Ibrox an all-too-brief home sweet home for awe-struck Hurlock, but still a place close to his heart

TERRY Hurlock left Rangers, but Rangers never left him. He had lived and played in London all his days, yet Ibrox became an all-too-brief home from home.

It is almost two decades since Hurlock, after just one fleeting but successful season at Rangers, returned south of the border and finished his career with Southampton, Millwall and

Fulham. Glasgow remains close to his heart, though.

He strides down the Ibrox tunnel with all the purpose and intent of his playing days. The frame is still imposing, the handshake firm and the accent unmistakable but that famous mass of dark hair has gone, proof that not everything stays the same over the years.

Ibrox has changed, too. But the memories and emotions come flooding back to the 61-year-old.

“Mate, it brought a tear to my eye walking back through that door,” Hurlock said. “My kids come up and they watch the Old Firm games but they haven’t been in here.

“I had a walk about where we used to get changed and went down the tunnel and I thought of my two boys and thought ‘if only they could see this’. They would absolutely love it to pieces.”

Hurlock was seeing Ibrox at the best it has looked for some time. A summer of modernisation and restoration has given the corridors back their lustre, the work symptomatic of the progress Rangers, as a team and a club, are making after the most difficult years in their illustrious history.

“Coming from Millwall, that was your taters and greens, you know what I mean,” Hurlock said. “Coming here, it doesn’t get any better. You can’t beat it here. It is tradition. The wood panelling, the picture of the Queen, what a place, what a club.

“I need my kids to see this. They are so passionate about Rangers but they haven’t been down here. They need to see this, this is a proper football club.”

The chance to visit Ibrox and take a walk down memory lane was an opportunity not to be missed, but it wasn’t the reason for Hurlock’s return to Glasgow. Last Friday, he was a guest at the Rangers Supporters Erskine Appeal dinner, an event that raised more than £25,000 with the £1million mark now in sight.

“Anything with the military and the Forces, I will be involved in,” Hurlock said. “I always have been. I have been brought up that way. I don’t see it as giving back. I do my own little bits and pieces. But, what a great cause. They need us and I think we could all do a bit more.”

A delayed flight from London ensured Hurlock’s time at Ibrox was shorter than it should have been which was apt given that he only spent a year with Rangers in the double winning season of 1990-91.

Millwall’s relegation from the First Division paved the way for Hurlock to leave the club where he had earned a title medal and legendary status. A wrangle over money delayed a move to Everton but cash was no stumbling block for Graeme Souness. A deal was done and Hurlock joined one of the most expensive and impressive squads in Britain.

“They were all big characters, big players and I was in awe of them, mate, in awe of them,” Hurlock said of his team-mates as the Souness Revolution gathered momentum.

“I had the likes of Terry Butcher, Richard Gough, Trevor Steven,

Gary Stevens. F*** me. I had watched these guys playing for England when I was in the Third Division. Now, I was playing amongst them. How good is that?

“I was in awe of them, I am still in awe. I am so proud, so lucky to have played with those boys at this club. Every single one of them were terrific footballers.”

The Second Division title that Hurlock won with Millwall followed a Third Division crown at Reading two seasons previously. He would match that tally of trophies in just a few months at Ibrox.

A 2-1 victory over Celtic secured the League Cup weeks after his arrival. Come the end of the season, the third of nine titles was won against Aberdeen.

“I jumped into a club that was winning everything,” Hurlock said. “They didn’t take no for an answer, they were winners. That is Rangers and I had to deal with that. I always trained hard. I liked a beer, but I trained hard.

“I couldn’t let anyone down, I never wanted to let anyone down. Even if I didn’t have a good game, I tried. These players, they could do it all and it made my job easier.”

In that star-studded Rangers line-up, Hurlock was never destined to stand out but that didn’t diminish his importance to the team. He would make 35 appearances and score twice for Souness’s side.

The second came against Hearts in a routine 4-0 win. The first was the equaliser on his Old Firm debut as a powerful strike from the edge of the area, followed by a roar and a punch of the air.

“It was new to me,” Hurlock said of the derby, a fixture that Rangers would win on three out of six occasions that season and saw him sent off for lashing out at Tommy Coyne in an ill-tempered defeat at Parkhead.

“The Ibrox game came early when I first came here. It was passion that I had never seen in the changing room. The team talk wasn’t a team talk, it was just ‘you know what this game is like, you know what it means’. I was looking about thinking ‘what is going on?’

“People were going potty,

Bomber [John Brown] is nutting the wall. I thought ‘f*** me, what is going on here?’ It was new to me, but I loved it. I was with them, I wanted to go with them and now I know how much it means. For me to play in that game... I can tell my kids, I can tell everyone down south.”

After drawing with Celtic in the September, Rangers beat them in October in the League Cup final through goals from Richard Gough and Mark Walters at Hampden. Hurlock had his medal, but his prize money didn’t last long.

“I loved it, loved it. I was so proud,” he said. “I’ll make you laugh. I got a few quid for winning it, a couple of grand. I went down to my pub and they said ‘there ain’t no beer’.

“I said ‘why is that?’ and they said my brother hadn’t paid Charrington [Brewery]. He owes them that, that and that. It was exactly what I had earned. What I got from winning