Rangers and the Famous ICF: My Life With Scotland's Most-Feared Football Hooligan Gang (18 page)

Meanwhile the rest of the boys had pushed the NGE and assorted drinkers back, right up against the front door of the Woodside. The baldy lad, with the help of his cosh, was doing his best to rally them and they even managed a charge. I picked up a folding chair, which I threw at Mr Bald, narrowly missing his head. Some of the other ICF were more accurate and several Thistle and a few of the locals were knocked unconscious after being hit by chairs.

Our mood by now was to hell with who owns the pub let’s attack it and give the cunts a right good leathering. But we could hear the cop cars screeching down Great Western Road, sirens blaring. It was time to make ourselves scarce.

The next day I got a call from the NGE, who told me the reason the pub was so busy was that a wake was being held in the bar. That would explain why the other customers joined in; they would have been raging that we had had the audacity to attack a pub packed full of people paying their respects to a deceased friend. One mourner however saw the funny
side. My NGE contact said that while we were attacking the Woodside one of the guys in the funeral party filmed the whole thing on his mobile phone, complete with a humorous running commentary on the fight, which he later uploaded to YouTube. The mourner has a strong Glasgow accent and when we saw it we pissed ourselves laughing. ‘Look at that. Look at that. Look at the fucking state of that. He’s been pure knocked out man.’

It is typical Glasgow patter. Fucking pure dead brilliant.

St Johnstone’s Fair City Firm have a big rivalry with Aberdeen and they always pull a good mob for that fixture. However, they did turn out for us a couple of times, the most memorable occasion being the Scottish Cup semi-final in April 1989 (the day of the Hillsborough disaster) a game that was played at Celtic Park. We had forty boys out and we mobbed up at Queen Street station, hoping for a spot of FV but not expecting St Johnstone to be there in big numbers. But credit where it’s due, they had a good firm out and there were skirmishes all the way from Queen Street to London Road. Their inspiration was a lad known to all and sundry as Mad Graham, who stood out in any crowd thanks to his long, flowing locks and his undoubted leadership qualities. He has now changed his allegiance and comes with the ICF but he was outstanding for the Fair City Firm that day, rallying them every time we steamed in. I think we fought each other to a standstill, which is commendable for a mob of their size.

Of the other mobs I have encountered the
Airdrie
Section B Boys stand out, not just for their fighting ability but also because so many of them are good Loyalists.
Falkirk
had a tasty mob – the Falkirk Fear – and they did well in the lower leagues but their day in the sun was a very short one and the same could be said about the Love Street Division, the mob attached to
St Mirren
; we have however had some memorable offs with both. Little
Stranraer
once gave us problems in Glasgow, as did
Ayr United
down at rickety old Somerset Park.

As I said I have a great deal of respect for the little teams who, despite invariably being heavily outnumbered, have often fronted up for the big boys. Only lack of space prevents me going into more detail.

Good luck to them all.

The media have always made a big deal out of the ICF’s links with the Chelsea Headhunters. Both mobs are right wing, both mobs are British and proud of it and both mobs hate Celtic and the IRA. All of that is true, especially the last bit about Celtic and the IRA. And it is also true that some of our lot would gather in the Toby Jug in Glasgow city centre and travel down to west London to give the Headhunters a hand. Some of our top boys, Davie Carrick included, were frequent visitors to Stamford Bridge.

Although I am a home bird and Rangers through and through, I have a lot of time for Chelsea. That said I consider my English team to be Manchester City, many of whose lads have real Loyalist leanings. Over the years I have also become aware that most English hooligans have a soft spot for Rangers. They love the way that we proudly fly the Union Jack and proclaim our Britishness. It is no coincidence that when a Scottish Defence League was set up – mirroring the much bigger English Defence League – Rangers fans dominated its membership. While English firms respect Rangers they loathe Celtic. In particular they hate the way that so many Celtic fans continue to venerate IRA murderers. And after the bombings in Warrington, Manchester, Birmingham and London can you blame them?

