How Rangers' 1986 League Cup win kick-started the Graeme Souness era and revived Scottish football’s sleeping giant

While bottles of champagne were being opened across Scotland to toast some new Rangers heroes, that an old one couldn’t contain his delight.

In a west London television studio, where he was supposed to be previewing Liverpool v Fulham for Sky Sports, Graeme Souness’s focus was fixed on Celtic’s draw at Tannadice, the moment that had finally ended all that pain.

There was beaming praise for a ‘phenomenal’ season, the characteristic Souness dig at the ‘anti-Rangers brigade’ who had enjoyed the last decade with too much relish and a nod to a support that had suffered for far too long but who now could bathe in that reflected glory.

There were new avatars to be had on social media and messageboards now. That very 21st-century badge of vicarious pride was suddenly full of fresh opportunity for Rangers fans in 2020-21. Some chose the manager, of course, looking either pensive or passionate. For others, there was James Tavernier's mock binoculars, Alfredo Morelos's heart and Ianis Hagi’s bow. At last, contemporaneous reminders of who is at the top of Scottish football.

Before Steven Gerrard’s arrival, those fans had to dig deep into the past for symbols of what Rangers once were and what they would surely become again and there were none quite as popular or emblematic as Souness.

Fans, some not even born during his reign, chose his image to represent what they felt they were missing at the club: a winning swagger and a willingness to fight back.

The raw machismo of the topless figure looking down the barrel of a shotgun or the picture on that first day at Easter Road in August 1986, him walking off the pitch by decree while George McCluskey was carried off by necessity. Souness is a Rangers icon, synonymous with success and strength.

For many that really began at Hampden Park 35 years ago this week, the scene of his first major success as Rangers manager.

On Sunday October 26, Souness had to make do with his seat in Hampden’s main stand as the Skol League Cup final kicked off.

He was injured this time, not suspended. He had to ask his young midfield to do the same job against Celtic as they had done at Ibrox two months previously when they dominated the reigning champions in a 1-0 victory that should have been so much more.

Fast and frenetic, this final was an Old Firm game fit for all the clichés, as both sides roared at each other from the outset, tempers never too far from boiling over.

The yellow cards - all 10 of them - mounted up at a pace in keeping with the football but led, in the end, to a match that could not be controlled by the referee David Syme.

Its farcical zenith was reached with only two minutes remaining when he showed Celtic’s Tony Shepherd a red card after mistakenly thinking that he was responsible for hitting him with a coin.

Quite why he thought that a professional footballer would be carrying loose change on the off-chance that an opposing defender might need to break a fiver before a corner remains unclear.

The matter was rectified quickly and the card rescinded, but by then it was too late to salvage the mess. Celtic had lost the cup but were handed an opportunity, never knowingly passed up, to wallow in paranoia.

As Alan Davidson put it in his Evening Times match report ‘To the victors the spoils. To the losers a sense of injustice that has hovered over them, like some maiden aunt, for the best part of a century’.

Earlier that season, after his Celtic side had surrendered a 2-0 lead at Tannadice, Davie Hay had requested that Bob Valentine not referee another game involving the Hoops.

A minute before the Shepherd chaos, Hay stormed onto the field to pick up the match ball, suggesting that they should pack up and leave. The reason for this particular moment of outrage was the ordering off of Maurice Johnston following an off-the-ball skirmish with Stuart Munro.

Syme didn’t make it clear whether he was showing both players a yellow or just Munro and then Johnston the red. What was bizarrely left untouched in the media narrative that followed was that it was entirely irrelevant due to Johnston’s earlier booking. He would have had to walk in either case. Hay’s reaction was therefore an entirely manufactured drama late in a game that had produced plenty of the proper stuff.

It was the first of three breathless League Cup finals, played at a pace and abandon that looks almost foreign to more modern eyes, shaped as they are by the cagey awareness that dominates 21st-century finals.

