KEVIN MUSCAT once joked he would never forgive Alex McLeish for not playing him in an Old Firm match, but his former manager at Rangers is at least attempting to make amends all these years later by talking the Australian up for his old gig at Ibrox.
The story goes that McLeish didn’t trust the famously fiery Aussie to not allow his temper to get the better of him in such a high pressure game, though that isn’t how the man himself recalls it.
“I don’t know - maybe it was just coincidental!” McLeish said.
“It just seemed to be that when those games came around that year, I had other players in mind to start.
“It wasn’t something like I was consciously going out with a decision that I was never going to play him against Celtic.
“But he was a good character about the dressing room. He let his voice be known and that’s possibly where you could see him moving into management and coaching in future.
“He was a captain-type person in the dressing room and I’ve nothing but good things to say about Kevin.
“Of course [there were times when you had to rein in his temper]. You have to manage your anger levels and not react at a club like Rangers.
“But he was a big rough Aussie, that was the type of character he was.”
The other half of Glasgow hasn’t long bid adieu to another big Aussie, of course, with Celtic’s loss of Ange Postecoglou so far looking to be very much Tottenham Hotspur’s gain.
McLeish believes that the apprenticeship Muscat has served under Postecoglou, and the fact he has so clearly adhered to the same footballing principles since succeeding him at Yokohama F. Marinos, would make him an intriguing appointment.
“Kev was a great lad,” he said.
“We’ve kept in touch down the years since our time at Rangers but I haven’t spoken to him recently about these links with the Rangers’ managers job.
“He’s obviously de rigueur because of his links with a certain Ange Postecoglou. Ange has done extremely well, and it seems like Australian coaches are now pretty popular.
“Postecoglou came in won’t have known much about Scottish football. I had a friend who I grew up with in my early days at Aberdeen called Dougie Brown. He played with Ange in Australia and told me he was successful with every team he’d coached and had made them better.
“Kevin has served a bit of an apprenticeship under Ange as well as a stint in Belgium. I was in touch with him during that period, but is he now ready for the Rangers job? Who is?
“I got a call from David Murray all those years back and I felt I was absolutely ready. I had so much energy at that time.
“I felt I could really work with those players Dick Advocaat was leaving me - all those world-class players!”
With the greatest of respect to the current crop of players at Ibrox, that is a label which certainly cannot be attached to them. And McLeish has been just as underwhelmed by Michael Beale’s summer signings as the Rangers supporters have.
“It doesn’t look as if recruitment has worked,” he said.
“Postecoglou brought in a formula [at Celtic] but he had quick players. He signed players who could burst through the backline and, soon enough, you could see what he wanted to do.
“If you compare Rangers’ recruitment to Celtic’s recruitment, it’s not been at the same level. The dynamism isn’t there.
“Looking at the Old Firm game, for example, you have two rookie Celtic players in central defence. I think even Brendan (Rodgers) alluded to that.
“Rangers didn’t lay a glove on them. Imagine what (Ally) McCoist and (Mark) Hateley would have done, or (Ronald) De Boer and Mikey Mols, or big Dado (Prso). These guys would have sniffed it out in a moment and prepared them for that.
“You soon realise that the biggest task in football is recruitment and if you don’t get that right it causes big problems for you as a manager.”
Where there are similarities though between the job the next Rangers manager faces – whoever that may be – and the one that McLeish walked into, is in the task of lifting the morale of a squad who are at a low ebb.
Inheriting an insurmountable deficit to Celtic in the league when he was appointed in December of 2001, he did however drag his men up by the bootlaces to win a cup double, before following that up with a treble the following season.
So, one of the first things that McLeish believes the new Rangers manager has to do is put an arm around the likes of Cyriel Dessers and Sam Lammers to see if they are capable of playing at a level commensurate with the club they now represent.
“He has to find a way to lift the confidence levels,” he said.
“Rangers is a difficult job, and you have to get the players to believe that they are up to the job.
“From what we’ve seen so far, the new players haven’t shown that yet. When you come to a club like Rangers, you’ve got to hit the ground running.
“For me, [it] was a man-management job. Dick (Advocaat) said to me: ‘Alex, it’s your turn. I’m tired. They don’t listen to me anymore.’ “He was very honest. He said I was the new kid on the block, and I was – I was bursting with energy.
“The raw material was there, so it was about man-managing the players. I couldn’t go to Ronald De Boer or Barry Ferguson and tell them to play like this or that. It was about making sure they could express themselves and play to their best levels.
"Of course, that was one of Sir Alex Ferguson’s great traits throughout his whole career. He was able to raise the players’ confidence.
“If there’s not the cash there for recruitment…it’s easy to say change the whole team, but it’s a fortune to do that nowadays.
“His job would be whether he could get the best out of these guys who have been identified through data or whatever.
“It would be one of his tasks for him to get what we were supposed to see from them – to the levels Rangers.”
Alex McLeish was promoting Viaplay’s live and exclusive coverage of Spain v Scotland. Viaplay is available to stream from viaplay.com or via your TV provider on Sky, Virgin TV and Amazon Prime as an add-on subscription.
