Sport

Keith Duggan: Gerrard the saviour for blue half of Glasgow as he buries an old ghost

Former Liverpool hero ends Rangers’ title torment and finally wins a league title

Steven Gerrard: has led Rangers to their first title success in a decade and ended the reign of of ten-in-a-row chasing rivals Celtic. Photograph: Andrew Milligan/PA

Keith Duggan's face
Keith Duggan
Sat Feb 27 2021 - 06:00

John Greig is a football god in the blue half of Glasgow. There’s a bronze statue of him outside Ibrox Stadium.

“Football’s not like an electric light,” he said in one of those proclamations in which Scottish football men specialise. “You can’t just flick the button from slow to quick.”

Still, there has been something instantaneous about the relighting by Steven Gerrard of Rangers after their twilight decade. The original Scouser has been recast as a sombre, driven, winning football man in the best Protestant Scots tradition.

It feels longer than seven years since Gerrard was the most recognisable face in English football, leading Liverpool with that determined slightly worried head of his towards sporadic cup and European glories and a series of near-misses in the Premier League which tortured Liverpool fans and delighted everyone else.

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After Gerrard’s infamous slip against Chelsea in the culminating weeks of the 2014 season, goading and taunting the midfielder became a tireless pastime for crowds all across England.

Now, Gerrard stands on the verge of his first domestic league title as player or manager. Rangers are sauntering towards their 55th title and have ended the unthinkable prospect of 10 league titles in a row for Celtic. Better, their rivals have endured a grotesque season, with Neil Lennon resigning this week, a squad in dire need of rebuilding and acute recognition that the next managerial appointment needs to be the right one.

And best of all for Rangers, on Thursday night Gerrard watched his team fire five goals past Antwerp as they surged into the last 16 of the Europa League against Slavia Prague: high glamour encounters with Milan or Manchester United are there to be dreamed about.

Ten years after their financial implosion, after the club was sold from one company director for the princely sum of £1, after their expulsion from the SPL and the surreal experience of starting again in the permanent winter of Division Three – those trips to Falkirk and to Berwick while, across town, the hated Hoops began to munch their way to title after title – Rangers are back. And the renaissance man is Stevie G, the bullet-headed player who seemed to carry the hopes of Liverpool on his shoulders since he was a teenager.

How has he done this?

A couple of weeks ago, Gerrard popped up as a guest on the show of possibly the least-likely podcast host of all time: Robbie Fowler. It would be a much better idea for Fowler to simply star as a guest on his own podcast forever. Invariably, any answer he gives would have more entertainment value than any question he might ask.

Fowler hasn’t changed much since his days as the impish scoring machine with Liverpool, still looking as though he was reluctantly dragged out of bed and sounding like he is getting over a bad head cold. The former team-mates were ostensibly there to talk about Rangers’ resurgence under Gerrard but, because they are both Scousers, they couldn’t help but reminisce about the old days.

Fowler has flitted in and out of management over the last decade and it is difficult to imagine him having the long-term temperament for the grimly repetitive business of keeping the disparate personalities of a dressing room in line. Fowler is too bright and easily distracted.

Bad luck

What he has become, it turns out, is a student of the game, forensically analysing the climactic games of the 2013-14 season immediately before and after Gerrard’s catastrophic slip.

Gerrard himself holds “vague memories” of that time, partly because the experience was such an unbelievably terrible personal moment, it could easily have broken something in him. It was just bad luck but it was bad luck with a cosmic backdrop.

“I’ve been around the f***ing game since I was 12 years old,” Gerrard said to Fowler, for once setting aside his manager’s mask. “I know what it takes to win over 38 games.”

That’s been the secret over his ascent with Rangers. He spent 15 years pouring his soul into Liverpool and never got there. Return to his final bow at Anfield, a 1-3 defeat at home to Crystal Palace on the last day of the league. The atmosphere was warm and hugely devotional. But the feeling was haunted and there was little doubt that Gerrard was leaving his boyhood club unfulfilled. His address to the crowd didn’t do much to suggest that this was a happy occasion.

“I’ve been dreading this moment and the reason is because I’m going to miss it so much,” he said as the mood turned suddenly funereal.

“I’ve loved every minute of it and I’m absolutely devastated that I’m never going to play in front of these supporters again.”

Would the message have been quite so anguished if Liverpool had won the league the previous year? Would Gerrard even have left, closing out his football career in America?

Over three seasons in Glasgow, he has been patient and focused and learned from mistakes. Managing either of the two huge Glasgow clubs is a unique assignment in football. You are in a division with 10 other clubs against whom you are expected to win and share a city with a rival club whom you have to beat.

Because the rivalry is so old and the hatred so inexplicably true and poisonous, it goes beyond the normal realm of sport. Gerrard grew up in a city largely defined by a century-old football rivalry. But the thing is Glasgow was different, a coldly furious loathing, based upon joy at the other crowd’s misery as much as elation at your own success. Right now, Gerrard is giving the Rangers crowd the best of both worlds.

There is a small army of Irish people of all ages who are both Liverpool and Glasgow Celtic football fans. I know several who make regular excursions to both Parkhead and Anfield to bask in the swaying, ale-y unending devotion. The sight of Stevie G leading the Rangers resurgence will lead to many a conflicting interior dialogue.

Freak hurricane

That Jurgen Klopp arrived in Liverpool even as Gerrard left seemed to confirm that for all the brilliant moments, there was something fated about his missing out on the league title; that he gave more than he ever got. But a year after delivering that restorative league title, the house of Klopp has, at best, been badly damaged in a freak hurricane of injuries and loss of form.

Gerrard, meanwhile, is on the verge of burying an old ghost. He had done it all as a player except win a league; now he is closing in on a title which the Rangers quarters of Glasgow will celebrate with livid outpourings.

It’s too early to know if he has been aided by Celtic’s calamitous year or whether he is on his way to emulating the enduring success in Scotland of managers like Graeme Souness or Walter Smith who strode out of Ibrox intent on making a name for themselves down in England. That’s for the future.

Right now, Gerrard still looks worried and bristles with nervous energy. But he’s the toast of blue Glasgow. They’ll be league champions when they visit Celtic for the last game of the season in late March. The hatred has never been more alive and never felt better.

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