Celtic shaded the overall play but both sides had periods of domination and troubled the woodwork more than once. With just over an hour gone, Davie Cooper was fouled for the umpteenth time, on this occasion by Peter Grant near the corner on the Rangers right side.

The free-kick was swung in by Cammy Fraser, missing its intended target Terry Butcher, but also Roy Aitken and instead it came through to Ian Durrant, with Tony Shepherd in close attention.

Controlling the ball instantly with his left thigh, Shepherd was taken out of the game, and Durrant drilled it low past Pat Bonner and into the net.

For the second time in eight weeks, the 19-year-old has shown a level of composure amidst the madness that was well beyond his years. As was tradition, the bears in the Rangers end showed far less.

Celtic responded strongly. Owen Archdeacon missed from a free header, Brian McClair then hit the bar with a free-kick before deservedly getting his side level with a superb goal that gave Chris Woods absolutely no chance.

Aitken was allowed to run freely through the middle of the park before giving it to Johnston who laid the ball off to McClair on the edge of the box, where he unleashed a rocket into the top-right corner. With just 20 minutes left, the dreaded momentum swing was only going in one direction.

Souness replaced the tired Cammy Fraser with Dave MacFarlane in an attempt to provide some much-needed solidity. The game was naturally becoming more and more stretched but the pattern remained the same: Rangers had good delivery from set-pieces that caused concern and confusion in the Celtic box and their opponents were dangerous and numerous on the break. If Celtic had stopped conceding so many needless fouls in dangerous areas, they may well have won the cup.

The moment that settled the final - and lit the fire of Celtic rage - yet again came from another foul on Cooper on the Rangers right-hand side.

Derek Ferguson - the teenage man of the match - floated one to the back of the box where Butcher was waiting. The ball was overhit - Butcher would have had no chance of getting an attacking header on it - but it didn’t stop Aitken trying to make sure with a little too much force.

While not a ‘stonewaller’, it was a penalty - there was no doubts according to Jim McLean in the commentary box - and with only a few minutes remaining the opportunity to take the spoils was presented to Cooper.

"There was never any doubt in my mind that, despite all the tension, Coop would score", wrote Ian Durrant years later.

"I never saw him miss one and I always felt it was unfair on keepers that Davie was allowed to go one on one against them. That spell was the best two seasons of Coop’s life because Souness understood him."

The noise that day was different. Rangers had beaten Celtic in the same cup final in 1984 - a great 3-2 win with Ally McCoist the hat-trick hero - but it was a salvage job at the end of another disappointing season.

For Walter Smith, it was a trophy that provided the momentum required to power a title campaign and he was delighted that the two goalscorers were players who had been at Ibrox for some time. Their flourishing was the real evidence of the revolution.

In Cooper specifically, he saw the burden - worn by a man whom, for many years had been the only hope the fans had - suddenly lift from his shoulders.

"Too much was expected from one man", Smith wrote in 1994, but now that the responsibility was shared it gave Cooper "the freedom to play, it gave him the setting he needed."

More generally, however, players were lifting their levels.

"It was as if the other players saw things happening at the club that they never believed would happen," he said. "They got the message that this was the start of something big and there was a response from all of them."

The Betamax recording of this final was eventually worn out in my house - along with the 1984 ITV broadcast of Star Wars - but two images from that day were seared on the memory.

Firstly, Cooper being lifted by McCoist at the winner. Two Rangers men who had toiled through tougher times taking their acclaim in sharp focus whilst the wild terracing celebrations raged in the background, where they would have been were they not legends.

And then, at the final whistle, Souness - by this stage down in the dugout - looking up for David Holmes in the stand and raising his fist in victory. He looked immaculate in a sharply cut Italian suit, in stark contrast to Hay who - with his mustard sweater, green blazer and grey anorak - looked less like a championship-winning football manager by comparison and more like a coach driver concerned that his group of pensioners were spending too much time in Soutwaite services.

The pressure was unquestionably on Souness that day more than anyone else. All that fanfare and spending had to be matched with silverware.

