Rangers and the Famous ICF: My Life With Scotland's Most-Feared Football Hooligan Gang (8 page)

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Although by the twenty-first century the golden days of the casuals had gone forever there was still huge potential for trouble any time we played Celtic. After one Old Firm game the ICF were drinking in the city centre when twenty of us decided to go to the Merchant City to look for them. Due to the number of police on the streets we got split up and I found myself in a group of five, made up of four Youth and me. I don’t know why but I had a sixth sense that we were going to come unstuck. We ended up in a pub in Trongate and we knew that the CSC had also been drinking in the area. So it was no great surprise that when we walked out there were twenty of them in front of us. Two of the Youth panicked and ran away. I had two bottles in my hand and I said to the two who were left, ‘No matter what happens I’m not running away.’

I knew one of the Celtic boys. I had helped him out in the past and now he was about to return the favour. He did his best to get me to leave quietly.

‘Sandy, just put down your bottles and walk away. We will let you off this time,’ he counselled.

I took his advice and calmly walked away, without panicking. I went into the pub that the two Rangers Youth had run into. I wasn’t going to leave them. Nobody owed them any favours and they would have been given a right doing if Celtic got a hold of them. In the end they bailed out the back door of the pub. Their mistake was to panic and run away. You should never do that.

That wasn’t my last encounter with Celtic. In 2005 after an Old Firm game the ICF were drinking in the Orange Lodge in Rutherglen, after which, funnily enough, we moved to a former Celtic boozer, which was then called The Edge. We had been on the phone to Celtic but as usual they were hiding in the pubs of the Gallowgate. First the Rangers Youth got in touch with them but no joy. Then I belled their top boy but he didn’t want to know either.

At eight o’clock I heard a commotion at the front door when a couple of the Youth lads left the building. When I went out to find out what the fuck was going on I saw that twenty Celtic were in a confrontation with our Youth. By this time all the main ICF boys were outside and they steamed into Celtic. I was fighting this fat lad when, all of a sudden, I was picking myself up off the pavement. I had no idea who, or what, had hit me. I tasted blood in my mouth and began to spit out bits of my teeth. I
saw five Celtic boys lying on the ground and it was then I realised that I had been knocked out, because the fight had moved on up the street.

‘Sandy, Sandy,’ someone was shouting.

I looked up and saw an old pal, Scooby, a Rangers fan from Haghill. He had been driving past and had seen me on the deck. Realising how bad I looked he drove me to the Royal infirmary. When I found out it would be several hours before I would be attended to I made a few phone calls to find out what exactly had happened. While I was told that several Celtic boys had been knocked out I didn’t find out what had happened to me until later. It turned out that one of the Rangers Youth had inadvertently hit me with a traffic cone while he was attacking the CSC. He denies it to this day even though I have reassured him there are no hard feelings.

I decided not to wait for treatment but to go home and lie down on my own bed. However, when I woke up I not only had a pain in my mouth but also on my neck and, to make matters worse, I had a blinding headache. I had recently (and temporarily) split up with my wife so a pal drove me to Monklands hospital. They were too busy to see me so on we went on to the accident-and-emergency unit at Stobhill.

I was seen pretty quickly at Stobhill and they took a precautionary X-ray, after which I was put in a neck brace and strapped to a trolley. I began to panic and asked the staff what was wrong. I was told there was a serious abnormality: an injury to one of my vertebrae, and that it might have moved. The worst-case scenario was that I might need a spinal operation, although they also said it could be an undiagnosed medical condition.

For the next three hours I went through hell. All sorts of thoughts swirled around in my head. What would the effect be on my kids, my employment prospects and my already fragile marriage? And all because of a fight after the football. As usual a drunk was abusing the nurses and I said to him, ‘If I could get up I’d fucking strangle you.’

I had another X-ray, after which I was made to do some exercises with my neck. They discovered I had a congenital vertebra defect, which had gone undetected. It wasn’t as bad as they thought and when the tests were completed I was discharged. I have never been so relieved in my life. As I made my way home I weighed up what had happened. It was another lesson about the hazards of being a hooligan and I couldn’t stop thinking about the effects that a serious injury could have on my sons. I also realised that one of the reasons for my temporary split with Kerry
was because of the football violence. Of course none of that put me off. I loved Rangers and I loved running with the ICF. Nothing was going to change that.

