No hiding place for the guilty

Playing the blame game is not going to rescue Rangers' reputation after carnage in Manchester

JUST WHEN they thought we'd seen it all, some new footage of the Manchester riot emerges to sink Rangers ever deeper in shame. Another attack on a police officer, as shown by BBC Scotland on Friday evening. Another PC trapped on the ground and beaten and kicked by another baying mob and for good measure a little audio that picks up chants of "U-V-F, U-V-F" from a band of thugs marching through the city streets. A brutal assault on a policeman and a celebration of a loyalist terror group. Around the world that video went and further into the gutter went Rangers' reputation.

Parts of it were reminiscent of '72. The excuse-making for one. Self-pitying and grotesque, it had echoes of Barcelona 36 years ago. Initially, Willie Waddell reacted thus to the rioting of the Rangers fans at the Nou Camp. "The Rangers Football Club refuse absolutely to take any responsibility for what happened in that stadium. The game was organised by UEFA and crowd control was in their hands completely." It seems that Waddell's spirit of defiance lives on in an element of the Rangers supporters of today.

The 2008 version goes like this...

"Manchester City Council have to take the majority of blame for this" – Gregor Moffat, Dunfermline. "I think the worst people there were the Rock Steady security guards" – Jason Stalker, Glasgow.

"It was remarkable that almost none of the ringleaders wore club colours or spoke with a Scottish accent. There were, however, many English and Northern Irish accents" – the Daily Record.

"There was nowhere to eat and no toilets, which was asking for trouble" – Kenny Barr, Ayrshire.

"Now England faces losing the 2018 World Cup. Amid the accusations and recriminations in the wake of the Battle of Piccadilly, that is all the powers-that-be really care about. They do not care they could have had a disaster on their hands because the game was played at a venue that was too small, in a city that couldn't cope and run by authorities that were ill-prepared" – Daily Record editorial.

"I blame the bar owners. They saw an opportunity to cash in by selling us beer from early in the morning and it's backfired really badly" – anonymous fan.

"Shame on the organisers from Manchester – badly organised event and a poor show all round. If you allow 100,000 to drink and then sabotage the screen and not allow dedicated loyal fans to find other TV screens no wonder the frustrations of a minority lost the plot. Let's have some media balance" – Arlene, Swindon.

So many myths. So much hypocrisy. Last Saturday morning, Sir David Murray and Martin Bain invited the Sunday journalists to an upstairs office at Ibrox for a little pre-UEFA Cup briefing. He'd opened some bottles of red from his vineyard and encouraged us to have a taste. The mood was convivial. Murray, quite understandably, was hugely excited at the final to come.

Both he and Bain were asked about the size of the travelling support. Did they really and truly believe that it would be as many as 100,000 people? Both agreed that it probably would be. That's the number they had in mind; 100,000. It's the number Manchester City Council had in mind also because it was given to them by Rangers and by their counterparts in Glasgow and by Strathclyde Police. Yet the council in Manchester are castigated by some Rangers fans for not having plans in place for another 50,000 on top.

In the wake of the trouble in Manchester, there has been little focus at what went on at the beamback event at Ibrox. There was over-crowding there as well. Too many people turned up and the club struggled to cope. There was fighting and blood was spilled. There was too much drink. There was organisational chaos and arrests; 17 in and around the stadium, three times more than at the last Old Firm game. However, we have not heard Rangers people condemn the event as being "run by authorities that were ill-prepared".

So many assumptions, so little evidence. Bain, the Rangers chief executive, said that the worst of the scenes were caused by people who "don't normally attach themselves to our support". Where he is getting this from is unclear. How he can be so sure is also unclear. If he's getting it from the same source that the Daily Record got their line about "none of the ringleaders wore colours or spoke with a Scottish accent" then Bain is spectacularly off the mark. YouTube exposes the nonsense of the absent colours. They are everywhere. One of the main pursuers of PC Mick Regan is wearing a Rangers top. In other footage, Rangers fans can be seen fighting with other Rangers fans, can be seen goading the police, can be seen punching and kicking officers, can be seen lobbing bottles and cans and traffic cones and destroying cars.

People will believe what they want to believe, see what they want to see, hear what they want to hear. Some Rangers fans will always be of the view that the initial cause of the trouble was the big screen breaking down in Piccadilly Gardens. It's the ned's defence. Some would argue that hard drinking from 7am was what sparked it all, that had the big screen not broken down the drunken thugs would have found some other cause to fight, some other reason to go on their disgusting rampage. Is there a soul out there who believes that, after 12 hours on the beer, Wednesday night was going to end with the Rangers fans slipping away quietly to their beds?

