What's it like to score for Rangers against Celtic in a cup final?

So imagine what it would feel like to be a born and bred Rangers supporter who grew up to play for your boyhood heroes and score on the winning team in one of these powder-keg matches.

Ibrox icons Barry Ferguson and Ian Durrant did just that and relived their experiences with Iain King when he was the ghostwriter on their autobiographies.

With the latest chapter set to unfold at Hampden, we took a walk down Memory Lane to two previous titanic trophy clashes between Glasgow’s footballing giants.

“Your heart stops for just a fleeting moment; it skips a beat, then you focus, look at the keeper, give him the eyes and sweep it into the far corner.

“It seems like your head is going to explode – that’s what it feels like to score against Celtic.”

Of all the chapters we worked on together for Barry Ferguson’s autobiography, Blue, I found his inside story of what it is like to be out there in the midst of an Old Firm battle one of the most compelling.

We had this hideaway spot when we wrote that book, an upstairs private room at the superb Spice Indian restaurant in Hamilton where we’d sometimes watch the big Sunday afternoon English Premiership game, have some pakora and a pint then get to work.

Barry was no different from any other diehard Rangers fan, he’d dreamed of scoring against Celtic and watched all the videos of games gone by.

After big brother Derek’s journey before him, he’d even been in the privileged position of being able to ask the players what it felt like.

Yet he shrugged: “Nothing they said to me did it justice; it’s the ultimate high.”

Some players secretly dread the suffocating pressure of Old Firm games, Ferguson lived for them.

In the storied 2002 Scottish Cup final, Rangers were in deep trouble 2-1 behind, Alex McLeish’s men looked aerially fragile every time a ball came into their box.

They were haunted by the threat of John Hartson and Bobo Balde who both profited to put the Hoops ahead.

Barry, though, was a force of nature in that stirring comeback and having spoken to him before about his technique of reversing free-kicks I remember sitting in the Hampden press box when the foul was awarded and thinking: ‘That’s his spot.’

Fergie would recall: “It was in a place I loved and I immediately scurried to get the ball.

“Then I glanced around to see Lorenzo Amoruso’s tanned, shaved legs walking towards me.

“In that Italian accent of his he said to me: ‘OK Barry, this is for me.’

“I turned to him and said: ‘Fuck off, ya fud!’

“I think that’s where the Only An Excuse sketches started but I had to let him know, in no uncertain terms, that I was taking this one because I’d had a vision.

“I knew that I was scoring and I did.”

There was a picture that hung in Barry’s house of the celebrations that followed that goal.

He’s giving it large in front of the Rangers end with his top off and his best mate Craig Moore is climbing on his back.

It made him smile every time he walked past it and he said: “My brother Derek was in amongst all the fans at that Final.

“He told me afterwards he’d fallen down ten rows of seats getting swept along in all the celebrations.

“I still laugh when I listen to that Sky Sports commentary, it should have made Ian Crocker for life.

“Neil McCann got it wide left with us tied at 2-2 and the clock ticking down and I just felt that something would happen.

“Crocker was yelling at that point: ‘Could there be a twist in the tale? Lovenkrands!’

“We knew it was the last minute and it was all over. I went off my head, it was a day I will always treasure.

“My dad always remembers the Old Firm 1973 Centenary Scottish Cup final when Tom Forysth forced the Rangers winner over the line from about six inches.

“Well, I’ll always feel that 2002 was like that for my generation.”

What was it like in the press box that day?

It has always amused me that some fans feel that those in the media were born in some mythical place in Scotland where they don’t have a leaning towards one side of the Old Firm or the other.

When I was embroiled in the day-to-day goldfish bowl of Glasgow journalism it was always fired at you that you favoured one side of a bitterly divided city or the other.

Rangers demolitions, Celtic joy days, the 2002 Final, Hoops in Seville, Helicopter Sunday, Gers in Manchester.

