Gerrard, Galatasaray; Glory

With 55 finally achieved, what next for Rangers? The immediate challenges are obvious; retain the league, bag some domestic cups and try a major step-up in Europe. But the latter two, for this Rangers team, have always been more closely related than we perhaps appreciate.

Leicester City narrowly dropping out England’s Champions League berths just one week after lifting their first FA Cup perfectly illustrates the difficulty in adding extra silverware to the essentials. For Leicester fans, however, given their club’s historic place in English football, the FA Cup was a dream come true.

For Rangers, the league is everything essential and Europe is the essential ambition.

For Rangers, cups are good springboards and then they’re a garnish. Steven Gerrard, who never won a league title as a player, used Europe as both springboard and garnish to the SPFL Premiership as a manager.

I was so excited by our win over Galatasaray last October, our third straight Europa League play-off victory in three seasons under Gerrard, I wrote a match report without anywhere to put it.

Now, re-reading my post-match rant, it’s clear I felt a failing manager would never have been able to get those performance levels out his players, at the same pivotal stage, three seasons on the bounce.

My obvious excitement takes its particular colour from a moment in time, with huge question marks remaining over our ability to win the domestic title, confined to history by what we went on to do in that historic Premiership campaign (even if we didn’t quite blow away Ross County in the way I predicted for our next home match).

I’ll post it here, on the blog I subsequently knocked together for just such outpourings, lest we forget.

So you may read the following as a retrospective on Rangers league title number 55. Galatasaray at Ibrox was one of the first moments we felt 2020-21 was the season we’d finally bring it home. Or you can read it as a preview of Rangers in the 2021-22 Champions League qualifiers; because Europe is Steven Gerrard’s springboard and he’s made continental competition easier for us with each year he’s in charge.

But next season’s Europe, even at the qualifying and play-off stage, will be of a level Rangers couldn’t hope to cope with without three years of UEFA group campaigns in our locker… as well as that lovely wee league title.

Our hosts equalise on the night then an insane red card for us, and then another and then we’re hanging on for dear aggregate life in one of those parts of Russia you know should be an independent state playing in the Asian confederation and we’re all so drained from watching it we’re ready to hit our kips rather than the pints even though it’s barely tea time.

Then a Polish chess match over 179 smoke-addled goalless minutes only prevented from the extra time and penalties written all over it by a Jordan Jones ball in the 180th minute and an Alfredo header which sends Ibrox into raptures of gratitude, relief and ecstasy.

Then we almost threaten to blow Hell’s own Turks away in the first eleven minutes of the first half then actually do in seven second half minutes and we, the screen-watching Bears, need the visitors’ goal three minutes from the end to give us the one thing which is gradually fading from Rangers European play-off ties under Steven Gerrard: Anxiety.

I came into this season pretending a European exit before the group stages could help us win the Premiership title. I go into October pretending I’m happy Celtic have also qualified because it means they’ll have the same draining midweek commitments as us between league games.

I came into this week feeling gutted I wouldn’t see Falcao in the flesh and worried that the lack of crowd at Ibrox would be detrimental against a team as street-wise and a club as Euro-savvy as Galatasaray. I end it feeling absolutely devastated I wasn’t there to cheer Rangers off that pitch but knowing those players will be absolutely fine without us.

It’s getting harder and harder to pretend I’m seriously worried about Steven Gerrard’s Rangers in Europe.  And being unworried about Rangers in Europe is so utterly alien to me I now realise why we imploded domestically in the last two seasons: to stop the Bears getting the bends. We, as a fan base, expected to reacclimatise gently. From the fourth tier back up to the top would take at least four years - probably more - and we expected a League Cup here, a Scottish Cup there - eventually title 55. Then - only then - would we start worrying about Europe.

But before we got any of that other, regular, domestic stuff into our lungs, the worry has been sucked right out of Europe. Stevie G hitting such giddy heights so quickly from such gloomy depths means rest stops are required along the way. But there are none. So, like you, I’m giddy.

It used to be European success demanded domestic hangovers and a result like thumping an Eredivisie side by four clear goals in the Netherlands would make Fir Park one of the last places you’d want to go the following weekend. But now we follow up by doing to Motherwell on the Sunday exactly what we did to Willem II on the Thursday.

What Stevie G has achieved for us in Europe isn’t just a miracle in terms of what happened the season prior to his arrival. In terms of season-on-season over-achievement, it outstrips anything Rangers as a club have ever managed.

Yes, Rangers have reached European finals. But the first three were in a period when Dunfermline, Kilmarnock and Dundee were reaching European semi-finals and the last came just five years after Celtic fell at the final hurdle. And we pump that mob all the time.

Okay, we qualified for near endless group stages throughout the Nineties and Noughties. But the money at our disposal then and our position within the game – sometimes as the most powerful club in the British Isles – meant an actual UEFA trophy should have arrived at the end of at least one of those campaigns. 

No, the sliding European scale of expectation versus material progress has never been tipped so dramatically in our favour as it is under Steven Gerrard. And the sheer lack of doings, disappointments and general embarrassment within the Gerrard European runs – Leverkusen are the only side to beat us in 17 home games, all minnows have been thumped and absolutely no-one has hammered us  - is fairly unparalleled since we first kicked a European ball sixty-odd years ago.

From an unknown Portuguese manager embarrassing himself in a bush in Luxembourg City, trying to excuse the incompetence he’d wrought on Rangers, to a legendary Turkish opposition manager embarrassing himself in the Ibrox technical area, attempting to distract from the fact he’s just been owned; to effect this scale of transformation in three years is frightening. It’s a scarily rapid rise. I need to catch my breath. Previously the players haven’t been able to – they’ve come back from their Dubai winter break still gasping for air.

