From 1993 CSKA tears to Seville fantasy come true: A personal reflection on following Rangers in Europe - Martyn Ramsay

29 years ago, on another spring evening, I had shed many more. I was a 12 year-old boy full of optimism and certainty as I headed to Ibrox on 21 April 1993 for the penultimate round of games of the inaugural Champions League. Rangers, undefeated in Europe and a certainty at home to the already eliminated CSKA Moscow, were surely headed for the Final in Munich, where I had been promised a ticket. There was the small matter of needing Marseille to drop points in Brugge but, as we left the same ground in March, I was assured by an elder that they’d find it difficult there. What could go wrong? We found out in a matter of minutes with news of an early Marseille goal and the night meandered frustratingly towards heartbreak. As the tears flowed, I was consoled by the two older guys who sat in front of us, Bud and Archie. ‘You’ll see them win it son’. I suddenly wasn’t convinced. In the space of 90 minutes I had grown cynical. This was our big chance and we had gone agonisingly close. Would I really ever get to see what the previous generation had seen? I was doubtful.

Of course, 15 years later, we nearly did. Another lump rose in my throat as I watched my team walk onto the field in a European final. I was sat so close to the UEFA Cup that I felt the heat from the stadium pyrotechnics. And then it all felt surreal. The lights were different, the ball was shinier and, if truth be told, it felt like Rangers were underdressed for a gala occasion at which they didn’t really belong. It was as if we were there to see them simply take their place on that stage. After the quarter-final win in Lisbon, Walter Smith remarked that he just hoped that we could make the final. He didn’t say that they could ‘go on now and win the thing’, just getting to the final which would be a remarkable achievement in and of itself. We all watched it play out in its most likely fashion as the manager we had originally sacked for failure in Europe was undone by the manager who we had brought in to provide us with that very success. The notion of a European final in the first decade of the 21st century involving Rangers that ended with Dick Advocaat parading the UEFA Cup would have made sense to Rangers fans in the summer of 2000. The idea of Walter Smith being back in charge for the occasion would have blown their minds but such is the complex story of Rangers in Europe.

And what of this story? It is one of innovation and breaking new ground but where the fleeting moments of glory are too often dulled by disappointment and, at times, humiliation. The sole triumph in 1971/72 should be better known for its whole campaign than its Barcelona final, a chaotic game matched only by a chaotic reaction, resulting in John Greig being forced to lift the trophy in the bowels of the Nou Camp, but not too high lest he burst a hole in the ceiling. Celtic and Aberdeen may have had more glamour in their final tests but neither cleared the kind of hurdles that Wille Waddell’s side had to, none more so than the semi-final with the new European powerhouse in-waiting, Bayern Munich. It was a third time lucky for Rangers and, by 1972, no British side had been in more European finals. None had been in any by the time Rangers played Fiorentina in the first-ever Cup Winners’ Cup Final in 1961, although it was not a UEFA tournament at the time and was only given official recognition a few years later when they took over the running of it. This was only a year on from the schooling dished out by Eintracht Frankfurt in the semi-finals of the European Cup (12-4 on aggregate including a 6-1 first-leg defeat in Germany. It was 1-1 at halftime) so there was a justifiable sense that Rangers were adapting and would be a fixture of this new era of continental competition. Add in the near-miss in the 1967 Cup Winners’ Cup Final against Bayern, and Rangers fans would have returned from Barcelona not relieved that their team had finally won something in Europe but that they had started to win things in Europe. After three finals in eleven years, Rangers were off the mark. More was surely to come.

It was an illusion. There is a valid claim that 1978/79 was a big opportunity missed after two of the greatest results in the club’s history against Juventus and PSV Eindhoven but ultimately, the modern story is one of European isolationism. Those two fabulous runs under Smith in 1992/93 and 2007/08 are stark exceptions, surrounded by bland dejection or abject embarrassment. Rangers had technically better sides in the modern era than those which nearly reached those summits. Graeme Souness had a more rounded side between 1988-90, Smith himself arguably had more balance in 1995-96 and Advocaat definitely did in 1999-00 but the former and latter had no hope of fostering the kind of team spirit that Smith could and, post-1993, even he couldn’t control the very essence of what had made his greatest season so special. Of course, that was the season where everything changed. The Champions League, the Premier League, law changes, television money and the increasing impact of an illegal rule on foreign players. The irony is that Rangers, more than any club, helped force the Champions League into being, and in doing so, set European football on a course that would swallow it up. Just as the wider game became quicker, more intelligent and more professional, Rangers became more Scottish, with a stronger emphasis on the bonding exercises that had served them well once but strangely failed every time thereafter.

