LIFE ON THE FRIN
Training alongside club legends, under famous coaches and playing in Europe made Davie Kirkwood’s Ibrox spell a memorable one
DA V I E KIRKWOOD’S Rangers career may have only yielded a handful of first-team appearances but he played his part in one of the most famous European nights Ibrox has ever witnessed.
Kirkwood arrived in Govan from East Fife as a fresh-faced 19-year-old in March 1987, just as the club were on the verge of wrestling back the league title in what was Graeme Souness’ first season as manager.
For Kirkwood, signing for his boyhood club was a dream come true – although he admits he could have joined prior to the Souness revolution.
“When I was 16 they tried to sign me then but I was obligated to sign for East Fife at the time,” he recalled. “I played against Rangers the year before I signed in the League Cup at Bayview and I think they kept tabs on me ever since then, so when the time came to sign it was a no-brainer.
“I was a massive Rangers fan, my dad’s family’s from Larkhall, they were all miners and when they found coal in Fife, that’s when they moved through there.
“My first game was the League Cup final when Derek Johnstone scored in the first minute, that was my first ever Rangers game. It was crazy, there were over 100,000 people there, I loved it.”
It would not be long before Kirkwood was playing in front of a similar-sized crowd on the biggest stage of European football. Like most players who walk through the grand entrance at Ibrox Stadium for the first time, Kirkwood remembers the day he signed vividly, although he soon learned the demands placed upon him were slightly higher than at Bayview.
He said: “I was told the night before I signed that I was to be in training the next morning,” he recalled. “You had to be in shirt and tie, you had to have a short haircut and you had to be clean-shaven. I was coming straight from college, I was a scruff!
“The first day in training I was put in the rondos with Davie Cooper and the amount of nutmegs that he got...” he joked.
“Cooper had a wand of a left foot, he was absolutely brilliant, if you had the highest pedestal, he’d probably be above that. I signed on the same day as Jimmy Phillips so the two of us were forever in the middle circle.”
The intensity of the training was something that stood out for Kirkwood.
“Training was like a battle but that’s the way you played,” he said. “When you played for Rangers, you trained the same way. That’s why they introduced the Scotland v England games at training, it was just to get the battle fever going from the players.”
Souness’ right-hand man Walter Smith would carry out the coaching duties on the training pitch and Kirkwood says he was something special.
“Walter was a man of steel, he was absolutely brilliant,” he said. “He led all the sessions. He was at reserve team games, youth team games, everything.
“It was the way he treated you as well, he wasn’t like an arm-around-the-shoulder type but if you needed it, you got it. But most of the time it was a kick up the arse but it was a kick up the arse in a good way, it wasn’t a kick up the arse to make you feel down, it was a kick up the arse to say, ‘Come on! You can do better than this.’ He and Souness were a dream team.”
Of course, the then Ibrox boss was combining managing and playing, and Kirkwood says the education he received from Souness and the vast array of sublime talent on the books at the club was priceless.
He said: “You learned off the likes of Souness and Ray Wilkins, players like that but you also learned off Derek Ferguson, Ian Durrant and [Ally] McCoist – the Scottish boys.
“Ian Durrant, without his injury, probably wouldn’t be a Rangers player. He’d probably have gone away to Italy or somewhere abroad – he was that good. With his late runs, Ray Wilkins’ passing under pressure, Graeme Souness and his actual presence on the pitch, you were in awe.
“Players would try to noise Souness up and he just took it in his stride and went, ‘Come and get it then’.
“It was just brilliant, I learned most about my football and my coaching through being at Rangers.”
Kirkwood would make his first-team debut in the final match of the season as the club received the Premier Division trophy in front of a jubilant, packed-out Ibrox against St Mirren. It is a day he will never forget.
“It was the game after the Aberdeen match up at Pittodrie when they won the title,” he said. “I still remember it to this day, I’ve still got the photographs and I’ve still got my top. We did the parade round the ground and met the supporters, it was fantastic. At that time I was 19, straight from college to doing that. It was one of the best days of my life in football.”
THE following season he would make seven appearances in what turned out to be a disappointing campaign overall for the club as Celtic won the title and Hearts pipped Souness’ men to second.
However, it is a campaign that is best remembered for one famous night at Ibrox as Dynamo Kiev came to town in the first round of the European Cup.
