Rangers and the Famous ICF: My Life With Scotland's Most-Feared Football Hooligan Gang (24 page)

We got lucky. When we got within a hundred yards of the station we saw them. Seventy Feyenoord, standing around the entrance to the Central hotel. Even though it was dark we could see they were all big, hard-looking lads, including two giants who were clearly of a South Pacific or Polynesian background. We quickly mobbed up and walked at a fast pace towards our Dutch visitors.

At first they didn’t spot us. It was only when we got to within fifty yards that the penny dropped. This was it. We had to take the initiative. ‘ICF, ICF’ we chanted as we charged. I expected, and hoped for, a severe test. It never materialised. Feyenoord turned tail and ran. Not one of us got to throw a punch. I was disappointed, given our previous experiences with Dutch hooligans. I can only put it down to the element of surprise. That and the fact that we were close to the top of our game in those years.

As the police sirens whined we made ourselves scarce, dividing once again into small groups. I was with Davie H and Neilly S and we kept in close contact with Carrick and Boris and the rest of the boys. I was sure Feyenoord would be pissed off at having been run and would be looking for revenge. I was right. While I was striding along Sauchiehall Street, talking away to Carrick on my mobile, my two pals and I walked right into sixty of Feyenoord’s finest. They ran across the street, surrounding us. We looked at them, they looked at us and then they made their decision. Instead of giving us a hiding they took the piss. I was given a couple of clips behind the ear. ‘Go away little Scotty boy,’ one of them said. There was nothing I could do. I had to stand there and take my medicine.

Fair play to them. They could have taken a right liberty and demolished us. It had been a lucky escape. I should have been relieved but my
blood was boiling. I had sleepwalked into the middle of a foreign mob in my home city. I was dying to fight them but there would have been no point. My night was over.

I didn’t go to the return leg in Rotterdam. Nor did the rest of the ICF. After what had happened in Eindhoven we were threatened with instant arrest if we set foot in the city. It turns out there was a lot of fighting between Rangers scarfers and Feyenoord’s mob, before and after the game. When I heard that I regretted my decision not to travel, as did the rest of the boys. Even though we would have been well outnumbered we would have given a good account of ourselves. We might even have avoided the clutches of the Dutch police.

The fans in Spain don’t have a tradition of organised football violence – they leave that to the police! In the spring of 2007 Rangers became the latest British club to suffer at the hands of Spanish cops. Not only did we get a battering from the riot police, but also when we got home the Scottish media were ready to give us another kicking. For once, however, we were innocents abroad.

The scenario was that Rangers had reached the last sixteen of the 2006/07 UEFA Cup and had drawn 1–1 with Osasuna in the first leg at Ibrox. About thirty ICF decided to make the trip to Spain, not really looking for FV, but first and foremost as fans. Like all bluenoses we were desperate for Rangers to reach the quarter finals of a European competition.

Osasuna play in Pamplona (the ancient and very beautiful capital of Navarre, which is in the north of Spain) and we flew out there, landing at an airport about sixty miles from the city. When we got to Pamplona we spent the day drinking and having a right good laugh. Some of the boys had fake 50-euro notes and were able successfully to pass them off in the local bars and shops, making the whole trip a hell of a lot cheaper. We ended up in a bar-cum-bowling-alley where one of the boys had a novel idea: he stripped naked and threw himself down one of the lanes. Of course the police were called but we were away by the time they got there. While the bulk of the Rangers support was transported to the ground in buses we walked, which gave us ample scope for more high jinks. In a cafe someone let off a fire extinguisher, covering everyone in thick white soot. Once again we left before the cops arrived.

During the game the ICF boys were in different parts of the ground, the reason being that Osasuna, in defiance of UEFA regulations, had sold tickets to anyone and everyone. Most of them were in a corner of the ground in the upper tier of a stand and across the stadium from the main body of Rangers fans. I was in a corner among the home support with a few more of the ICF. At first the Osasuna fans were amused by the vociferous support we were giving our team but when a couple of the boys hung up a huge Union Jack, with the letters ICF on it, the mood immediately darkened. Neither the home support nor the Spanish police liked that flag and both groups became openly hostile.

It was however the cops and not the Spanish supporters who got violent. The police waded into the ICF group at the other end of the stadium, lashing out indiscriminately with their batons as they went. Our boys were on the receiving end of sustained brutality and clearly in need of help and so at half-time our smaller group vacated its seats and went into the section where the trouble had kicked off. I was surprised that we were able to do that without being hindered by the stewards or the cops but the Spanish have their own way of doing things.

We joined up with the other group of ICF, who by this time were positioned in front of the main body of the Rangers support. They had been battling manfully with the cops, who with the usual heavy-handedness of the Spanish police were taking no prisoners. There were now two empty rows of seats at the front of the upper tier, simply because the fans had been pushed back by the riot squad. The atmosphere was very tense. I was having verbals with a cop in full body armour when I felt a dull thud. It turned out that one of his colleagues had hit me on the head with a steel baton. He wasn’t satisfied with that because he caught me with two more sickening blows, knocking me to the floor. Luckily for me one of our boys helped me to my feet or the cop might have come back for more.

‘I am going to throw you into the bottom tier of the stand,’ I raged at my assailant, but I don’t think he understood English as she is spoken in Glasgow.

There was then a ten-minute standoff after which the police charged us again. We held firm and even tried to snatch the batons out of their hands and after a few more scuffles an uneasy peace was restored.

Rangers lost 1–0, eliminating us from Europe, and at the end of the game the stadium announcer put on ‘Simply the Best’ by Tina Turner. His choice of music surprised me. It is of course a favourite of Rangers fans everywhere not only because it sums up how we feel about the club
but also because it gives us the opportunity to add some cheeky lines of our own. It later became clear to me why he had played our unofficial anthem. When the song reached the part where Rangers fans add the line ‘Fuck the Pope and the IRA’ it seemed to me that the volume from the PA system was turned down, making it easier to hear the little improvisation. That led to Rangers being fined £8,000 by UEFA for so-called discriminatory singing.