It wasn’t the eviscerations at the hands of Juventus and Ajax that rankled with the Rangers support the most, it was the shambles of Athens and Grasshoppers and Gothenburg and Strasbourg. The ‘Holidaymakers’ as they were called in Zurich. In any case, it was a domestic sequence that was becoming the priority, one that was increasingly incompatible with moving in step with the game itself. ‘How do we stay ahead of a recovering Celtic?’, was a more pertinent question than ‘How often do you think that Juventus players find themselves upside down in kebab shops at 3am?’. Once all of that had been parked, David Murray entrusted Advocaat with too many millions to try and play catch up but, despite some memorable nights, it was far too late. Like Souness, the Dutchman could point to the fact that he was never eliminated from Europe by a bad team (Parma, Borussia Dortmund and Kaiserslautern finished off Rangers before he left on a high with victory over PSG) but it was still elusive. Alex McLeish’s grim approach to success in getting out the Champions League group stage for the first time in 2005/06 may have sown the seeds for Smith’s more robust plan the second time around but there was still Kaunus and Unirea Urziceni to come after Manchester. Even before the nightmare of 2012, most of us had given up hope.

But, with our club being so successful in general, unsurpassed within the parish walls, why do we care so much in the first place? Perhaps there is a generational aspect to that. Those older than me may have a sense of unfulfilled promise. A nagging feeling that one trophy wasn’t enough or that Rangers didn’t win the old European Cup when there was still a chance. The generation after mine have never known anything different, where Scottish clubs being in Europe after the clocks go forward is a minor miracle and where those latter stages seem to produce football that looks like it is a different sport from what they physically watch every week. My generation experienced the transition. We didn’t endure the years of domestic wasteland and, as a result, started to get very used to the success of the Souness era very quickly. The early exits to Bayern Munich and Red Star Belgrade - after the hints of promise in his first two seasons - were annoying and all 1992/93 did was raise expectations for more. A tabloid phone poll in the summer of 1997 found that 75% of Rangers fans would rather win 10 in a row than the Champions League. Some kind of breakdown of those numbers would be fascinating to read but I do wonder if those craving European success more were the younger fans, those whose eyes had been opened and horizons broadened as the nineties developed.

Gazza's tears were just one small part of what made Italia 90 so defining for a generation

You can blame Italia ’90 for that. Before then, exposure to live football was very limited. In 1986/87 Scottish fans were treated to eight live football matches and five of those were due only to Dundee United’s run to the two-legged UEFA Cup Final. Unless you had advanced satellite technology, the great AC Milan side of 1988-90 were only accessible in snapshots, with their two European Cup Finals coming to us via Sportsnight highlights. Even English football was restricted. Live FA Cup finals in the 1980s were only shown if there was a replay due to the clash with the Scottish Cup Final but, when the Football League sold the rights to ITV for £44m in exchange for live Sunday matches from October 1988 to May 1992, it still didn’t apply up here apart from the exceptional Friday night denouement of the 1988/89 season at Anfield. Manchester United drew 1-1 with Everton at Goodison Park on Sunday 30 October 1988 but viewers in Scotland had to make do with Broadway Serenade from 1939.

As a result - and by design - our game felt more important. It was effectively a protected species and so, especially with those league cup finals taking place under the darkening skies of late October, it felt like the centre of your footballing universe. And then the floodgates opened. Live football on at the perfect times of every day, for a month. Arguably the only World Cup to have taken place in a country that was football’s epicentre at the time of the tournament, there can be criticism over the quality of attacking football but absolutely none about the sheer drama that seemed to unfold on a daily basis and it was the coverage of this that changed the game. The BBC’s touch was operatic but not overdone and - for the nineties at least - this balance was stuck perfectly with Puccini, Bernstein and Faure before the tipping point was reached in the 21st Century and Bolton v West Ham could be sold as the coming apocalypse. Then however, they understood that sport produces a kind of tension that no writer possibly can. Pavarotti’s soundtrack simply amplified the action and, with Schillachi’s eyes and Gascoigne’s tears, they engaged the middle classes and made football executives realise that the solution to the carnage and violence of the seventies and eighties had been staring them in the face from the corner of the living room all along. Make the event an attractive one and people will want to be a part of it. In England, they did, and soon it would all change with the draw that Rangers had enjoyed since the revolution, weakening quickly. We were Rangers fans but also television viewers and soon our weekends would include live English and Italian games the day after our trip to Ibrox or some ramshackle part of Scotland. The protection had gone and, more and more, we wanted to see our team take to stages that other people tuned in to watch, in games that mattered to others as much as to ourselves.

