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Guide to Ibrox
A visit to Ibrox to see your team receive a whupping need not be a totally unpleasureable experience. And a stranger having a look for the first time should be aware of the differing treats on store around Govan way. Ibrox Stadium, is situated in the South West of the city and is easily accessible from train, plane or car. (Or foot, if you’re a local!) It is Glasgow’s finest stadium in terms of its history and architecture and the famous red brick facade at the Main stand is one of the city’s most recognisable landmarks.
Away fans arriving by coach receive the type of treatment given to English fans. Buses up to the ground, straight in and buses waiting at the end of the game to whisk them away. However, not all fans go by bus and if you’re coming in by car, try to park as far away from the ground as possible, (without then needing a taxi!) as gridlock post-match is the norm. Coming from the City centre (East) try the side streets on Paisley Road West and if coming in from the West try and get over the motorway to Mosspark and surrounding areas. A trip to the official car park outside the stadium will set you back seven bangers. Ouch!
From the City centre you can use bus, taxi or underground. (It’s also an enjoyable walk if you’re that way inclined) The clockwork Orange underground will take you straight outside the ground but is often packed and uncomfortable. And if you are even average height, be prepared to be very cramped. Moreover, after the game queues can be very long and unruly and the police horses often stamp on your toes, consequently causing more disorder than they prevent!
Whatever way you go you might want to sample the local hostelries around the ground and especially along Paisley Road West. ‘The Doctors’, ‘The Grapes’ and ‘The District bar’ are always packed, usually by those Rangers fans who have travelled a long distance and the atmosphere is often better than at the games. The CD’s and tapes are put on and the pubs rock with Rangers songs and others of a more dubious nature. But for the big games it is often ‘regulars only’ so you may want to do your drinking before you travel. Need I tell you not to wear colours if you’re an away fan? But don’t worry about accents, there will be few from the Glasgow area, out numbered by Ulstermen, English, Borderers and Tuechtars.
For a laugh, shout out the name ‘Billy’ in the pub and half the customers will turn round! On the other had, if you happen to be with a Seamus or a Patrick, (or indeed you are one!) keep it to yourself. Ambulances are notoriously slow on match days.
The ‘Stadium bar’ outside the underground is always jam-packed and should be avoided. An Interesting ritual occurs at ten minutes to kick-off when the place empties. The local ‘jakies’ all invade the bar and scoff the half finished drinks!
Do not enter Ibrox on an empty stomach. Like most football stadiums they only sell very expensive food and definitely not worth the money. (But although everyone knows this, there are always queues!) There are plenty of shops in the surrounding areas, mostly Asian, and the burger vans do nice Chips and Curry sauce. Also, there is no beer for sale inside the ground –unless of course you’re on a hospitality/corporate package.
Programmes –don’t bother. Over priced catalogues with no team news.
The Rangers Superstore is situated at the corner of the Copland Road and the Govan stands and is busy before matches. In fact, at one minute to kick off there are still people wandering around with shopping baskets as if they were at the local Asda. Very disconcerting.
If you are an away fan you will be situated in the corner section under the huge Jumbotron screen between the Broomloan Road stand (Still called the Celtic end by many people)and the Govan Stand. Be prepared for pies, coins, mars bars and such like coming down from the top tier of the Broomloan in particular. Unles you're a Smelltic fan - allocated the entire Broomloan Stand for their all too frequent visits to a real stadium - do not cheer when your team scores – you’ll wake the Rangers fans up. Also, if you are an away fan who finds himself amongst the Bears, do not cheer when your team scores. A dry slap often offends.
If you're a Sellik fan just don't ever be among the Bears.
Rangers v Dunfermline, SPL, Saturday 17th November 2001:
It wasn't til I arrived at the Brox a whole half hour before kick-off on Saturday that I realised I actually had a pre-match routine. Seeing as how, for the last year and a bit, this subconscious routine has coincided with no trophies arriving in the trophy room at the top of that marble staircase I decided to go all extra superstitious and totally break my home game habits.
Hardly revolutionary, I know - like most of us I'm already staggeringly superstitious about what I do and don't do in relation to pre-match ritual - but it's strange to suddenly realise that for all but three or four matches in the last two years I've been following the exact same route and schedule when visiting my beloveds at their Govan Palace:
I Shuffle off at Ibrox Underground station around quarter of an hour before kick-off, nudging my way up the stairs from the dangerously packed platform and through the SPT turnstiles (Sometimes all the turnstiles let you through - sometimes only half of them go the right way and someone always brutalises his crown jewels by trying to push through a non-turning metal bar) into a sea of faces looking to buy or sell spare tickets. I then take my slow right turn and, like a player in a massive football team of sorts, pour out onto Copland Road through the tunnel-like entrance/exit of the tube station and there the noise which has been burgeoning since allighting the train hits you loudest: "Spare tickets!", "Fee-shell programme!", "Erra Follow Follow!", "Hats, scarves and badges", "Erra Number One Fanzine" and all this rising only ever-so-slightly above the general humming of the crowd overspilling out The Stadium bar and Willie Hills the bookies, the snaking queue into the chip shop and the jam-packed Ladbrokes which used to be The Rangers Shop.
