“Walter Smith storms down from the stands. He came down onto the touchline - he was pulling, he was pushing, he was organising. I think he had the Playstation remote out to make sure we were all in the right areas at the right times!”
Kenny Miller is in full flow. As memories go, this one remains up there, at the very top. And crystal clear, despite the fog of time. It’s 13 years to the very day, in fact, but Miller recalls that remarkable League Cup Final as if its unrelenting drama was played out yesterday.
In this week’s episode of the ‘Off the Record’ podcast, the former Rangers striker reveals how Smith’s managerial masterclass helped his side to glory over St Mirren, despite going down to nine men. And, then, how it broke his heart to tell the late great boss that his second stint at Ibrox had come to end as the club began to teeter on the brink of a catastrophic financial collapse.
Miller picks up the story back at Hampden. He’s staring disaster in the face after red cards for Kevin Thomson and Danny Wilson had threatened to shatter the club’s hopes of a potential treble.
He said: “Trust me, see when you’re down to nine men on that big Hampden field, it doesn’t matter who you are playing against, there’s a lot of space that you need to cover and work that you need to put in.
“So everybody was just grafting to try to keep the clean sheet. If we could have nicked a goal, great. But you are thinking, ‘Right OK, make sure they don’t score and if we get to penalties then at least we’ve got a chance!’.
“But sure enough, it gets to 85 minutes, and they probably over committed for the first time in the game. Maybe they thought it was a real opportunity for them to actually go and win it and not just protect a 0-0.
“I think wee [Craig] Dargo tried to do a step over on the edge of the box, Big Davie Weir read it, stepped forward and released Naisy and he was just allowed to run about 60 yards of the pitch, unchallenged. He never had to beat anybody or run away from anybody. He just kind of found his way forward to the corner of the box.
“Then, you could see me and Nacho - with everything we had - just trying to get into the box to score a goal. Naisy puts it right on the money, the pigeon then flies past the ball, throwing a dummy, and I head it into the bottom corner! That’s it, cup final won.
“I still remember the feeling of running and jumping the hoardings at Hampden, running to the gates and shaking the gates right in front of all the thousands of Rangers fans. I’ve watched the replays back a million times by the way!
"The camera actually pans to Walter and you see Walter going to header it as well! There’s no doubt that day showed - and probably typifies everything that club is about - at that time, with that team under that manager, we had to find a way to win. We had to find a way to do it.
“It was a cup final and there’s no coming back from that as Rangers are now experiencing. The league form since Michael [Beale] has come in has been sensational. But they lost that one game and there’s no coming back from that. It’s a cup gone.”
Nine months later it was Miller’s time to go. And that decision, to leave a financially stricken Rangers for Bursaspor, despite a blistering start to the season, haunts him to this day. It remains, in fact, the biggest single regret of his career.
He said: “We went to Australia for pre-season and we were sitting in an airport on the way back, one of the stopovers. The gaffer pulls me and he says, ‘You’re going into your last year. What are you thinking about signing a new deal?’. “I went, ‘Gaffer, f****** hell, it’s not even a question. Just put the deal on the table!’.
“He went, ‘Right, nae bother. What I’ll do is try to get you the same deal for another couple of seasons,’. So time went by and that season I got off to a flyer. I think I had ten league goals in the first six games. I had 22 goals before Christmas.
“About October time the gaffer came to me and said he’d got me the same deal, same terms, same everything for another couple of seasons. The contract came through to my agent and, yep, everything is the same.
"I’m talking to my agent and he’s saying, ‘Do we sign it, obviously you’re flying right now and there is a lot of interest already,’. I said, ‘Look, I want to sign it but what I do know is that there are players who have got better terms,’.
"He said, ‘Well why don’t I just go back and try to get better terms?’. “But that never happened because the same afternoon the contract came through it got taken off the table.
“I think, without knowing, it was like they kind of knew what was going on and it was maybe the start of the decline. Maybe they couldn’t offer a 31-year-old that type of contract over that length.
“There was no negotiating. It never even got that far. I’ll be honest with you, I probably would have just signed it because why would I want to leave? I was going to get 40 goals that season, we won the league, we won the cup again.
“So that’s a regret. But I was 31, you never know what’s going to happen with injuries and there were a lot of things on the table. I was supposed to sign for Fiorentina but it fell through on the day I was supposed to be flying.
“Big Alex [McLeish] gave me an opportunity of going down to Birmingham but I had to phone him to say, ‘Look gaffer, I’m not going to come,’. He went, ‘Well, Florence is a lovely place!’.
“I really thought Italy would have suited my style of play but it fell through and mentally I had decided I was going to leave. We had a game that night, was it maybe Inverness at Ibrox? I sat in the boardroom upstairs, just me and the gaffer and he went, ‘That’s it? You’re sure?’.
“I said, after the whole contract thing, I thought it was probably best I go now. We shook hands and had a wee cuddle. I left the stadium that night with a tear in my eye because I knew I didn’t want to do it. I knew I was probably going to regret it.
“And sure enough, probably within two months, I was on the phone to Super Ally because he was going to be the gaffer next year saying, ‘Look, do you want to take me back in the summer?’.”
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