Tangled Up in Blue

by Stephen O'Donnell

  The following week, Rangers faced Hearts in the Scottish Cup Final at Celtic Park. In Walter Smith’s last game in charge, Rangers got off to the worst possible start when they conceded a penalty within 33 seconds after Hearts captain Steve Fulton was brought down by Ian Ferguson. Colin Cameron converted from the spot and the Edinburgh side then extended their lead in the second half, when a mistake from Amoruso allowed Frenchman Stéphane Adam in to score. Substitute McCoist pulled a goal back ten minutes from the end but Hearts, with a team put together for less than £1m, held on to secure their first trophy of any kind for 36 years, giving the men from Tynecastle some tangible reward for their efforts over the course of the season. But for Rangers there would only be tears of frustration and regret, and with so many players out of contract in the summer, many of the team finished the game slumped on the Parkhead pitch in despair. Smith himself admitted that his failure to bow out with a victory ‘remains my biggest disappointment in football’, explaining, ‘This was their last game and I wanted them to go out on a high.’

  Despite losing out on both the league and the cup in his final season, clearly Smith was bringing success to Rangers, and in that regard he can be seen as one of the great Ibrox managers. At times he was accused, and not without justification, of being a chequebook manager, but regardless of the arrangements that owner David Murray was enjoying with the club’s bankers, Smith undoubtedly brought some great players to Rangers, although there were some expensive duds along the way too.

  Overall, Smith is one of the more difficult Rangers managers to assess, because of the money he was allowed to spend, out of all proportion to the size of the club, and in comparison to their domestic opponents, who remained largely exasperated and bewildered by the financial power at Ibrox under the Smith/Murray regime. He was decent at Everton for a while, in a very different financial environment at Goodison Park, as Christmas hamper tycoon Peter Johnson sold out to Bill Kenwright, but he was eventually sacked after almost four years on Merseyside.

  He improved things with Scotland, although again, Smith took over the national team at its lowest ebb after the debacle of the Bertie Vogts era, and the hype that accompanied his tenure at Hampden disguised some poor results and awful performances, with a 1-0 home loss to Belarus in an important qualifier springing painfully to mind.

  He returned to Rangers in 2007, when, even with the club in a gathering financial maelstrom, he would continue to be wedded to the idea of the spending strategy, with disastrous consequences. The basics were his forte, motivating and nurturing a shared sense of purpose in his squad, and a hunger to stay in front and keep winning. In his first, seven-year spell at Ibrox, Smith fashioned a side that was very much in his own image – strong, steady, unspectacular, and ready to fight for the cause – but his belief in the pursuit of expensive and high-profile signings as the quickest and most effective route to success was storing up future problems for the club, which ultimately, they would be unable to solve.

  In one of the final interviews he gave as Rangers boss, after his swansong was ruined following defeat to Hearts in the Scottish Cup Final, the departing manager announced, ‘The bad news for Scottish football is this is as bad as it gets for Glasgow Rangers.’

  It was an assurance which epitomised Caledonian defiance at its best, yet Smith could hardly have been more painfully or catastrophically wrong in his prediction.

  10

  WORLD DOMINATION

  IN the summer of 1998, a short time after Walter Smith’s departure from the club, Rangers chairman David Murray moved to reassure colleagues, when he informed them, ‘For every five pounds Celtic spend, we will spend ten.’ It was a statement which summed up not only the strategy of the club at the time, but also the hubris attached to it. After witnessing his team surrender the title to their Glasgow rivals for the first time since his involvement at Ibrox, Murray’s expressed ambition was now to once again put as much distance between his club and the team from the other side of the city as possible, and, in the end, he achieved his goal, but only in the manner of the unsuspecting Greek general, who consulted the Oracle at Delphi before setting out to war and was told that if he embarked on his risky, vainglorious expedition then he would destroy a great army. It was a lesson which would ultimately be lost on Murray, as the army which was eventually destroyed, like the Rangers chairman’s, turned out to be his own.