On Friday, PC Regan spoke of the moment he was attacked. Already a legend is forming in places that it was a Rangers fan who rescued him, who picked him up and helped him get away from the angry mob. This is what PC Regan actually said: "One of them shouted at me saying 'I'm British Army, I'm a medic.' He grabbed me by the collar and he propelled me up the street. Then one of our vans came round the corner, he threw me in the back of it and off he went. Thank God. I feel lucky. Whoever that army lad was, he wants a medal." All Regan can remember was that he had an English accent. Maybe he was an Englishman who supports Rangers. And maybe those Englishmen that the Daily Record say they heard in the front line of battle were Rangers supporters too. Could be, couldn't it?

And it could also be the case that the officer's estimate of the number of troublemakers in the city was pretty accurate. The figure that has done the rounds since Wednesday was 200. PC Regan reckons it was closer to a thousand. He's been in the job for 23 years so maybe his opinion has a bit of substance to it. A thousand is still a small minority but it's more than enough to scare the living daylights out of experienced policemen who have been dealing with crowd disorder all their careers but who had never, ever seen anything like Wednesday before.

INSIDE THE stadium there was a different kind of mayhem. As the teams appeared a little before 7.45pm the atmosphere was electrifying, the Rangers support raucous at the sight of Barry Ferguson leading his men out. As is the custom these days, both sets of players were accompanied by young children holding the hands of the footballers as they made their way on to the field. The kid in Ferguson's care was terrified by the noise, almost stiff with fear. The Rangers captain picked him up and brought him in close. It was a lovely moment. In many ways, it was the best of it.

The scenes at the stadium were wonderful but the final itself was everything we thought it would be. A slow grind. A team of attacking class against a team happy to hang on in there and hope for a miracle.

There was no shame in it. Rangers played to their strengths, but it didn't work this time. There's been some criticism about their negativity in the final, but what would positivity have brought? Not victory. Certainly not that. Against a side as quick and as skilful Zenit? Almost certainly a terrible defeat. These guys beat Bayern Munich 4-0 in their last competitive game. Bayern went to Russia to play expansively and got mugged. If they did that to the Germans, God alone knows what they would have done to Rangers. Two goals could easily have been four – or worse.

Zenit were excellent or as excellent as they could be when faced with the great spoilers of the UEFA Cup. Rangers have frustrated all-comers in this tournament but the Russians were a step above, in terms of precision and craft, anything Rangers had faced before. Some of the Ibrox men said later that they had faced better this season. Werder Bremen were mentioned. But Zenit didn't have the self-destructiveness of the Germans. They didn't have a calamitous goalkeeper or a set of strikers whose luck was out.

Ferguson was one of the Rangers men who thought that Bremen were superior to Zenit and it added to his frustration. "They're a good team," he said. "They took boys wide, played three up top but I'm not saying they battered us. They've won the cup and we congratulate them but we've beaten better. They won the game in the end and fair play to them, but I think we've played against better opposition."

The captain was resigned in the aftermath. "That's it over and done with now," he sighed. "It was a great achievement to get to the final but there's huge disappointment we didn't do it in the end. It's been a great experience, something I thought would never happen. It's been great for myself, my family, all my mates. Disappointing in the end I've got a runners-up medal. But you never know. I might get to another one. You never know."

The half-smile on Ferguson's face suggested that he does know. That was his chance, been and gone. Walter Smith's chance, too.

How will history remember the day, Smith was asked. "It depends on how people want to look upon it," he said. "You can't take away what happened, but a lot of good things happened prior to that. For the majority of the people there they'll remember the good things. A minority have caused embarrassment and that's the biggest shame because the vast majority went down for enjoyment."

Those people are as much victims as anybody else. They have been scarred by the dysfunctional yobs who attach themselves to this football club. The ones who perpetrated the violence and the many, many others who sought to explain it away by laying the blame on heavy-handed policing humiliated Rangers, Glasgow and Scotland as a whole on Wednesday.

"These animals are not football supporters," said local man Matthew to the Manchester Evening News on Thursday. "They're louts and idiots who came here for one reason only, to get drunk and cause trouble. It's 9am now on the day after. I'm sat in my office at Piccadilly Gardens looking out on the carnage. What else can I see? Rangers hooligans stood on the street drinking vodka out of a bottle while they're waiting for the pub to open. Great. Same story tonight as well then. Well done Scotland, you should be proud."