Belgrade may be 1,700 miles away from Glasgow but former Rangers defender Gordan Petric recognises a familiar facet of life in Scotland - intensity of pressure.

After serving his apprenticeship as a coach, Petric is now in charge of one of Serbia’s big two and is making quite an impression.

When the 53-year-old took over Partizan Belgrade earlier this season, the club were languishing in 11th in the Serbian league and had just been dumped out of the Europa League qualifiers by Cypriot outfit AEK Larnaca.

He has since led them to 2nd in the table, racking up 11 wins out of 14 as well as navigating a challenging Europa Conference League group where they finished joint-top with French big-spenders Nice which contains a certain Aaron Ramsey.

It’s been a remarkable start to life as manager of a club close to his heart. He was plucked from the Belgrade giants by Dundee United’s then-Yugoslav boss Ivan Golac back in 1993 which kicked off a largely successful stint in Scotland.

Despite being part of the Arabs side that would shock Rangers in the 1994 Scottish Cup final, Petric would soon be lining up for Walter Smith’s side not long afterwards and would play a role in delivering the holy grail of Nine-in-a-Row.

Since ending his playing career almost 20 years ago, Petric has worked his way up the coaching ladder, taking charge of a number of lower-league Serbian clubs as well as brief stints in Greece and Slovenia. There's no doubt he's gone down the old-fashioned route and earned his stripes.

He explained: “Partizan Belgrade is the first chance for me to work with a big club. If you see my CV before Partizan you can see why I decided to take the UEFA Pro Licence. 

“To take that you must pass the B Licence and A Licence first so you need to work at a second division club and that’s what I did. It was a big experience - plus I had the freedom to work, make mistakes and learn every single day.

“When I arrived they had lost a few games in the league and had lost in the Europa League qualifier. Everyone wasn’t happy so the club decided to make a change.

“I’ve spent a lot of time with Partizan. I used to be a player and the general secretary and now I’m the coach. The club called me and we started well. We qualified for the Europa Conference League and we got through the group to the playoff round in February.

“We have a team full of young players with some experienced players. At the moment, it’s so far so good so I’m happy.

Petric is no stranger to having to deliver both results and performances as part of the all-conquering Rangers team of the 1990s.

He says that experience has stood him in good stead as he looks to bring success to Partizan. “Like at Rangers, I want to play attacking football,” he said.

“As is the case in Scotland, you have the same big two clubs here in Partizan and Red Star and, at the end of the day, you must play attacking football when you play domestically. We’ve scored a lot of goals in the last few months, we’ve scored about 65 goals this season already.

“It was difficult because we lost a couple of points and, like in Scotland, it’s not easy to catch up later on. Similar to Rangers, Partizan Belgrade need to win 90 per cent of their games. The demands are very high especially when you have young players here in Serbia.

“You need to have patience. Next year they will be better players but you need time to wait for them to develop. Some clubs don’t have the patience. It’s not easy to win 90 per cent of the games every year.

Petric’s Partizan side will be hoping to emulate Rangers’ heroic European run last season when Giovanni van Bronckhorst guided the club to within a whisker of Europa League glory. With the Dutchman dismissed just six months following that final in Seville, Petric has sympathy for his former Ibrox teammate. “I follow Rangers and watched their European games more so because the Scottish league isn’t shown that much in Serbia. Giovanni did a great job last year but at the end of the day, that’s football.

“There’s not much patience these days but that’s business at the end of the day. When I used to play there was more patience with the coaching but as a coach, you must be ready for everything.

“It was a bit of a surprise for me to see him lose his job but also it wasn’t because football is different now than it was before.”

With Rangers looking to appoint a successor to van Bronckhorst, Petric admits it’s a job that would appeal.

He admitted: “Everybody who is in football like me as a coach would like the opportunity.

“I liked the opportunity to take the Partizan Belgrade job. In the future, maybe it will happen with Rangers or maybe it will not. At the end of the day, I’m in no rush but you never know in life what will happen in the future.”

Like many former Rangers players who embark on a coaching career, Petric credits much of what he knows now to the late great Walter Smith and the legendary Ibrox dressing room.

“Walter was like a father to the players,” he said. “He had a good combination with Archie Knox. When I look back to my Rangers days I learned a lot of things from Walter and Archie about how to control a dressing room and how I can control the players, it’s very important in football.

“It was important during my time as a player because we had around 21 players who played for their national teams and it’s not possible for every player to play all the games all the time. How Walter and Archie controlled the dressing room was very important and it’s something I learned now that I’m a coach.

Rangers Review: (Image: NQ)

“At the end of the day, Rangers players have the quality to move to Glasgow in the first place but you need to be able to control these players to keep everyone happy and to get the best from the players when they get their chance.

“I was lucky to be in a dressing room from 1995 until 1999 because the group of players were amazing. There were so many Scottish players who controlled it. Archie was the coach but you had Richard Gough, Coisty, Durranty, Andy Goram, Ian Ferguson, as well as Gazza, Brian Laudrup, myself, Gordon Durie, Mikhailichenko, Oleg Salenko. All these players were great characters but they adapted to the dressing room which was the most important thing.”

“I remember Richard Gough was a mentor for myself, Alan McLaren and Joachim Bjorklund. He would teach us during the games and during the training sessions. That’s very important for young players at a club to have somebody like that.”

Petric is fondly remembered by the Rangers fanbase for the role he played in delivering Nine-in-a-Row as well as one of the most iconic celebrations seen at Ibrox when he glanced a header past Alania Vladikavkaz goalkeeper Sergey Kramarenko to seal a 3-1 first-leg win in their Champions League qualifier. 

Smith’s side would dismantle the Russian champions in their own backyard in the second leg to prevail 10-3 on aggregate but that was to be a rare European highlight with regular beatings commonplace.

Petric admits their focus on domestic domination was overpowering and had a detrimental impact on any potential European ambitions. “In my time with Rangers, the European games, I feel we just looked for Nine-in-a-Row. It didn’t matter if we lost 4-0 against Juventus, it was very important to win the next game against Partick Thistle because we were going for Eight-in-a-Row then Nine-in-a-Row. We were just focused to win the league.”

“It was special to win Nine-in-a-Row because every game was like a cup game. We were under a lot of pressure but what we had in the dressing room eased the pressure. We just gave our maximum to win the title.
“Unfortunately, we didn’t win 10-in-a-Row. We had a lot of players arrive at the club in the summer and we also had some injuries to important players.

“I remember Richard Gough was out injured as well as Brian Laudrup, Andy Goram, Stuart McCall and some others and some foreign players arrived that maybe didn’t understand what it was like to play in Scotland.”

Petric beams when he looks back on his time in Scotland. The country holds a special place in his heart. So much so, he considers himself Scottish. “When I look back, I am happy with my career especially my time in Scotland because I played more years in Scotland than in Serbia,” he said.

“I feel more of a Scottish player than a Serbian player because I spent eight and a half years there.

“I am coming back on the 30th of November because we have a break until the start of February. I’m travelling over with my wife for 10 days. We are going to visit Edinburgh, Glasgow, Inverness, Dundee and all these places. We are going to hire a car and just drive around Scotland.

“My son was born in Dundee and my daughter came to the country when she was just six months old so I have good memories of Scotland. So many players from my generation moved to Spain, Italy and Germany. If I had to choose a country to move to again back in 1993 when I moved to Dundee, I would choose Scotland. I had such a nice experience there.”

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