Tangled Up in Blue

by Stephen O'Donnell

  Responding to suggestions that he failed to adhere to the manager’s directives, Ferguson denied ever receiving any tactical instructions from the manager, but admitted, ‘Yes, okay I might have eaten the occasional packet of Monster Munch which might have been against his nutritional rules, but come on… No one is going to tell me a packet of pickled onion now and again is going to take years off your career. It’s nonsense.’

  Clearly there was something of a clash of cultures going on behind the scenes at Le Guen’s Rangers.

  The club’s next game was at home to St Mirren, a 1-1 draw with Ferguson again infuriating his manager by roaming all over the pitch instead of holding his position ‘in the hole’ behind the two strikers. With Celtic now disappearing into the distance at the top of the table, 16 points clear of second-placed Aberdeen and 17 ahead of Rangers in third, the exasperated Le Guen decided to act; he stripped Ferguson of the captaincy, dropped him from the side and informed the player that his days at the club were at an end. It was desperation stakes for the Frenchman; David Murray, who had sounded so bullish about Le Guen’s long-term prospects at the club only a few weeks earlier flinched and refused to back his manager over the controversial decision.

  The denouement finally came at Fir Park, Motherwell, the scene of such promise and optimism back in the heady days of late summer and Le Guen’s first game in charge. Now in the cold of midwinter, the Rangers fans barracked the Frenchman as he stepped off the team coach and chanted Ferguson’s name throughout the match, which was settled by a disputed Kris Boyd penalty midway through the second half. Having scored what turned out to be the game’s only goal, Boyd melodramatically held up six fingers to the Rangers fans in support of Ferguson, who was so emotionally attached to his squad number that he was known simply as ‘six’ within the dressing room.

  The end came quickly for the manager; bereft of the chairman’s support, Le Guen was unable to definitively answer questions from the media, crammed into the incommodious Fir Park pressroom after the game, about his future. ‘I don’t know if Ferguson will be sold,’ he shrugged. ‘It remains to be seen.’ The Frenchman seemed to appreciate that his days at the club were numbered, when he added, ‘The situation of a manager in this case is precarious. I don’t know if I’ll be here in the months ahead. I am not here to protect myself… if I go, I go.’ By the time his remarks were published in the press the next day, Le Guen had already spoken on the phone to Murray, now Sir David Murray, after the chairman was named in the New Year’s Honours list for services to business. One of Sir David’s first acts as a knight of the realm was to sanction Le Guen’s departure from Ibrox, by mutual consent, after just 27 weeks and 31 games in the job, the shortest spell of any manager in the club’s history.

  Le Guen’s brief tenure at Rangers was beset with problems from start to finish, some of which were of his own making: he was initially naïve with his choice of club and then made things more difficult for himself by failing to adapt to a foreign culture at an institution that was a cultural law unto itself. Le Guen was a quiet, understated, privately educated Catholic taking on a club known for its association with brash and triumphalist Protestantism, yet the Frenchman didn’t seem to care, as he vainly tried to apply the methods at Ibrox which had worked for him in his homeland. The manager had a preference for light touch training sessions, with a ban on tackles and over-physical contact rigorously enforced, so that when Manchester United loanee Phil Bardsley, against explicit instructions, steamed into a challenge on team-mate Thomas Buffel, he was swiftly dispatched back to his parent club.

  To the home-grown contingent, steeped in Rangers’ customary methods, this was as bewildering as it was ineffective, and Le Guen maintains his belief that Barry Ferguson, with his sullen demeanour and his intractable ways, had been on a mission to destabilise his regime from the start, something the player has always denied. Far more plausibly, Ferguson was just acting normal and Le Guen had been in the wrong movie all along. In addition, his recruitment strategy was weak, albeit with limited financial resources, but despite the number of players who came into the club, the manager failed to unearth a single footballer who made more than a superficial contribution to the Ibrox cause.

