Tangled Up in Blue

by Stephen O'Donnell

  The new Rangers manager won his first two games in charge of the club, as a nervy, error-strewn tussle with St Mirren in Paisley, settled by a late strike from youngster Sandy Robertson, was followed four days later by a close victory over Dundee United by the same scoreline, 1-0 at Ibrox. But with the finishing line in sight, Smith’s side lost heavily, 3-0 away to Motherwell in the penultimate game of the season. The margin of defeat was potentially crucial as Aberdeen, managed by the astute Alex Smith, completed a narrow win over St Johnstone and, with the two sides now level on points and goal difference, the Dons moved to the top of the league due to their superior tally of goals scored and now only needed a draw in the final fixture to secure their first title of the post-Alex Ferguson era.

  For the decider, Aberdeen would be without key defender Brian Irvine through injury as well as first-choice goalkeeper Theo Snelders, while Rangers were missing a number of important players such as Gough and Trevor Steven. With a lack of available alternatives, Smith was also forced to name both McCoist and Durrant as substitutes, despite neither being fully match fit, although sympathy for the Ibrox men was limited due to the amount of money they had spent on their team, with expensive imports such as Peter Huistra not even listed in the matchday squad.

  Aberdeen started the game strongly, and were arguably the better side in the first half. They missed a clear chance to take the lead when Peter van de Ven shot straight at Woods after being put through on goal by McKimmie, and fellow Dutchman and top scorer Hans Gilhaus then headed Stephen Wright’s cross over the bar from inside the six-yard box. Rangers grew into the game and five minutes before half-time, in front of a raucous Ibrox crowd, Hateley rose above McLeish to power a trademark header beyond Watt. The English striker had tried to unsettle Aberdeen’s inexperienced young goalkeeper, targeting him for some rough treatment early in the game, as he later explained to the Daily Record, ‘Top strikers try to identify the weakest link in a defence, whether it’s a full-back, centre-half or a goalkeeper… Their keeper that day was a young lad and he was playing in the biggest day of his career in front of 52,000 [sic] screaming fans. I battered him that day. It was something which came about literally when we were in the tunnel before the game. I said to Gary Stevens that if he could put over one of his normal crosses, hang it up there, don’t pick anyone out and just give me a chance to get in and make a challenge. I was up against the likes of Alex McLeish so their young keeper was the one to pinpoint.’

  The home side extended their advantage early in the second half when a defensive mistake by substitute Scott Booth let in Hateley again, and he pounced from a suspiciously offside position on to a Johnston shot which had been spilled by Watt. Despite the capacity at Ibrox being reduced to 37,000, due to further renovations of the stadium, Booth describes the atmosphere on the day as the most hostile he has ever played in front of, ‘I remember coming on at half-time and finding it hard to concentrate. It was just absolutely deafening. Guys like myself and Michael Watt, I think it’s quite natural if we were slightly overawed by it all.’ Booth went on to enjoy spells in Holland and Germany with Twente Enschede and Borussia Dortmund, and played 22 times for Scotland, but Michael Watt’s career never fully recovered. He failed to live up to his early potential and, by the time he turned 30, he had left football altogether and was pursuing a career in financial services in Glasgow.

  Two crucial goals in such a decisive game led to Hateley’s belated acceptance by the Rangers supporters, after fans had initially been sceptical about the player, blaming him for keeping McCoist out of the team, although in reality it was Johnston who had relegated their favourite to the bench. The big English striker later admitted that his bulging eyes, fist-pumping celebrations that day were a ‘get-it-right-up-you’ gesture towards the old East Enclosure, a frightening bear pit under the Main Stand at Ibrox, where the most recalcitrant Rangers diehards were housed, in the only remaining standing area left inside the ground. Aberdeen’s challenge flickered and died, and despite having to make readjustments when Cowan and Brown suffered serious injuries, Rangers saw the game out to take their third title in a row. Brian Irvine later admitted, ‘It was pretty agonising to watch… if we’d got a goal early, it would have been a whole different game… When Rangers got their goal, it gave them confidence and it just drifted away from us.’ It was the closest any team outside of Rangers and Celtic would come to winning the league in the modern era.

