Tangled Up in Blue

by Stephen O'Donnell

  This is the murky end of Scottish football, which in the west of Scotland lurks never far from the surface, and where the red-tops love to stray whenever the opportunity presents itself. It was undoubtedly the case that Rangers’ opponents, including Celtic, felt that they were too often on the wrong end of refereeing decisions around this period and there was particular bad blood between Celtic and the SFA at this time, with several ongoing disputes and disagreements rumbling along in the background, the most serious of which would eventually lead to the governing body’s CEO, Jim Farry, being sacked for gross misconduct. Whether any of this played a part in McBride’s appointment for the New Year fixture, or in his decision to disallow Cadete’s ‘goal’, his involvement in such a high-profile and important game was a poor exercise of judgement by the SFA, which, at such a crucial stage of the season, exploded in their, or more accurately, in Celtic’s faces. Of course Rangers were having none of this conspiracy theory nonsense. ‘They were paranoid against us, they didny know how to beat us,’ is Goram’s more straightforward explanation of the hex that his side seemed to have over Celtic at this time.

  Heading in to the latter stages of the season, and with the tension and importance of each Old Firm fixture increasing cumulatively, the final encounter between the pair was again at Celtic Park in March, with seven games remaining. The gap between the sides had been reduced from 14 points, after the Ne’erday match encounter in January, to just five, with Celtic hoping to emerge having shortened the deficit still further to a mere two. But, in a repeat of the meeting in November, the only goal was scored by Laudrup, the Dane latching on to Durrant’s lob seconds before half-time, after another weak moment in the Celtic defence.

  To say that the Rangers players were pumped up for the occasion would be an understatement, and almost inevitably, it was a scrappy, bad-tempered affair, with Mark Hateley, recalled from QPR on a short-term deal, sent off in the second half on his second debut for the club for a head-butt on Stewart Kerr. He was soon joined by Celtic’s Mackay, who committed a second rash challenge while already on a yellow card, and Ian Ferguson was in trouble with the Celtic Park crowd, after the Rangers midfielder booted the ball into supporters in the North Stand from close range.

  Ferguson then became involved in a running dispute towards the end of the game with Di Canio, which continued after the final whistle, when the Rangers players went into a huddle, mocking Celtic’s customary pre-match ritual. Ten days earlier, the Parkhead men had celebrated their 2-0 win over their rivals in the Scottish Cup by regrouping en masse for a second huddle at the end of the match, and the cunning Smith, steeped in Scottish football’s black arts, had used the Celtic players’ reaction as extra motivation for his side, branding their behaviour disrespectful. Pumped up with a contrived sense of grievance, the Rangers players were now taunting their rivals on the Celtic Park pitch, with Goram later admitting that he and Ferguson had planned the gesture in advance, and that they had in fact intended to dance the conga all the way off the field and up the tunnel, but the fracas at the end of the game prevented them.

  Despite winning all four of the head-to-heads against Celtic, their only title rival, Rangers stuttered badly in the run-in, losing at home to Kilmarnock and then, with the championship in sight, Motherwell, in front of a packed Ibrox expecting nine-in-a-row to be delivered. With nerves beginning to fray, the penultimate match of the season was away to Dundee United, who had already beaten Rangers twice that season. Top spot was secured following a 1-0 victory at Tannadice, thanks to a rare headed goal from Laudrup, with the victory immediately provoking a huge outpouring of celebration and relief among everyone concerned with the Ibrox club. The Rangers squad didn’t arrive back in Glasgow until the small hours of the morning, but an estimated crowd of 6,000 fans had gathered around Ibrox, staying up to welcome and acknowledge their all-conquering heroes.

  Captain Richard Gough, lifting the trophy at Tannadice, was moved to tears by the achievement, which provoked the indignation of his wife, who pointed out that he hadn’t even cried when their children were born. Admitting there were times when he thought that Rangers would cave in under the intense pressure, the captain explained, ‘Nine in a row was the big one for me. I think that everybody saw that from my reaction when I lifted the trophy. I think we all knew if we had failed that season then it would have been an absolute disaster for Rangers FC.’ Laudrup summed up the sense of relief, ‘I think, for a lot of the players, it would have been like they had failed. That was my impression.’