Our understanding of the game was changing too. Because the main feed came from the Italian broadcaster RAI, there was more emphasis on statistics and the tactical shape of a side was represented on screen. Every live game in Scotland until the Scottish Cup Final of 1990 had shown the team line-ups in either a vertical or horizontal line but on the first day of the 1990/91 season, the BBC highlights of Rangers v Dunfermline had the teams shown in formation. A rudimentary change perhaps, but it was the start of an acceptance that football fans could take more detail. Andy Gray would famously be the pioneer of this on Sky with The Footballer’s Football Show on top of the analysis of live matches and don’t underestimate the impact on the generation who would develop this much further in the 2000s, of Championship Manager, a daily computer obsession that started a relationship in the mind between football and numbers but also an increasing exposure to other players, clubs, styles and culture. The outside world wasn’t alien anymore and all we wanted was for Rangers to feel at home there.

Now, finally, we do. This season’s run to Sevilla has not been a freak. Rangers have had all their knock-out opponents well beaten, at times blasting them away whilst also boxing clever when appropriate, demonstrating a consistent level of tactical flexibility that we’ve rarely seen by a Rangers manager in Europe, if at all. It has not been the result of that intoxicating mixture of luck and spirit, which can seduce fans with no end result. Instead, it is a significant part of a four-year pattern of renewed European respectability that was started instantly by Steven Gerrard in 2018. When speaking to Ryan Kent at the Rangers Training Centre last week, although he recognised the impact that the result in Dortmund had in sharpening the squad’s self belief, he was at pains to point out that this started in Ufa, that Russian outpost that is practically Asia, where a new-look Rangers battled to qualify for the Europa League at the first time of asking. They had no business being there after having to go through four rounds of qualifying and they followed up that last game disappointment in Vienna by two successive last 16 appearances. Bayer Leverkusen were too classy but, even accounting for the emotional outpouring of 55 and the champagne soaked dressing room, there was a feeling that Slavia Prague was a missed chance. However, this Rangers squad did what many of their predecessors have failed to do with European lessons: learn and apply them. Without question, in the modern era at least, we are living in a golden period of Rangers in Europe, one of genuine respect, admiration and now - dare we say when teams come to Ibrox - fear. This is the team we’ve been waiting for.

James Tavernier will likely end the season as top scorer in the Europa League

Yet, for so much of this season few Rangers fans would share that belief. Even after the heroics in the Westfalenstadion, my joyous Twitter feed was still punctuated by ‘Yes, but it’s all about Tannadice on Sunday’. It was all about the league, the suffocating daily experience of stressing about a loss of momentum when it should have been taken care of as early as September when a win at home to Motherwell would have changed the season’s dynamic entirely. Even in early April, there was a large consensus that Giovanni van Bronkhorst would have to go in the summer after surrendering the title. Europe was a bauble, a bonus on top of the day job which was about being the best at home. The thing is, you can’t see European success clearly until you’re in the semi-finals. Before a quarter-final triumph, it is a fantasy, something intangible, almost ethereal. And then Braga were disposed of, with a timely cup win over Celtic to follow, and it was all very different. The reality hit home that this Rangers side - the same one that has been criticised for most of the season - were three games away from making all of that completely redundant.

Now it is just one, against the club responsible for the first of many difficult European nights for Rangers. There is no point in being coy or cool about it: Wednesday night could be the greatest of my life and the same will go for many others. Every great game I’ve seen or written about, every disappointment I’ve endured, all eighteen league titles that I’ve seen us win or the nineteen that I’ve seen us lose, could be overshadowed by the events of one single night. Bragging rights would be almost permanently transferred. Taken in the context of modern demands and relative strength, it would be the greatest achievement in the history of Scottish football and it is right there in front of us.

It might not happen, of course. It’s a cup final against a side who have enjoyed this competition in recent years too. And us, with no recognised striker with which to use. But I know, when I take my place in the Rangers end of the Ramon Sanchez-Pizjuan Stadium, that I won’t be there as a tourist. I won’t be there to take pictures of my team walking out and shaking hands. There will be no imposter syndrome. This time my team believe they can win it. Few of us have slept properly since that night at Ibrox. There has been almost two weeks of stress about arrangements and the Final itself but not one of us would swap places with any another support in Europe.

And that, ultimately, is all we’ve ever wanted.