Especially the League Cup, which was seen as something that even the under-performing Rangers managers were able to win. But in winning, it only confirmed the large fears that were growing outside of Ibrox.

Hay’s meltdown continued long after the match, telling the press later that evening that, "if it had anything to do with me I would apply for Celtic to join the English league tomorrow." This feeling of robbery was backed by the club’s official newspaper later in the week but it lacked any substance.

That insecurity was evident from Souness’s very arrival. In the build-up to the Glasgow Cup final in May 1986 - technically the first trophy that Souness won as a manager, for any pub quiz dullards - it was telling that Hay, who had just won a league title with Celtic less than a week ago, chose not to talk about the prospects of a new ‘Celtic Era’ after their league win, but of an ‘Old Firm’ one where Glasgow as a whole was going to re-emerge in its footballing prominence.

"All the signs are that ourselves and Rangers can go on from here to bigger and better things and it is an exciting time for the Old Firm in general."

He wasn’t wrong of course - no club outside the two has won the title since - but it is indicative of the threat that was felt by rivals almost immediately from a club who hadn’t been close to being champions for the best part of a decade. That threat only grew in size as Rangers spent the best part of £3million on internationalists and Celtic opted for Anton Rogan of Lisburn Distillery FC on an undisclosed fee.

There is no aggression from Souness in those few frames of video, nor is there any overt arrogance. It was more, as he fixed his tie whilst saluting his chief executive, a sense of assurance. Everything was going to be alright now and, with 19 more trophies to add to this one over the course of both his and Smith’s original tenure, it was not a misplaced promise.

Until he left Rangers in 1991, there was rarely a bad word said about Souness in my house. From that day on, I had a new hero but I was five years old when he arrived and 10 when he left. That constant childlike wonder wasn’t universal and the general feeling of 21st-century warmth from the Rangers support towards him - his speaking engagements were a sell-out last weekend - can often paint a misleading picture of that original relationship. One of widespread devotion to a saviour. That an entire fanbase, so starved of success for so long, spent five years in thrall at the feet of the chosen one.

In reality, that picture is more complicated than that. For some fans, this new-found success was inextricably linked to a constant sense of unease. For some fans, this wasn’t their Rangers anymore. As the late, great Clive James said about the British: "they love a winner, so long as it isn’t them".

The media reaction to the appointment of Souness, on April 8 1986, tried hard to absorb the scale and sensation of it all. With most of the focus taken up by his attitudes on signing Roman Catholics and the size of the footballing task being passed to someone with no experience in management.

On the day of his arrival the Evening Times printed an extremely interesting caricature of Souness - the boy from Edinburgh who had never played a minute of domestic football in his home country - entitled ‘Where Is Ibrox?’. It depicted him wearing a Gucci suit with an 'A to B of football management’ and a map of Scottish football grounds in the pockets whilst carrying a suitcase bulging with cash and an I.O.U. He has a bottle of Brut aftershave - seemingly the height of cosmopolitan fashion in mid-eighties Glasgow - and is wearing a badge that says ‘I Love Me’. A man who was respected but never loved in Scotland, who was the living embodiment of a political philosophy that contrasted with so much of the city, was now in charge of its biggest club. This wasn’t a local appointment.

His horizons weren’t local either. It was Souness who first grasped the possibilities that Rangers now had in the post-Heysel transfer market. Although genuinely humbled to have been given this opportunity at such a big club, he didn’t waste any time being overawed. He wanted to reverse the traditional flow of talent south, of which he had of course been apart, and attempt to bring the best of England north. Such was the bitter competition in Scotland, he knew that there was little point in trying to raid rival clubs who simply wouldn’t sell at a reasonable price.

Foreign investments were risky as if it didn’t work out, their value wouldn’t recover whereas the English market would still pay a fair rate if a particular experiment went wrong.

"It seemed a logical step but some of the Rangers board expressed surprise at the idea and were worried that the fans would resist a Sassenach invasion," Souness later wrote. "I disagreed. I believed the public would welcome any new faces who would help to make Rangers the number one team again."