  Overall, the sense was one of mission accomplished, even though Celtic’s record had only been matched, not surpassed. In the close season, it was agreed that the bulk of the squad who had participated in the historic success would be allowed to stay on, to see if they could go one step further and achieve an unprecedented tenth title, but with their primary domestic objective now reached, Rangers refocused their attention on their other main aim, which had been temporarily put on the back-burner during nine-in-a-row, namely winning the Champions League.

  To this end, and to counter the effects of age which were beginning to show in many of his players, Smith and Murray embarked on another huge spending spree over the summer, unprecedented even by the club’s already enormous level of expenditure, acquiring Lorenzo Amoruso from Fiorentina, Champions League winner Sergio Porrini from Juventus, Marco Negri, top scorer with relegated Perugia, and his team-mate, future World Cup and Champions League winner Gennaro ‘Rino’ Gattuso. Staale Stensaas joined from Rosenberg, alongside experienced Swedish international Jonas Thern, who came from Roma. Around the same time Australian defender Tony Vidmar came from NAC Breda in Holland, Finnish forward Jonatan Johansson, signed from Estonian side FC Flora, while goalkeeper Antti Niemi also arrived at the club, from FC Copenhagen.

  The cost in transfer fees alone to acquire these players, some of whom arrived for free under the Bosman rule, was approximately £14m, with the three experienced Italians alone costing around £4m each, pushing Smith’s spending during his six-year spell past £50m. Rangers had spent more than any other club in Britain over the same period, but of course these figures didn’t include the extravagant wages which were required to entice these superstars to Glasgow. The generous pay packages on offer at Ibrox, unsurprisingly, were a vital factor in attracting so many high-profile players from clubs in Italy’s Serie A, a league which had been used to paying the highest salaries and consequently attracting the best players in the world only a few years earlier. Amoruso later admitted that Rangers had been determined to sign him after the club had apparently suffered the indignity of losing out on Gianluca Vialli, who had joined Chelsea the previous year. Rangers were consequently prepared to pay the Italian defender a fortune to secure his services, while Gattuso confessed that he was unconvinced about moving to Scotland until his father, with the dollar signs lighting up in his eyes at the prospect of his teenage son earning a basic wage of roughly £50,000 per week, 500 times more than what the old man had to make do with, persuaded young Rino that Rangers represented a ‘good opportunity’.

  Thern admitted when he arrived in Glasgow that the wages on offer were simply too good to turn down, with Rangers prepared to pay him more than his three previous clubs, Benfica, Napoli and Roma, could afford between them. Rangers also scorned the chance to recoup some revenue when the club turned down a bid from Ajax for Brian Laudrup, with the Amsterdam club prepared to pay £4m for a player with only one year left on his contract. They insisted that the Dane remain in Glasgow for another season and Laudrup subsequently left Glasgow the following summer on a free transfer, when he joined Chelsea.

  These acquisitions and other expenses, such as servicing the club’s spiralling debt, were partially funded by investment from ENIC, the company associated with the English businessman Joe Lewis, a tax exile based in the Bahamas, who put £40m into Rangers around this time, money that would ultimately be swallowed up by the financial black hole engulfing Ibrox. By contrast, at rivals Celtic, three
of their best forwards, Cadete, Di Canio and van Hooijdonk, all left over the summer, with replacement Henrik Larsson coming in from Feyenoord for a paltry £650,000, prompting the Daily Record, at the start of the new season, to set out three Rangers teams it believed were capable of winning the league.

  With so many quality new players in the squad complementing many of the old guard who had remained, or like Richard Gough, who returned after a few weeks in America, Rangers once again set out to make some sort of impression in the Champions League. Unfortunately, after routing a team from the Faroe Islands, they were eliminated at the second qualifying stage by the Swedish part-timers from Gothenburg, 4-1 on aggregate.