  Le Guen showed he was a man of honour when he quit the club and refused all forms of compensation from Rangers, asking only that Murray pay for his removal van, as the Frenchman left the country immediately, dragging his tearful daughters out of their local school. He deserves less sympathy, however, over his participation in the contentious EBT tax avoidance scheme; while footballers were generally able to plead ignorance over their involvement in the wheeze, citing their own ignorance and lack of intelligence in their defence against any perceived wrongdoing, it is harder to make that argument in the case of the urbane Le Guen, who along with several members of his staff, Yves Colleau (assistant manager), Joel Le Hir (physiotherapist) and Stephane Wiertelak (fitness coach) all signed up to the scheme, and who between them received £364,000 in untaxed income during their short stay in Glasgow.

  It wouldn’t be long, however, before the supposed secret of Rangers’ success would come to light, as the club received a visit from the City of London Police.

  12

  THE PRODIGAL FATHER

  BETWEEN 2006 and 2008 Celtic won three consecutive Scottish Premier League titles, a feat that was matched by Rangers, under returning father figure Walter Smith’s management, between 2009 and 2011. These bare statistics conceal the more important story however, with even the seemingly eternal power struggle between the two old rivals at the top of the Scottish game becoming a secondary consideration at times over the course of this period as the ticking time bomb of tax evasion and maladministration at Rangers eventually went off, engulfing the Ibrox club in a legal and financial maelstrom which would ultimately only end with its insolvency.

  Back in January 2008, however, over four years out from the spectre of liquidation and with matters still very much focused on football, the immediate priority of the newly knighted club chairman, Sir David Murray, was to find the man who could rescue Rangers from their on-field travails, after the failure of the Paul Le Guen experiment. For many older Rangers fans, the situation at the club bore a notable resemblance to events of almost 40 years earlier, when an attempt to introduce a more enlightened approach under Davie White ended with the young tracksuit manager being replaced by Willie Waddell, a man who knew the club inside out.

  Now Rangers would revert to type once more, although the man Murray wanted to restore the club’s fortunes was currently in employment within the game.

  Walter Smith, after four years of, by his own admission, failure at Everton, was now in charge of the Scotland national team, and doing a fine job of repairing the country’s battered credibility following the ineptitude and embarrassment of Berti Vogts’s short tenure. Such inconveniences were of no concern to the Rangers chairman, however, and by the time Smith handed in his letter of resignation to the SFA on 10 January, he had already agreed a bumper three-year contract to become the next Rangers manager.

  Needless to say, the governing body were none too pleased at having their most high-profile employee snatched from their grasp in such an audacious manner and the organisation’s CEO, David Taylor, and president, John McBeth, immediately threatened legal action against Smith ‘for breach of contract’ and against Rangers ‘for inducement to break the contract’, although they soon backed down after compensation was agreed between the parties. Smith, dismissing the concerns of his former employers, observed, ‘When I took over, these people [the president and the chief executive] had to be smuggled out of stadiums in the backs of cars with fans shouting that they should resign and that Scottish football was a shambles… When I came in it was a diabolical time, and this is how they act in the end.’

  Having completed such an abrupt return to his spiritual home, Smith’s first act in his second spell in charge of Rangers was to appoint Ally McCoist as his assistant, with the former striker
having to relinquish his role as team captain on A Question of Sport in order to accept the position. He also brought in Kenny McDowall, who had been working without a contract as the boss of Celtic’s youth and reserve sides, and promoted Ian Durrant from reserve team coach to first team coach, the former midfielder who, in his only game in charge after Le Guen’s departure, had presided over Rangers’ exit from the Scottish Cup at the hands of Dunfermline.

  The new regime had an immediate impact as Smith’s first game back in the Ibrox dugout ended in a 5-0 victory over Dundee United, a team who had beaten Le Guen’s side as recently as November, with all the goals coming from Smith’s Scottish contingent, including an 88th-minute strike from Barry Ferguson, restored to the captaincy and clearly back in his element after seeing off Le Guen’s attempt to offload him.