It is ironic that I was raised in the Gallowgate, which is without doubt the spiritual home of the Celtic support. Their shining city on a hill. It was always thronged with Celtic fans and Republican sympathisers before and after Old Firm games and was therefore a hard place for the ICF to go. Until that is one day, sometime in the mid-to-late Eighties, when we went there and fucking annihilated anyone who got in our way.

What follows is Mr Blue’s experience of that fateful day.

Looking back, going to Celtic Park was a weird situation in the 1980s. There are three main roads into Celtic Park from the city centre and Rangers, despite being the away team, dominated two of them. London Road was always a no-go for Celtic mainly because they would have to negotiate Bridgeton Cross, which was always a bridge too far due to Bridgeton being the predominant Rangers, Protestant and Loyalist area in Glasgow. Another entry point to the Piggery was through Duke Street, which has always been known as a Rangers area, however it wasn’t unusual to find Celtic fans wandering through en route to that dump, until of course the ICF came on the scene around 1983/84. For the rest of the Eighties, Duke Street became our domain, even on days when we weren’t playing at Parkhead. From 1983 until 1989 it was defended vigorously from many Celtic invasions. Quite often Celtic’s firm would ignore their opposition that day/night and try to get through Duke Street unscathed. It also wasn’t unusual for us to ignore our game in order to defend our ‘headquarters’. Being from Glasgow we looked down on everybody else in Scotland anyway and, to many of us, only Celtic mattered – so missing some games to get one over them wasn’t a problem.

Whilst holding superiority on the streets leading to Celtic Park was great for us we didn’t quite have what the military call ‘supremacy’. Generally speaking when Celtic came to Ibrox they had to scurry up back streets as we had total dominance on the roads from the city centre to Ibrox. Whether we were at home or away we ruled supreme on the streets of Glasgow . . . with one exception.

That fly in the ointment was known as the Gallowgate!

The Gallowgate is to Celtic what Bridgeton has always been, and Duke Street became, to Rangers. It was their base, their spiritual home. They were safe there. They couldn’t be touched there. Their firm were surrounded there by many active IRA men who in turn were surrounded by hundreds – which became thousands on match days – of IRA sympathisers who drank in the Gallowgate’s many Republican pubs. Take the murderers, terrorists, hard men, Celtic’s firm and throw in the odd nutter – it’s fair to say the Gallowgate was a pretty ferocious place for anyone of a bluenose persuasion.

To the east-end lads in the Rangers firm the Gallowgate was a bit of a bogeyman. Although there had been whispers about ‘taking it’, and even some half-hearted plans about how we would achieve that feat, it remained the untouchable green fortress on the hill.

The first Old Firm game of the season always brings a unique sense of anticipation. When early August comes around you are straining at the leash to get going. I made an early start that day, meeting Jinks and a few other lads on Duke Street. Although lads from Duke Street and elsewhere in the east end often made their own way directly to Celtic Park, having their own battles, we decided to head into town to have a drink in Minstrels, our pub of choice at the time. We got to Minstrels at half twelve and there was a decent seventy or eighty lads already in there. By two o’clock our numbers had grown to one hundred and fifty or so. ‘We better make a move,’ somebody said, to be met by the usual moans and groans: ‘Fuck off you, I’ve just got a pint in,’ and ‘I canny be arsed walking, you won’t find Celtic until after the game, I’m jumping in a taxi.’

About forty of us left, walked up onto Argyle Street and began the couple of miles walk to the Piggery. We came across small pockets of Celtic’s firm, who had been dispatched to keep a close eye on us. Then, somewhere on Argyle Street, it was said.

‘Mon go up that fuckin Gallowgate and do these cunts there.’ ‘Aye mon,’ another voice said ‘they are fucking shit.’

Those fateful words had been uttered. It had been said. Now it had been said many times before but this time it was seconded. Before long it was ‘thirded’ and we were off.

