Screaming blue murder

Chief football writer

Wednesday 20 June 2012

HISTORY lessons have never been everyone's cup of tea, which makes things all the worse for many Rangers supporters now facing a wearying curriculum featuring no other subject.

Rangers' European Cup-Winners' Cup victory over Moscow Dynamo in 1972 will always be part of their history as far as the fans are concerned. Picture: Newsquest Media Group

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Michael Grant

The club has subjected its followers to various indignities over the past couple of years and not the least of them is an obligation to assert endlessly the continued ownership of their own back story. Rangers are being told – forcibly and repeatedly – that they have "lost" their history. No ifs, no buts: it was flushed away when Rangers Football Club plc was plunged into liquidation last Thursday. Nine-in-a-row? Barcelona 1972? Others would scoop those memories out of their brains if they could.

Scottish football is still getting its head around the full implications of Rangers being liquidated and attempting to pull the pieces back together in order to continue playing next season. Even that sort of innocuous statement can bring a swift slapdown from the armies of angry detractors populating the social media: get it into your head, there is no Rangers, they're dead and gone, deceased, the SPL's ex-parrot. According to the more hysterical, even referring to them as Rangers at all it is "peddling the myth that they are alive and well". Many won't be happy unless every mention comes with some sort of footnote, suffix or asterisk, lest anyone be under the impression that a skeletal hand is rising up through the soil on Rangers' grave.Well, fine, the point has been made often enough by now. But if people are going to carry on hectoring about what they should really be called every time the word "Rangers" is used, this will soon become tedious beyond belief. It's one of those contrived issues, really. No-one in offices, cafes or pubs is going to go around calling them anything but Rangers for very long, regardless of what it says on the paperwork at Companies House. It's the obvious and inevitable shorthand for the football club playing its home games at Ibrox next season.Rangers fans will simply have to suck it up for a while, in the hope that Celtic supporters and others will eventually exhaust themselves in the schadenfreude of their numerous embarrassments. They insist they should be called Sevco 5088, or Club 12, or Zombie FC, or countless unprintable alternatives, and there was further grist to the mill when it emerged yesterday that the Charles Green consortium cannot yet legally use the name "The Rangers Football Club", as they intend to. That title will have to be approved by liquidators BDO, and BDO cannot give that approval because they have yet to take control of the club's affairs. It amounts to yet another little defeat in a seemingly endless sequence of them, not to mention confusing the issue of what working name should be used between Green and the SPL while the former tries to secure the latter's approval at a meeting of all 12 member clubs on June 4.Most Rangers fans long for a future when the club has navigated itself back to prominence in the SPL, winning trophies and playing to full houses at Ibrox. In the meantime they will insist that the newco is a continuation of their history, and to hell with what anyone else says. They will watch a team in blue at Ibrox, they'll sing the same songs, cherish the same heroes – Jim Baxter, Davie Cooper, Ian Durrant – and buy scarves and flags celebrating nine straight titles and a European Cup-Winners' Cup.The notion that none of that would be the newco's history is not going to be taken seriously anywhere around Ibrox. The line taken by the club itself will be that both the oldco and the newco amount to the corporate structure running Rangers Football Club, which was the entity which won all the trophies and which carries on regardless. Expect to see all the silverware – the 54 titles, 60 domestic cups and European trophy – being listed in the match programme the next time they play at home.The obvious comparison is how Airdrie United deal with Airdrieonians' history. Airdrie United was formed in 2002 after Airdrieonians went bust. They secured a place in the Scottish Football League by buying out Clydebank FC, relocating it to Airdrie and changing the strips to the old Airdrieonians colours. In essence, the club which finished fourth in the Second Division last season is a reincarnation of Clydebank which its supporters see instead as a reborn Airdrieonians. Under "Club History" on their website, the headline reads: "The Past Cannot be Forgotten". The section highlights that Airdrieonians played in four Scottish Cup finals, winning one, and played in Europe in 1992. Great old names like Hughie Gallacher and Bob McPhail are celebrated."Their" history is Airdieonians' rather than Clydebank's for one simple reason: it is their supporters' wish. It will be the same at Rangers, no matter how often the realities of liquidation and newco status are hammered home to them by others insisting that they have a clean slate and no right to celebrate what "another club" won. In one regard the history of Rangers is way too significant for petty pointscoring. The club suffered Scottish football's greatest loss of life when 66 fans died in the 1971 Ibrox disaster, a tragedy mourned by fans of all clubs but most deeply felt by Rangers. That memory must endure, commemorated annually and visibly. What happened on Stairway 13 is as poignantly relevant to any new Rangers as it was to the old one.

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