Like many Bears, it took a while for my auld Da’ to mention Mo Johnston by name. He was ‘him’, ‘that yin’ or something much less complimentary and, as I look back on events of July 10, 1989, I can again feel the turmoil which enveloped us. Although I’d heard a few rumours that something big was in the wind, they were never treated seriously until I got a crack of dawn phone call on that fateful morning.
“Have ye seen The Sun?” asked the voice at the other end of the line.
“Whit? Ah havnae even opened the curtains yet,” was my less than cheerful response.
“Not the sun, The Sun, the paper! Souness has signed Johnston .”
“Get lost! Its just The Sun stirring the shit, they’ll probably have McCoist moving tae Parkheid before the end o the week.”
My early morning alarm call let out an exasperated sigh. “Listen, they’ve got eighteen pages on it,” he said. “The Lockerbie Disaster only got ten!”
That is how the news broke at LBB Towers and the next few days passed in something of a blur. Everybody had an opinion on the deal, no matter what team they followed, and while the Rangers support was split, our reservations paled into insignificance alongside the devastation felt by the Great Unwashed. Even the less rabid among the Charlie Sims showed themselves in their true colours, giving up all pretence of moderation and rationality to rant and rave about dyke-jumping, treason, excommunication, even execution.
At that time I was quite friendly with a wee barmaid who, although I knew her to be one of Them, always seemed to take my part in any arguments which might ensue over a shandy or two so I regarded her as normal, or as near as normal as her sectarian education was ever likely to let her become. As we discussed the matter she suddenly took me by surprise by interrupting my point of view.
“Nah,” she said. “He’s just a firkin wee rat!”
In the space of a couple of seconds she’d said more about herself than she did about ‘him’ and, if somebody as mild-mannered as her was prepared to spit out such a poisoned take on the move, I sussed that Timmy was in big, big trouble. And so it continued all summer long, with graffiti on the walls, anonymous threats of mayhem and murder and, of course, the Scottish media, having spent years calling for Rangers to sign a Catholic, suddenly blamed the club for inflaming the atmosphere by making such a controversial signing.
The hypocrisy of urging our club to sign a Catholic, then deciding they wanted to have some input on which Catholic we could sign, was lost on those impartial defenders (joke!) of the public conscience. One in particular, Brian Wilson, a scribbler on a local rag who used an anti-Rangers campaign to get his name in lights, moving on a career path which would stop off at Westminster on the way to the boardroom at Breezeblock Boulevard , couldn’t bring himself to praise Rangers for finally breaking with the tradition he so clearly despised.
“Its long overdue,” he groaned. “But I don’t think the whole performance which preceded it reflects too much credit on the parties involved.”
What really bothered this slimy specimen and the rest of his hate-filled band was that, having pulled a stroke by parading Johnston as a Septic player a few weeks earlier, the custodians of the biscuit tin were unable to come across with the cash to complete the deal and were found out as a shower of chancers. That Rangers should then nip in to capitalise on their incompetence, sign a top quality player and deny our club’s enemies the very stick they’d been using against us, was just too much to bear. They were in meltdown and were instantly exposed as small-minded, bigoted frauds whose call for Rangers to open up the Ibrox dressing-room to their kind was as bogus as their claim to have signed Johnston in the first place.
Mind you, there are many perfectly reasonable Rangers men who identify the signing of MoJo as the day our club sold its soul and I ain’t going to argue about that. Anyone who still feels that way twenty years after the event isn’t likely to be persuaded to change his mind by any argument I might offer. I would suggest that Rangers have subsequently sold their soul in so many other areas to make the move for Johnston little more than a side issue. Perhaps it was the first step on the slippery slope but I didn’t hear too many Bears complaining around 4.45 on the afternoon of November 4, 1989 when MoJo stuck it to the Mockit Ones big time. His last minute winner and the manic celebrations which followed blew away any doubts about his commitment to the blue jersey, Timothy’s widespread weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth was a joy to behold, they’d been shafted by one of their own and it was firkin lovely!