  Smith quickly identified that Rangers needed to shore up their defence and brought in centre-halves David Weir and Ugo Ehiogu during the January transfer window, with the latter scoring an unlikely winner at Celtic Park in March, as the revival under the new manager continued. Asked after the game if he thought the match would have a bearing on next season’s championship race, Celtic boss Gordon Strachan replied, ‘I hope so,‘ referring to his side’s domination of the encounter, especially in the first half, but the defeat precipitated a wobble in their form as the Parkhead men lost to Falkirk and then drew with Dundee United, leaving Rangers, for a few hours at least, with a glimmer of hope of getting back into the title race.

  Following their rivals’ lunchtime stalemate at Tannadice, however, Rangers’ chances finally seemed to evaporate later that afternoon, as Smith’s side, after taking the lead, could only manage a home draw against ten-man Inverness, leaving Celtic to steer their way to the title, which was confirmed with four games to spare after a 2-1 win against Kilmarnock at Rugby Park. There was still time, however, for another morale-boosting victory over the champions, as Smith’s charges recorded a late-season 2-0 success against Celtic at Ibrox, in a match which saw the otherwise prolific striker Kris Boyd score his only Old Firm goal.

  With the scores reset to zero, the season of 2007/08 was much anticipated in Glasgow as it pitted the returning Smith, in charge of a seemingly revitalised Rangers, against Strachan’s Celtic from the start; it would not disappoint. Having already spent £2m to acquire Kevin Thomson from Hibs in January, Smith demanded more money to strengthen his squad, bringing in a total of 15 players on permanent transfers over the summer, including DaMarcus Beasley, an American winger from PSV Eindhoven (£0.7m), right-back Steven Whittaker from Hibs (£2m), Daniel Cousin, a burly striker from the French side Lens (£1.1m), Carlos Cuellar, a Spanish centre-half from Osasuna who had helped knock Rangers out of the previous season’s UEFA Cup (£2.37m), versatile Lee McCulloch from Wigan (£2.25m) and striker Steven Naismith in a last-minute, transfer deadline-busting deal from Kilmarnock (£2m), as well as Alan Gow, Roy Carroll, Kirk Broadfoot and Jean-Claude Darcheville on free transfers.

  The season began in late July with Rangers seeing off FK Zeta and then Red Star Belgrade to qualify for the Champions League group stages. Already there were grumblings about the team’s negative style of play, with the Ibrox men jeered from the park at half-time against the Montenegrins, while against the Serbs only Novo’s last-minute strike silenced Smith’s home-grown critics, a goal which eventually proved decisive after a scoreless encounter in the return leg in Belgrade. Rangers fans expected their team to be on the front foot against such sides, although, as Smith’s biographer Neil Drysdale pointed out, ‘Some of Rangers’ fans have such a staggering superiority complex, which is untroubled by reality, that their displeasure was predictable.’

  The fans suffered when their team was compared to rivals Celtic, with the Parkhead side generally adopting a more positive, aggressive approach but Smith, after experiencing such a series of traumatic nights at this level against the likes of Juventus and Ajax during his first spell at the club in the 1990s, had devised an ultra-defensive system, which involved deploying multiple men behind the ball and then hoping for the best up front, a mistake perhaps or a piece of luck which could lead to a potentially decisive goal. Against Barcelona at home, Rangers sat in, refusing even to counter-attack until the game’s latter stages, and came away with a goalless draw, prompting Lionel Messi to observe, ‘It’s incredible, Rangers didn’t want to play football. Right from the start they went for anti-football… It’s a real pain playing against teams like them.’ In the return leg at the Camp Nou, Rangers adopted the same tactics, refusing to come out and play even after finding themselves two goals down at the end of the first half, much to the bemusement of Barcelona head coach Frank Rijkaard, who couldn’t believe that Smith’s side would so obviously settle for a 2-0 defeat.

