A step up in class would be required again when Rangers were drawn to face Parma in the next round, the small-town Italian club whose ambitions were fuelled by the sponsorship and ownership of local multinational dairy firm Parmalat. Parma had a team full of genuine stars of the global game, such as World Cup winner Lilian Thuram, runner-up Dino Baggio, and future winners Gianluigi Buffon and Fabio Cannavaro, as well as Argentinian internationals Hernan Crespo and Juan Veron. But it was Abel Balbo who gave the Italians the lead at Ibrox, in a match controlled by the visitors, before Rod Wallace’s late equaliser gave Rangers hope. In the second leg in Emilia-Romagna, Albertz’s strike put Rangers in charge, but they were let down by their own Italian contingent, after Porrini was sent off, and with the home side back in charge at 2-1, a typically obtuse mistake from Amoruso, swiping at the ball with his arm in the penalty box while under no pressure from an opponent, allowed Chiesa to convert from the spot and put Rangers out, ending their interest in European competition for another year.
Back home, the strongest challenge to Rangers and Celtic in the early part of the season had come from Kilmarnock, but the Ayrshire side were eventually overtaken by St Johnstone, who defeated the Ibrox men twice and their neighbours three times over the course of the season, although in between there was a scalding 5-0 reverse at Parkhead in late January and the Perth side also lost the League Cup Final to Rangers at the end of November.
The 1998/99 season had seen the introduction of the self-governing Scottish Premier League breakaway, modelled on the English version but on a far less lucrative scale, with a £45m deal secured with Sky over four years for the broadcast rights to SPL matches and a sponsorship agreement with Gavin Masterton’s Bank of Scotland. New rules meant that teams now had to include two under-21 players in their 16-man matchday squads, and for the first time there would be a winter break in Scottish football as the season closed down for three weeks in January.
The time off seemed to serve Celtic particularly well as the Parkhead club’s form, which had been patchy under Vengloš earlier in the season, recovered notably after the resumption and they set out to reel Rangers in with a remarkable run of results all the way through to the end of April. However, the Ibrox men were also dropping very few points, until successive defeats in early spring, shortly after van Bronckhorst and Amoruso had stated in interviews that Scottish football was too easy, gave Celtic hope. But with four games remaining in an exhausting title chase, Rangers found themselves in a position where they could regain the league championship on the day of the final derby of the season, which was to take place at Celtic Park on Sunday, 2 May, with a kick-off time of 6.05pm on a bank holiday weekend. To the unwary, it may have seemed like a pleasant spring evening, but there was a storm brewing in the east end of Glasgow.
Advocaat had yet to record a victory over Celtic in three attempts, after two draws at Ibrox and a 5-1 humbling at Celtic Park in November, and the pre-match consensus suggested that Celtic would not allow their rivals to win the league at their ground. An early goal from Rangers’ McCann certainly wasn’t in the home team’s script, and matters became worse for the Parkhead men when French full-back Stephane Mahé was ordered off by referee Hugh Dallas, receiving a second yellow card after taking exception to a foul by McCann. In the context of the white-hot atmosphere, Mahé’s initial reaction was unremarkable and the referee, who behaved throughout as if he was the most important man on the field, could and should have done more to try and calm the player down and keep a lid on the situation. Instead, after his dismissal, the volatile Mahé totally lost the plot and had to be escorted from the field in tears by Celtic’s assistant manager Eric Black. Already a goal down at the time after McCann’s opener and now down to ten men, it was a setback from which Celtic were unable to recover.
But this was merely the prelude to a day of shame for the Parkhead club. As the game approached half-time, and with the Celtic Park crowd fizzing, referee Dallas awarded Rangers a free kick near the corner flag, then jogged over towards the byline and patted van Bronckhorst on the backside to encourage him to stop wasting time. As missiles rained down from the crowd, Dallas was struck by a coin and had to receive treatment on the field for a cut to his head; shortly after that, stewards and police hauled away a supporter who had invaded the field and was making an apparent beeline for the official. Then, seconds after getting back to his feet, as the free kick eventually came into the box, the referee, injured and angry, awarded Rangers a soft penalty for an apparent foul by Riseth on Vidmar, which Albertz, despite further insurgences on to the field by irate fans, calmly slotted away to extend the visitors’ lead.
