Interview: Alex Cleland still on Cloud 9

Alex Cleland at work in his assistant coaching role at St Johnstone. Picture: SNS.

Yes, you read it right – Alex not Alec, which is how Wikipedia wrongly spells his name. Most match reports made the same mistake and doubtless most kids’ player cards, if indeed such souvenirs were produced for the most unsung member of the famed record-equalling side.

Didn’t he ever point out the error? “I did at first but then I just gave up,” he says. “Folk also think I’m Clelland with two ls in the middle. It’s funny but I’ve kind of been correcting people all my life … ”

Most unsung and very nearly the most played. Only Der Hammer, Jorg Albertz, turned out more often than Cleland in 1996-97 and his 45 appearances top Gough, Goram and Gazza and all the rest. He is immensely proud of this but even now still wonders how he ever became a Ranger.

We meet in Bridge of Allan on Cleland’s day off from assistant-coaching duties at St Johnstone. Normally he’d be on his bike – he has three – cycling the roads between here, his home in Dunblane, and Perth but I’ve managed to detain the 48-year-old father-of-two long enough to talk over a coffee about the magic number.

Like everyone else in Scottish football, Cleland is required to watch while the Old Firm engage in one of their occasional games of nine-card brag. There is this nagging feeling already this season that the rest of us don’t really matter; it’s all about the nine-chasers and the nine-nixers. But at least Cleland, signed by Walter Smith as the Ibrox club tried and eventually succeeded in matching the nine league titles won by Jock Stein’s Celtic, can supply some insight into what it’s like to be involved in this desperate  struggle.

“It wasn’t really desperate,” he says. “Not at the start, anyway. When we began the season we didn’t think: ‘This is the big one, we’ve got to get to nine’. There were no rousing speeches from Walter, Archie [Knox, assistant manager] or the chairman [David Murray]. No one beat a big drum and said it was do or die. At least not until we went along to the supporters’ clubs!

“That was where the pressure came from. I don’t think there can be an intensity like that which you’d find in one half of the Old Firm when they’re trying to stop the  other half or better what they’ve done.

“Folk say the hype surrounding both clubs is greater now and perhaps that’s true,” he continues.

The Old Firm rivalry is often about cutting off one’s neb to spite one’s coupon – does he think denying Celtic this time almost matters more to the Govan faithful than anything their club achieved in the past? “I don’t know, but in ’96-’97 the Rangers fans were saying to us: ‘We need to win this title’. In fact, do you know, they were already talking about ten. They were saying how good it would be to go one better than Celtic, before we’d even begun on nine.”

Glasgow-born Cleland contrasts the pressure on Rangers with that affecting St Johnstone. “Every year the league gets harder and harder,” he says, and Saints’ opening-day hammering by Celtic suggests this will be a long, gruelling season for the Perth club, tipped by some to finally topple out of the top flight. “The pressure for St Johnstone is always to stay in the league and finish in the top six. We’re a fine wee club who’ve worked wonders in recent times and are doing all we can to continue that.”

So what pressure did Cleland feel, arriving at Rangers in 1995 after seven years at Dundee United, and finding himself in a star-studded dressing room? “A lot,” he says. “And I still ask myself: ‘How did I sign for Rangers? How did the move happen?’ It seems astonishing.”

Not that astonishing. From Jim Baxter through to Alex Ferguson, Rangers have always been more than intrigued by players who have contrived eye-catching performances against them. For Cleland that was the 1994 Scottish Cup final. “I was a young boy who got his first-team chance at United at 17. As an S-form I played in warm-up games at Tannadice on those great European nights of the 1980s. There had been a lot of brilliant players at the club, and better teams than the one which won the cup. But I had a very good game that day, even though I say so myself, and possibly that was what persuaded Rangers to come for me.”

Now he’s laughing: “Two of us, me and Gary Bollan, were told by Jim McLean he’d be picking us up right after training and driving us through to Glasgow for ‘signing talks’. But he didn’t tell us which club. This could have been Clyde or Partick Thistle or maybe some amateur mob. When we drew up outside Ibrox I was pretty pleased. I’d supported Rangers as a boy. I didn’t really know Walter, he’d left United before I’d come through. Me and Gary were told: ‘Here’s your contracts – they’re non-negotiable’.”

Before we concentrate on Rangers, I ask for a favourite Wee Jim story. “Maybe it would have to be his little disagreement with some of the South American boys he signed. Victor Ferreyra was one of them and he was actually pretty good but Jim got frustrated with the others and this day he was doing his dinger but they didn’t speak English and couldn’t understand him. Jim was getting redder and redder and eventually these guys just sloped off to the physio’s room. Now, no one walked out on a McLean team-talk and he marched right after them and shut the door. There was a lot of shouting and swearing and tables and chairs flew. But I owe Jim a lot. I can still see him jumping out of his dugout, banging on the glass and shouting: ‘Cleland! Cleland!’ He drove me on.”

At Ibrox, Bollan suffered a bad injury and struggled to make an impact. Cleland had an advantage over his pal in that he wasn’t having to dislodge David Robertson, Rangers’ redoubtable left-back, and more recently the sweary star of the Real Kashmir FC documentary. “That was great telly, but I couldn’t believe it was Davie. He used to be so quiet!”

Even without a film made about him, Cleland’s time as a Ranger, before he moved on to Everton and had his career curtailed by injury, is not so well documented. At times like these, therefore, fan websites are invaluable, an alternative to Wisden that you might call Wizened, and indeed The Bears’ Den once posed the question: “Was Alec [sic] Cleland any good?”

