Tangled Up in Blue

by Stephen O'Donnell

  The bank, HBOS, in full pre-credit crunch madness mode, also provided Rangers with a further £15m overdraft facility for ‘ongoing working capital requirements’ and agreed to restructure the remaining Ibrox debt, which now stood at £23.1m. Murray and Rangers had looked death in the face and the chairman, thanks to his friends at the bank and some powder puff coverage of his handling of the situation in the media, had come up smelling of roses.

  Following the disappointment of missing out on the Champions League group stages, the month of August ended with Rangers losing another Old Firm game, Alan Thompson’s late winner at Celtic Park condemning the Ibrox club to a record-breaking seventh consecutive defeat in the fixture. After six games unbeaten against the Parkhead side in the period immediately following his appointment as Rangers manager, McLeish had now chalked up an unprecedented series of losses against Celtic, with this latest setback handing their rivals an early five-point lead in the title race, an advantage which was extended further when Rangers could only draw their next game 0-0 against Hearts at Tynecastle.

  After an insipid 1-0 defeat in Portugal against Maritimo in the UEFA Cup play-off round, a result which was only rectified following a penalty shoot-out at Ibrox in the second leg, Rangers fans were calling for McLeish’s head on a stick. However, there was to be another dramatic end to the domestic league season in 2005, which rivalled the finish of two years earlier. Rangers had made productive use of the Bosman market over the summer, perhaps for the first time since the introduction of the landmark ruling almost a decade earlier, with the free transfer acquisitions of Dado Pršo, a Croatian forward, lured to Ibrox with the help of the owner’s ostentatious use of his private jet, and Jean-Alain Boumsong, although the French defender was quickly sold on to Graeme Souness’s Newcastle for £8m in January after turning out just 28 times in all competitions for the Ibrox club. With Rangers splashing the proceeds on new singings Sotirios Kyrgiakos, Thomas Buffel and Ronald Waterreus, the club had subsequently ended their run of bad luck in the Celtic fixture with wins at both venues, but in the final encounter in April, Celtic defeated McLeish’s side at Ibrox to go five points clear at the top of the league with just four games of the season remaining.

  The Parkhead club failed to consolidate their advantage however, losing the following week, 3-1 at home to Hibs, and with the other games after the match 33 league ‘split’ all resulting in wins for the Glasgow sides, Celtic still found themselves two points clear at the top going into the final fixture, but with Rangers holding a superior goal difference. The Parkhead men were well aware that only a win against Motherwell at Fir Park would be enough to guarantee them the title and things seemed to be going to plan for the visitors when Sutton fired home a loose ball on 29 minutes. Leading 1-0 as the clock ticked down on the season, and having spurned several opportunities to increase their advantage and put the title beyond doubt, Celtic conceded an equaliser to a strike from Australian forward Scott McDonald, who then netted a second goal on the counter-attack in the dying seconds of the game as the Parkhead men pushed to try and retake the lead.

  Over at Easter Road, there was no question of nerves affecting the Rangers players, as many argued had happened with Celtic, because the game was being played out at walking pace. After Novo gave Rangers the lead with a deflected shot on the hour, the teams settled for the 1-0 result, which seemed to suit both parties as a heavier defeat would have jeopardised Hibs’ hopes of finishing third and qualifying for the UEFA Cup. The only excitement at Easter Road came when news of Motherwell’s two goals came through from Fir Park, both of which were greeted with huge roars from the Rangers end of the ground, and with the SPL trophy now en route to the presentation ceremony in Edinburgh, amid jubilant scenes, the commentator’s announcement would be remembered by fans of the Ibrox club for many years, ‘The helicopter is changing direction!’

  Highlighting the rollercoaster nature of McLeish’s tenure at the club, after the last-day title triumph of 2005 the extraordinary lows quickly returned the following season during a campaign which saw Rangers notch up a ten-game run without a victory over the autumn, a record-breaking winless streak for the Ibrox side. It was a remarkable display of mediocrity from McLeish’s side, considering the colossal financial advantages which Rangers continued to enjoy over most of their domestic opponents, including the apex of the club’s EBT usage, with a total of almost £10m plundered from MGMRT in tax-free earnings over the course of the year. After a goalless stalemate at Ibrox against the manager’s former side Aberdeen in November 2005, Rangers’ third successive league draw, which left them 12 points behind joint leaders Celtic and Hearts after just 14 games, a banner was unfurled by fans at the away end of the ground, directed at their former idol, which read: ‘AGENT MCLEISH, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, RETURN TO BASE’.