  According to Hateley, the next four days were an alcoholic blur, with the striker describing the subsequent celebrations as ‘carnage’. In particular, it was a triumph for the new manager, and the result led to his quick acceptance among the many who had doubted his suitability for the job. Despite the success that he would go on to enjoy, Smith was not an inevitable choice to succeed Souness, despite serving as his assistant for the previous five years. A self-effacing character, he was a relatively low-profile figure at the time, with plenty of coaching but no managerial experience, and he seemed to be shocked that he was even in contention for the vacant position. ‘When the news broke, David Murray phoned me up and I went to see him the next day. He said that Graeme’s departure had caught him unawares and that it would take him a few days to make up his mind,’ Smith later recollected. ‘That took me by surprise, because I realised that he was considering me for the job.’

  Smith had, however, turned down the opportunity to join Souness and Phil Boersma at Liverpool, so he may have harboured hopes that he was at least in contention for a next-in-line promotion. In the end, Murray stuck to the promised timescale and Smith’s appointment was confirmed within three days. Behind the scenes, the chairman had sought advice and considered the possibility of approaching a candidate with a better track record, but regardless of how much time he had to canvass opinion and complete a thorough due diligence on his new manager, Smith was the correct choice. An external appointment at such a late stage of the season could have been disruptive, whereas with Smith it was almost business as usual. Another option, delaying a final decision and installing Smith as caretaker manager until the end of the season, might have been the more prudent approach, but Murray was in no mood for equivocation and the advice he was receiving was that the assistant manager was ready to make the step up.

  Smith was a popular appointment, particularly with the players, who welcomed some respite from all the head-banging and the shouting matches involved in Souness’s more bellicose approach. Most were glad to see the back of the now former manager and the squad initially responded at least as much to Souness’s absence as Smith’s promotion, although the change of mindset involved in seeing a former assistant step out of the old boss’s shadow and become the new gaffer was perhaps a factor in their struggle to hold on to the title. Gough also hinted at the relief that was felt elsewhere at Souness’s departure. ‘Walter’s no soft touch but he’s a bit different, and that will go a long way to helping our difficulties with the SFA and the press,’ the captain admitted. Joining Smith at Ibrox as his assistant would be Archie Knox, the man who used to walk into the boot-room at Pittodrie carrying a baseball bat. Knox had been Ferguson’s number two at both Aberdeen and Manchester United, and the Old Trafford supremo wasn’t best pleased when Smith pinched his long-serving assistant on the eve of United’s biggest game for many years, the Cup Winners’ Cup Final against Barcelona in Rotterdam.

  Smith was born in Lanark in 1948 and grew up in the Glasgow suburb of Carmyle, an isolated, almost rural enclave to the east of the city. He was taken to see Rangers as a boy by his grandfather and later admitted that he sang sectarian songs from the terraces of the old Ibrox. Like so many others from his background at that time, Smith had eschewed pop culture and Beatlemania while growing up during the Swinging Sixties in favour of an orthodox attachment to the old school Rangers traditions, and what his biographer, Neil Drysdale, euphemistically refers to as the club’s ‘cussed refusal to become trendy’.

  As a teenager he signed for Dundee United from Junior side Ashfield in
1966, but failed to make the breakthrough to regular first team football. On the day of the Ibrox disaster, in January 1971, Smith was not named in United’s squad and was consequently free to attend the match in Glasgow, missing the fatal crush at the end of the game along with his brother by only a few minutes. Even at a very early stage in his career, Smith had showed an interest in coaching, which was encouraged by Jerry Kerr, and by his long-serving successor in the Tannadice hotseat, Jim McLean, who invited Smith on to his staff in 1977, when a pelvic injury threatened to end the defender’s playing days at the age of just 29. In the early 1980s, Smith combined his position as McLean’s deputy with youth coaching roles, working under future Scotland manager Andy Roxburgh and leading the Scotland under-18 side to victory at the European Youth Championships in Finland in 1982, before moving on to the under-21s and then serving as Ferguson’s assistant at the World Cup in Mexico in 1986.

