How long ago it feels now. Paul Gascoigne on the steps of Ibrox in flip flops and bleached hair, resplendent in a home shirt with McEwan’s Lager on the front and the number four on the back.
Thursday marks the 30th anniversary of a deal Rangers couldn’t do these days. Even if they wanted to spend that £100m in the bank on tried-and-tested players instead of Japanese projects, neither could Celtic.
Buying England’s star midfielder in the current market would take more than a benevolent owner with deep pockets. They’d need Jeff Bezos writing the cheques.
There were times when Sir David Murray spent like he, too, was married to Lauren Sanchez. The former Ibrox chairman would match or better the salaries on offer from EPL clubs to snap up England internationalists who, by rights, should have been nowhere near Scottish football.
In his new autobiography, Murray encourages supporters to remember him for the titles, the trophies and the nights of arm-wrestling with Gazza instead of that unfortunate business with HMRC, Craig Whyte and a pound coin.
He can take heart from the knowledge that there’s always someone willing to let bygones be bygones. For every Rangers fan lining up to tell STV News where their old owner could stick his new book, there was another debating whether they should thank him for blessing the club with players like Gascoigne and Laudrup.
Strip it down and so much of what Rangers did in those days – from signing Gazza to signing side letters – stemmed from the same mindset.
The win-at-all-costs, risk-and-reward instincts which persuaded Murray to shell out a club record £4.3million for an injury prone, tortured genius with a tangled personal life were the same risk-and-reward instincts which convinced him that EBTs were worth a punt. Right up until the point when Gazza – like the tax avoidance – became more trouble than he was worth.
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The journey to Glasgow began the day he damaged cruciate knee ligaments in a reckless challenge on Nottingham Forest’s Gary Charles in the 1991 FA Cup final.
After a year on the sidelines, he joined Lazio then sustained another broken leg. Despite the self-inflicted injuries, indiscipline and suspect temperament, Rangers rolled the dice anyway. From signing Tore Andre Flo for £12m to shelling out £6.5m for Michael Ball, that’s what they did.
For two years the gamble paid out. In his fourth league game, Gascoigne guaranteed his place in the affections of the support by slotting a breakaway goal in a 2–0 win over Celtic at Parkhead. A brilliant hat-trick in a 3-1 comeback win over Aberdeen then secured eight-in-a-row, en route to the coveted nine.
By season three he’d moved from the back pages to the front. During a family break at Gleneagles Hotel he drank a potent cocktail of whisky and champagne and headbutted former wife Sheryl in their hotel room. The following day, the midfielder flew to Amsterdam and lasted 10 minutes as a makeshift striker before being dismissed for an assault on Ajax opponent Winston Bogarde during a 4-1 defeat in the Champions League.
The time had come for Rangers to cash out. Much like the man who signed the cheque to land him in the first place, an Ibrox career which promised succulent lamb finished up a dog’s dinner.
The court of public opinion has been kinder to the slightly tragic figure of Gascoigne than it has to Murray. Despite Scottish football’s hall of fame denying him a plaque on the wall, Gazza could still turn up at Ibrox for a half-time draw and secure a standing ovation. The only way Murray is likely to darken the door again is in a blacked out people carrier on a quiet night.
Given all the hurdles he overcame – the recovery from a life-threatening car accident, 15 league titles, 20 trophies and an end to the club’s sectarian signing policy – that must feel like a source of pain and regret to the former chairman. An injustice, even. Despite using his new book as a vehicle to extend a public apology to the support, however, there’s no sign of the mea culpa making much difference.
Few seem to buy the view that banks were partly to blame for lending the club all that money in the first place. And, while faceless jobsworths at HMRC are targeted for aggressively going after the club, Hector wouldn’t have taken much interest in a football team in Govan if Murray International had steered clean of a morally dubious tax scheme in the first place.
In a series of PR sit-downs to promote ‘Mettle; Tragedy, Courage and Titles’, Murray seem reluctant to dwell on either point. What he does offer is some unsolicited advice to the new American owners on the need to give manager Russell Martin the tools to get the job done.
When a man has flogged a national institution like Rangers to Craig Whyte for a quid, his opinions tend to lose a bit of currency. Patrick Stewart, you suspect, will file them in the same drawer as King Herod’s dossier on child minding.
It can’t be easy for a self-made knight of the realm to portray himself as the hapless victim of a timeshare salesman from Motherwell in an ill-fitting suit. Years since he first pedalled that line about being duped by Whyte, however, Murray clings to the hope that fans will buy the idea that a man who knew everything about everyone was, for one deal only, completely in the dark. If he believes that, they should get in touch; this column has a bridge to sell them.
As the man himself admits, you couldn’t run a football club the way he did now. The days of bringing in big-ticket, crowd-pleasing gambles like Gascoigne are pretty much over and, fun though they were, that’s for the best.
Signings on that scale were always unsustainable without the guarantee of Champions League group-stage football every year or the development of a successful trading model.
The arrival of Andrew Cavenagh and the 49ers investment group offers a chance, in time, to push for both. To consign the car crash of 2012 to the rear-view mirror and, for the first time in years, create a sustainable football club.
Ideally without the ghost of Rangers past popping up to remind them of the hubris, the moonbeams and the over-spending which drove them over a cliff in the first place.
