Kevin McKenna: Why I still care about Celtic v Rangers so bloody much

My first Celtic v Rangers game was the iconic 4-2 victory on May 22 1979 when the Ten Men Won the League. My second was a 1-1 draw at Ibrox made memorable only by Bobby Lennox’s goal, his last ever against Rangers 14 years after his first. 

And then the 1980 Hampden Riot cup final and George McCluskey’s extra-time winner when he re-directed Danny McGrain’s shot. Me and my friends, Gary and Jim, are being held back by a senior member of our bus to prevent us from jumping the fence onto the park to join the, er, ‘proceedings’. 

Indeed, the memories of my first seven Celtic v Rangers games – and the circumstances surrounding them - are just as fresh and sharp as those from last month’s League Cup final win. I’m not really sure why. 

I thought then that I could never get enough of these games. For a few days afterwards a victory against Rangers would help you through any challenges you might have been encountering elsewhere in your life. It sort of put them into perspective… except that it didn’t really. Rather, it drove everything else out of their proper perspective. Stuff that should have mattered seemed to matter less. 

And then I encountered my first defeat against Rangers, a 2-1 loss at Parkhead at the start of the 1980-81 season. That was the one where Murdo Macleod had a wonderful goal ruled out by a phantom infringement visible only to the linesman before Rangers scored a last-minute winner. 

Afterwards, I had to break the news to my parents that their eldest son wouldn’t be continuing his studies to become a priest on account of being informed by the Father Superior that “perhaps Jesus wants you to toil in another part of His vineyard”.

I could have chosen a better moment to tell them (my mum especially) that they’d just have to settle for plain old Kevin and not Father Kevin.  

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That game, incidentally, was the precursor to Billy McNeill “inviting Gerry McNee outside” to discuss the offside decision further. Celtic were en-route to play Politechnica Timisoara in the European Cup-Winners' Cup and the famously irascible football writer had apparently disagreed with big Billy at the airport that the linesman had got it wrong. 

And then there was the misery of a 3-0 defeat at Ibrox. And you wondered how you would deal with the next few days. Could you maybe take a couple of days' leave; throw a sickie; invent a maiden auntie’s funeral? 

But this was the advent of Charlie Nicholas. A few months later Champagne Charlie was scoring two in a 3-1 win at Parkhead, the one where big Roy Aitken clinched it by playing a one-two off Colin Jackson, burying it behind Peter McCloy and then running towards the front of the main stand with his fist in the air as the Rangers fans (who had a portion of those seats back then) gave him abuse. 

I’d just started university that year and met an American student from New York who was keen to attend this game he’d heard so much about. His name was Chuck and he smoked Winston’s cigarettes which he shook out of a red soft-pack. Chuck was a baseball fan and mad for the Yankees. I took him to the old Jungle and, I swear to God, when Charlie scored his second goal the jubilation was lifting smaller people clean off the ground. 

When I turned to hug big Chuck he was crying like a little child, simply overcome by the madness around him and unable to process it. He said later he’d never encountered anything like it and we had to seek out a pub immediately afterwards – the Old Barns, I think, in the Barras - where only after he had downed four whiskies did he feel able to talk about what he had just witnessed.    

Less than three months later, there was Charlie Nic again to score in a 1-0 win at Ibrox which more or less wrapped up the title. I still remember Charlie’s goal – not unlike his second at Parkhead in February and his League Cup final goal against Rangers the following year – hitting the ball early when everyone else was expecting him to take another touch. 

I remember too that Celtic had to play Dundee United at Tannadice four days later to make it all official. They did so with a thrilling 3-2 win and afterwards another iconic moment: that picture of Tommy Burns and McGrain and Macleod and the rest celebrating on the park.    

It was better than a drug but maybe just as ruinous. How many wrong decisions are taken in the days after a win against Rangers because you simply didn’t care as much as you ought to have?

“M’lud, the defendant was under the influence of a win against Rangers at the weekend and didn’t see the car pulling out in front of him.” 

I once spent five hours in a pub following our 3-0 win against Rangers at Ibrox in 2001 – the Lubo Moravcik game – and didn’t touch a drop of alcohol as I was starting work early the next day.

Normally, at those times when you’re the designated teetotaller, just one hour in a tavern makes you fidgety and depressed. But on that occasion Lubo’s double lasted the whole night and just kept on replenishing itself. 

At some point, maybe 25 years or so ago, I wondered if I’d ever grow out of this madness. I mean every other season Celtic seem to play Rangers five times when you add in the cups. By now, you’ve got those responsibilities that go with being an adult: a wife, children, mortgage; trying to make it in the treacherous and slippery world of newspapers. And you wonder why you still care so much about this game. But then you just surrender yourself to it. 

Others who’ve never experienced life inside this fever which connects us with Rangers supporters will loftily try to disparage it and ascribe base instincts to it. That having such passion and commitment must be indicative of those unhealthy social and cultural currents that run beneath it.

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They declare that it’s not healthy and shouldn’t be part of modern, enlightened ‘progressive’ Scotland. But they all have their own passions and psychoses too, some of which adversely affect the running of our country and the welfare of those communities from which most Celtic and Rangers supporters were reared. So I’m not having any of their supercilious and bogus hand-wringing.  

I remember too, after the 5-0 win in 2018, I popped into a perjink Glasgow wine bar to process the achievement on my own before the real revelry that would unfold later.

There I met an old friend, a Rangers supporter, who was seeking a similar escape but for entirely different reasons. You do that thing where you’re trying hard to rein in your euphoria and telling him lies like maybe the scoreline was generous to us or that once they got a new manager in there were enough good players for him to rebuild. 

Just then, Ally McCoist walks past. He’s off to some sportsman’s dinner and so I beckon him over and tell him that Jim here (who worships him) is suffering. And so Ally spends a good half-hour with us, feeling my friend’s pain and helping him come to terms with it by recalling some of the 15 goals the wee weapon scored against us. Say what you like about Ally but I like him and never more so than in those moments. 

So now, here we are again at the beginning of an agonisingly exquisite three-game cycle against Rangers: Parkhead, Hampden, Ibrox.

I’ll settle for two wins out of three, so long as one of the two is the cup semi-final. But I know that come the third one in Govan – even if Celtic have won the first two – victory will be just as important. Just as it was in 2004 when Chris Sutton’s last-minute belter, weeks after the title had been won, rounded off the green and whitewash. 

My Hibs-supporting friend Simon once asked me what it felt like during and after these games. I remember telling him that, though I’d seen Celtic win much more often against Rangers than not, it was still a cross to bear. And I think this mad Hibee got it… kind of.