Rangers eye Europe as the Old Firm returns with a bang . . .
Four years of Rangers frustration evaporate after thrilling Hampden duel
WITH one errant sweep of Tom Rogic’s left boot, Rangers were free. All that struggling through the lower reaches of the Scottish game felt strangely like a hallucination as four years of frustration evaporated into the Hampden air.
While some bang on about new clubs and old clubs, a small cottage industry has sprung up to investigate the small print of the five-way agreement which led to the Ibrox club’s messy rebirth in the summer of 2012. Fans of both sides still harbour grievances about how their financial apocalypse was handled.
But this was an Old Firm match alright. It looked like one and smelled like one. And as they trooped disconsolately out of Hampden yesterday, even the most fervent Celtic fan would grudgingly admit they have a new rival when it comes to the major silverware in Scottish football. And it looks remarkably like the old one.
It is Rangers, and not the Parkhead side, who will return to the national stadium in May to take on Hibs in the William Hill Scottish Cup final. How their supporters had waited for this moment. It almost, but not quite, made the final itself an irrelevance.
The quality on the park might not be up there just yet with the days when the De Boers and the Larssons mixed it on Mount Florida but victory in May will take Rangers back into Europe, and unlike last year’s League Cup semifinal, when Kenny McDowall’s outmatched squad seemed pleased just to hear the final whistle with limited damage, this was what we had been waiting for, a worthy addition to the age-old series for millions of worldwide TV viewers and watching Barclays Premier League footballers Phil Jagielka and Craig Gardner and their WAGs to savour. In the form of Patrick Roberts’ first-half open goal, it even had an equivalent to Peter van Vossen.
There is always, of course, a danger of reading too much into one performance or one result. It is one thing to go toe-to-toe with an opponent for 90 minutes, quite another to match them stride for stride over 38 league matches. But there is an accumulation of evidence that Rangers under Mark Warburton are closing the gap on their historic rivals and this result will send reverberations across the city. His P45 may not arrive in the morning, as the Ibrox fans mercilessly sang, but we may not have to wait long for a final judgment to be passed on the Ronny Deila era at Celtic.
What else did yesterday mean? Well the first detour, as ever, after one of these matches, will be to the SFA compliance office. The main point of interest will be the behaviour of both sets of supporters, with banners and pyrotechnics at both ends at Hampden.
While the playing of an anthem from each club over the Tannoy before kick off was an attempt to keep the song book as clean as possible, a Celtic banner goading their rivals with the phrase ‘Rangers then Zombies Now, Hun Scum Forever’ is likely to land them in hot water, as will its riposte from the Rangers end ‘Zombies are fictional, paedophiles are real’. It wasn’t so long ago that Old Firm players were appearing in the High Court themselves as a result of their