“Rangers are a club with ambition”, said an angry Alex Ferguson somewhere in the depths of the Ibrox Main Stand. Their directors and manager have great ambitions, but their support doesn’t live up to those ambitions. The supporters are not big time.”
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It was thirty years ago, as the close season of 1994 drew to a close, that the two biggest clubs in Britain faced off against a backdrop of growing tension. The inaugural Ibrox International Trophy was set up, with the three invitations very deliberately selected. Sampdoria, European Cup finalists only two years before, guaranteed a presence from the epicentre of world football, Serie A. Newcastle United had only completed their first season back in England’s top flight but represented an increasingly necessary football ingredient: entertainment. Fresh from the endless sunshine and goals witnessed at the World Cup in the United States, Kevin Keegan’s side embodied the kind of opponent that fans, and therefore television, wanted to see. Completing the cast of footballing royalty and jesters were winners. Manchester United were now very much on the road to becoming the dominant force in English football by the summer of 1994. With a trophy in the bag every year since 1990, they had become double winners as well as back-to-back league champions only a few months before. United now had an aura that felt awfully familiar.
If Rangers and Manchester United did have a long rivalry, as many Rangers fans at the time believed, then it was something of a Cold War, with no competitive games having been played between the two clubs until 2003. More of a struggle off the pitch than on it, with Rangers beating United to the signatures of Trevor Steven and Kevin Drinkell1 and both clubs exploiting more than most the new merchandising and marketing potential that the game was providing. It was better described as a fight to become the biggest club in the Kingdom when opportunities to determine who was best were so few. Surely a showdown in the latter stages of the Champions League was only a matter of time. This would have to do until then.
The hope was that both would meet in the final on the Saturday following the Friday night semis but that was only half fulfilled. Rangers started brilliantly against Sampdoria as Walter Smith fielded what many assumed would be his starting 11 five days later in Athens for the first leg of the Champions League qualifier against AEK. Sporting the new third kit - the lilac ‘European away’ - Rangers were 2-0 up after 31 minutes with goals from Mark Hateley and Trevor Steven, with Brian Laudrup effortlessly gliding across his new home turf for the first time. Hateley should have had another after a quite incredible miss and the Italians made their hosts pay as they quickly eased into bigger gears and finished up convincing 4-2 winners.
England’s two Uniteds went all the way to penalties after an Eric Cantona cushioned header cancelled out Ruel Fox’s earlier strike. Cantona’s sense of flair got the better of him in the shoot-out however, as his attempted Panenka penalty was chipped over the bar, much to the delight of the remaining Ibrox crowd. And it was the hostile reception and overt support of the Magpies that irked Ferguson and his captain Steve Bruce when they arrived back at the stadium for the third/fourth place play-off the following afternoon. “Stupid and pointless” was how Ferguson described it after it was raised several notches. “If they are going to boo every good team which comes to Ibrox for friendlies then teams might stop coming.”
They didn’t boo Sampdoria or Newcastle, however. Attilio Lombardo was almost given a standing ovation. As Ferguson knew only too well, this was a bigger mark of respect than a polite golf applause for a well-worked goal. With rivals at home only theoretical, the Rangers support needed a side more on their level with whom to jostle and jibe. The future was to be about the construction of international club rivalry. Hostility on a broader scale and with Rangers at its heart. Again, that hope was only partially realised.
Understandably both managers made wholesale changes from the previous evening with only Ally McCoist starting again for Rangers who were also unveiling Basile Boli, the marquee signing that summer ahead of Laudrup but who was suspended for the first leg in Greece. The Scottish champions were brighter and well worthy of their half-time lead and eventual victory. Peter Schmeichel had to deny McCoist and Neil Murray, Duncan Ferguson swept the ball inches past the post and Boli went closer by crashing one off the woodwork before David May - a new signing from Blackburn - diverted Gordon Durie’s cross from Ferguson’s path and beyond Schmeichel. Ally Maxwell got the better of David Beckham - a combination of words that was starting to lose credibility in August 1994, never mind 30 years later - and at the break, Ferguson was pushed to add the quality of Cantona and Ryan Giggs to a side containing so many at either end of their careers. It was here that the real fun started. Steven Pressley, then a young Rangers prospect tipped by some as the eventual successor to Richard Gough, was getting a little too close to the Frenchman, with too many tackles from behind for a friendly. Or even a competitive match, given the recent FIFA clampdown at the World Cup.
