I’m still bitter about the day Roy Aitken pulled a fast one to deny us the Treble!
John Brown on the painful 1989 defeat for Rangers that offers hope to Clement’s team
THERE might eventually come a day when John Brown doesn’t think about the Scottish Cup that got away from him.
Yet, after 35 years and three days of contemplating what might have been, the Ibrox legend isn’t expecting to make peace with the past any time soon.
The 1989 final pitted Graeme Souness’ all-conquering Rangers side against a Celtic team cast in the role of party poopers.
Rangers had claimed the league comfortably that year, finishing six points ahead of Aberdeen and ten in front of Billy McNeill’s men in the days when only two points were awarded for a win.
With the League Cup also in the trophy cabinet after beating Aberdeen for the second year on the spin, Souness’ outfit were heavy favourites to complete the domestic Treble.
Hampden was heaving. Some 72,069 spectators packed in that day — no final since has drawn a bigger crowd — with sunglasses and factor 50 the must-have accessories.
The atmosphere was raucous, but perhaps the blistering heat and the huge stakes at play contributed to a match that was high on drama yet low on quality.
The build-up to the winning goal just before half-time was entirely in keeping with an error-strewn affair. Having advanced down the left flank, Brown’s progress was halted by Roy Aitken. The Celtic skipper’s final touch on the ball ought to have led to a Rangers’ throw-in, but Aitken’s look of innocence as he picked it up and launched the ball up the park duped match referee Bob Valentine and his fellow officials.
In the blink of an eye, Rangers were struggling to clear their lines. The normally dependable Gary Stevens thinned a back pass to Chris Woods, leaving Joe Miller to pounce and stroke home what proved to be the only goal of the final.
‘I could have done with VAR,’ smiled Brown. ‘To be fair to Roy, he was right at the ball and the referee allowed him to take it.
‘To this day, it still grates with me that we lost that. I’ve still got a bitter feeling about it.’
It wasn’t just the controversial manner of the goal that got under his skin and stayed there. For the lifelong Rangers supporter who had joined from Dundee the previous year, completing the clean sweep in his first full season would have been the stuff of dreams.
‘We’d done a Double (league and League Cup),’ recalled the 62-year-old. ‘That season, we’d beaten Celtic 5-1 and 4-1 at Ibrox. Celtic beat us 3-1 over there and it could have been five or six. Then we managed to win the last league game 2-1 at Parkhead.
‘So, we won three out of the five.
But that cup final has stayed with me to this day.
‘It just shows you what can happen on a one-off occasion. Celtic had Paul McStay, Roy Aitken, Tommy Burns and Packie Bonner — all international-level players. They had a decent team.
‘We managed to win the league and the majority of the games against them over that period, but they were often close affairs. The level of those games… there was never an easy one.’
This Saturday feels like a role reversal. After a title race that swung one way then the next, it was the green-and-white hordes who took to the streets of Glasgow in celebration last weekend.
Rangers may have fallen just short in their main aim, but there would be significant consolation for their followers if they could sign off for the season with another piece of silverware after winning the Viaplay Cup last December.
‘The last game of the season is massive,’ said Brown. ‘For our boys to upset the Celtic party that’s been going on for a week would be fantastic for our club. It would also mean we’d have won both cups.
‘I’m sure all the Celtic players have had a fantastic week there. Going into the cup final, they’ll be full of optimism. But I go back to the 1989 game, we went into that knowing that Celtic were a good team and that we had to be at our best. ‘We were poor that day. And it turned out that we never got that cup when all the press guys were tipping us to win it. It shows that anything can happen.’
The three league encounters since Philippe Clement took charge have been strikingly similar.
On each occasion, Rangers have been two goals down before they’ve woken up and got the work heads on. Both in December and May, their efforts to redeem themselves at Celtic Park proved too little, too late.
‘Celtic have come out the blocks in recent games and they’ve got at us,’ reflected Brown.
‘The recent game here (3-3 in April), they scored so early and silenced 50,000 Rangers fans. That performance from Celtic in the first half was one of the best I’ve seen.
‘We really struggled to get back into it. Every game we’ve played against them, they’ve come out the traps and we need to be ready for that.
‘We need to try to get at them and put them off their stride.’
The need to be aggressive and competitive scarcely needs stressing, but there’s a line to be drawn.
Having just seen Cyriel Dessers pull one back for his side earlier this month, John Lundstram’s rash challenge on Alistair Johnston ensured Rangers’ title hopes went up the tunnel with him.
‘You have to channel your aggression in these games, you have to have a calm head when everyone else is losing theirs. That’s good coming from me,’ laughed Brown.
‘But I never got sent off in any Old Firm games. Graeme Souness and Walter Smith used to say it: “We need you on the park”. You were of no use to anyone sitting in the stands.
‘The one with Lundstram, the fact he’s just scored an own goal, his head is away with it. He lunges, and when you lunge like that you are taking chances.
‘It was a red. Had they got to half-time, with it being 2-1, it could have been a different story. A guy with his experience…’
Brown is just thankful that his own storied Rangers career didn’t become defined by that upset in 1989.
While losses to Celtic in the early rounds of the following two editions kept Rangers waiting to get their hands on a trophy they last won in 1981, Brown would lift the cup three times, beginning with a win over Airdrie in 1992.
‘Graeme had left the previous season to go to Liverpool,’ he recalled. ‘When the campaign started, Walter said it was 11 years since we’d won the Scottish Cup and it stops this year.
‘He wanted us to make a dent in the competition and that’s what we did, we laid a marker down.
‘We beat Celtic in the semi-final, Davie Robertson was sent off after six minutes. That was the turning point for us. We won it the following year at Parkhead (against Aberdeen) as Hampden was being done up and then we had 1996, the Laudrup Final (against Hearts).
‘That turned out to be my lastever game, not that I knew it at the time. I got injured going into the following pre-season, the nine-in-a-row season.
‘I have great memories… and a sore one from that one in 1989.’