  McLean and Smith were a formidable combination at United, the manager’s notorious dourness and inflexibility seeming to fit with his assistant’s outlook as well. Smith wore the look of a man who would take no nonsense from anyone, but beneath his brooding, po-faced exterior, he nurtured a steely determination and a ferocious competitive instinct, another characteristic he shared with McLean. The pair were not averse to using physical intimidation and even violence towards their own squad in order to enforce discipline; one of Smith’s favoured techniques was to lock himself in the dressing room with an errant player and offer him the first punch. Former United forward Kevin Gallacher remembers, ‘Walter got me in the Tannadice boot-room and gave me what for. I was lucky because the room was small and he could only jab you there. If you were really unfortunate, Walter would get you in the gym and there was enough room for full-blooded punches to be thrown. He was absolutely ferocious when he was angry and the players feared him even more than they did McLean.’

  With such an able enforcer at his side, McLean led Dundee United to League Cup success in December 1979 and, in 1983, with Smith now the assistant manager, to the Premier Division title, the first and only championship success in the club’s history. The following year, United reached the European Cup semi-final, where, after beating Roma 2-0 at Tannadice, they were defeated 3-0 in the return leg at a hostile Olympic Stadium in somewhat mysterious circumstances – it was later revealed that Roma president, Giuseppe Viola, had attempted to bribe the referee – and consequently missed out on the opportunity to face Liverpool in a battle of Britain showdown in the final at the same venue.

  By 1986, Smith was regarded as one of the better young coaches working in Scotland and, given his boyhood allegiances and his knowledge of the Scottish scene, he was an excellent and obvious choice to serve as assistant to Souness, who was not only unfamiliar with the local, domestic game, but he had, by his own admission, no clear idea of what he was letting himself in for when he agreed to become Rangers manager in April 1986.

  Smith and Souness knew each other well from the Scotland set-up and the new assistant recognised that, as deputy to Souness, he would have to play a subtly different role from the bad cop/worse cop routine he had mastered under McLean; McLean had a notoriously short fuse, but Souness was like a smouldering volcano, which could blow its stack and erupt at any moment and Smith learned to complement his boss at Ibrox, picking up the loose ends, arbitrating the training sessions and expanding on the manager’s notoriously short pre-match addresses with useful tactical advice. Inevitably, most of the credit for winning the league in 1991 went to the departed Souness, but the title-clinching victory over Aberdeen helped Smith establish himself in his new role and the following season, he set out from scratch to succeed on his own.

  The manager began to reshape his squad with Trevor Steven, Chris Woods, Mark Walters, Terry Hurlock, Nigel Spackman and Maurice Johnston all leaving the club, while Rangers’ penchant for exotic, expensive signings continued with the arrival of Soviet international midfielder Alexei Mikhailichenko, signed from Sampdoria for a tidy £2.2m, who joined his compatriot Oleg Kuznetsov at Ibrox. Smith realised, however, that UEFA’s recently introduced ‘three plus two’ foreigner rule would be a hindrance to the club’s European ambitions going forward and, with a squad bloated with non-Scots in the pre-Bosman era, he signed ‘native’ Scottish players Stuart McCall, David Robertson and goalkeeper Andy Goram, who immediately supplanted the discarded Woods. Rangers also continued to recruit from the English market, although there was concern that Smith would not be able to attract the same profile of player to Ibrox as his predecessor, as Dale Gordon and Paul Rideout arrived.

  The departure of Maurice Johnston, after just two years at the club, paved the way for Hateley to be partnered in attack with McCoist, who was brought in from the cold by the new manager and given a new lease of life. Distrusted by Souness for his off-field misdemeanours, the Scottish striker had previously been dubbed ‘the judge’, because of the number of times he found himself sitting on the bench. Often known for his jovial Jack-the-lad image, which he liked to play up to, McCoist in reality was a tenacious, sometimes nasty competitor, with a tough winner’s mentality. He went on to become an established part of the Rangers firmament and, benefitting greatly from Hateley’s knockdowns, he won the European Golden Boot in 1992 and again in 1993, scoring an impressive 34 goals in each season.