  It was clear that the manager was living on borrowed time, as a few days later, Rangers were eliminated from the League Cup, losing 2-0 at Celtic Park. By early February the Ibrox men had also crashed out of the Scottish Cup, losing 3-0 at home to Hibs, a third victory of the season over Rangers for Tony Mowbray’s young side, a result which saw hundreds of fans protesting outside the ground after the game. With Celtic, now managed by McLeish’s former Aberdeen team-mate Gordon Strachan, running away with the league once again, their fourth wide-margin title success in six years, Rangers’ domestic season was effectively over in midwinter. Even second place eventually eluded the club, with Hearts, despite using four managers over the course of the campaign, taking the runners-up spot and qualifying for the Champions League play-offs, the Edinburgh men becoming the first team outside of the Glasgow duopoly to break into the top two positions since 1995. Rangers’ form had improved in the second half of the season, but McLeish’s side still somehow contrived to finish third in what was generally considered to be a two-horse race.

  There was some welcome respite for the beleaguered manager in Europe as Rangers made history by becoming the first Scottish side to reach the knockout stages of the Champions League, despite winning only one of their six group games. By the time of their narrow last-16 defeat on away goals to Villarreal, however, McLeish had already made known his intention to step down from the role at the end of the season. In another crafted managerial departure, Rangers had avoided any reference to their head coach being ‘sacked’, although by any loose definition – the club weren’t happy with the results the manager was achieving and they believed they could get another guy in who could do a better job – not only was McLeish sacked, but his two predecessors were as well.

  Adding to the suspicion that McLeish’s decision was not entirely his own, by the time of the announcement, Murray and the club’s chief executive Martin Bain were already some way down the line to appointing his replacement. Although an agreement had not yet been formally concluded, the coveted Frenchman Paul Le Guen, who had led Lyon to three consecutive titles in his homeland and twice to the quarter-finals of the Champions League, had already verbally consented to become the next Rangers manager. Forced to sit on his hands and wait while the contractual details were being negotiated, Murray, the great propagandist, announced to the club’s in-house television channel that Rangers’ troubles were coming to an end, and, unable to contain his excitement at the identity of McLeish’s intended successor, the chairman proclaimed that it wasn’t just light which he could see at the end of the proverbial tunnel, but moonbeams.

  ‘There’s a massive moonbeam of success awaiting us,’ he blurted out on Rangers TV the day after McLeish’s departure was made public, referring not only to Le Guen’s expected appointment, but also to an imminent, multi-million-pound deal with the retailer JJB Sports. It seemed a typical piece of Murray hyperbole, but it backfired on him with neither Le Guen nor the retail partnership, which netted the club plenty of cash in the short term, but sacrificed an important revenue stream over the years ahead, living up to expectation. The expression ‘moonbeams’ has subsequently passed into shorthand, and been used by sceptics and riva
l fans to ridicule every pronouncement of expected good news to emanate from the Ibrox club, even amid its evidently degenerating circumstances.

  Le Guen was one of the most sought-after managers in Europe, having been courted by a host of top clubs including Lazio, Dynamo Kiev and cash-rich Lokomotiv Moscow, all of whom he visited in person during the period of his sabbatical from the game. After quitting Lyon at the end of the 2005 season, the former French international defender, who earned 17 caps for his country between 1993 and 1997, had taken a year off from coaching and was working as a summariser and football analyst for the French TV station Canal Plus, so Le Guen was very much seen as available and, given his impressive track record at Rennes and Lyon, desirable by ambitious owners across the continent.

