseyside by his Sun story.

  Whatever view one takes of him, there is no doubt that Graeme Souness’s five-year tenure of the Ibrox hotseat had wide-ranging and lasting repercussions for the whole of Scottish and even British football, which were still being felt many years later. The ‘Souness revolution’, as it became known, should have been a short, sharp injection to turn the club around and revitalise a struggling former giant of the Scottish game, but with a clear endgame in sight from the start. With interest regenerated, and the average attendance at Rangers soaring back up towards 40,000, and with sponsorship and sportswear deals pouring money into the club’s coffers, the bank loans should have been paid back over time, and a level playing field restored, both on and off the park. Instead, in the years ahead, rather than return the club to proper governance, David Murray, drunk on success, ran Rangers as if he was on a one-man quest to indulge his ego, taking the club ever deeper into debt to its increasingly indulgent bankers, with no apparent regard for the long-term consequences.

  Ultimately, Murray and Rangers inhaled too deeply, and, flying too close to the sun like Icarus, came subsequently crashing back to earth, almost bringing the whole of Scottish football down with them.

  9

  NINE! NINE! NINE!

  THE immediate and most important task facing Walter Smith, following his appointment as Rangers manager on 19 April 1991, three days after th
e unexpected departure of Graeme Souness, was to maintain his team’s position at the top of the Premier Division table and, with four games of the season remaining, to see the club over the line and ensure the retention of the league championship.

  Rangers were involved in a tight title race with a resurgent Aberdeen team, which went down to the final day and a head-to-head, winner-takes-all meeting between the pair at Ibrox. At one point it had looked a certainty for the Glasgow side, but, ever since the infamous incident between Souness and the tea lady at St Johnstone, Rangers’ form had been patchy and they were hampered by injuries and in particular suspensions, as the perennial issue of indiscipline, which Souness seemed to have finally brought under control, returned at the worst possible moment for the club.

  In March, during a 2-0 Scottish Cup quarter-final defeat to Celtic at Celtic Park, three Rangers players were sent off; Englishmen Hurlock, Walters and Hateley were all red-carded for violent offences, as the match slipped away from Souness’s men, after Celtic’s Grant had initially been dismissed for encroachment. The two teams then met again a week later in a league encounter at the same venue, when another Rangers player, defender Scott Nisbet, received his marching orders, resulting this time in a 3-0 rout. Further points were dropped in early April after a goalless home draw with lowly Hibernian, in one of Souness’s last games in charge of the club. Aberdeen, on the other hand, were flying. Since a defeat to Celtic on 18 January, they had embarked on an unbeaten run of 12 games, chalking up 11 wins and a draw, including a 1-0 victory over Souness’s men at Pittodrie in early March. With just ten games of the season remaining, the gap between the teams extended to fully seven points, but the Dons had succeeded in gradually reducing the deficit and were now back in serious contention by the time of Smith’s appointment.