  Talk of strategy as such at Murray’s Rangers is in fact misleading; there was no great plan or clear set of policies in place, no roadmap to future success at the club. They may be overused words in modern football, but there was no Ibrox ‘project’, no overarching ‘philosophy’ that could be discerned, other than a belief in the power of the chequebook as the quickest and surest route to success. Murray, hopelessly intoxicated by the profile and prestige that his association with Rangers was bringing him, was the chief cultural architect of this flawed methodology, although it seems clear that he and Rangers, a club with an equally abrasive sense of self-importance seemingly written into its DNA, were the perfect fit for one other.

  It may have looked like much of the money which was funding this vanity project was coming out of the chairman’s own pocket, but, as we were later to learn, very little of it was, although the line which was being put out at the time could hardly have been less equivocal. It was generally assumed and indeed widely reported, in newspapers and books, that Murray’s lavish spending on the club was being financed from his own largesse. Benevolent benefactor, entrepreneur, swashbuckling captain of industry, Murray had the media in the palm of his hand, dining on ‘succulent lamb’, another unsettling phrase which emerged at this time to describe the symbiotic relationship he enjoyed with the press, after he wined and dined an invited group of journalists at his holiday retreat in the Channel Islands.

  Murray ran Rangers as if it was his own private fiefdom. He was in charge, so he considered, of ‘the second most important institution in Scotland, after the Church of Scotland’. He gathered friendly reporters into his circle and for those who refused to get on message, or who dared to offer criticism, to which at times he seemed to display an almost hypersensitivity, there was excommunication.

  On a certain level, it worked, just as, on a certain level, dictatorship works. If, for instance, Murray’s manager wanted to sign a player, Rangers could, once the chairman had given his assent, move swiftly to negotiate a deal and conclude a transfer. By comparison, at Celtic, a club by now operating under a plc structure and therefore accountable to its shareholders, if the manager identified a player he thought might enhance his squad, he first had to wait for a board meeting to be convened, which might take up to a week, before the expenditure could be approved and the funds released. Rangers by contrast could snap up their targets at much shorter notice, but the Ibrox club, under the effective control of one man, were left exposed to the error and miscalculation of the individual; in this case an individual who was particularly vulnerable because he would brook no criticism nor pay heed to prudent advice, not that either of these were particularly forthcoming from the media or anyone else associated with the club, as the chairman surrounded himself with sycophants.

  Murray believed that Rangers’ obsession with nine-in-a-row was beneath their dignity; unlike the club’s players and staff, he couldn’t really give a stuff about Celtic, or their records, and he believed that the blinkered pursuit of the ninth title was holding up their ambitions in Europe. With the historic domestic achievement finally out of the way, the fact that his manager, Walter Smith, had again flopped in the Champions League was the final nail in his coffin. Murray’s eye was again on Europe, and he proceeded to scan the continent looking for a suitable replacement, ideally northern European but certainly English-speaking, who would bring success and renown to the club in that arena. He also wanted his new head coach to be a disciplinarian, a man who would put an end to the drinking culture as well as the law-breaking and the poor professionalism at the club, which many Rangers partisans belie
ved had cost their team the league in 1998.

  Smith’s notice of intended resignation had been tendered at the club’s AGM at the end of October, prompting inevitable speculation about the identity of his successor. Amid a frenzy of conjecture, the intrepid reporters on the case would be on the phone to anyone they could possibly connect to the job, and as long as their enquiries weren’t met with outright repudiation, the headlines would appear the next day, ‘Gers swoop for so and so’, or ‘So and so issues “come and get me” plea’. Marcello Lippi, Fabio Capello and Sven-Goran Eriksson were all beating a path to Ibrox apparently, regardless of any quibbling concerns about their availability at the time. In the end, many Rangers fans were left distinctly underwhelmed with Murray’s eventual choice, the Dutchman Dick Advocaat, who, it was announced in February, quashing the ‘exclusive’ red herrings, would take over at the start of the new season after working his notice at PSV Eindhoven.

