First of all let us be clear that Andy is quite correct to say that he is entitled to his view as a Rangers fan even if his point happens to be a critical one. After all, only by analysing and being critical of ourselves as a club will we have the best chance of progressing in the manner we all want to see. Blind loyalty is certainly not an option. Criticism however must be balanced and accurate if it is to be meaningful.
One of Andy’s main criticisms is that the silky football and thirty pass moves of Dick Advocaat’s days have gone. This is undoubtedly true but takes no account of the fact Dick was working in different days under far different circumstances. If you look at Advocaat’s strongest side at the end of the 99-00 season when we were magnificent to watch just remember the quality: Klos, Reyna, Numan, Amoruso, Moore, Kanchelskis, Ferguson, Van Bronckhorst, Albertz, Wallace and Dodds. That starting eleven cost around £25 million plus a fortune in wages. In addition to this players such as Tugay, McCann and Porrini were often on the bench. They cost another 5.5 million and more hefty wages. For that kind of investment you expect a certain technical level and a side that is adept at playing slick passing football. In more recent times we have signed players from clubs such as Livingston, Hibs and Dundee for low fees or on Bosmans. These signings are of course still good players but logically they will be on a different level in terms of sheer ability. They possess different qualities such as dynamism, tackling and bravery. This obviously results in a different kind of team. On their best days they are a hard working, energetic side enlivened by some genuine class who are difficult to play against and capable of defeating technically gifted opponents e.g. Porto. On their bad days, they lack fluency in possession and are far harder on the eyes than the 99-00 team e.g. Falkirk.
Andy states that he believes Dick Advocaat was removed in December 2001due to trailing Celtic by 12 points and having suffered five successive OF defeats. He then states that McLeish suffered seven successive OF defeats, went eleven points behind Hearts this September and so is of the view McLeish should not be given time to turn things around. The principal difference Andy is that Advoccaat’s team was far better than Celtic team he was failing against, technically superior and vastly more expensive in terms of wages and fees. The cost in assembling the 99-00 squad has already been detailed above.
Thereafter Advocaat was allowed to spend 24 million the following season. It must surely be accepted that in light of our dismal league showing in 2000-2001 that Dick failed to get the best out of this collection of players assembled at near ruinous cost. This point is underlined by the fact that McLeish took five trophies out of five against Celtic with almost the same players. Arguably McLeish was left considerably worse off in terms of personnel given Albertz, Miller, Tugay, Reyna and Van Bronckhorst all required to be sold during 2001 and only Arteta, Thomson and Muscat could be brought in thereafter.
The 2003-2004 season when we won nothing and suffered five successive defeats to Celtic was sore for all Rangers fans. However, let us contrast the failure this particular season with the latter days of Dick’s era. In the summer of 2003 after we won The Treble Amoruso and McCann were sold for financial reasons, Numan retired after turning down reduced terms and Caniggia could not be given a deal due to his back injury. Not one penny in fees was spent replacing these players.
On top of this, four days prior to the close of the transfer window we were hit with the news Barry Ferguson wished to leave the club. This left us without our captain, playmaker and top goalscorer. Was the manager given a penny of the £6.5 million to spend? No. He was forced to deal in the Bosman market again. We had to make do with the gifted but erratic veteran Emerson. If all this were not enough our other top scorer of the treble year, Ronald De Boer, was injured for all but 10 of the seasons fixtures. If it is the case that a club can lose six key players as well as the forty goals brought by its two top scorers, spend not a penny replacing any of this talent and still remain as good a team then why does every big club not try it?
Despite all of this, Andy demands closer investigation of the manager’s domestic record. What exactly needs closer analysis Andy? He has won seven trophies out of a possible eleven. The three trophies that were conceded in 2003-2004 season were chiefly a result of the decimation of our Treble winning squad discussed in the previous paragraph. The 2005 Scottish Cup exit to Celtic came at a time when our old friends Souness and Advoccaat had demanded the instant arrival of Boumsong and Moore that January. Does any fair minded person think we would not have won at least a replay that day if either of these lads had replaced Zurab Khisnashvilli who everyone knows struggles with route one tactics, good player though he is? These mitigating circumstances aside, we could be looking at a story of domestic perfection last season
Andy states that both titles were won by the narrowest of margins as if this lessened the achievement. So what? Do you get two titles for winning it comfortably? Do you get automatic entry into the Champions League for winning it by ten points? Of course not. Winning the title it is all that counts and McLeish deservedly has already won it twice. Somewhat selectively, Andy tries to make something of the big points gap supposedly ‘blown’ during both the Manager’s title seasons.