  With his pick of leading European clubs to choose from, his eventual decision to join Rangers left many in France flummoxed, but Le Guen’s single-mindedness meant that he had little time for the sceptics. ‘I’ve not got a lot to say to people who think that I am making a mistake in going to Glasgow. To be honest I’m not interested in what other people might think. It doesn’t bother me in the slightest,’ he stated. What arguably delighted Murray most of all about his snaring of Le Guen was the Frenchman’s acceptance of the budgetary restrictions which he would be working under at Ibrox. Now at last, the chairman could see a way forward for the club – they would navigate their way safely through troubled financial waters thanks to the sheer quality of the man at the tiller.

  For his part, Le Guen had been impressed in particular by the Ibrox club’s clarity of purpose and their determination to get their man, as he explained in an interview with Canal Plus’s Darren Tulett, ‘He [Murray] made me understand that I was going to be able to feel good at this club, that he was prepared to do everything necessary for that to be the case. And you know, he said all that with such force, such charisma and enthusiasm, that it gave it an extra dimension. He’s the kind of guy who can’t leave you indifferent.’

  In May 2006, Le Guen finally confirmed the worst-kept secret in Scottish football when he announced that he was becoming the new manager of Rangers, and he and his family soon decamped en masse, along with a coterie of fellow Breton coaches, physios and translators, to Glasgow.

  Le Guen’s first game in charge, as the new season got under way, was against Motherwell at Fir Park. Goals from Pršo and new signing Libor Sionko gave Rangers a well-deserved 2-1 win, which was probably more comfortable than the scoreline suggested. Rangers had started the game strongly and scored early, and although the hosts came back into the game and equalised, Le Guen’s side quickly restored their lead and held on to take the three points. Afterwards the manager seemed pleased with his team’s performance. ‘I am very happy,’ he reflected. ‘We made many chances but we weren’t efficient enough, but it doesn’t matter. There was a good rhythm and a good relationship between our players.’

  It seemed like a positive start but from that opening-day victory, things began to unravel with startling alacrity for the Frenchman. In their first game at Ibrox, Rangers found themselves two goals down to Dundee United before a strike from substitute Chris Burke and an own goal rescued a 2-2 draw. By the end of August, Rangers, the pre-season favourites for the title with most, had dropped further points following draws with Dunfermline and Kilmarnock, as slowly but surely the hype and expectation following the manager’s appointment began to dissipate.

  Much of Le Guen’s initial difficulties seemed to stem from the quality and calibre of his signings. Acting without a technical director and with sole responsibility for player acquisitions for the first time in his career, the new manager plundered Austria Vienna, downsizing at the time following the withdrawal of a long-standing sponsorship agreement with the vehicle component supplier Magna International, taking Filip Sebo, an awful Slovakian striker whom the incredulous Austrians managed to entice £1.8m from Rangers for, Saša Papac, a solid but unspectacular Bosnian left-back and the only one of Le Guen’s 11 permanent signings, apart from the invisible Dean Furman, who would still be at the club the following season, as well as Sionko, the Czech winger, from the struggling Viennese side.

  Other arrivals included Karl Svensson, an unremarkable Swedish defender, youngsters Furman, Antoine Ponroy and William Stanger, who between them managed only a single competitive appearance for the first team, Lionel Letizi, a blundering goalkeeper who was controversially reinstated after injury despite the impressive form of Allan McGregor, while Jérémy Clément looked like a decent player, but never fully settled into his surroundings and left after six months for the home comforts of Paris Saint-Germain.

  If his signings were poor, Le Guen had even greater difficulty handling the players he inherited at the club. Even as early as pre-season, the Frenchman felt compelled to send Fernando Ricksen home from a training camp in South Africa after the Dutchman had got drunk on the flight and apparently offended a stewardess with his antics. To many of his team-mates, the defender’s transgressions amounted to nothing more than simply ‘Fernando being Fernando’, but the new manager felt the need to act, and dispatched the player back to Glasgow on the next available flight. Within a few weeks, Ricksen had joined Dick Advocaat’s Zenit St Petersburg on loan.

  As the season progressed, the manager’s stance regarding two other indigenous players, Boyd and McGregor, was also called into question. Striker Boyd was constantly berated for not working hard enough outside the penalty box, despite the efficiency of his goalscoring when inside it, and used sparingly, while McGregor was dropped, even after the goalkeeper had been named Scotland’s player of the month for September, in favour of the returning Letizi, who had missed several games with a calf strain and whose performances prior to injury had been anything but convincing.

