Graeme Souness signed a number of Englishmen during his reign as Glasgow Rangers manager, so many that five-a-side training games on Fridays could be split into England vs Scotland matches. Controversially, Souness would line up against his own country.
Souness did make his name in English football. Starting as an apprentice at Tottenham Hotspur in 1970 he failed to properly break through at White Hart Lane and signed for Middlesbrough for £30,000 two years later.
Playing almost 200 times for the Teesside club, he earned a high-profile move to Liverpool, winning five league titles, three European Cups and four League Cups. He went on to manage the club in the early 90s and won the FA Cup in charge of the club in 1990.
‘They could never beat us’
“Graeme used to play with England, which drove us mental,” recalls Ally McCoist, speaking to FourFourTwo. McCoist enjoyed some of the best seasons of his career under Souness with the manager using these cross-border games as a motivational tactic.
“They could never beat us, even though they had Terry Butcher, Chris Woods, Graham Roberts and Souness,” says McCoist. “We were beating them one Friday and taking the mickey – ‘Ole!’ and all that stuff. I could see Graeme slowly getting angrier and angrier.
‘Is that your best?’
“A pass went to Ian Durrant and Graeme smashed him. Durranty got up, put his foot on the ball and said, ‘Is that your best?’.
“Graeme said, ‘No, this is’ – bang! Then we were all into it, a proper free-for-all, a good old-fashioned scrap! Walter Smith was Graeme’s assistant, running about with a whistle going, ‘Beep! Beep!’
Back inside the dressing room, McCoist and his Rangers team-mates braced themselves, expecting the rarely shy and retiring Souness to read them their riot act.
“Graeme walked into the dressing room afterwards and we were thinking, ‘What’s he going to say? Fighting the day before a match, he’s going to be raging’. He said, ‘That’s exactly the spirit I’m looking for’. I’m sitting there with a big fillet steak over my eye, Durranty’s got an ice pack on his knee…”
The club won two league titles, plus three Scottish League Cups, during his spell of five years – four of which were as player-manager. His time at Ibrox was not without controversy.
He signed Mo Johnston from Celtic in 1989, with Rangers historically being a club supported by Protestants having, for most of the 20th century, a policy of refusing to sign Roman Catholics. In 2009, Souness said of his time as Rangers manager, “When I look back on my actions and antics at Ibrox I bordered on being out of order. I was obnoxious and difficult to deal with.”
Taking part in training was a staple of Souness’ managerial style, up until at least 2004 when he was involved in a bust up as manager of Blackburn with striker Dwight Yorke. At the time Souness told BBC Sport: “There was something, but these things happen on training grounds every week in football and you move on. You want your players to be competitive and we’ll speak about it.”