  By then Rangers had already secured creditable wins at home to Stuttgart and then an eyebrow-raising result away to Lyon, Le Guen’s former side, who Rangers picked off, showing admirable adherence to the game plan to come away with a 3-0 win, with goals from three of Smith’s summer signings, McCulloch, Cousin and Beasley. A loss in the return game against Stuttgart meant that Rangers had to beat the French side again in the final fixture at Ibrox to finish in second place and progress to the knockout stages, and with such a crucial game looming, Rangers took the unprecedented step of seeking a postponement of their weekend fixture against the league’s bottom side Gretna in order to give the team more time to prepare for the winner-takes-all encounter in the Champions League. The request caused bad blood, because it seemed gratuitous and unnecessary, with Rangers resorting to spurious arguments about the good of Scottish football and apparently using the pretext of the postponement of Celtic’s and Rangers’ fixtures the previous month, before Scotland’s defining Euro 2008 qualifier against Italy at Hampden, to their advantage. The club also appeared to be claiming that Lyon had been granted a similar request and that the French side would have a full week to prepare for the game, but this was not in fact the case, despite what was being widely reported in the Scottish press, and Lyon’s weekend game against Caen went ahead as scheduled. Many also felt that a busy schedule of fixtures was simply an occupational hazard for top players around Europe and that big clubs were generally just expected to get on with it, but Rangers appeared to be acting as if they should be considered a special case, especially after witnessing Celtic drop points against Hearts at Tynecastle the previous week, days before their equally vital game with AC Milan.

  Presumably, it was a case of ‘if you don’t ask, you don’t get’ on Celtic’s part, but when Aberdeen, once Rangers’ wish for a postponement had been granted, made a similar request to the SPL the following week, asking for their trip to Motherwell, days before a crucial UEFA Cup group game against FC Copenhagen, to be postponed, permission was refused. In the end, Setanta Sports, the SPL’s broadcast partner, reluctantly agreed to the rearrangement of a fixture it had scheduled to be shown live, but the company expressed concerns about the potential damage to the credibility of the league if such short-notice cancellations were to become the norm.

  The decision eventually backfired on Rangers, however, as the postponement contributed to the fixture congestion which accumulated for the Ibrox club towards the end of the season and resulted in them having to play their final four games in just eight days. In addition, having opted for a free week of preparation instead of a potentially morale-boosting win on Sunday over a Gretna team sitting bottom of the league with just five points from their 15 games, Rangers lost 3-0 to Lyon with two late goals from 19-year-old striker Karim Benzema putting the seal on a deserved win for the French side. Substitute Jean-Claude Darchville endured a miserable cameo, spurning the chance of a vital equaliser when he missed the home side’s best opportunity of the night, slicing the ball over the crossbar from inside the six-yard box, and the French striker compounded his error by getting himself sent off late on for a foul on Lyon’s Kim Källström.

  That defeat saw Rangers eventually finish third in the group, leaving the
m with the consolation of a place in the UEFA Cup knockout stages, meaning that Scottish football would see three teams playing in Europe after Christmas for the first time in many years. In addition to Rangers, Celtic had qualified for the last 16 of the Champions League for the second successive season and Aberdeen, despite the SPL’s refusal to rearrange their game with Motherwell, went on to beat Copenhagen 4-0 at Pittodrie and qualify for the last 32 of the UEFA Cup. It was now that Smith, over the 180 minutes of the two-legged knockout ties, deployed his ultra-defensive tactics to full effect, and with jibes about anti-football and ‘Wattienaccio’ ringing in their ears, the Rangers fans were despairing of the strategy, particularly in games at Ibrox. The new mentality seemed to involve an acceptance that a goalless draw at home in the first leg wasn’t such a bad result, and then if the team could keep its shape under pressure, defending diligently with men behind the ball, there would always be an opportunity at some point to score in the away leg.

  This is exactly what happened in the last-32 tie with Panathinaikos and again in the quarter-final against Sporting Lisbon, when a 1-1 draw in Greece and a 2-0 win in Portugal followed scoreless first legs at Ibrox, allowing Rangers to advance on each occasion. In between Smith’s men dispatched the formidable Werder Bremen, whose goalkeeper Tim Wiese seemed overawed by the occasion at Ibrox, coughing up a couple of soft goals either side of half-time, and then, in the return leg in Germany, the heroics of his opposite number Allan McGregor kept the score down to 1-0, a result which saw Rangers through despite what defender David Weir described as, ‘The biggest doing I have played in. We hardly got out of our own half.’