“Kind of a more talented Kirk Broadfoot,” was the critique of one member of the Copland Road cognoscenti but another, harder to please, opined: “A poor man’s Stuart Munro.” The  verdicts included “Very steady” and “Never let us down but … ” and possibly the ultimate Scottish approbation: “No’ bad”.

Cleland chuckles at all of this. “The supporters were definitely hard to please and demanding, but I knew they would be. There had been this procession of big names from England and abroad and suddenly these two boys from Dundee United turn up. That might have been underwhelming for them!

“Honestly, you couldn’t move for superstars: Laudrup, Gazza, [Mark] Hateley, [Alexei] Mikhailichenko, Basile Boli. Then there were the Scotland internationals: Gough, Goram, [Ally] McCoist, [Stuart] McCall. I was bound to ask myself: ‘What am I doing here?’ And wonder: ‘Am I up to this?’

“I don’t really mind if the opinion of the fans is simply that I ‘did a job’ because I knew my limitations. That job was to get hold of the ball, nothing fancy, and to give it to the Gazzas and the Laudrups, then make runs up the wing so they could play their football.

“Folk still say to me, ‘You had it easy at Rangers’ because there were so many talented players round about me. Well, there was still pressure. That would happen at any time pulling on that shirt and it certainly came when the team were chasing seven, eight then nine championships. But of course a guy like Laudrup was the ultimate out-ball. If you kept up a steady supply he’d stay on your wing but if he wasn’t getting enough he’d drift over to Davie Robertson’s side and then I’d be like: ‘Who can I give the ball to?’ ”

The fansite espouses the theory that No 2 Knox had it in for our man. Cleland begs to differ, though admits his teachings could be severe and so could those of the captain. “Goughie used to shout and shout and shout at me all the time during games. I did wonder: was he picking on me? But, looking back, that continual bombardment – ‘Over there … right, left … do it better’ – was because we were getting closer to nine-in-a-row. He knew what that meant to the club.”

I request a favourite Gazza tale and he recalls the time the clown prince of Ibrox nicked his suit. “I came back from training and everything was gone, shirt, shoes, even my pants. I knew it was Gazza because a particularly manky tracksuit was on my peg – the backside was hanging out of it. I found him in the foyer of our hotel dressed as me, everything bursting at the seams. Great player and a great laugh which was brilliant for the camaraderie of the team. Every day was a stand-up comedy show for Gazza.”

McCoist ran him close in the funster stakes and it was Super Ally who christened Cleland Freddie van de Foreheaden. “Every day heading off to training we had to wait for Ally who was always late. ‘Of course you were going to hang back for me’, he’d say, ‘because I’m guaranteeing you 35 goals a season’. And do you know, that journey was made by minibus. To cricket grounds and such places. That was the lot of the nine-in-a-row team.

“I smile if the modern footballer complains about his training facilities when these state-of-the-art centres are everywhere now. We used to pile off the minibus and put up the nets ourselves. I mean, not all of us. The likes of Gazza and Laudrup were excused having to pick up mallets and pegs!”

Cleland may have found that such basic tools fitted easier in his hand but in a coaching career which took him to East Stirlingshire and Livingston before McDiarmid Park he has delighted in regaling young players with the story of the hat-trick he scored at Pittodrie. “ ‘Aye right!’ is their usual response. ‘Right foot, left foot, header’, I’ll say. Okay, so it wasn’t against Aberdeen but Keith… ”

In 1996, the Highland League club used the Dons’ ground to host a Scottish Cup tie against the Gers and were walloped 10-1. Small consolation for Cleland, who three months previously in the Champions League had been nutmegged most extravagantly by Juventus’ Alessandro Del Piero.

“I’ve never managed to live that down,” he groans. “Folk will say: ‘It must have been great playing for Rangers in the nine-in-a-row era, winning the Scottish Cup and the League Cup as well in 150-odd appearances… but what about that nutmeg?’ Listen, it was a wonderful piece of skill, although Archie’s reaction was: ‘Ach, you got beat far too easy’. I’m afraid the red mist descended after that and I got sent off for kicking Del Piero. Jimmy Bell, our old kitman, tried to console me in the dressing room. ‘You need to get over it,’ he said, but he doesn’t let me. Every time I go back to Ibrox he teases me about the nutmeg. And at St Johnstone the guys still try to re-enact it. This has got to stop!”

Cleland’s “no’ bad” rating is improved when supporters recall a goal he scored in a 2-0 victory over Celtic at Parkhead in 1995. From an Oleg Salenko cross he caught the ball right on the Foreheaden. One subscriber to The Bears’ Den reports that Cleland was spotted later that night in a Coatbridge nightclub, name of Universe. “Perfectly true,” he says. “That goal had to be celebrated.”

He loved Old Firm games, terrific contests where Rangers would sometimes be battered by “fantastic” Celtic sides, then clinch them on the breakaway. And although the ninth title would be achieved with a victory at first club Dundee United, it was Rangers’ 100 per cent record of four victories in the fixture with the Celts which proved crucial. “After the final whistle at Tannadice there was huge emotion and when we got back to Glasgow there was even a wee parade, a lap of George Square.”

Such celebrations are rare in the city, of course, proof of the demented nature of the rivalry, the struggle for supremacy and the race to win to the power of ten. So what happened to his Rangers’ bid for ten-in-a-row? “I don’t think we had a bad season, it’s just that Celtic were better. Mind you, there are some who maintain it was fixed, that neither of the Old Firm would be allowed to ever get to ten.”

In the interests of public safety? Under a bylaw sneaked through “any other business” at a closed meeting of the city council’s general purposes sub-committee? An Old Firm conspiracy? Who’s ever heard of such a thing?