But this time I think we can just about manage another great European run without home defeats by Hamilton Accies or chucking leads at Rugby Park. The Rangers players see Fatih Terim, a UEFA Cup-winning manager, reduced to emptying his own lungs at his opposite number, being dismissed on and off the park by their own gaffer, a man who won both European Club trophies as a player, scoring in each final (one in a town called Istanbul). What we’re doing here becomes increasingly believable. This potential is becoming real. We’re all getting our lungs round it now.

Alfie, up against a national hero of his, was having a bit of a “Boumsong against Auxerre” moment when faced with a clear header at their goal, making a run through their square defence or slipping an easy ball through to Kent. But he persisted. He dummied sublimely for the opener and he left that park victorious over Radamel Falcao. A Colombian who scored three in two straight winning Europa League finals was outdone by a Colombian who’s now got his club into three straight Europa League group stages and holds the record for the most goals in the competition before Christmas. That club is Rangers. It’s us.

As Stevie G stood there post-match tonight, on Rangers TV, on the legends podium with Magnificent Souness and Sir Walter, as if his coronation was complete, the talk was of the need to win domestic trophies. Souness told his fellow European Cup-Winning Liverpool Captain that the first trophy would start the deluge. Stevie G told his fellow Rangers Manager Brought in Young to Stop a Rot that it was all about where we were in May, not tonight. I’m not arguing with those guys. But don’t tell me these group stage qualifications aren’t the equivalent of, if not superior to Scottish domestic trophies.

I began September pleased we would at least play only three European games before the group stage, conserving more energy for the domestic challenge. I hit October upset that we played one round less and only one leg each time. Why? Because if we can’t turn Gerrard’s European progress into domestic trophies, we can at least turn it into terminology as understandable as any shiny cup in our captain’s hand:

To quickly explain exactly what Steven Gerrard’s done since following on from Pedro Caixhina’s solitary European tie in 2017-18 – to make a punchy retort to the “no trophies in two seasons” slap - I’ve been saying “32 European games though”. I wanted to have shoved at least another six games onto that stat by this point. But he’s now guaranteed to break the 40 mark anyway*.

Another way of explaining it, of buffing it up, comes via the coefficient. Gerrard has almost single-handedly made it a possibility league title 55 or 56 will put us straight into the Champions League group stages.

But the best and by far the most enjoyable method of understanding what Steven Gerrard has done for Rangers, in Europe, is by simply watching us play.

When the linesman wrongly raised his flag for Alfredo’s goal in Moscow two seasons back – the one that should have put us 4-2 up on Spartak – it not only cost us the game but ruined one of the most scintillating one-touch counter-attacking goals we’ve ever scored in UEFA competition.

Last season, Alfie taking that touch at Do Dragao, before slapping it into the Porto net, arguably prevented that equaliser becoming Rangers’ best European counter-attacking goal of all-time. It couldn’t ever be as vital or legendary as Tommy McLean to Bobby Russell in Eindhoven or Ferguson to Durrant to Hateley to McCoist at Elland Road. But in terms of sheer speed, precision and aesthetic beauty, it was only that touch – in itself a lovely moment of control which probably ensured Alfie would score – which simultaneously stopped that move in Oporto becoming unbeatably slick in the annals of our continental expeditions.

When Borna took his time to get his cross in tonight – and the cross took that deflection en route – it put a disingenuously “clumsy” spin on not just the cross but the entire move. It was a construction of patience, acuity and pace. It was less a goal than an expression of high culture:

Starting from our goalie and moving across our backline at pace, crossing the pitch with easy ingenuity and working up the left flank with a precision which left only that last chamber of the lock requiring just a tad of extra concentration to pick, our captain and right back, was once again allowed to ghost in and finish a move, once again convert a cross from our left back, because Galatasaray didn’t know what the hell was happening to them.

The first goal, seven minutes earlier, was so beautifully executed I don’t want to think about the fact we weren’t all there to give it the four roofs in tribute.

It was relentless competence in the first Gerrard run – you’d not beat us at Ibrox and you’d have to fight like hell to beat us, narrowly, on your own patch. Then it was relentlessly impressive last season – you’ll lose at Ibrox and we’ll take something from your place. Now we’re annihilating Dutch sides away and at Ibrox, against Turkish giants, we’re scoring goals which border on the sublime.

Bears are all fluent these days in the language of “scar tissue” – 2012 left the Rangers support more loyal than ever but also more hurt. However, on our European skin the tissue has been forming over wounds closer to 80 than eight years old. From European bans and early exits to home stuffings by everyone from Juventus and Seville to Eintracht Frankfurt and Unirea Urziceni, Europe has always been our biggest problem. And on that podium tonight we saw three men – in fact four if ye throw in square-go specialist Neil McCann – who always went for the biggest guy in the room, knowing everyone and everything thing else would fall into line once he’d been sorted.

Europe is sorted.

Ross County don’t come to Ibrox on Sunday looking to exploit our European hangover. They come to Ibrox on Sunday knowing we don’t get those hangovers anymore. Like we’ll all have to with our European worrying, Rangers under Steven Gerrard – the man who said “Let’s go”- are learning how to let go of anything that stops us going forward. No more Progrès – only progress.

And breathe.

*Steven Gerrard's Rangers in Europe; The update:

P 45, W 24, D 15, L 6

Draws include games at Legia, Porto, Slavia and Feyenoord and four contributing to away goal head-to-head victories over Benfica and Villarreal (that’s the Villarreal contesting tonight’s Europa League final versus Manchester United). Gerrard’s lost just twice at Ibrox in Europe - once against Bundesliga powerhouses and the other when Rangers were down to nine men. The most we’ve ever lost a match by is two goals.

All this in just three seasons.