Like many of our number, I put Johnston’s contribution under the microscope from day one and, believe me, had he been found wanting, he would have got it loud and clear in both ears. But he never failed to put in a shift and I’ll never forget a European Cup tie, when Rangers were pissing into the wind against Bayern Munich and the frustration was getting to each and every one of us, when he ran 30/40 yards to take a throw-in in front of the East Enclosure and the Main Stand rose to him, recognising that, while others had thrown in the towel, he was not prepared to simply go through the motions.
Nor was he the sort who just rattled in the goals in liberty-taking exercises against the wee diddy teams. In the first half of his crucial first season, Rangers registered 1-0 wins against our three main title rivals – Sheepies, Watery Farts, FC Semtex – and Mo Johnston was the man who turned draws into victories with those crucial strikes and played a major part in wrapping up the league title with some room to spare.
And it was the same again the following season when the Gers once more ruled the roost, although by the time we’d clinched the title on a dramatic last day of the season showdown with Dolly & Co, Graeme Souness had moved on and Walter Smith was calling the shots. Where Souness was very much a fan of the Johnston-Hateley partnership, with McCoist relegated to the bench, Walter preferred the McCoist-Hateley combination and MoJo found himself spending more and more time on the sidelines.
Throughout his career, Johnston had been good for a couple of seasons at whatever club he was with, before going off the boil and getting itchy feet. That’s how it was at Thistle, Watford, RaSellick and Nantes , its how it was at Rangers, and it would continue to be that way at Everton, Hearts and Falkirk . But I reckon, of all the clubs he was with, Rangers got the best two years of his career and he was beginning to lose it when, after he’d failed to turn up for a reserve team game, he was on his way to Everton, just over two years after his much-hyped move.
So Mo had come and gone, our club discarded the tradition which fuelled so much anti-Rangers rhetoric, yet we are still the big bad wolf of Scottish football. The arrival of high profile players like Albertz, Amoruso, Gattuso, McCann, Amato, Van Bronckhorst – each and every one an RC and all warmly welcomed, idolised even, by the Rangers support – didn’t change the blinkered approach of Scotland’s journos (whether discredited or just working towards it). The Ibrox dressing-room has long since been a multi-cultural, ecumenical workplace but anybody expecting recognition in the pages of the Scottish press has yet to find it.
While Rangers supporters have freely accepted Catholic players in our team, it is the self-proclaimed greatest fans in the world who have turned to abuse and intimidation to deliver their response. Why was it that Mo Johnston had to live in Edinburgh , needed the permananet presence of a minder alongside him and finally had to live in exile when his career ended? Sadly, the threat from those who are portrayed as cuddly craicsters has never gone away, just as a trip to the supermarket for the likes of Neil McCann or Chris Burke will never be quite as straightforward as it should be because they happen to be Catholics who chose to play for Rangers. Yet the media men persist in wrongly singling out Johnston as our club’s first-ever RC player and have opted to turn a blind eye to Septic fans’ despicable reaction to such signings.
Pandering to the vanity of Mr Chairman, the Hack Pack have moved the goalposts, targeted the Rangers support in their attacks, successfully exploiting the growing chasm between club and fans, to the extent where we now go to games unsure of what we are allowed to sing, what chants are acceptable, with the club clearly more concerned with appeasing our enemies than supporting the very people who hand over their hard-earned cash on a regular basis. The Billy Boys is banned, The Famine Song has been criminalised, where is it all going to end? How long will it be before Bears are being dragged out of the stands for singing The Sash or Derry ’s Walls? Ferfuxxake, they’ve even turned against Follow Follow (the song, not the website!) and objected to the line: ‘If they go to Dublin we will follow on’. Every capitulation only further encourages our club’s enemies, although if you listen to Kenny Scott, hell have you believe we don’t have enemies, only rivals. What planet does that joker live on?