  Advocaat fitted the bill in terms of his track record, both as an enforcer of discipline – he once sent Ruud Gullit home from a training camp when manager of the Dutch national team, which he had led, without the dreadlocked talisman, to the quarter-finals of the 1994 World Cup – and as a winner of trophies, after he guided PSV to the Eredivisie title in 1997, toppling the domination of Ajax, whose Champions League-winning team of 1995 had begun to break up. Despite the disappointment of some that Ottmar Hitzfeld or Arrigo Sacchi wouldn’t be arriving at Ibrox, Murray was delighted to have landed his man. ‘In Dick we have one of the biggest figures in world football,’ the chairman announced. ‘This shows that Rangers can attract the best in the world in terms of coaches and players.’

  Advocaat admitted that he had to use the internet to research his new club, but he was certainly impressed with the almost unlimited budget that was being made available to him, as well as, once he arrived at Ibrox, the interesting décor. ‘There is a sense of tradition and everyone who comes to visit me talks of it – the wood, the pictures, the paintings. I like all of that,’ he pondered. Known as ‘The Little General’ from his time in Holland, after a period spent serving as assistant to Rinus Michels, the godfather of Dutch ‘Totaalvoetball’, and the original ‘general’, the nickname was eagerly adopted by the Scottish press, accustomed as they were to flattering Rangers managers at every suitable opportunity, although it was noticeable how quickly the moniker was dropped after rival fans began referring to Advocaat as ‘the little genital’.

  Murray considered Celtic’s championship victory of 1998 to have been a mere interregnum. Determined to win back immediately what he referred to as ‘our title’, and with so many players to replace, Advocaat was given carte blanche to more or less sign whoever was required to bring the championship back to Ibrox and to make the longed-for impression in Europe. After clearing out a cabal of Smith’s regulars over the summer, Advocaat’s squad was depleted to such an extent that the new manager reckoned there were only three players left who were up to the task: Albertz, Amoruso, who was named the new club captain, and Porrini. ‘There are some players here who in my opinion are not good enough,’ the Dutchman admitted, adding, ‘It has been difficult to move some on to other clubs, because they are on good salaries, but we had to build a new team.’

  Arriving at the club over the summer were Arthur Numan, a Dutch international left-back and Advocaat’s captain at PSV, for a fee of £5m, who was lured to Glasgow, the defender openly admitted, by ‘ridiculous wages’, his compatriot Giovanni van Bronkhorst, another £5m purchase from Feyenoord, the Ukrainian winger Andrei Kanchelskis, who signed from Fiorentina for a then Scottish record £5.5m despite being clearly past his best, Argentinian forward Gabriel Amato, £4.2m from Real Mallorca, goalkeeper Lionel Charbonnier from Auxerre for £1.5m, while Romanian international Daniel Prodan was a £2.2m signing from Atletico Madrid, who joined up at Ibrox with an injured knee and failed to make a single appearance for the club. Accepting a share of the blame for the Prodan mistake, Murray later admitted that players ‘were coming in by the hour’ at that point and there wasn’t enough time to put the defender through a proper medical.

  Over the course of the season, Advocaat added Champions League winner Stefan Klos, who arrived from Borussia Dortmund for £700,000 on Christmas Eve and became one of the best-paid footballers in Europe at Ibrox, and Rod Wallace, who came from Leeds United on a free transfer. Stephane Guivarc’h (£3.5m from Newcastle) and USA captain Claudio Reyna, from Wolfsburg via parent club Bayer Leverkusen, with both German sides taking a share of the £2m transfer fee, were Rangers’ other acquisitions, while Advocaat was even prepared to pay £2m to sign Neil McCann from Hearts.

  With Durrant, Goram, Gough, Laudrup, McCall and McCoist all leaving, along with the departed manager Smith, there seemed little hope of the club retaining a Scottish identity or influence within the dressing room, although youngster Barry Ferguson, who had been stifled in his opportunities under the previous regime, was given a five-year contract and promoted to regular first-team action. In addition, national team captain and English Premier League winner Colin Hendry, who had led Scotland out at the Stade de France in the opening fixture of the World Cup over the summer, arrived from Blackburn Rovers for £3.5m shortly after the season commenced.

  At a time when a new European approach was being adopted at Ibrox, it was alleged that Murray, a man who demonstrably knew nothing about the game of football, was heavily involved in bringing Hendry to Rangers, with the chairman apparently pulling rank on the manager in order to sign the Scottish defender in a practice that was not uncommon on the continent.