In the 2003 season we were eight ahead but Celtic had a game in hand and an OF fixture also remained. In effect they made up two points in other fixtures. Hardly a calamity especially given the fact this point gain simply was not enough for Celtic. In the 2005 season we did have a seven-point lead after the ICT fixture in March. However, Celtic had three games in hand. In any event, surely the definition of blowing a lead is being well ahead in points with an equal number of games played and not ultimately claiming the trophy. Martin O’Neill managed the rare triumph of bottling not one but two substantial leads during the 2004-2005 season. Celtic were seven points ahead after five games and five points ahead with four games remaining and still came up short.
Despite the fact that the Manager won the title last year Andy chooses to gripe about the fact that the manager stated his main aim was merely to challenge Celtic . I think Andy is being a touch literal with the manager’s words. All top managers try to take the pressure of their team whenever they can especially when the team is a new one as ours was last season. One cannot help thinking if another manager had taken a similar tack Andy might have rated it as smart management. If the manager had been truly content with running Celtic close, would the towel not have been thrown in after the Old firm defeat in April? As we know it was not and the title was ours.
To be fair to Andy he seems to have decided McLeish was not the man for the job even before we won the title last year. Strangely enough, Andy attributes a great deal of weight to the fact that Bajram Fetai came on as a substitute for ICT against us at Ibrox last March. We would all rather Fetai had not played. McLeish felt there was a verbal agreement and Brewster disagreed. It was a misunderstanding and a lesson learned as McGregor’s absence for Dunfermline at Ibrox recently demonstrated. It certainly was not a humiliation as Andy states. A humiliation would have been losing to ICT in the Scottish Cup when they were lower division opposition as Martin O’Neill’s Celtic managed in 2003.
Andy goes on to write that Celtic’s much vaunted UEFA cup campaign in 2002-2003 is what Rangers as a club should aspire to. If he is seriously suggesting that he would have preferred their trophyless campaign to our treble then his judgement must be doubted. Furthermore, I have to disagree with his view that this run represented a ‘remarkable achievement.’ Let’s examine this so called magnificent run. It resulted from a failure even to qualify for the Champions League against Basle. Blackburn are a club that annually flirt with relegation. They were in Europe due to a win in a League Cup that no big club in England took seriously until the arrival of the great Jose Mourihno. Celta Vigo were relegated from La Liga the season following their meeting with Celtic. Stuttgart played 73 minutes at Parkhead with ten men and had three of their back four suspended for the second leg in Germany. They finished sixteen points behind champions Bayern. Liverpool were in serious decline at the beginning of the end for the Houllier era. They finished a distant fifth in the Premiership twenty points behind Man Utd. As for Boavista they finished eighth in the Portuguese league and managed just over thirty goals during their whole league campaign. So if being ridiculously proud of beating this list of GIANTS is what Andy thinks we should aspire to then we have different standards for the club.
Let’s not fall into Timothy’s trap of pretending this run was something it was not. While we are dealing with the myth making surrounding this UEFA cup run another fallacy that needs to be dealt with is that the road to a runners up medal somehow cost Celtic domestic glory. Following the winter break of that season Celtic took 37 points out of a possible forty two in the League. These points were dropped at Dundee where they drew and at Hearts where they lost. Both games were after free weeks and not European weeks
Trotting out the received wisdom of the Scottish footballing press when examining our manager’s European Record seemingly Andy is not willing to extend the same level of charity he shows to Martin O’Neill. Let’s therefore look at the record game by game. Starting with the Feyenoord game in 2002 we were a goal up in the second leg and in control when we had a stonewall penalty turned down and then a clearly onside goal disallowed before two soft free kick awards resulted in Van Hooijdonk scoring both to put them in the lead. To rub salt in the wounds McCann was sent off in dubious circumstances.