There is a myth propagated by many of the Celtic minded that they have a special bond with Man United. They base this theory on the fact that at one time United was owned by a Roman Catholic family, the Edwards, and that Matt Busby and Tommy Docherty and some of its other managers have been Catholics. Even Celtic’s best-known hooligan, John O’Kane, has swallowed this claptrap. In a recent newspaper interview he said that the Celtic mob had never had any problems with the Red Army or the Men in Black. It is of course shite. In fact it is shite on stilts. I have
spoken to many Red Army and they despise Celtic and the (very) large minority of their fans who belt out the Republican hate anthems.

All of this does not mean that the ICF, me included, did not enjoy taking on English firms. We did, and with as much relish as when we faced Aberdeen, Hibs or the Utility. We have always enjoyed going down south, rubbing every cunt’s nose in it, from Spurs in 1962 to Manchester in 2008. There is no doubt about it, taking on the English, especially in England, is a big fucking thrill, both in a football sense and as a hooligan. In fact one of my biggest disappointments as a young teenager was when my mum refused to let me go down to White Hart Lane for a pre-season friendly in 1986. I was gutted when my brother came back from London and told me they had it all day with Spurs, not to mention the shoplifting expeditions in Oxford Street.

So I am sorry to disappoint the conspiracy theorists. Rangers have always taken on English mobs. And we always will.

In fact it was a game against the Wearsiders that put the ICF right in the centre of the media spotlight. It was July 1993 and Rangers were supplying the opposition for Gary Bennett’s testimonial at the old Roker Park. The main body of ICF got a bus from the city centre, while I got a seat on a scarfers coach from Shettleston. I was excited to be going down there because I knew it would be tasty. My only problem was that I had had a heavy alcohol-and-ecstasy session the night before and was faced with the inevitable low. To combat it I had taken three Temazepam tabs and when they were mixed with the copious amounts of lager I managed to get through on the road to the north-east of England I was feeling even more aggressive than usual.

The ICF met up at twelve in a pub called Digby’s, where we stayed until late afternoon, before moving to a pub next to a shoe shop. The bar was down a flight of stairs and as we walked in we saw a group of local lads, clearly annoyed that their pub was being taken over. Those same lads would later portray themselves as angels. They weren’t.

The atmosphere grew more and more poisonous. Two locals in particular were giving it big licks, making all sorts of smart remarks about Scots. I could sense that something serious was about to go off and, when someone shouted ‘Orange bastards’, it did.

In a flash, two of the Sunderland boys got slashed across the cheeks. I didn’t see the slashings but I did chase some of the other loudmouths up the stairs and along the street, where we pelted them with shoes we had lifted from the neighbouring shop. At the time it didn’t seem that big a deal. Just one mob sticking it to another mob. Little did we know.

Realising that the cops would be on the way we left the area pretty quickly and mobbed up again, ready to walk to Roker Park. There were many more skirmishes on the way to the ground including a fight with Rangers scarfers, a fight that threatened to become very nasty indeed. It wasn’t just us. It seemed to be going off all over Sunderland.
The Sun
later printed a helpful ‘Timetable of Terror’, which gave the time and place of dozens of incidents, including a man being glassed, a robbery at bookie’s, a car being stolen, Rangers fans urinating in gardens and of course more fights than you could shake a stick at.

My only recollection of the game – I was behind the goals – is of a Sunderland fan running onto the playing surface and trying to get into our end. The funny cunt then whipped off his jacket to reveal a Celtic strip underneath. We were fucking raging and the cops had a real job on their hands to stop me, several other ICF and a large number of Rangers scarfers from getting onto the pitch and giving our uninvited visitor a right kicking.

The trip back up to Glasgow was uneventful but as we drove home a media storm of immense proportions was blowing up. The newspaper headlines said it all.

‘Rangers Night of Shame’

‘A Bloody Disgrace’

‘Thugs United’

‘Police Probe Gers Casuals’

‘Slash Probe Cops At Ibrox’

As usual the whole affair was shrouded in a fog of confusion. Some people, most notably the police, blamed Rangers hooligans from Scotland for the trouble. However, representatives of Rangers supporters groups claimed that casuals attached to English clubs, but wearing Rangers strips, were responsible. Rangers Football Club took a different tack, with David Murray aiming his guns at the press coverage, ‘It has been blown out of all proportion. I think the media caused this reaction . . . A few fans were arrested for being drunk and disorderly. That is not going mental.’