In the second half, McCann, playing through the middle and using his pace to good effect on the break, added a third goal allowing the Ibrox men, after two more red cards in the closing stages for Rangers’ Wallace and Celtic’s Riseth, who committed a shocking challenge on Reyna, to complete the win and regain the championship. It was the first title to have been decided on the day of the Old Firm fixture since May 1979, and only the fourth time in the history of the game.
In the aftermath, Celtic were fined £45,000 by the SFA, and in an atmosphere of general browbeating, the Rangers players were criticised for engaging in another post-match ‘huddle’ on the Celtic Park pitch, just as they had done two years earlier with an almost entirely different squad of players and staff, as they celebrated in front of their fans at the end of the game. This had provoked another torrent of improvised missiles to rain down from the crowd and the visiting delegation required a police escort just to get out of the ground.
The fall-out and repercussions continued as the fixture spelled the end for Sky TV’s 6.05pm graveyard slot on a Sunday evening for their coverage of top-flight Scottish football, an experiment which had lasted all of one season. The match was the making of referee Hugh Dallas, the official from Bonkle, a village in North Lanarkshire, who had largely been a figure of fun in the media up to that point. On one occasion, after a particularly error-strewn performance, the press had christened him Hugh Bonkle, from Dallas. But he would go on to be a media darling, even earning his own slot on TV discussion shows.
Another consequence of the controversial derby was that referees’ home towns would no longer be stipulated publicly, after a brick was thrown through Dallas’s window by a neighbour who had been at the game, and in a final, bizarre episode, Celtic CEO Allan MacDonald, seemingly perturbed by the referee’s bottom-patting gesture towards van Bronckhorst, hired a behavioural psychologist to analyse Dallas’s conduct during the match. The idea inevitably backfired when the press got wind of it and mockingly used the affair as further evidence of Celtic’s supposed ‘paranoia’ towards officials and the media at this time.
To compound the Parkhead men’s misery, in a less controversial match between the two teams at the end of the month, Rangers lifted the Scottish Cup, winning 1-0 in a final which was once again refereed by Dallas. In the build-up, it was reported that even the corporate guests for the showpiece event at the newly rebuilt Hampden Park would have to be segregated and a police watch was stationed over the referee’s house. But the game turned out to be a poor spectacle and passed almost without incident, with the only goal of the game scored by Wallace just after half-time to hand Advocaat’s side the Treble in the manager’s first season in charge of the club.
The following season Celtic imploded. Highlighting the sense of complacency and nepotism at the club, MacDonald appointed his friend Kenny Dalglish to the role of director of football; Dalglish then hired his former colleague John Barnes to coach the first team, following the departure over the summer of Jozef Vengloš, and Barnes then signed his mate Ian Wright to play centre-forward. It didn’t work. All four men would be gone, or on the point of departure, by the end of the season, as Rangers romped to the title by a margin of 21 points.
The nadir for the Parkhead men came in early February, after a 3-1 home defeat to First Division Inverness Caledonian Thistle in the Scottish Cup, wh
ich prompted the memorable headline in The Sun, ‘Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious’. Following a row with the rookie manager and his assistant Eric Black, Australian striker Mark Viduka had taken his boots off in the dressing room at half-time and refused to take the field for the second half. The next morning Dalglish was recalled from the golfing resort of La Manga, Spain, where he had supposedly been on a scouting trip, and put in charge of first team affairs, after Barnes, with his side struggling in the league as well by this point, was removed from his post. Director Brian Quinn later admitted, ‘Barnes just wasn’t up to it… His tactical plans made a lot of sense, but it was one of those cases where he knew the words but didn’t know the music.’
Much like Liam Brady at the start of the decade, another gifted winger who was handed the Celtic job as a chastening first experience in management, Barnes’ career as a first team coach had ended almost before it had started.