It was my privilege to live, write and work through all of these dramas.

And it makes me smile to think of one of my colleagues trying to keep a lid on his celebrations but punching me on the thigh under the desk as Lovenkrands buried that last-gasp header. I had the bruise for days!

There were others in the media pack not so happy behind their masks of professionalism, that is the nature of the business.

Before that unforgettable Scottish Cup final, Ferguson’s first Old Firm goal had come in a 5-1 hammering of the Hoops during the Dick Advocaat era in November 2000.

Rangers wreaked revenge for a 6-2 thumping in Martin O’Neill’s derby debut and Barry led the way with a goal that oozed class in its construction.

He revealed: “Before that game, my mind kept flashing back to 1986 when Ian Durrant had taken Davie Cooper’s unbelievable reverse ball before waiting for the right moment to slot the ball into the corner past Packie Bonner.

“It was eerie when that game came around that we should fast-forward to my time and my life and an almost carbon-copy situation.

“Claudio Reyna’s pass was up there with the one Coop gave Durranty. You pause, your mind is clear and then you whip it in the corner.

“Those goals against Celtic are 100 per cent the best feeling in football that I’ve ever known.”

Ian Durrant, Blue and White Dynamite.

When we embarked on the journey to write my favourite Rangers player’s autobiography Ian knew that his time at the club he loves with every fibre of his being was up.

He was 31 years old, the knee that was wrecked in that fateful challenge from Aberdeen midfielder Neil Simpson had been through over 1,000 stitches and countless operations.

Durranty would go on to have four fruitful years at Kilmarnock but I remember that time putting the book together as one of reflection.

He was a Nine-in-a-Row hero, he’d bounced back from that hellish injury to score in Marseille and help take Walter Smith’s iconic side to within a heartbeat of the Champions League final.

For me, he was a generational talent, the player that Graeme Souness singled out as the Scot who would sparkle in Italy’s Serie A.

There will always be that question that gnaws away at you.

How good could he have been without that wretched injury?

Yet to always dwell on that is to diminish the magical moments that he did produce, like that finish from Coop’s uncanny pass or his goal in his own Old Firm final.

Ian Durrant wheels away after scoring against Celtic in the 1986 Skol Cup final (Image: SNS)

Durrant notched in the 1986 Skol Cup Final to help secure Souness’ first piece of Ibrox silverware in a 2-1 win.

We sat down to examine his happy knack of scoring against Celtic, he notched five derby goals in his career, and he smiled: “What a match that was. The ref Davie Syme was hit on the head with a 50p piece and he thought Celtic’s Tony Shepherd had punched him and tried to send him off!

“I was just standing in the middle of the park and laughing because I thought that Syme, the big medallion man, was only angry because the coin could have cut his face and ruined his suntan.

“Derek Ferguson and I did really well in the middle of the park that day and I scored with my left foot from close range before leaping the hoardings in front of the Rangers end. What a feeling!

“Brian McClair kept them in it but then we got a penalty late on when Roy Aitken fouled Terry Butcher and I always knew Coop would score it.

“There I was just 19 years old and in Dreamland and I did my first ever set of live interviews.

“I bumbled through the TV one then on radio I said: ‘The free-kick from Cammy Fraser came in, it’s hit me in the baws and broke down and I just blasted it in!’ Not one of the best Durrant interviews.”

Old Firm Finals. As the cast assembles for the 2023 version at Hampden new stories wait to be written, fresh legends are ready to be created.

These are games that can define entire careers. Think of Peter Lovenkrands.

If one of Michael Beale’s stars can steer Rangers towards glory then this season will begin to evoke memories of Alex McLeish's trophies turnaround back in Fergie’s pomp in 2002 and Durrant’s glory days amidst the Souness Revolution in 1986.

One thing is for sure. If that famous trophy is bedecked in red, white and blue ribbons for the first time in 12 years on Sunday night I know two men who will be cheering louder than most.