Rangers and the Famous ICF: My Life With Scotland's Most-Feared Football Hooligan Gang (25 page)

We improvised. We bought scarves from the Zenit supporters and pretended we were Russian. In the end, everyone got in but not before I had a run-in with a jobsworth steward. As I passed him he decided to question me.

‘Where are you from mate?’

I mumbled something that sounded vaguely Russian.

‘Look mate. I’m from Coatbridge,’ he replied.

‘And no doubt you’re a Celtic supporter as well,’ I thought, as he continued giving me the third degree.

‘It’s obvious you’re from Glasgow. I can’t let you in,’ Jobsworth concluded.

‘Well look mate. You’ll know the score. I’m from Shettleston in Glasgow and I paid £400 for my ticket. And if you’re not letting me in I’ll plant the nut on you and bite your ear off. Then I’d be getting the jail for something worthwhile.’

I have never seen someone’s demeanour change so quickly. He turned as white as a ghost and waved me through.

In the stadium, as more and more Zenit fans arrived, it became clear there might be a problem. Looks were exchanged, lines in the sand drawn. We quickly realised we would have to move if a full-scale riot was to be avoided. Normally, we would have been right in there but we didn’t want our dads and our other friends and relations involved in something like that. To my surprise, given that the game was a sell-out, we managed to squeeze into seats near to the halfway line and settled down to watch the most important game of our lives. It was a truly wonderful atmosphere, created almost entirely by the Rangers contingent, which made up around 80 per cent of the crowd. The hairs on the back of my neck stood to attention as the traditional songs and chants rang round the stadium. It could have been our finest hour since 1972.

Sadly, it wasn’t to be as the Rangers players, exhausted by their seventh game in twenty-one days, went down by two goals to nil. I still find it hard to talk about that game. Unlike Celtic fans, who, with their usual twisted logic have turned Seville into some kind of moral victory, I associate
Manchester 2008 with failure. It was the most disappointed I have ever felt after a Rangers defeat.

I left the ground utterly dejected and almost immediately I took a call from an ICF boy to say they had just chased Manchester riot cops all over the city centre. In the depths of despair I thought, ‘Thank fuck I am not involved. They will no doubt pin the blame on us [the ICF].’

We walked back into Manchester, heading for the same pub we had been drinking in before the game, but ended up instead in the Deansgate Hilton. The city centre resembled a war zone. The streets were littered with broken glass and empty cans and there were riot vans full of police speeding this way and that. Having used our keys from the Blackpool Hilton to get in to the Deansgate equivalent we drowned our sorrows in the bar. All the while I was taking calls from ICF boys telling me what happened that afternoon with the giant screens, the toilets and the over-crowding. Another message that came across loud and clear was how heavy handed the Manchester police had been in their dealings with Rangers fans, even those who had not been involved in the disturbances. To be honest my pals and I were so crushed at losing to Zenit that we couldn’t even think about getting involved. Apart from anything else the cops had things under control by that stage. After a couple of hours we got a taxi back to Blackpool.

My verdict on the debacle that was Manchester is quite simple. The city got what it deserved. Right from the word go the authorities made it clear that Rangers fans weren’t welcome. It was only when they realised that we would travel in unprecedented numbers that they got their act together and started to prepare. By then, however, it was a case of too little too late. I have been told that the giant screens were deliberately turned off and I believe it. Some people wanted to give the Rangers fans a good hiding and when they quite understandably expressed their disappointment about the loss of the pictures that gave the police the perfect justification for wading in. What the cops didn’t expect was that we would fight back, and fight back hard. I don’t condone everything our fans did in Manchester but if you go around whacking people with a metal baton what do you expect?

Although we played very little part in the fighting we still got most of the blame. I know for a fact that the first mugshots the police asked for were those of the ICF. Instead of looking at the piss-poor organisation and their own brutality to explain what went wrong they wanted a convenient scapegoat. I am afraid I have nothing but contempt for the city
of Manchester. It was bombed by the IRA but still welcomes Celtic fans. Yet it continues to treat us with contempt and has stopped Rangers from playing a couple of friendlies down there in recent years. I would of course not include Man City fans in this; to me they are sound, pro Loyalist and pro Rangers. It just goes to show that no place is all bad.