The eventual winners of the competition therefore edged us out. Incidentally Andy, Feyenoord’s winning coach Bert Van Marwijk was sacked early in the next season which shows the esteem in which this ‘remarkable achievement ‘is viewed in Holland. The following season we were drawn against Zizkov. Contrary to the misrepresentations of some of our supposedly neutral pressmen this outfit was far from a pub team. They had finished second in the Czech league(which surely even the most ignorant football watchers now accept is a good league) by a point. That being said there is no question they are a team we should have beaten.
Only the most bitter of Celtic people or footballing idiots could argue that we did not deserve to go through. Those at the game will remember we could have quite easily scored ten at Ibrox. Maybe we would have had McLeish been given £12 million to spend on a striker. The following season started brightly with a victory against Copenhagen. In the group stages we started well against a Stuttgart side who kept eleven men on the field unlike during their visit to Parkhead. We then put in a great performance away to Panathanaikos and led into injury time when a clearly offside goal robbed us of two points. Unsurprisingly none of the Scottish footballing press highlighted this leaving it to RTL in Germany to point out the injustice.
Then in a fantastic Battle of Britain at Ibrox Rangers took Man Utd all the way. On a night when Man Utd cleared three off the line the manager got his tactics spot on. Hopefully even Andy and I can agree it was no disgrace to go down so narrowly to the then English champions. After this injuries began to bite in a squad already decimated by the pre season cost cutting measures and the sale of our captain. There is no argument that this lack of depth was then cruelly exposed in the modern game’s highest stage.
Last season,after the scandalous witch hunt of Alex Rae, we were edged out (having had a good Nacho Novo goal chopped off) by an excellent Moscow side that would have made the last sixteen if the already qualified Chelsea had not played their reserves in Porto. Instead Moscow accepted the lesser prize of winning the UEFA cup. Our own Uefa Cup run started well with two wins in the group stages. With just a point required in Alkmaar all fans who were at the game will remember the two blatant penalties we were denied robbing us of the point that would have seen us home. In what was a nightmare day for the club started by Souness unsettling our star centre half in making his interest in the player public, against Auxerre we suffered Boumsong’s worst display for the club. This display went a long way to explaining our defeat.
This season has thus far given us a solid European campaign. After two solid wins against the Cypriots, we defeated a wonderfully gifted Porto side before being edged out by the South American select that is Inter Milan. We have at least an even chance of making the last sixteen. That would be a magnificent achievement for the club in light of the much changed financial strategy of recent times. I believe we can do it under this manager. I hope that all Rangers fans will be behind the team all the way to see us over the line.
In conclusion, I feel McLeish has been magnificent for the club. He has made Rangers the most successful side in Scotland once more and that by a clear margin. His seven trophies to Martin O’Neill’s three in the eleven they have gone head to head are testament to this. Furthermore, he has achieved this without the financial resources of his predecessors and more significantly his main rival. His transfer credit of thirteen million compared with Dick Advocaat’s deficit of 47 million and O’Neill’s deficit of 25 million illustrate this. In addition to this McLeish has vastly reduced the wage bill compared with O’Neill’s doubling of the Celtic wage bill to the sixth highest in Britain.
Far from being the liability that he is characterised as by Andy Alex McLeish has in fact been exactly the right man at the right time. Without him Celtic may well have achieved five in a row and back-to-back trebles. He has had by far the poorest hand of any Rangers Manager of the last 20 years and faced the strongest Celtic side in 30 years. Despite this he has come out on top. For this he deserves the eternal thanks of every Rangers fan. He certainly does not deserve to be sacked at this stage of the season. Although we trail in the league at present we have still to play both the main challengers for our title three times. We still have a live chance of qualifying for the latter stages of the Champions League. We are still in the League Cup and the Scottish Cup has yet to even start.
Look at the facts Bears and think on. The man deserves some credit. Keep Believing.
PEDRO