The Scottish champions trailed 1-0 from the first leg in the Ukrainian capital in front of over 100,000 spectators with former Rangers player Alexei Mikhailichenko converting a penalty. Kirkwood came on as a substitute for the late Avi Cohen midway through the second half and despite the gravitas of the match, he never had the chance to be nervous. He said: “The night before the game we trained at the stadium and there were 40,000 people watching us and every single one of them was in a uniform and we thought, ‘Oh my God!’
“You weren’t
allowed to talk tactics in your bedrooms because they were probably bugged and all that sort of stuff.
“It was the first round of the European Cup and every single player of theirs was a Russian international. Russia had just been to the final of the European Championships themselves so we’re playing them and thinking, ‘Oh Christ!’
“I’ll tell you what took the nerves out of it, Souness sent everybody out to warm up – except me. So I’m sitting there thinking, ‘There’s no chance of me coming on’.
“It was Walter who said to me, ‘Get stripped you’re going on!’
“We never saw the ball for 90 minutes, it was just wall-towall defending.”
A fortnight later, Rangers would produce a thrilling display on what has become an almost mythical evening which is still said to be the loudest night ever witnessed down Edmiston Drive.
Kirkwood, again, replaced Israeli Cohen on 64 minutes as Rangers preserved a 2-0 lead thanks to goals from Mark Falco and McCoist.
“The atmosphere that night was just like a wall of noise from the warm-up all the way through to the 90th minute,” Kirkwood said. “That made you so proud to play and be part of a club that is unlike any other.
“You can’t really explain it to anyone else. We put so much effort into the game that players were getting tired, and it was just a matter of getting legs on the pitch. In the 15-20 minutes I was on, I was knackered but it was difficult in that game because you couldn’t hear any instructions from the side so it was team-led.
“Their keeper threw the ball off the back of somebody’s nut and Mark Falco rolled it in and then Coisty scored with a header in the last 15 minutes – brilliant! It felt like a proper occasion but I think we knew, because we were only 1-0 down, that we had a chance.
“It was the proper European Cup when it was just the winners in the competition. To play such a prestigious team, at that time, in the first round, I think it meant a lot to everybody – the club, the players, the supporters – just to get past them. That night was just so special for the supporters and the players and it came through in the noise.”
Despite playing a part in such an iconic match, Kirkwood’s first-team opportunities dried up. He headed out on loan to former club East Fife before swapping Ibrox for Tynecastle in search of regular football. It is a move that did not come easy but he acknowledged it was one he had to make for the sake of his career.
“It was frustrating not to kick on,” he admitted. “I couldn’t convert what I could do in training in the first team but at the same time, you had to be better than anyone that was playing in the midfield. So when you talk about Ray Wilkins, Graeme Souness, Fergie and Durrant and what have you, you could understand at the time. You had to be extra special to oust any of those players.
“I had just bought a new house in Glasgow and everything else so it was a wrench to leave but I wanted to play every Saturday. I didn’t want to see my pals all go and play on a Saturday and I’m sitting at home or playing in the reserves, it wasn’t for me.
“I was 21 or 22, I wanted to play first-team football every week. I had got that bug from Rangers so a chance came up to join Hearts where I actually did play every week so it was probably the right thing to do but it was one of the hardest things to do.”
AFTER a spell at Hearts, Kirkwood enjoyed a successful time at Airdrie where he came up against his former club in the 1992 Scottish Cup final. A six-year stint at Raith Rovers would follow before he would hang up his boots in 2000.
He would get the opportunity to return to Rangers as a youth coach in the mid-2000s and it was one he could not turn down.
“I was a youth coach at Motherwell at the time and it was George Adams who wanted me to come back to the club as assistant to him at the academy just to revamp things,” he said.
“We had to work at it. Our first year we had to put in so many hours into organisation, we had so many schools all over Scotland that we had to get covered, we had schools in Aberdeen, Ayrshire, Edinburgh all set up, it was a machine going to go mad but we had some great players in the youths.
“Coming to their end with the youths at that time were Alan Hutton, Chris Burke, Allan McGregor and the ones still there were Charlie Adam, Ross McCormack, even younger than that, John Fleck, Danny Wilson. We had some cracking young players.”
These days, Kirkwood is looking to return to the game he loves after his time as academy director at Ross County came to an end but he still keeps a close eye on his beloved Rangers.
Like many, he can’t help but be impressed with the work Giovanni van Bronckhorst has done since taking over the reins from Steven Gerrard.
“I think he’s brought a more calming influence coming from his style in Europe but I think he’s identified what the players can do and what they can’t do very quickly.”
This article was produced for the Rangers Review. Find out more and subscribe at rangersreview. co.uk.