During the early-to-mid Nineties organised football violence went into decline, ravaged by football intelligence, the rave scene, acid house and old Father Time. Boys became men, got married and took on mortgages. The ICF wasn’t immune. By the middle of the decade our numbers had fallen sharply. Sometimes we were lucky if ten boys turned up, even for big games. Other mobs too were feeling the pinch, most notably the all-conquering Capital City Service, which hadn’t been helped by the long jail sentence handed down to its most prominent member, Andy Blance, in 1991.

Radical solutions were required if we were to keep the good ship football violence afloat. It meant thinking the unthinkable. And that’s what happened after Davie Carrick and one of the best-known faces from Hibs, James ‘Fat’ McLeod, got together on a night out. Between them they concocted the idea of a Scotland-wide mob, to be called, you’ve guessed it, the Scottish National Firm. Although it would mean joining up with our most implacable opponents, guys we had been fighting with for years, there was some logic to it. The ICF had lost many good boys, including stalwarts like Barry Johnstone and Harky, while Hibs too had seen a decline and had not been helped by a vicious power struggle between factions led by Blance, now released from jail, and Fat McLeod. It was also proposed that some boys from the Hearts Capital Service Firm would be invited to join.

I almost choked on my cornflakes when Davie told me about the proposed ‘super’ firm. I am Rangers through and through and the thought of boys from other mobs coming along with the ICF made me distinctly uneasy. Here we were, effectively disbanding the ICF and setting up a new mob with our sworn enemies. Gradually however, I came round to the
idea. It wasn’t as if we had that many alternatives and in addition working with other mobs also had a certain novelty value. So, after a lot of deliberation, I threw my lot in with the fledgling SNF. Some ICF objected strongly to the new organisation but only guys who weren’t that active and so we just ignored them. With the benefit of hindsight it turned out to be a master stroke from Davie and McLeod, because it kept the flame of hooliganism burning and eventually led to the renaissance of a new and more powerful ICF.

It was also through the auspices of the SNF that I got to know some of the most hardened thugs that Scotland has ever produced. Step forward the aforesaid ‘Fat’ McLeod. The big man was the most dedicated football hooligan I have ever met. He was a larger-than-life character, and I am not just talking about his twenty-stone bulk, a natural leader who completely dominated his faction of the Hibs mob. Starting off in Blackley’s Baby Crew, James graduated to the CCS, in which he became a leading light thanks in no small measure to his great organisational skills. It was clear from the first day I met him that football violence was the main driving force in his life. He was excitable and he came alive when he talked about hooliganism. In fact I would say he almost got a sexual thrill when he was discussing it: he would put his hands over his eyes, rub them and squeal like a pig as he discussed steaming in. I know that some of his former Hibs pals say he was never a true front liner but that is shite: I have seen him in action many times and he was game, of that there is no doubt.

Among many other fine thugs I was particularly impressed by Bobby T, a Hearts boy, who, ironically, hailed from the Hibs heartland of Leith. Bobby was reputedly one of the hardest men in Leith and people talked of his fighting abilities in reverential tones. Like Fat McLeod, Bobby had a big personality to match his prowess as a street fighter and for those reasons people willingly followed him. His brother too was a prominent member of the Hearts crew and he was another good recruit for the SNF. Another guy I should mention here is ‘English’ Steve, who despite a cockney accent and a boyhood supporting West Ham was another former Hibs boy. English Steve was another handy guy to have around; he is massive and I always thought he put the brick into brick shithouse. I am pleased to say that he now comes with the ICF.

*

The SNF’s first outing was to Aberdeen during season 1996/97, for which two minibuses were hired, one for the ICF members and the other for the CCS contingent. I was living in Cumbernauld at the time and so I was the last to be picked up. It was actually quite depressing. There were only nine of a bluenose persuasion on the bus and given that it was a Rangers fixture that was very disappointing. It showed how sharp our decline had been and that was pointed up even further when I saw there were more from Hibs than from the ICF. That saddened me because a club like Rangers should never be the junior partner in anything. I was also concerned because in total only twenty SNF were making the journey to Pittodrie, despite the undoubted calibre of those in the buses.