I looked around at the boys with us and realised it was far from our top firm. We had maybe seven or eight top-table lads and a collection of dependable, but by no means main lads, in which category, incidentally, I included myself at that time. As we approached Glasgow Cross it was time . . . time to decide. I was thinking ‘It’s one thing chasing off fifteen of them bastards here, and twenty
there, but this is the Gallowgate for fuck’s sake, they will have their main firm, backed up by a good few hundred others, who’d be delighted to murder us.’

Being 100 per cent honest I was half hoping we would choose the right-hand side of the Glasgow Cross fork and head for the safety of Bridgeton via London Road. That wasn’t because I was a shitbag – quite the contrary, I was beginning to make a decent name for myself in our firm – but because I wasn’t into suicide missions (this would change!) and this was a suicide mission and a half. As we approached the fork I knew we were heading left because after it had been said and backed up there was no fucking way we could do anything else.

‘Oh fuck,’ I thought. Again, being 100 per cent honest, it briefly crossed my mind to accidentally lose our lads in the crowd. ‘Fuck that, get a grip ya cunt,’ I was telling myself. As we got into the middle of Glasgow Cross our forty or so had became thirty: possibly one or two of the lads had the same concerns as me; possibly others had accidentally lost us; and possibly some had been carried away chasing the little pockets of Celtic we’d done. Whatever the reason our already small number of boys had been reduced by a quarter.

As we got closer to the Barras, where Celtic pubs are everywhere, all I could see was a sea of them in front, behind us, around us, everywhere. I felt it like I’d never felt it before. The fear, the dread, the expectation that we’d struggle like fuck. We were on the enemy’s doorstep; we were about to face the bogeyman with seriously depleted numbers. I fucking loved it.

As we got closer, Harky, Chugg and one or two others walked into the middle of the road and swaggered towards their main pub without a care in the world. That helped: being a relatively young lad I needed a display of confidence like that to reassure me. We got to within thirty yards of the front door, our pace quickening, when I saw John O’Kane, Celtic’s main lad, running down the middle of the road towards us. He had a few others behind him but it was impossible to work out how many due to the number of shoppers and scarfers who were thronging the street.

As O’Kane got closer I noticed he was carrying a pint with some lager still in it. He poured out the beer and bent down to smash the glass on the road, but as the glass broke, bang, Harky had put him on his arse. That alarmed the rest of the Tarriers, who seemed shocked to see us on the Gallowgate. By now they were hesitant. We weren’t. The shout went up ‘ICCCF ICCCF’ as we charged forward. By now Celtic were off, not just backing off, but fully turned and running past their pubs, through the Barras market. They were in full fucking panic mode. A few of the local loons came out of Baird’s and Norma Jean’s (as it then was) well tooled up. But we had the momentum, we were unstoppable and lads who’ve been part of a firm will know the feeling. The momentum was with us.

‘ICCCF, ICCCF.’

Hearing that chant as we obliterated the Gallowgate sent shivers down my spine. Then we heard that familiar sound. Sirens! As the police came flying down the Gallowgate we ran through the market and came out the other side at London Road, by which time, amidst the mayhem, our thirty had become fifteen.

‘Lets go back and do them again,’ somebody said.

‘Aye, mon, that was fucking brilliant.’

‘Walk down here and come out one hundred yards fae Baird’s and we’ll walk up again.’

I was buzzing like fuck and was delighted to carry on. In fact looking back I possibly even suggested it. Fuck knows, whatever the case, we were going back into the lion’s den. We cut through one of the side streets that run from London Road onto the Gallowgate. There was a tentative peek around the corner to check for the police. Nothing. Great, we were on again, and as we walked back towards their pubs it slowly dawned on me that before the last battle the actual road was a heaving mass of people, people we could blend in with. However, now it was us, just us, fifteen-handed!

As we got within ten yards of Baird’s they spotted us and this time they were tooled up to fuck. After a brief exchange they had us backing off, and, within seconds, I heard a commotion from behind. It was the other part of Celtic’s firm who we had chased off in dribs and drabs along Argyle Street. Fucking hell, we were in serious trouble now. Then, as we made for the safety of London Road, I heard the beautiful sound of sirens. Luckily, the market was still crammed full of shoppers – it takes more than a spot of football violence to stop a Glaswegian in search of a bargain – so we were able to blend in and get to safety, almost in one piece. By now there were only six in my group.