  Smith’s Rangers swept all before them, with the club collecting a fourth consecutive title and, while there was disappointment in the League Cup after a semi-final defeat to Hibs, and in Europe with a low-key elimination to Sparta Prague on away goals, the Ibrox men recaptured the Scottish Cup for the first time in 11 years with a routine win over Airdrie in the Hampden final. The real struggle, however, had been in the semi-final against Celtic when a Rangers team reduced to ten men, after the early ordering off of David Robertson for a cynical challenge on his former Aberdeen team-mate Joe Miller, held on for a 1-0 win, despite a second-half pummelling from the Parkhead side.

  Intriguingly, midfielder Stuart McCall later cited that win at a rain-soaked Hampden, rather than the title-clinching victory over Aberdeen the previous season, as the making of Walter Smith’s team. It’s a revealing admission; Celtic, struggling domestically at the time under Liam Brady, threw absolutely everything at their old rivals that night, leaving rope-a-dope Rangers hanging on defiantly after McCoist’s counter-attacking strike just before half-time. Incredibly, years later, assistant manager Archie Knox admitted that he had paid the Rangers-supporting ball boys at half-time to counter the Celtic onslaught by delaying the retrieval of the ball when it went out of play. Grim determination, defensive bloody-mindedness and even bending the rules to their advantage would come to characterise Smith’s teams in the years ahead, and the tone had been set.

  The following year, in only his second full season in charge of the club, Rangers won the Treble under Smith, beating Aberdeen into second place in all three competitions, with the Ibrox side finishing nine points ahead of the Dons in the league and defeating them in both cup finals, 2-1 on each occasion. Extra time was required to separate the teams in an evenly fought League Cup Final in October, in the last match played at the old Hampden, before the destiny of the trophy was decided by a late own goal from the unfortunate Gary Smith, who had performed well in nullifying the threat from McCoist for the previous 114 minutes of the contest. Trevor Steven had returned from Marseille, in a good bit of business for the club, and he helped the team chalk up a 44 match unbeaten run over a seven-month period, including eight games unbeaten in Europe. Smith also signed Scotland international defender Dave McPherson, who was reacquired from Hearts after initially leaving Ibrox in 1987, and the home-grown contingent – players who were eligible in Europe – was augmented by the emergence of striker Gary McSwegan alongside defenders Neil Murray and Steven Pressley, as the club put in a serious challenge on the continent for the first time in many years.

  Although the format of the competition had been altered the previous year to include group stages for the first tim
e, 1992/93 saw the official introduction of the Champions League, rebranded from the old European Cup. In the first round, Rangers breezed past Danish outfit Lyngby, 3-0 on aggregate, to set up an intriguing second round play-off tie with Leeds United, the last English champions of the old First Division, recently abolished in favour of the money-spinning Premier League. With Scotsmen Gordon Strachan and Gary McAllister featuring in the English side, and Englishmen Steven, Gordon and Hateley all involved for the Scots, even by the expected standards of media cliché, the hype surrounding the ‘Battle of Britain’ clash was considerable, on both sides of the border. The Scottish press were firmly behind their Ibrox favourites, while their supercilious English counterparts, condescending to cover a Scottish side and coming across the lugubrious Smith for the first time, were moved to recall P.G. Wodehouse’s unkind, but perhaps in this case merited aphorism, ‘It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.’

  With away fans banned from both matches, McAllister stunned a raucous Ibrox in the first minute of the tie, firing home a thunderous volley from the edge of the box, and Leeds should have increased their advantage shortly afterwards when Strachan’s effort, following a neat one-two with Gary Speed, was wrongly disallowed for offside. Gradually Rangers grew into the game, and after a series of corners Leeds goalkeeper Lukic punched the ball into his own net, which, the local press boys noted with some amusement, put an end to the perennial English jibes about Scottish goalkeepers. A second shaky moment from Lukic at another corner allowed McCoist to pounce and the first leg finished 2-1 in Rangers’ favour.

  At Elland Road, Leeds believed that their away goal would prove decisive, and their confidence was once again shared by large sections of the English media, whose dismissal of his side’s chances irritated Smith to such an extent that he marched into the away dressing room before the game, threw a pile of newspaper clippings on the floor, and, in lieu of a rousing pre-match address, simply told his players, ‘If that doesn’t motivate you, then nothing will.’