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How Gerrard handles this will be fascinating. How Souness dealt with a similar situation was unsurprising.
“Mr Souness probably didn’t speak to us,” recalled Walters. “We knew that, if we didn’t win, he’d be very quiet. But he’d have been effing and blinding and going in over the top on us at training.
“Losing a game when I was at Rangers was like a death in the family. Will Steven be surprised at the intensity? Maybe, but he’ll know about it by now for sure.”
A quick glance at Walters’s book suggests an interesting read. The chapter that recalls his debut at Celtic Park, and banana-throwing, was followed by a trip to Tynecastle that was “10 times worse”.
Thank goodness things have changed and the likes of Walters led the good fight.
“Whenever a black player came to Scotland, I always got a call from journalists up here to talk about it. After 10 years of it, it got a bit boring, to be honest,” he said. “So, I avoided speaking about it for about 15 years. Doing the book was really good for me. There are things I haven’t spoken about before.
“I reflect on my Rangers days as a fantastic time in my career. My debut wasn’t memorable for good reasons, of course. I’m human and when you have 60,000 people abusing you it’s hard to take and understand. But the bigger picture was good.
“Players don’t have to worry about it so much now. My peers at the start of my career, some of them at clubs like Coventry or West Brom, couldn’t handle the abuse.
“It affected them on the pitch. They got into fights with other players or skirmishes with refs. As a coach, you can’t have players who are problematic in their team, so a lot of the black players went out of the game, unfortunately. I don’t hear so much about racist incidents in football now. It has come on leaps and bounds.”
Wingin’ It – The Mark Walters Story by Jeff Holmes, published by Pitch Publishing Ltd, costs £18.99 hardback