Over at Rangers, by contrast, having delivered a domestic Treble and made a positive impression on Europe in his first season, Advocaat seemed to be fulfilling his remit.
The new season started with eight consecutive victories for the Ibrox club, as Rangers put four past Hearts, Motherwell and Dundee United in successive weeks, with recent arrivals Michael Mols, a £4m purchase from Utrecht, excelling in the striker’s position, and Dariusz Adamczuk, signed from Dundee, slotting in as an occasional right-back. But Mols had played just nine league games for the club when he was injured on Champions League duty in a crucial group match against Bayern Munich, and he would never again be the same player. Advocaat replaced his sidelined compatriot by purchasing Billy Dodds from Dundee United for £1.3m, and the later acquisition of Turkish international Tugay Kerimoğlu, signed for a similar amount from Galatasaray, completed the manager’s more modest spending for season 1999/2000.
Money was instead being poured into the club’s new training facility, which would eventually become Murray Park, and in addition, the Bank of Scotland, who had been bankrolling Murray’s lavish borrowing for years, at last felt compelled to try and curb the chairman’s excessive spending when, in February 1999, it acquired a so-called ‘floating charge’ over Rangers’ income and assets, a security which could crystallise into a fixed charge should an insolvency event occur, with the bank also taking a seven per cent stake in the club. Throughout the decade, Rangers’ level of debt had fluctuated between £20m and £40m, but despite the £40m share transfer from ENIC, all of which had been converted to revenue by the chairman just two years earlier, the club once again found itself heavily in the red by the turn of the century.
Rangers made further progress on the European front when they eliminated Finnish side FC Haka, then Parma, their conquerors of the previous season, from the Champions League qualifiers. Having gone on to win the UEFA Cup the previous season, Parma were now ranked among the top sides in Europe, but a terrific performance from Rangers, in a game which seemed to represent the template for the way Advocaat wanted his team to play against continental opposition, saw the Ibrox men earn a 2-0 home win. Rangers displayed pace and power throughout, following the red card shown to the Italians’ captain, Fabio Cannavaro, after 26 minutes, and despite a 1-0 reverse in Italy in the second leg, Advocaat’s side advanced to the group stages, where a tough section involving Valencia, PSV Eindhoven and Bayern Munich awaited.
Many within the Rangers camp wisely set their initial sights on achieving third position in the group and qualification for the UEFA Cup, and after a poor, lacklustre defeat to Valencia in their opening fixture, a team who would go on to finish runners-up in the competition that season, and a home draw with Bayern, who had agonisingly lost out to Manchester United in the final the previous year, Rangers knew that the double header against PSV would probably determine which team would secure the important third spot and continued participation in Europe. A 1-0 win in Eindhoven, thanks to a late goal from Albertz, set Rangers on their way and they completed the job three weeks later at Ibrox, defeating the Dutch side by the club’s biggest ever margin of victory in the group stages, 4-1 on the night, including two goals against his fellow countrymen from the doomed Mols.
Rangers now needed just one more point to continue in the Champions League but hopes were dashed in the following two games, both of which were lost narrowly, 2-1 and 1-0, with an unlucky defeat in Munich made all the more painful by Mols’s unfortunate, career-threatening injury, as the striker ruptured the cruciate ligaments in his knee following a challenge with Oliver Kahn.
Following that valiant effort, Rangers continued their European campaign in the UEFA Cup, where Borussia Dortmund awaited. A 2-0 win for the home team at Ibrox was reciprocated in the Westfalen Stadion, and with no further goals in extra time, the Germans displayed their customary efficiency in the subsequent penalty shoot-out as Advocaat’s side, who had three spot kicks saved by Jens Lehmann, were eliminated in the most disappointing fashion. Rangers’ misery was compounded when Amoruso was seen mouthing the words ‘black bastard’ in the direction of Dortmund’s Nigerian striker Victor Ikpeba, and the Italian was lucky to escape with a slap on the wrist and a forced apology for his racist remark, after Ikpeba refused to complain about the incident.
