Win in Seville and all the hassle and pain will feel like it was a price worth paying
THERE are many things about UEFA which prompt a shake of the head. An insistence on handing European club finals to Seville is one of them.
The local football team might have won the Europa League about 800 times. Yet the decision to hand this year’s showpiece to the Ramón Sánchez-Pizjuán Stadium, with its hopeless capacity of 42,000, is a baffling business.
Rangers could sell twice as many tickets as the stadium capacity all by themselves and still leave thousands out on the street.
Given some of the characters who attach themselves to Eintracht Frankfurt, meanwhile, the very last thing the Spanish city needs is thousands of stray fans roaming the avenues looking for tickets.
Maybe it makes no difference where they play it. UEFA could move the game to the 60,000 home of Real Betis tomorrow and it would make no discernible difference to the number of fans likely to be locked out. Seville would still be hopelessly unprepared for the influx.
That much became clear when Celtic lost the 2003 UEFA Cup final to Jose Mourinho’s Porto.
It wasn’t the done thing to say so at the time, but that experience was pretty awful.
Budget airlines used the whole experience to exploit the desperate. Charter airlines charged fortunes to shuttle ticketless fans from Glasgow to Spain on the day of the game. Hopelessly illprepared to handle 80,000 Celtic punters — most of whom hadn’t a hope in hell of seeing the action — Seville was paralysed.
Hotels couldn’t cope with the demand, taxi drivers preferred a couple of days off to ferrying around bladdered football fans and transport to and from the stadium was hopeless.
Despite a virtuoso performance from Henrik Larsson, Celtic lost the game in extra-time. And the morning after the night before the concourse of the shambolic San Pablo Airport resembled a scene from Apocalypse Now.
None of this will make the blindest bit of difference to Rangers supporters hellbent on being there to see their team contest their fifth European final. And neither should it. Ten years since their club stared down the barrel of a gun, a run to the Europa League final has been a stunning and thrilling experience.
When Giovanni van Bronckhorst took over days after a 3-1 defeat to Hibs in the League Cup semi-final, no one saw a run to a European final come down the line.
And, in contrast with the Celtic fans who saw their side come up short against Jose Mourinho’s multi-talented Porto side, they have an outstanding chance of returning from Seville with more than a bad bout of sunstroke and blisters on their feet.
Despite their run in Europe, Eintracht Frankfurt currently sit 11th in the German Bundesliga. They’ve won just three of their last 11 games and, while all three of them were in the Europa League, they are 14 points behind RB Leipzig in the Bundesliga and 23 adrift of Borussia Dortmund. Rangers will never have a better chance of winning their second major European trophy.
They won the first by beating Dinamo Moscow in the final of the Cup Winners’ Cup in 1972. And for those who believe in omens, they overcame German opposition in the last four before contesting the final on Spanish soil then as well.
The fitness coach of that team was Jock Wallace, a military man stationed in the Malay Peninsula in the 1950s. An advocate of jungle warfare, Wallace survived on eating what he called ‘monkey steaks’.
In pre-season, his players would run up and down ‘Murder Hill’ at Gullane Sands until they threw up. And then they did it all again to build ‘character’.
Wallace, you suspect, would approve of the never-say-die spirit in this Rangers team. They were on the ropes against Borussia Dortmund before half-time and dug it out. They were forced into extra-time by a late Braga goal in the quarter-finals and found a way through. RB Leipzig were banging on the door, chasing an equaliser, when John Lundstram claimed a late winner.
Whatever the challenge in Europe, they find a way. The next challenge is Seville and if they win,
handing the league to Celtic on a plate won’t hurt half as much.
Winning the Europa League would also mean joining their bitter rivals in the group stage of next season’s Champions League.
The last time Scotland had two teams in the groups at the same time was season 2007/08. And for Rangers, the loss of the Premiership title would be eased significantly by a £30million seat at the top table and a lucrative crack at Liverpool or Real Madrid in the European Super Cup.
For a club which has spent recent years relying on the deep pockets and largesse of wealthy shareholders, winning a European trophy could be transformational. They have to win it first, of course. Minutes after the final whistle on Thursday night, around 20 members of the extended Van Bronckhorst family posed for pictures at the mouth of the Ibrox tunnel. And when the selfies stopped, the manager began the serious business of preparing to face Eintracht.
The final might be the first game in this Europa League run supporters have actually expected to win and that brings its own dangers. Despite their underwhelming domestic form, Eintracht have beaten both Barcelona and West Ham away from home. Bookmakers’ favourites, they can’t be written off before a ball is kicked.
On and off the pitch, the Seville experience will be a bigger test of nerve and character than a Jock Wallace training session. Not just for Rangers players and management, but also for the fans and media who have to find a way to get there.
The flight headaches, the overpriced hotels, the local transport network, the heat and the sheer number of fans from both clubs will raise further questions of UEFA’s decision to host the whole shooting match there in the first place. If Rangers find a way to banish the ghosts of 2012 by winning their second European trophy, all the hassle and pain will feel like a price worth paying.