Archie MacGregor salutes a long overdue win for St Johnstone
Twenty-six and three-quarters years of hurt. Doesn’t exactly roll poetically off the tongue, does it? But then again, we St Johnstone supporters don’t sing much anyway in the sanitized confines of McDiarmid Park, where the noise levels often barely exceed those of the nearby crematorium. Besides, to have finally beaten our jinx team – Glasgow Rangers, no less – after all this time left many of us in a state of shock just a couple of stops short of stunned silence.
Forget Souness, Walter Smith, or David Murray: over the last quarter of a century through a mixture of ineptitude, rank misfortune and woeful capitulations, few have done more to elevate Rangers to that hallowed sanctum of greatness occupied only by themselves and, ahem, Dynamo Berlin. St Johnstone’s donations of nine to 12 points per season have delivered several championships, and a pairing with us in the cup has usually been as good as a bye with shooting practice thrown in. No other team has been as obliging to the Ibrox cause, unless you include Celtic.
Ironically, the precursor to this long sequence of charitable deeds had been a euphoric double over the gruesome ’Gers during 1970-71, in the long lost days when Scottish clubs did sensible things like only playing each other twice a season.
From them on we didn’t just get beaten by Rangers almost every time our paths crossed. Just leaf through Rothmans and you’ll find a litany of calamitous gubbings – 5-0, 5-1, 6-3, 6-0 – resembling the sort of marks usually earned by British entrants in international figure skating competitions.
If one were looking for excuses, the old disparity in resources argument could be trotted out with some justification. These things are relative as well – it’s not as if Albion Rovers or Cowdenbeath can bask in the glory of having handed out regular thrashings to Rangers over the last 50 years. Yet for all that, we could only look on with a mixture of admiration and jealousy as clubs who were hardly rolling the corporate millions themselves forgot about the myths, got stuck in and had the Ibrox hordes chucking their scarves on the running track. Hamilton and Dunfermline enjoyed memorable cup wins, Partick once recorded a fine 3-0 victory in the League, while in his short spell in charge of Kilmarnock, Tommy Burns’s success rate against his life-long foes was way ahead of what he was ever to achieve as manager of Celtic. Then there’s Motherwell who, whether in their short-lived mutation into Scotland’s standard bearers in Europe (ie once losing only 1-0 to Borussia Dortmund), or their more traditional role of perennial relegation strugglers, seem to have had the capacity to give the Govan mob a good going over almost at will.
Inevitably there was the odd occasion when the Saints came close to emulating such bravura, most notably in Scottish Cup ties in 1981 and 1989 while we were taking one of our breaks from assisting Rangers’ championship aspirations through finding ourselves in the First Division.
But if there was ever going to be a season when we finally beat the curse it probably had to be 98-99. This, after all, was the campaign in which Rangers gave the impression they could be beaten by just about anybody, as just about everybody has proved. Still, our long-awaited 2-0 victory on January 31st represented a handsome cuffing (our only League win by more than a single goal all season, natch). Celebrations, we’ve had a few.
Faithful to type,we immediately scurried back into the comfort zone and failed to win again for the best part of two months. If any measure were required of how precipitous our decline was to become, it was provided several weeks later when we went down to a tame defeat against a side who had become synonymous with mediocrity and were destined to finish the season as also-rans. Yep, that’s right, we lost 2-1 at Ibrox. Can’t wait for the next quarter century.
From WSC 139 September 1998. What was happening this month