  Englishman Peter Keeling, who had been coaching in Scandinavia for 16 years at the time, highlighted the cultural differences between the sides when he told The Independent, ‘I think Swedish players are quite capable of changing the course of a match by themselves. That’s the difference. Because players here are only part-time they are well aware of what goes on in the world outside football. They are used to making decisions for themselves in everyday life and they take that into their football. Players in Britain are cossetted. When they finish at 32 and 33 they may have plenty of experience of nightclubs, but no real experience of the outside world. Gothenburg have a framework in place, like many Swedish clubs, that has served them well over the years. They bring in boys at eight and the accent is on technique and teamwork with different coaches at different age levels. Rangers tend to buy players for their image, not what they can actually do. It is a policy that has proved their undoing in Europe and perhaps it is time they changed it.’

  The defeat was a setback and a blow to Rangers’ pride, but UEFA’s newly introduced rule allowed teams eliminated in the Champions League qualifiers to have a go in the UEFA Cup instead. Dropping down into the secondary tournament, Smith’s side duly lost home and away to lowly Strasbourg, a team who were struggling in the French league at the time, meaning that Rangers, for all their apparent wealth and ambition, became one of the first sides in history to be knocked out of two European competitions in one season.

  It was the final straw; soon after their double elimination from Europe it was announced at the club’s AGM in October that Smith would be leaving his post at the end of the season. A glance at the manager’s record in Europe reveals how abysmally Rangers had failed in their stated objective over the course of Smith’s tenure at the club. After the highs of 1992/93, which in retrospect seemed to have allowed a sense of false hope to pervade, Rangers only reached the group stages of the Champions League on two further occasions, finishing bottom of their section both times, with one win, three draws and eight defeats from their 12 matches. That was in the good years. In four seasons out of seven, Rangers failed to even qualify for a competition they had clear hopes of winning, provoking a prolonged series of inquests, in among all the navel-gazing and the exasperated self-immolation caused by the club’s repeated disappointments in the European arena.

  Many theories have been put forward regarding Rangers’ failure to make an impact in Europe over this period, some inevitably more credible than others, but what seems unarguable is that the team’s direct, bustling style of play, which was serving them so well domestically, was found to be an inadequate formula for consistent, top-level European success. Rangers were too dependent on the old British ideals of team spirit and aggressive intentions, which Liverpool had realised as far back as 1973 after a painful defeat in the European Cup at the hands of Red Star Belgrade, could only get you so far in Europe, where the stronger sides had the ability to frustrate and expose teams like Rangers by retaining the ball for long passages of play. The unsophisticated tactics were accompanied by a lack of professionalism at Ibrox, certainly by the standards of contemporary football, which were changing even in Britain, as exemplified at Arsenal under their French manager Arsène Wenger, who had introduced a more modern, continental approach at the north London club, with an emphasis on nutrition and sports science. By comparison, when Smith took charge at Rangers, he relaxed the rules on drinking, which had been much stricter under the Italian-trained Souness, in the hope of winning over his players and forging a team spirit, with captain Gough encapsulating the squad mantra when he claimed, ‘the team that drinks together, wins together’.

  It was sufficient in Scotland, where a majority of clubs operated under more or less the same principles, but in comparison to most of their European opponents, it was as if Rangers were operating in the dark ages. Too frequently, Rangers players, who seemed altogether too pleased with themselves for their domestic achievements, were caught boozing in nightclubs, which may have added to their aura in Scotland, but was nowhere near good enough among the abstemious professionals employed by top European clubs. Laudrup appeared to be in the wrong movie at times, admitting that he couldn’t keep up with all the bevvying, ‘I realised early on in my Rangers career that I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t join the players every week, that’s for sure, it was too tough on my body.’

  Later Smith moved to counter this idea, claiming that the drinking culture at the club was exaggerated, while McCoist observed, ‘If we had drunk as much as some people had made out, we would all have needed to book in to the Betty Ford Clinic.’ Those ‘some people’ evidently included Andy Goram, who claimed that he and his team-mates couldn’t remember half of their achievements during the 1990s, such was the alcoholic blur in which they were celebrated. The goalkeeper later admitted, ‘We certainly went out for lunch… lasted three days… well documented. But then on a Saturday we’d come out and win three or four nil and play really well.’ Unfortunately, this peculiar prescription for success failed to extend to a Tuesday or Wednesday, as Rangers’ consistent series of embarrassments in Europe proved.

