LAUDRUP CALLED IT JUST LIKE IT IS
McCoist knows Rangers have to improve rapidly if history is to repeat itself
ABSORBING Brian Laudrup’s first
Sportsmail column earlier this week Ally McCoist found himself nodding in silent recognition. The memories came flooding back.
The impact Walter Smith’s departure announcement had on the Rangers dressing room. Paul Gascoigne leaving before the end of the season. The creeping feeling a dominant team had already peaked.
Some of the details are patchier than others. McCoist has little or no recollection of losing to Aberdeen at Pittodrie. Ally Mitchell’s winner for Kilmarnock in the second last game of the season in the fourth minute of stoppagetime? He remembers that clearly.
In 1998 an ageing Rangers team were spent. The pressure to match Celtic’s record run to nine in a row had taken its toll. Their race run, they saw the line looming on the horizon and stumbled.
‘I read Brian Laudrup talking about that season and saying there were a couple of things which went against us,’ says the former Ibrox boss now. ‘He was spot on.
‘There were a few of us in the team reaching a stage in our careers when time was running against us.
‘We didn’t perform as well as we had done in previous years. We had Paul Gascoigne leaving and Walter Smith announcing he was leaving Wise: Laudrup’s views in his new Sportsmail column on Tuesday struck a chord with McCoist at the end of that season. There were a lot of things — but that’s to take nothing away from Celtic, who did the business.
‘I couldn’t remember being beaten by Aberdeen until I read Brian. I remember losing to Kilmarnock at home to an Ally Mitchell goal, it was the first thing I dug him up about when I signed for Kilmarnock the following season.
‘Not getting ten was a disappointment — but if we hadn’t made it to nine then it would have been an absolute disaster.
‘We were an excellent side just as this Celtic side is and as the Celtic team previously were magnificent but the pressure was on us to equal that record, not to beat it.’
Discussing that season now, Smith will concede in hindsight that he should have sold Gascoigne and Laudrup (right) straight after nine in a row. Yet, when season 1997-98 got underway Rangers were strong favourites to win a tenth straight title.
Celtic had sacked Tommy Burns, Paul McStay had retired, Paolo Di Canio and Jorge Cadete had left in acrimony and Wim Jansen’s new team lost the opening two matches of the league season to Dunfermline and Hibs. Had they lost to St Johnstone on matchday three the Dutchman would have been lucky to keep his job. Yet, as in 1974-75 when the last remnants of Jock Stein’s lions let the ten slip from their grasp, a younger hungrier side prevailed. For history to repeat itself McCoist believes Steven Gerrard has to arrest the alarming slumps of the last two New Years. ‘I look at Rangers defensively when they came back and I thought, not so much that they were all over the place, but that there was a mistake in them. There was definitely a mistake in them and they weren’t the same side post-Christmas and New Year. ‘Celtic, I felt without being brilliant after the New Year, certainly continued their momentum and run of form and deserved to be where they were. ‘You’ve got to look at the pre-Christmas form. If you’re looking after that, there’s not a lot of hope, let’s be honest about it.
‘You’ve always got hope but you hope they have the same form that they did in the first half of last season, because their form after that was not up to scratch, was not title-winning form.
‘The hope that Rangers have, quite simply, is the form they had up to that. They’ve got to not only get back to that, they’ve got to sustain it over the full season. That’s the hope the Rangers fans have, that they can sustain that form.
‘They’ve overcome hurdles, big hurdles. They’ve managed to beat Celtic home and away, not on a regular basis, but they’ve certainly looked more comfortable against Celtic. The next step is to win something.
‘I don’t think anybody can argue that they weren’t unlucky in the League Cup final.
‘They probably should have won the League Cup, missing a penalty and the goal maybe being offside.
‘But that can happen in Old Firm games, how many times have we seen it? I think from Rangers’ point of view, you’ve got to be upbeat.
‘You can be upbeat because if you can isolate the Celtic games and get them to look after themselves, which they can do, then where you need your concentration is places like Hearts, where Rangers were outfought last season.’
Should Alfredo Morelos leave for Lille then a hefty transfer fee offers the opportunity for Gerrard to buy three or four disciplined, hungry new players.
Based on current squads, little or nothing has changed. And to win the title Rangers need things to change significantly.
‘In terms of the whole season, I think if you take a logical look at it Celtic look to have a better squad because the squad hasn’t changed that much and they won the title last year,’ reasoned McCoist.
‘Something has to change for Rangers to win that. Clearly they have to be more consistent, particularly going away from home against teams like Aberdeen, Hibernian. They have to find a greater level of consistency. I believe the Celtic games will look after themselves.’
One of the more prominent close-season transfers, McCoist has left BT Sport to join Sky’s new line-up of analysts.
If there is a lingering slither of regret over the fact he no longer stands in the Ibrox technical area it’s offset by a knowledge of the pressure both managers are likely to come under.
Asked whose shoes he would rather be in entering a campaign guaranteed to be tetchy, edgy, fraught and thrilling, he laughs: ‘Do you know something? I would rather be none of them!
‘I know what both of them will be going through. I must admit I am far happier watching it from a Sky Sports commentary box...’
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