When we reached Dundee we decided to mix things up, with former CCS piling into our bus and some of our lads going into theirs. If we were stopped by a normal cop – football intelligence would have been a different matter – it might confuse them to hear Glasgow and Edinburgh accents in the same bus. There was another advantage. It helped us to get to know our new colleagues. Over a few beers and a couple of lines we got on like the proverbial house on fire, swapping stories of battles past and looking ahead to the violence to come. The Hearts and Hibs boys were like-minded individuals, and the only difference from us was their Edinburgh accent. The fact that I remembered fighting a few of them didn’t seem to be a problem and as the alcohol and the drugs worked their magic it seemed that the ‘unholy alliance’ might work after all.

But it all came to a shuddering halt. We got pulled over on the A90 between Arbroath and Stonehaven by traffic cops from Grampian police. It was a routine check on football fans, which was a fairly regular occurrence. Minutes later they were joined by a ginger-haired cunt, who I recognised as an officer in Grampian’s football-intelligence unit. He started to reel off our names, ‘Chugg, Carrick, McLeod, Trotter . . .’ before the penny dropped. Rangers and Hibs hooligans travelling together! He just couldn’t believe it. His face was a fucking picture.

‘What the fuck is this all about?’ he asked Fat McLeod.

Someone at the back of the bus shouted out, ‘What do you think we’re doing? We’re going to the match.’

‘I’m glad you think so,’ the cop replied.

We were marched off the bus one by one to be searched and checked for outstanding warrants on the police national computer. The Old Bill noted down our details, which were then recorded in FI files.

Perhaps naively we thought we would still be able to go to the game. I had a ticket, which I showed to the FI cop but it did no good. We were escorted out of the Grampian area with a police escort and even when we got out of their jurisdiction every exit on the motorway was blocked by a cop car. After the disappointment we needed a drink and we stopped off in Falkirk, where we visited a few pubs and clubs. I was still there drinking and snorting at one in the morning with the four boys who had not made their way back to either Glasgow or Edinburgh. Although our first expedition hadn’t been a success in FV terms it served one very useful purpose: it broke the ice between the different contingents. Next time we would be better.

Two of Scotland’s leading mobs took nothing to do with the SNF: Aberdeen and the Dundee Utility, and as far as we were concerned they were fair game. So when Aberdeen and Dundee United were drawn together in the League Cup semi final of 1997/98 we saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. The game was at Tynecastle and I travelled through to the capital with a group of fifteen ICF. We met the Edinburgh contingent on Broughton Road in an industrial estate, Fat McLeod, the brothers T and Warren B among them.

The Utility were our first target and we fully expected them to trap. They were normally reliable and they had given us a clear indication they were up for it. We left the pub in small numbers to avoid detection and went in search of the men from Dundee. It just didn’t happen. They were nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they had heard that the SNF was the crème de la crème and they just didn’t fancy it.

Plan B was quickly hatched. We made for the Wheatsheaf, well known as a Hearts pub. The plan was to plot up in there until after the game and to attack Aberdeen, who we knew had come down in a coach.
²³
At time up we left the Wheatsheaf and mingled with the thousands of Aberdeen fans who were streaming away from Tynecastle. We were planning to sneak up to the ASC bus and to take the cunts by surprise. With any luck they wouldn’t know what had hit them. It would have been our first major coup.

On the way however some of our boys just couldn’t help themselves. They laid into the Sheep scarfers, no doubt still angry with the many dirty tricks they had pulled over the years. Still, it was out of order. You don’t
attack the non-combatants; it is a liberty. But that was as nothing compared to what happened next, which must go down as the most shameful event in the short history of the Scottish National Firm.

There is no other way to describe what was done.

One of the SNF slashed a female Aberdeen fan across the back. I was disgusted, as were the other main faces. To attack a woman, never mind stabbing her, is beyond the pale. It was disgraceful and I am still ashamed of it to this day. It is little wonder the incident made headlines the next day.