  In addition to all the drinking and clubbing, there were further controversies for Smith’s side, such as when Goram chose to wear a black armband on his Rangers jersey, allegedly in honour of the murdered UVF terrorist Billy Wright. The goalkeeper was later pictured holding up a flag bearing the name of the UVF and was subsequently accused by the Sunday Mail of building a ‘chilling shrine to the infamous terrorists in his luxury home’. Then there were the usual, almost expected drink-driving convictions, while Durrant and Derek Ferguson were hauled in front of the courts after an incident in a kebab shop, and with Gazza playing the flute, egged on by his team-mates, in mock imitation of a loyalist marching band, and kicking the shit out of his wife, the overall impression is of a rather dislikeable bunch of players, arrogant, prone to fighting in training, revelling in the fame and fortune which accompanied their domestic success, while trying to take on the elite of Europe, sides such as Ajax and Juventus. With the benefit of hindsight, it was a recipe for the kind of sporting disaster which subsequently ensued.

  Following the club’s early, ignominious, double elimination from Europe, Rangers found themselves in the unwelcome position of being free to concentrate on their domestic form and the prospect of securing an unprecedented tenth consecutive title. However, their hearts didn’t seem to be in it to quite the same extent. While Laudrup admits that there were times during the previous campaign when the team appeared to be too motivated, this season proved to be the opposite, despite all the new arrivals. The year started well, with Negri scoring in his first ten league games for the club, blasting 23 goals in the process, but the Italian striker soon faded and fell out of the picture at Ibrox. A three-way tussle began to develop between Rangers, Celtic and Hearts, as the Edinburgh club topped the league table for long periods over the course of the season and seemed to be in genuine contention for the title.

  With Laudrup troubled by illness and loss of form in his final season at the club and with the new signings at Ibrox either injured or failing to settle, Rangers fell away in the second half of the season, winning only one game in six between the end of January and the middle of March, leaving the championship seemingly a straight fight between Celtic and Hearts. Both teams stutt
ered in the run-in however, allowing Rangers, minus the ineffective Gascoigne, who was sold to Middlesbrough in the spring, back into the race. After a 2-0 home win over Celtic, the Ibrox men once again topped the league on goal difference, but the following week at Pittodrie they lost to Aberdeen, after Amoruso was ordered off for violent conduct, while Celtic also dropped points after a home draw with lowly Hibernian. Hearts, meanwhile, eventually faded out of contention and with three games remaining, Rangers won 3-0 at Tynecastle, finally putting Jim Jefferies’s side out of their misery.

  Still trailing Celtic by a single point, the Ibrox men struggled in their penultimate fixture at home to Kilmarnock against an Ayrshire side still looking to qualify for the UEFA Cup. Refereed by Bobby Tait, another Rangers-supporting official who had requested, and received, one last game at Ibrox as a retirement present, Smith’s side pushed desperately for a winner until deep into injury time when Kilmarnock broke away and scored the only goal of the game through Ally Mitchell. The loss meant that Celtic, managed by Dutch World Cup finalist Wim Jansen, now just had to win against Dunfermline at East End Park the following day to secure their first title in a decade, but after taking the lead, the Parkhead men became a bag of nerves, and conceded an equaliser as the race for the championship continued into the final week.

  On the day, Rangers did all they could, winning 2-1 against Dundee United at Tannadice, while at Celtic Park the early tension was eased following a second-minute strike from Henrik Larsson against St Johnstone. But a draw would have been insufficient for Celtic, and as the game wore on into the second half, the Parkhead crowd were on tenterhooks as news of Rangers’ lead on Tayside filtered through. A second goal, scored by Norwegian striker Harald Brattback midway through the second half, settled the nerves and the final minutes of the game were played out to scenes of near delirium in the rebuilt Celtic Park stands, with supporters seemingly overwhelmed by the end through a combination of relief and ecstasy.