Prior to the signing of Mo Johnston, all the ills of Scottish society were laid on Rangers’ doorstep. Whenever there was crowd trouble at a game, the Press Gang would get up on the soapbox and proclaim that is was all caused by our club’s sectarian signing policy. Of course, at a time when football violence was widespread, they failed to explain the hooliganism of Man Utd, Liverpool or Leeds fans who carried no religious baggage. A punch-up at a bus stop, a brawl in a pub, a gang fight in a housing scheme, all were attributed to Rangers’ reluctance to sign a Catholic player.
So did the West of Scotland, or the world at large, become a safer place after July 10, 1989? No, of course it didn’t. Human nature is such that there will always be arguments, fights, even wars, it was that way before Mo Johnston put pen to paper for Graeme Souness and it has been that way long after both walked away from Ibrox. Rangers did what the media demanded of them but, as always, it was never going to be enough, they up the ante time after time, and it is clear they won’t rest until we suffer points deductions, a stand closure, perhaps the closure of the entire ground, and every time David Murray, Martin Bain, Sandy Jardine, Kenny Scott or another muppet in a blazer mouths off and scores one more own goal, they leave our club exposed to further attack.
For what its worth, I always saw it as inevitable that we would someday sign a Catholic, although I never bargained for MoJo being the man to break the mould, and I was always of the view that, while such a signing would cause a bit of unrest among the support, it was never going to be the cure-all for society’s ailments the self-appointed experts claimed it would be. All it did was deprive the anti-Rangers lobby of their prime weapon, expose their motives as a sham and, as we continue to find ourselves on the back-foot fully twenty years after lowering the drawbridge, highlight the bogus dogma behind our critics’ desire to keep piling on the pressure until the very existence of the Rangers F.C. is under threat.
And it has all happened on the Minted One’s watch. He inherited a thriving club from David Holmes, the new-look Rangers embraced the multi-cultural environment of sport in the latter years of the twentieth century, we swopped a parochial homegrown approach for a more worldly ethos which attracted some truly wonderful players to our club. In any right-minded society, such a forward-thinking, ambitious gameplan, would be applauded but it couldn’t happen in Joke McConnell’s or Alex Salmond’s Scotland , the most small-minded wee country in the world.
The Rangers have changed so much over the past twenty years but our enemies have grown more intransigent than ever before. While David Murray didn’t hesitate to hang Donald Findlay out to dry, the green-and-grey brigade are prepared to get up early in the morning and walk a lot of miles to be offended, they’ll keep chip-chip-chipping away at our songs, more and more Rangers fans will find themselves in the dock for little more than taking the piss, and the man at the head of the house will sit back and do sweet hee-haw, effectively inviting Timothy to continue to do his worst.
All of which merely confirms that the signing of Mo Johnston, or any other Catholic player for that matter, was never going to appease Rangers’ critics. Over the past two decades, our club has had a Catholic chief executive (Bob Brannan), a Catholic manager, a Catholic captain and Catholics have been among our most popular players. But the attacks go on and on, giving credence to the suspicion that these evil specimens won’t rest until every hint of the proud club we once were is airbrushed from history. It will be that way until somebody inside Ibrox grows a backbone and starts to defend the heritage so many of us hold dear.
My auld fella didn’t live to see the debt-laden shell our great club has become but I can’t help thinking that he’d have something substantial to say about it. Mo Johnston’s goals finally won him over but his declaration that ‘everything is different noo’ has stood the test of time. The signing did more damage to RaSellick than it ever did to Rangers, of that there can be no doubt, but there is merit to the line that it set off a chain of events which has taken us to where we are today. However, I’m more inclined to get upset about the long-running programme of asset-stripping (a process which started pre-Mo), than the signing of a player who caused so much distress to those who would gladly see our club wiped off the map.
Until somebody somewhere addresses this issue, The Rangers F.C. is not in safe hands.