Even the police fell out about who should be blamed for the trouble. The top cop from the Criminal Intelligence Service, based in London, stated that ‘a 50-strong mob of supporters [from Scotland] with links to the ultra-right-wing British National Party caused most of the violence’. It was rubbish of course. Some of our guys may have voted for the BNP, and others may have sympathised with some of their views, but there was no formal link between us and the BNP or any other political party. The English cop then showed just how clueless he was by claiming that ‘police saw a vehicle with a flag sticking outside the window with ICF on it’ and that ‘ICF stood for Ibrox City Fan Club’. What a plonker. He obviously didn’t know that our firm is, like West Ham’s, called the Inter City Firm. Where he got ‘Ibrox City Fan Club’ from I will never know. Criminal Intelligence right enough!

The ludicrous claims by the English police that we are fascist sympathisers was given short shrift by the man responsible for policing at Ibrox, chief superintendent Lawrence McIntyre. He told the press that ‘I have no intelligence saying there is a Rangers group linked to the BNP. It might have been nice for people who are going to make comments like that to come to the man who polices every game at Ibrox.’

The furore refused to die down, with the focus now switching to the two boys who had been slashed. They were featured in many newspaper reports, and on television, with their slash marks clear for all to see. Pedro, one of our boys, saw this as a good chance to enhance our media profile. He contacted the
Daily Record
and arranged to meet their reporters in a Glasgow pub. During the meeting Pedro boasted about the trouble the ICF had caused all over Scotland and went to say that it had been ICF boys who had slashed the two Sunderland fans. The reporters persuaded him to hand over photos taken both inside and outside Digby’s, which they used in a front-page splash that also took up two pages inside the paper.

Yes, Pedro got publicity. But not the type you want. He and three other ICF, all brothers, were arrested and charged with the slashings. As far as the authorities were concerned it was all done with an eye to maximising the public-relations possibilities, with the police turning up at their homes complete with camera crews and batteries of press photographers to witness the arrests. That to me is trial by media and it makes a mockery of the justice system. The four guys then had to endure a few months of hassle in their private life and at work; in fact they all lost their jobs. The
only consolation was that when the trial finally came around they were all acquitted.

Sunderland put the ICF on the map. It shifted the focus away from Hibs and Aberdeen, the traditional bogeymen. It also taught us how easy it is for the media to fuck up your life.

They say that elephants never forget. Believe me even a pachyderm with total recall has nothing on a football hooligan with a grudge against another firm. When Sunderland came north in July 1999 to provide the opposition for Ian Ferguson’s testimonial they were still raging about what happened in 1993, six years before. We heard that they were looking for revenge and we were delighted.

It was a time when we were regrouping. The Scottish National Firm, to which many of us had been attached, had been disbanded and the boys from Rangers had returned to the ICF fold, hoping to build it up again as a fighting force. My involvement with the SNF helped. The publicity it created prompted boys to rejoin – being a casual was in vogue again – and we hoped that we would go from strength to strength.

Our main problem was getting a mob out early enough. It was a midweek game with an evening kickoff and as many of our boys lived outside of Glasgow it was difficult to get everyone there on time. So I was pleasantly surprised when I walked into our pub of choice – Dr Brown’s in Queen Street – and found a fair number already ensconced. By seven the group had swollen to fifty, of whom twenty-five, me included, went to Ibrox. The plan was that the other half would join us after the game to take on Sunderland, who, we had again been assured, were well up for it.

I was in the Broomloan for the game – which Rangers won 3–1 – directly above Sunderland’s scarfers and their mob. It looked promising; they had a tasty-looking crew out. We decided to leave at half time and go back to Doc Brown’s to get things organised. We were given the honour of a police escort out of the ground and, bizarrely, the Old Bill walked us right past the Sunderland fans on the bottom tier. I looked at the other ICF in disbelief. We thought it was a set-up, as no doubt did Sunderland, who were gobsmacked by the police tactics. We all thought the cops wanted us to have a go at Sunderland, at which point we would be arrested. I was only a few feet from their mob but the only action was of the verbal variety.