  The manager was left with egg on his face as a mistake from Letizi, parrying Dargo’s long-range shot into the path of the grateful Bayne, allowed Inverness to record a famous 1-0 win at Ibrox in mid-October, the Highlanders’ first ever victory over Rangers. ‘I do not feel I put pressure on Lionel Letizi. I do not regret my decision. I am not used to discussing this in the press,’ the Frenchman said, closing ranks when questioned about his selection after the game.

  Having already lost successive matches to Hibernian and Celtic, Le Guen’s side were now struggling badly, ten points behind the Parkhead men, and the situation only worsened in November. At the start of the month, Rangers lost a further league match, 2-1 away to Dundee United, leaving them 15 points off the pace and then, just a few days later, the Ibrox men were knocked out of the CIS League Cup, losing 2-0 at home to First Division St Johnstone. In a result which was similar to Celtic’s epochal home loss to Inverness in 2000, although far less celebrated, Rangers were beaten by lower-league opposition at Ibrox for the first time in their history. It seemed that the bubble of Le Guen’s reputation had well and truly burst.

  Amid much speculation about the manager’s position, chairman David Murray called a press conference days after the St Johnstone defeat with the intention of publicly backing the struggling Frenchman. ‘Paul is here to do a long-term job,’ Murray told the assembled media. ‘Okay, our results have been bad, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it comes from Captain Mainwaring: you don’t panic… in life, in business, in anything,’ the chairman expounded, presumably trying to apply an old adage from the 1970s BBC sitcom Dad’s Army to the circumstances surrounding his flagging institution, but failing to remember that it was Clive Dunn’s Lance Corporal Jones, the Walmington-on-Sea butcher, who had employed that particular catchphrase, not Arthur Lowe’s Mainwaring. Perhaps an alert journalist might have suggested to Murray that Rangers’ problems were due to the fact that they didn’t ‘like it up ’em’, but no such notions were forthcoming.

  Despite Murray’s cack-handed intervention, which only served to further undermine the manager’s position and his credibility with the media, Rangers’ fortunes improved in the short term, with Le Guen’s side winning their next three lea
gue games against Dunfermline, Hearts and Kilmarnock. But then, on a freezing, wet Sunday afternoon in early December, Rangers lost again, 1-0 away to a Falkirk side who had thoroughly outplayed the Ibrox men.

  Within days Le Guen was on the phone to Murray, telling the chairman that the only way he could see the team progressing under his stewardship was if the club sold Barry Ferguson. The club captain had returned to the team in mid-September after a five-month lay-off with an injured ankle, but the new manager quickly grew frustrated by his apparent tactical indiscipline, with Ferguson seemingly incapable of following instructions and holding his position at the apex of the midfield.

  But the animosity between captain and manager ran far deeper, with Le Guen later claiming that Ferguson had been trying to undermine him throughout his entire spell at the club. Ferguson was the leader of the Scottish clique within the dressing room, a recalcitrant group, sceptical of the manager’s methods seemingly from the start, which even appeared to include club doctor Ian McGuinness, who was chastised and put aside by the manager for having too strong an influence over certain players and for frequently exceeding his remit.

  Following a spirited 1-1 draw with Celtic at Ibrox on 17 December and a 2-1 win at Aberdeen, matters came to a head over the festive period as Rangers lost, once again, to Inverness, the Ibrox men suffering a 2-1 reverse in the Highland capital having initially led. Back in the dressing room, Le Guen applied his customary mantra of ‘don’t worry, let’s stick together and move on’, an approach to adversity which Ferguson decided he could stomach no longer. Quoting himself regarding the infamous mutiny, Ferguson subsequently related his own account of the incident: ‘I said, “Aye, we must stick together, but it’s not fucking okay that we’ve lost another three points. What part of that don’t you get? This is Glasgow Rangers you are working for!” I admit I lost the head. I was just so angered by the lack of passion… Yes, maybe I was guilty of letting my emotions boil over… But I just couldn’t take any more of it. But that was it. It wasn’t as if I asked the guy outside for a square-go.’