In the aftermath of Souness’s first Ibrox defeat in August 1986 - a remarkable 3-2 capitulation to Dundee United from a 2-0 lead created by some excellent football - a Mrs M Robertson wrote a letter to the Times to complain that Souness was "making it the English Rangers instead of the Glasgow Rangers…and at exorbitant prices. Take it from someone who has known Rangers longer than most that it will not work". 

There was a long-held perception of Anglo-centrism in Souness himself due to the fact that he had never played in Scotland throughout his career until then, tended to prioritise Liverpool when it came to Scotland friendlies or indeed because one chapter of his first autobiography No Holds Barred was entitled ‘Sometimes I Wish I Was English’. A dry joke certainly, but never a truer word said in jest and the fear that this mercenary attitude would fail in Scotland because Souness and his big-money signings were not ‘real Rangers men who knew what it was all about’, was genuine for some.

Alongside the feelings of excitement ran those of trepidation and, even when the success came, the next internal struggle was to try to balance the celebrations with just how this revolution was coming about and the transformational effect that it was having on their club. For what some really meant when they expressed concern about the Rangers manager’s perceived aloofness, arrogance or ‘Englishness’ was something else. In 1980s Scotland, those characteristics had a visceral political dimension and, right there in Govan - the former heart of Red Clydeside - a Thatcherite revolution was taking shape.

"I’m a professional footballer who plays for money", said Souness when asked to open up on the topic of the professional game in this country for the BBC Scotland documentary Only A Game?, filmed in September 1985 but which would be shown in May 1986 in the run up to the World Cup in Mexico.

"I can earn a great deal more by playing football outside of Scotland than I could in Scotland. So that’s why I play football outside of Scotland."

Then there’s a pause and grin. "But I’d still like to be player-manager of Rangers one day. I’d settle for manager. Jock Wallace watch out!"

And so, the idea of the next Rangers boss was born and, with it, the style and approach that would turn Scottish football on its head with more than a touch of south-east England in south-west Glasgow.

Souness was a big fan of Margaret Thatcher - his pride was obvious when showing her around Ibrox in February 1990, where she was to carry out the Scottish Cup draw - and there is little question that the project of which he was the face of was Thatcherite in nature, despite its other architect - David Holmes - being ostensibly an old Labour man.

It was a hard-nosed and ruthless attitude to a free footballing market and was an exercise in speculating to accumulate that was more successful than most Conservative policies of the time. Souness and Holmes built it and they came. Or, perhaps that should be, they came back.

It was on this issue, expressed throughout the pages of the early editions of the Follow Follow fanzine which hit the streets in August 1988, where tensions were constant, regardless of results.

Who are these ‘new’ fans and where were they when Rangers were toiling at the start of the decade? During games, there would be taunts from the East Enclosure - one of only two sections at Ibrox that weren’t seated and where the old fan culture could still be expressed - to the new and growing group of ‘elitist’ season ticket holders that they could ‘stick them up their arse’.

The phrase ‘Camel Coat Brigade’ can be read multiple times in a paragraph, let alone a page, but it nicely encapsulates the sense of fear that their club, and their game, was slipping away from them towards softer atmospheres, executive boxes, Club Deck debentures and exorbitantly priced match tickets.

"To me, Rangers should be run as a limited commercial company in the areas of finance only," one contributor opined in the lead up to the Scottish Cup final of 1989 where tickets were like gold dust.

"In all other aspects, it should be run as a club where each member has the same rights."

How realistic that neat separation of investment and expectation was, would be answered as the new decade wore on.

Perhaps the strongest feature of this ideology, which Sandy Jamieson points out in his 1997 book on Souness and Thatcherism, was its contempt for traditional practice.

How things have always been was no reason for continuing that way and any sentiment that might be attached to those old ways was not to be indulged.