  It wasn’t a great success; Hendry, along with fellow newcomers Guivarc’h and Amato, would eventually depart after spending barely a full season in Glasgow, with Murray’s club taking a £5m hit on the three under-performers, although the chairman generally considered such losses to be an occupational hazard.

  A conservative estimate of the total expenditure on player acquisitions that season would be £32m, a British record for a single season at the time and by any regard a truly hideous sum of money in the context of Scottish football, with absolute fortunes also draining out of the club in agents’ fees and players’ pay. Rangers’ spending, which had been risky but deliberate under Souness, reckless and extravagant under Smith, was now becoming irresponsible and unsustainable under Advocaat’s regime, but the excessively high wages were the only way, the Dutchman candidly conceded, that the club could entice these superstars to come and play in Scotland.

  The new manager’s first game in charge was a UEFA Cup preliminary round tie against League of Ireland side Shelbourne, and it proved to be an inauspicious start, both on and off the field. Amid clashes between drunken Rangers fans and police, the Irish team bus was pelted with missiles as it approached Tranmere Rovers’ Prenton Park ground in Birkenhead, where the game had been moved due to fears over potentially more serious crowd trouble in Dublin. Tranmere chairman Frank Corfe was so appalled by what he witnessed that he vowed never to allow Rangers to return to his club’s ground again, branding the behaviour of the fans ‘a disgrace to their club, their country and to the human race’ and urging UEFA to take action ‘by punishing these people where it really hurts – their football club’.

  Perhaps in response to the treatment they had been afforded by their opponents’ supporters, the semi-professional Irishmen soon raced into a two-goal lead, leaving Advocaat’s aspiring Rangers galacticos staring at a potential embarrassment. The manager, to his credit, made adjustments at half-time and, despite the Irishmen adding a third goal shortly after the interval, his team recovered to win 5-3, with Amato, after being introduced from the bench, scoring two goals and Albertz converting twice from the penalty spot, before a routine 2-0 win at Ibrox in the second leg saw Rangers through.

  The shaky start to the season continued when Rangers visited Tynecastle for the opening domestic fixture of the campaign and found themselves two goals down to Hearts after 20 minutes, eventually losing 2-1. In the aftermath, howeve
r, there was a rare outbreak of temperance in response to defeat at Ibrox, as the new manager’s honeymoon period continued, and the loss was put down to the inevitable period of adjustment involved in converting the players, new and old, to the Dutchman’s more nuanced tactical system.

  The patient approach was rewarded as the season progressed, and with more of Advocaat’s new signings being introduced into the team and settling into their surroundings, the league became plain sailing for Rangers. A last-minute penalty from Albertz gave Advocaat’s side a 2-1 victory over Motherwell in their first home game, and if that seemed unconvincing to some, it was followed by 3-1 and 4-0 wins over Kilmarnock and St Johnstone before the end of August. By November the Ibrox men were sitting comfortably, six points ahead of Kilmarnock in second place and fully ten points clear of Celtic in third. A 5-1 defeat at Parkhead on 21 November brought Rangers back down to earth with a bump as two goals from recent signing Ĺubomír Moravĉik lit up Celtic Park, but the men from the east end of Glasgow were undergoing their own transitional season under yet another head coach, the cerebral Slovak Dr Jozef Vengloš, and the gap between the teams was merely reduced temporarily.

  Meanwhile, on the European stage, Rangers made a positive impact for the first time in many years under their new coach. After eventually seeing off Shelbourne there were grounds for cautious optimism following well-orchestrated wins against PAOK Salonika and Beitar Jerusalem, before Advocaat’s side were paired with Bayer Leverkusen, one of the leading sides of the day in Germany’s Bundesliga. A classy performance, with Scottish youngster Barry Ferguson controlling the game from the base of midfield, saw Rangers come away from the first leg in Germany with a 2-1 advantage after goals from van Bronckhorst and Johansson. Two weeks later in Glasgow the sides drew 1-1, with the unheralded Johansson scoring again, a result which represented a terrific aggregate victory for the Ibrox men and probably the club’s biggest scalp in Europe for 20 years.