Nevertheless it seemed that Advocaat, albeit backed by grotesque amounts of money, had achieved the seemingly impossible feat of turning Rangers into a genuinely credible force in Europe. Chairman David Murray was still not satisfied, however, and vowed to continue spending in order to improve the side. ‘We are not talking here about players who only cost a million. Rangers are well down the road to huge signings and they will be of a much better standard than what we have now,’ he boasted after the defeat in Germany.
On the domestic front, Advocaat’s side were knocked out of the League Cup by Aberdeen, who lost to Celtic in the final, but they retained the Scottish Cup with a 4-0 victory over the same opponents at Hampden. Nothing went right for Aberdeen on the day of the final as goalkeeper Jim Leighton suffered an injury in only the second minute, meaning that diminutive forward Robbie Winters had to play in goal for almost the entire 90 minutes of the showpiece event. The game descended into farce and Rangers romped home with goals from van Bronckhorst, Vidmar, Dodds and Albertz to give Advocaat, after a first-season Treble, the Double in his second year.
Rangers fans attracted controversy at the final when, in a supposed tribute to the manager and the other Dutchmen at Ibrox, they decked themselves out en masse in the traditional colours of Advocaat’s homeland, in what was dubbed ‘the Oranje final’. Needless to say, large displays of orange regalia tend to carry sectarian connotations in the west of Scotland, particularly in a footballing context, and the fans had embraced the idea rather too gleefully for some. Not long afterwards, Rangers attracted further condemnation from anti-sectarian charities and campaigners when the club issued an orange away strip, although the Ibrox marketing department deflected some of the criticism by describing the shirt as ‘tangerine’. The offending garment was eventually ditched ‘for commercial rather than political reasons’ after one full season, during which replica sales of the kit were estimated to have topped 300,000.
Success followed success and, on the field at least, it seemed that Rangers could barely put a foot wrong. The margin of victory in the league, 21 points over 36 games, which included a 4-0 rout of Celtic at Ibrox in March, provoked one radio pundit to suggest that it would take the Parkhead men 20 years to catch up with their all-conquering rivals. Up in the boardroom, however, chairman David Murray was scrambling around desperately trying to find finance for his debt-ridden club. The wage bill at Rangers had topped £23m in 1998/99, the equivalent one newspaper reported, without any apparent sense of irony, of employing 2,000 full-time manual workers at £11,500 per year.
The overall level of expenditure had only increased during Advocaat’s second season in Glasgow, with players such as Rozental and Prodan picking up fortunes for next to nothing in return, while Marco Negri refused to leave Ibrox, running
down his contract over the course of two years of almost complete inactivity. One might have assumed that the unhappy Italian would be yearning for home and the challenges of Serie A, a league which still offered some of the best wages available anywhere in the world at the time, but such were his earnings at Ibrox that Negri was determined to sit tight in Scotland, draining every penny that he was owed from Rangers, despite barely kicking a ball for the club. Advocaat admitted his frustration with the player, ‘He just said, “I’m staying and you have to pay me my money.” We tried so much to send him back to Italy, but he just didn’t want to go.’
But with his minions in the media remaining on message and in full compliance mode, Murray sold them a fairytale about the future of his club and where he was intending to take it over the next few years, and the press duly obliged, faithfully reproducing the chairman’s verbose assertions and the triumphalist tone which accompanied them, without stopping to scrutinise the feasibility of what they were so breathlessly reporting.
One particularly egregious example of uncritical, sycophantic reporting towards Murray and Rangers over this period came from The Herald’s veteran football correspondent, Ken Gallacher, and his piece on the chairman’s future plans for the Ibrox club in anticipation of Advocaat’s second championship victory in 2000, which was reproduced in both Rangers and Celtic fanzines in the years ahead as financial despair gripped the Govan institution, is worth quoting from at some length in order to give a feeling for the kind of brown-nosing servility which Murray was able to induce from sections of the mainstream media at this time:
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