The Rangers wage cap for example - which kept a sense of humility and perspective - was blown apart within weeks of his arrival with the signings of Chris Woods and Terry Butcher.

For some, there was a fear that this would remove the stars from the people who paid their way and thus, their wages, but the success that those players brought went some way to assuaging those tensions. Fans were relatively conformable waving goodbye to some traditions in the name of progress. One other would prove less so.

There was no single act of Thatcherite, headstrong arrogance as strong as the signing of Maurice Johnston in July 1989.

It was a deal that was ambitious in both its fee and wages, brutally competitive in that it ended any semblance of a Celtic challenge for six years and deliberately abrasive in its modernisation.

This was no gradual and carefully managed breakdown of a policy that the management and much of the support recognised needed to change. It was a short, sharp shock as Souness didn’t just nudge the door towards a new transfer market ajar, he blew it off its hinges.

Any grumbling resistance towards the management of Souness and, by then, David Murray that had been kept in check in the pages of the fanzines - the Twitter of the day - was now in full flow.

For every letter that welcomed the Johnston signing and what sporting success it would surely lead to, there were more for whom the club had sold its soul.

"These two are not winners, they're Thatcherite money-grabbers who operate only with profit and a healthy bank balance in mind. They may be self-made men but they couldn't care a toss about anyone who doesn't line their pockets," said one letter-writer.

"I have watched the present management destroy everything that it used to stand for in the name of progress. Granted, championships and cups have come our way, but as far as I am concerned the price has been too high," wrote another. "Souness and especially Murray are making the mistake of running Rangers as a business rather than as a football club.

"In doing so they are causing thousands of true supporters to become disillusioned with the club and they will eventually be driven away from the club completely."

Some did, albeit temporarily. For them, the signing of Johnston - not simply a Roman Catholic but an ex-Celtic star who enjoyed antagonising the Rangers support for whom he would now play - was the sign of a rot that had set in 1986.

"Rangers probably died before then, it probably died when Souness came and we didn't realise it," said one. "There's still a team that plays in Govan in red, white and blue and they still call themselves Rangers but I don't believe it's the Rangers I knew, that I've watched, grew up with and I don’t believe it's the same Rangers support."

There were still thousands prepared to deal with it, however. As Colin McPhie, a fan interviewed for Chanel 4’s Passion Play which was broadcast in 1990, put it: "success will never ever replace losing a bit of the tradition of the club. But it can make the pain bearable".

It was the trade-off that thousands of Rangers fans were prepared to pay and it was a trade-off synonymous with the modernisation that was happening all over the country at that time. The opportunity of a more affluent life was greater for more than it had ever been, even if it was only made possible, in some way, by ‘that bloody woman.’

Ironically the ideological trait that brought the end of both Souness and Thatcher - just five months apart - was that the iron will that had wielded power for so long eventually developed into a counterproductive stubbornness.

Where Europe caused more fatal damage to Thatcher, the evisceration that Rangers suffered in Belgrade at the hands of Red Star in October 1991 was arguably the final realisation that the required money and tactical nous to crack that next level was more than Souness had at his disposal.

When the criticism inevitably followed, Souness responded in a way that was becoming the norm, quickly banning Jim Traynor, then of the Glasgow Herald, and decrying him as a ‘little socialist’ due to his envy at the wages that the Rangers players were earning. STV, the SFA (who were now threatening him with a lifetime ban from the touchline), and Aggie the St Johnstone tea lady were all in the crosshairs of a manager that needed to escape a game and a club that he had shaped by that same force of will.

When that frustration was turned towards two Rangers heroes - Butcher, who was sold after being sensationally dropped and McCoist, who spent much of that season on the bench despite often saving Rangers when he came off it - most ordinary fans started to lose patience.

In January 1991, following a win at home to Dunfermline, Souness then attacked the support on Radio Clyde.

"They came, sat down and never got behind the team, he said. "They were more intent on the silly little chants about who they feel should and shouldn’t be in the team… don't come to sit on your hands and criticise."

