Clockwise from far
left England duo
Butcher and
Woods joined the
Souness
revolution; the
signing of Catholic
striker Johnston
(second from left)
broke a Scottish
football taboo;
Celtic’s Frank
McAvennie gets
the treatment in
’88; ‘Headbanger’
McCoist (far right)
had a rather
hostile relationship
with his bossThe failure of so many great footballers to become great managers
is often explained by their difficulty in understanding players who are
not as good as they were. At Ibrox, this may have been one source of
Souness’ dissatisfaction. Wife Danielle bore the brunt of this, recalling:
“On the rare occasions he took me out, he talked about nothing but
football and the good and bad points about players. By the time I left
him, I knew more about the game than most managers.”
If Gerrard learns anything from Souness’ reign at Ibrox, it should be
that you can be at loggerheads with some of your players all of the
time and all of your players some of the time, but never most of your
players most of the time.
Yet Souness’ arrogance could be a strength as well as a weakness –
it gave him the confidence to confront the tribalism plaguing Scottish
football. He signed Mo Johnston, the first Catholic to play for Rangers
in modern times, and Mark Walters, their first black footballer who,
despite having bananas, golf balls and darts thrown at him, relished
his time at Ibrox and rated Souness among his best ever managers.
Walters did, though, add the caveat: “He had a reputation for being
abrasive but it’s just like any other job – if you know who the boss is,
you’re going to get on fine.”
Recruiting Johnston from French club Nantes in 1989 was a seismic
shock. The 26-year-old Glaswegian was set to rejoin Celtic – for whom
he’d scored 52 goals in 99 league matches – when Souness, bumping
into Johnston’s agent Bill McMurdo at Ibrox, declared his interest. With
remarkable speed, the striker was persuaded to break one of Scottish
football’s oldest taboos. Souness’ wife was Catholic and he would not
have been comfortable at a club that could never sign Catholics. He
also saw the opportunity, he later revealed, to indulge in a little bit of
mischief at Celtic’s expense.
The visceral reaction from both clubs’ fanbases astonished him. An
official ‘We Hate Mo Johnston Celtic Supporters Club’ was founded,
while outside Ibrox, a wreath was left
with the message: “116 years of
tradition ended.” Souness later admitted: “I was naive about what
Rangers were about. In a sense I was a ‘foreigner’ because I had left
Edinburgh for a career played entirely in England and Italy. None of
that religious stuff mattered to me. We changed things for the better.”THE n OTORIOUS RUn -In WITH TEA LADY AGGIE
Souness was not joking about feeling like a foreigner. One chapter in
his autobiography was headed ‘Sometimes I wish I was English’, and
the Rangers fans who maintained he was English told Jamieson: “He
was never one of us.”
Even today, many Gers fans have, Jamieson suggested in his book,
“a strong sense that Souness didn’t particularly like Glasgow Rangers
and certainly didn’t like its mass of supporters, particularly the faithful
core that he had no deep respect for or the traditions of the club they
love, and saw them as an impediment to his own agenda.”
That might sound like a criticism but Souness would probably agree
with much of that assessment. He was in too much of a rush, he later
admitted, to join Liverpool in 1991.
Looking back, he concluded that his famous run-in with Aggie, the
St Johnstone tea lady, proved he was losing the plot. Her complaint
about the mess his team had left in the McDiarmid Park dressing room
so enraged him, he confronted the St Johnstone chairman. “Nobody
knows me better than I know myself,” he told Rangers TV, “and I knew
then I had to get out.”
What he needed was a sabbatical, but Liverpool were the one club
he couldn’t refuse. His dream Anfield return soon turned nightmarish
and led to a heart attack. It began to dawn on him that “the winning
didn’t compensate for the losing”.
He realises now that he could never manage a team today the way
he did Rangers. “The power’s with the players now. If you fall out with
one in the dressing room, he and his four or five mates have the
power to get rid of you as collectively they are worth £200 million.”
As Gerrard kicks off his managerial career at Rangers, there is one
more lesson he could heed from Souness’ reign. Don’t be a ‘foreigner’.
Better still, even though he’s won 114 caps for
England, try not to talk or act like an Englishman.
That may buy time to lead his own Rangers
revolution and restore some competitive balance to
Scottish football. Whenever he leaves Ibrox, he’ll
certainly hope the supporters agree: “He was one of us.”SOUn ESS