As was his wont, Cantona took retribution into his own hands. His first nibble back at Pressley merited a warning from referee Andrew Waddell but, when United’s talisman went to shake the defender’s hand, Waddell took that to be him deliberately turning his back on his stern and earnest lecture and he reached for a yellow card. His second attempt a vigilante justice a minute later - a two footed lunge after losing possession - was a straight red in any game of football. There was more delight in the stands at this decision than the solitary goal.
And that was telling. Cantona was very clearly the catalyst that turned a good cup team into league champions who were now showing few signs of relinquishing their grip. He was the lightning rod for the growing ‘Anyone But United’ movement in England and naturally, Rangers fans enjoyed baiting him all weekend. But there was a jealousy in there too, as there almost always is when fans react to opposition players in such a way. Rangers may have been in the middle of an unprecedented era of success and only two years before had won a legitimate ‘Battle of Britain’ in a European Cup tie of which Cantona failed to alter the outcome, but they had lacked a player like that.
Physically imposing and technically gifted, Cantona had an individual Gallic gallusness that modern Rangers fans had only seen glimpses of through Graeme Souness. One had just arrived of course, and another would be added the following summer but, as fondly as fans felt for Smith’s band of brothers, a lack of flair and individuality was becoming a problem. “It’s my nature to play like I do and react like I react”, explained the player afterwards. “It’s an instinct and to Hell with anyone who is not happy about it.” His manager seemed happy to continue giving him the licence. “When he feels an injustice has been allowed to pass, he tries to correct it. He can't control his temper in such situations. Love him or hate him, we have to live with his faults and we are delighted to have him.”
Cantona missed the opening games of the league season as a result but it wouldn’t be his last ban. In January he famously deployed his trademark lunge on a xenophobic Crystal Palace fan, was banned for the rest of the season and almost certainly cost his team the title. Many have pointed out that both club's fortunes have run somewhat parallel in the last 40 years. Success propelled by a managerial change in 1986, one a revolution and the other a more patient evolution. Two trebles in 1998/99, one more impressive than the other. Wilderness from 2012 and 2013, one a great deal more relative than the other. Large parts of both fanbases forced to turn away from their national side in the 1990s due to the growing internal bitterness towards the unrelenting success. Both clubs who were once the model of football operations but more recently have become more associated with circus than competence.
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As the two sides meet together again today, the gap between them - in terms of transfer fees, wages, and exposure - is a chasm which was unthinkable 30 years ago. But even then, the sense of closeness was an illusion. Rangers had made a lot of noise about breaking the British transfer record the previous year, so soon after United upped the ante with their purchase of Roy Keane. It was a bravado that belied an insecurity.
Ferguson’s dig at the Rangers support was almost certainly more about a frustration at losing games and players than anything else. Why Gerry McNee called them “morons” that weekend is anyone’s guess but fans booing quality opponents is all just part of the theatre. His words had some resonance, however. There really were questions starting to be asked though about how “big-time” Rangers were. The season that was about to follow seems now to be something of a departure point in those relative fortunes.
Manchester United were embarrassed in the Nou Camp as Rangers were in Athens but they had a structure around them that allowed them to learn, build and eventually reach the summit of the game within the decade. They would lose out to Blackburn in that season’s title race but at least there was one, and plenty of other entertainment besides. With no competition, Rangers ground out the rest of 1994/95, lit up only by their new number 11. For two years the Premier League was really the old First Division with better marketing but this was the season that it really took off on its own with the arrival of Jürgen Klinsmann that summer and the steady climb of sensational fees soon after. In January the two English clubs who had pitched up at Ibrox traded Andy Cole for a deal worth £7m, more than Rangers had ever spent in a season in total. Two years later and Newcastle - a club with four league titles to their name and who had won nothing of note in 25 years - were able to pay more than double that for Alan Shearer. It was becoming a different world. A whole new ball game.
In 1994, the Rangers Commercial Director Bob Reilly talked excitedly about the Ibrox International Trophy eventually becoming “the most prestigious event in Britain.” It ran for one more year.
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