An edition of The Rangers Historian was published on Monday April 15 where the usually conservative Robert McElroy called for a "reappraisal by the Rangers Board of the current management". The following day, Souness left Ibrox.

Even when hindsight shows that the writing was all over the wall, the shock of his departure was still seismic and the fan reaction conveys that.

Even the strongest expressions of betrayal and anger at Souness’s move to Liverpool, in the closing yards of a tight title race, are prefaced with lines such as ‘he was by far and away, the best thing to ever happen to Rangers’ whereas the main thrust of the television news reaction from supporters is that he was forced out by a footballing nation that never really forgave him for turning their game upside down.

One letter in Follow Follow, under the pseudonym ‘MacDougall’ is the most balanced and interesting of all. At times it reads like a calm and detached analysis.

"The guy could be brutal, dangerously temperamental and cynically ruthless; he created as many problems as were visited, often unjustly, on him," it read. "Nonetheless, he gave us - and restored to us - a true sense of greatness and made us believe that anything was possible and achievable."

Later on, it is more like a melancholic love letter about a departed partner.

"He was no fly-by-night: he stayed five years, although it now seems like five weeks. Already I feel something wonderful has gone, although there is no reason why something as great cannot be achieved in the future…Unfortunately, the squalidness of the way the affair has been handled and the parting shots and innuendoes encouraged the feelings of betrayal. I don’t think all this should be allowed to tarnish some treasured memories: Dynamo Kiev at Ibrox, the 5-1 game, Pittodrie 87…none of us deep down would have missed the last five years for anything…So from the heart thanks, you piss-elegant arrogant bastard - if we ever win the European Cup I, for one, will toast you." 

The support’s appreciation for the success that they had been given and admiration for the swagger that they lacked was so often in conflict with discomfort at such an outward sense of self-confidence, not unlike the previous generation’s perception of Jim Baxter, the last example that Rangers had of that type of presence.

For most, the bitter taste left by his departure would last throughout the 1990s and even his return to Ibrox in 1995 as manager of the ‘old’ Rangers for Scott Nisbet’s testimonial produced a mixed response.

It arguably took until he was a BBC Scotland pundit for an Old Firm game at Parkhead in March 2000 when, contrary to the broadcasting norms, he referred to Rangers as ‘us’ and ‘we’, that the feelings started to soften and the hero status had a re-birth. By the second decade of the new century, when there was such a large vacuum of leadership at Ibrox for so long, the idea of the tough and dynamic figure was more attractive than ever and so the mythology was given new life.

He was a hero to thousands at the time, of course. Plenty of Rangers supporters had few or none of the hang-ups about Souness or what he represented, indeed many loved him for exactly those reasons.

The same shock therapy that had revived Rangers was seen as a natural extension of the wider political mood and the late eighties Rangers story is an excellent example of why the story of the decade itself is more complex than the popular polarised narrative allows, the one where no-one can speak without ‘Two Tribes’ or ‘Ghost Town’ underscoring the conversation.

As the historian Dominic Sandbrook described it "on any given street, one family might be struggling to come to terms with redundancy, another struggling to work their new video recorder. One brother might be heading out on a Right to Work march, another might be finishing the paperwork for the Right to Buy. Aspiration and anxiety often lived under the same roof: the same people who lamented the death of community and the decline of traditional morality might be looking forward to a night in with a rented film or a summer break in Yugoslavia." The Rangers Revival was actually a story of conflict and contradiction for many.

Above all, though, it was the same story of modernisation that was shaping both the entire sport and the country itself. One shaped directly by those who had a vision and indirectly by those who lacked it. Paeans for what possibilities the future could bring, laments for what would have to be left in the past.

Iconography simplifies, as it always does - and there is nothing wrong, on occasion, with indulging our inner five-year old, captivated by the image of the winner who seems to be in total control - but the reality is always more interesting.

As if there are frailties that make up the hero and some dissent in among the worship. Which there always is.