After the game the police again used their batons in a quite indiscriminate way, on both scarfers and ICF. We learnt they had done the same before the game. The buses carrying our fans had been penned into a car park and when they tried to get off the police had set about them for no reason at all, hitting even women and children with their batons. Eventually, after taking yet more whacks from the thugs in uniform, we reached our designated coach, which was to take us to the airport for a flight home that night. The airport terminal was bristling with cops – there were literally hundreds of them – and I felt sure round two was on the cards. But it turned out they just wanted us out of the country as quickly as possible.

The aftermath was fraught to say the least, hardly surprising given the scale of the disturbances. For once the Scottish media recognised that Rangers fans were the victims of brutality. Although they did of course take the ICF to task (of which more later) most papers were highly critical of the tactics use by the Spanish cops. The
Evening Times
described the police as ‘outrageous’; Jim Traynor in the
Daily Record
insisted that ‘the behaviour of those cops was savage and extremely dangerous’; while in
The Sun
Rangers captain Barry Ferguson (who was suspended for the game and watched from the stands) told the paper that ‘he feared for Rangers fans as he watched them being battered senseless by Spanish riot cops’.

Despite the overwhelming evidence about the conduct of the Spanish police the Scottish media just couldn’t help themselves. They picked up on the ICF banner at the game and made us out to be as bad as the cops. One reporter noted there were ‘banned thugs in Gers crowd’, another churned out phrases like ‘lunatic fringe’ while a third talked about ‘a calculated bid to cause mayhem’. All shite of course. We were reacting to extreme provocation. I believe that if the ICF had not been in the thick of it defending normal Rangers fans things would have been much worse. There might even have been some people coming home to Scotland in body bags.

If you think I am exaggerating just consider a document released by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the wake of the game. As several newspapers reported, the Foreign Office feared there would be mayhem at the game and had put in place emergency measures to deal with the injured and even the dead. The document states that ‘Injured British survivors to receive prompt, adequate medical attention. British fatalities to be identified formally and rapidly.’ The British government knew of course how shambolic the Spanish authorities were likely to be in terms of issues like ticketing and segregation and also that the police would adopt a zero-tolerance approach to Rangers fans.

That cut no ice with the Scottish papers, which sadly is par for the course where we are concerned. The resulting media stushie resulted in three ICF, including me, getting letters from Rangers, informing us that we were banned from Ibrox for life.

Astonishingly, it was my third lifetime ban.

The headlines said it all.

That was the reaction to what happened in Manchester after the UEFA Cup final between Rangers and Zenit St Petersburg on 14 May 2008. Rangers fans fought back in the face of brutal attacks by some police officers and a riot ensued in the city centre. It was without doubt the most sustained and vicious battle with the constabulary on British soil since the great Hampden riot of 1909.

The irony was that the ICF missed the party. We were too busy watching the football.

Given what happened after we lost to Zenit it is surprising that in our run to the final there was very little organised violence either at Ibrox or at our away games with the likes of Werder Bremen, Sporting Lisbon and Fiorentina. As soon as it was confirmed that we were going to the final we got straight on the blower to Man U to see if they were up for a dash. By this time however it was becoming clear that the city was going to be
swamped by Rangers fans from all over the world and so the Red Army and the Men in Black politely declined our kind invitation. We weren’t that bothered. After all it would be our first final for nearly forty years and another bonus was that we had emulated Celtic’s run to Seville in 2003. We were just happy to be at the centre of the football world.

With up to two hundred thousand Rangers supporters about to descend on Manchester the biggest problem was getting hold of a ticket. They were like the proverbial gold dust. Luckily, a mate of ours, Myles Sarward, runs a travel company in London and he got his hands on forty precious briefs. At £400 a pop they weren’t cheap but it was well worth it to see our team in a prestigious European final. Because of the historic nature of the occasion I decided to give tickets to family members and close friends who I knew were regular attendees at Rangers games, then to pass on any that were left to other ICF members. The other ICF leaders did the same, which shows that, despite what people may think, we are genuine football fans. I can assure you that trouble was the last thing on our mind.

We had booked into the Blackpool Hilton and by the time we arrived at the seaside town’s railway station it had become clear that Manchester was about to be swamped by the biggest away support in history, much bigger than the contingent of eighty thousand that Celtic took to Seville. There were many thousands of Rangers fans in Blackpool so what the fuck was Manchester going to be like?

As getting on a train would have been impossible we got a coach to Manchester, arriving there about 12.30 p.m. I would have said there were already a hundred thousand Rangers fans in the city centre, with more pouring in by the minute. It was obvious the infrastructure that had been put in place to deal with a gathering of that size was totally inadequate.

We found a pub in Deansgate and spent the day there drinking, where we met up with lads from mobs throughout the country, the main group being the Chelsea youth firm. There was only the occasional interruption by Glasgow and Manchester football-intelligence officers. They were keeping an eye on me and the other forty ICF in the city but they were probably reassured when they clocked the family members we had with us. They would also have been glad to learn we had match tickets and that football seemed to be our priority. Maybe they would have a quiet day after all.

There wasn’t any trouble during our drinking session, although we did hear that thirty Zenit skinheads had kicked it off in a nearby bar. We
weren’t tempted. It was all about the game and adding to our haul of trophies. We left the pub about two hours before kickoff and made our way to the City of Manchester stadium (as it then was). When we got there we discovered there was a problem. Our tickets were for the Zenit end and some of our party had already been knocked back by the stewards.