The Goalie
Well-Known Member
Steven Gerrard should be in no rush to leave Rangers – they are a huge club
Steven Gerrard will go back to Liverpool sooner or later, but for the sake of Rangers’ supporters, myself included, I hope not for a few years yet. I don’t know how Steven sees it, but Liverpool already have a very good manager and Rangers, the team I supported as a boy, are flying with him in charge, so on a purely selfish basis I’d like him to stay for the foreseeable future.
He’s cut his teeth at a big football club with big pressures. It’s been a good grounding for him and given him an enormous advantage over a contemporary like Frank Lampard. Derby County didn’t give Lampard an insight into managing a big club before he became Chelsea’s boss.
I did five years as Rangers manager, but eventually the parochialism in Scotland drove me out. The media were unashamedly biased at times — on both sides. The job I was offered at Liverpool was the only one I’d have considered leaving Rangers for, but if I hadn’t been banned from the touchline for the second time and didn’t feel I was on the front pages as much as the back pages, I might have stayed. There was too much focus on me and not the club and that was detrimental.
Rangers and Celtic are arguably the hardest jobs in British football because you’re judged on four games and expected to wipe the floor with everybody else, so the criticism and pressure is severe. This was a make or break season for Gerrard, I don’t think he could have stayed if Celtic had won a tenth consecutive title, knowing the pressures up there. There always has to be a loser and Neil Lennon, who I’ve worked with on television and have a lot of time for, has lost the league and his job.
Don’t expect Celtic to roll over and accept this as the norm. They will respond this summer. I can’t second guess their board, but if they went for Roy Keane, as a report suggested, it would light the touch paper and be great for the Scottish game because people throughout football and far beyond Scotland would be talking about the rivalry with those two personalities in charge.
When you’re employed by either club, you soon learn what it means to the supporters. I believe there’s four clubs in Britain that are institutions — Rangers and Celtic in Glasgow and Liverpool and Manchester United in England. I’m sure supporters of other clubs up and down the country will disagree, but that’s how I see it.
For nine years, Rangers supporters have been going to work on a Monday to have the mickey taken out of them. The bragging rights in the west of Scotland are so important because it’s a small population, so it must have been a terrible time for them. I can’t emphasise that enough.
Gerrard was never going to go in and win it first time round, it’s been a slow burn. You had a Rangers team starting from a very low point trying to catch a Celtic one that were consistent qualifiers for the Champions League, with the money that generates, so it was never going to happen overnight. He’s done an incredible job to get them to where they are, playing the kind of football they are playing and winning the league so convincingly. This year, they’ve been relentless. You also have to throw in the way Celtic have imploded. For a Rangers supporter, that’s only good news because it means there are underlying problems that they are not going to solve overnight.
I’ve spoken to Gary McAllister, Gerrard’s assistant, since they won the league and it was a conversation that confirmed what I suspected. I said, “I bet even you, a Rangers supporter as a boy, were surprised by the club” and he said, “Oh yeah, I thought I knew it but I didn’t”.
There are so many similarities between Glasgow and Liverpool, but it would still be a shock to Gerrard. Initially, he’d have been like me walking into Ibrox in 1986, thinking, “I’ve been at a big, passionate football club, captained my country and worked with great managers, so I can handle this”.
Well, I’m sorry, and I’m sure he’d agree, I didn’t know what I was walking into. Being from the east of Scotland I thought I knew the club, but I knew nothing. The passion, the history, the emotion... it’s easy for players and a manager, as I did at times, to get caught up in it all.
Gerrard’s put the foundations down for sustained success now. Rangers are playing a brand of football which is a good watch, but they have a pragmatic approach at times, too. This season they have shared the goals around, with 16 different scorers in the league, whereas in previous seasons they were too reliant on Alfredo Morelos.
Rangers are just six games — two of them against Celtic — from achieving an entire league season unbeaten. I’m sure Gerrard and McAllister will remind their players of how Liverpool collapsed after winning the Premier League last season. You can’t get in your armchairs when you have a chance to create history.