At that corner of Copland Road, most of us take a right and catch our first sight of The Brox, sitting atop a gently rising hill, peppered with red, white and blue ants on its incline. The 1873 shop with it's post-modern pipe-work and cladding, joins the Copland and Govan stands and gives The Palace the appearance of a recently-landed alien space-craft from this angle (and, no, my pre-match routine does NOT involve a few draws on a very sweet-smelling home-grown cigarette!!). To the left we have the boy selling his old match programmes from Gers games all over Europe and beyond, there's more hat, scarf and badge-sellers and there's Robert McElroy selling his copies of The Rangers Historian.
To the right there's the last-minute-pinters popping in or still queuing-up for a shandy or two in the Masonic Lodge - can never remember the lodge number - and there's a cornucopia of hot-dog and burger vans on that tarmacked road which used to be the steps up to the old Rangers end ... a mere twenty three years ago. All along the way, resting on the thin, metal crush barriers which line the route up to the 1873 shop, Bears sit enjoying a pre-match feast of processed meat with or without onions. Usually I just carry on up - fighting the urge to up my cholestoral intake at this point and it's the first entrance on the back of the Govan proper for me.
I step into Heaven via the turnstiles which take you up to the Copland end of The Govan Rear. There's always that little lingering doubt about the smart card until the horribly GREEN button glows, the LCD reads "Enter" and the seven-foot high stiles yield to your eager push. A quick left past the fluorescent stewards and a sharp right up those stairs to the concourse with the Rangers crest on the floor and the Rangers goals of the recent past being screened on endless rows of tellys just under the ceiling. Once in there, I'll maybe grab a pie and bovril or - if I'm just being plain greedy as opposed to catching some, aherm, "brunch" - a coke and a Snickers/Mars bar. By the time I get into the queue the Steak pies are usually sold out and, if not, they are by the time I'VE been served!
It's then a glance up at the Davie Cooper collage/painting on the gable wall and a bounce up the vomitory steps to eventually see the magnificence of The Main Stand in all it's glory and the beautiful bowling-green pitch below it. I have a peak over to the Broomloan to see the size of the away support - this is becoming more of a neck-strain now as they sit in the corner betwixt Broomloan and Govan - and then it's up the stairs to my row and in past the old boy who's always standing at the very end of it talking to the young fellah behind him. If he had a pound for every time someone said "'Scuse me, mate" to him he'd've made a million off me alone.
I'll talk to my mate, Allan, I'll have a bit of banter with the two guys on my left hand side and I'll spend the whole match ranting away to the boy on my right and the fellah immediately in front of him. Occasionally I'll talk to the younger guys right behind me but they see the rest of the Govan Rear as a bit of a Boring Old Farts club and, having just rhymed off a pre-match routine like mine, I can't really blame them. Me? I'm from the "been there, seen it, done it, was lifted by the polis and thrown out of it" school of attitude. The Brox can indeed be like a library but that's because we're a discerning bunch in the blue stands - we've played some of the biggest names in Europe and some of them have played for us. When it comes to The Old Firm games, the games where we can go top of the league, seal the championship and, of course, the big European nights - the games which really count - when it comes to these games, us 30 years+ "Old Timers" tend to show the young yins how it should be done. At times I think we probably scare them.
More often than not that's fuelled by a bit of alcohol but not necessarily as much as you'd think. I like a couple of beers before a game but literally no more than two. I like to get drunk ON the football itself - I don't want to miss a single second of the action - and I prefer an after-match pint or twelve to soak up any adrenalin over-load. If the game's been unspectacular - and that includes thumping Dunfermline 4-0 - I really just want to go home and save my socialising for later. If, on the other hand, it's been a spectacularly good or a spectacularly bad day then I almost NEED to get ripped to restore some sort of equilibrium to my temperament before returning to the real world. The best post-match bevvy-sessions I had last season came after the 5-1 trashing of the trash at The Brox but also after the 3-0 home skuddings by Killie and the very same hooped horrors in April. Momentous victories demand celebration because they make the future seem so exciting you need something to calm you down. Momentous defeats tend to bring together all the guys who remember darker days and, what I've found, is you end up hearing better stories and swapping the most nostalgic tales in the hours after a dark day - it's almost like a wake.
If I'm going to have a few pre-match pints I'll do it locally, before getting on the Underground, and this is where a pre-bought underground ticket proves invaluable. Every other Bear in the Glasgow woods has the same idea and, in seeking to avoid the nightmare which is trying to get served in a Paisley Road West boozer, they hit the hostelry nearest their local underground - ten to three on a Saturday afternoon and there's a line as long as a Peter McCloy drop-kick trying to get a ticket from the wee man in the Subway booth who switched off the self-service machines because every middle-aged Rangers supporter in site was trying to buy a child ticket!
Of course, despite this advice, I have frequently found myself in The Grapes, The District (Don't tell anyone I've been to BOTH ... please!), the Doctor's etc trying to carry two pints of lager, three pints of heavy, one Lager tops and a vodka 'n coke through a sardine-packed scrum of spill-phobic Bears with nowhere to move to when I say "Scuse me, mate" and I have found myself pounding down Edmiston Drive at 2:59 with the teams taking the field, drunken Bluenoses taking up the way across the back of The Copland and my bladder barely taking the strain and, for The Brechin City and Glentoran games last season and the Anderlecht game this season, I have found myself sitting in different parts of The Brox BUT, for the most part, I've followed the same boring Home-pub-underground-Govan Rear routine for well over a year.
Before the Dunfermline game on Saturday it was different:
I won't recount how or why I ended up on the Underground a half hour earlier than usual but ye can be sure the up-coming consumer-fest known as Christmas had a large part to play in me avoiding a few sociable but pricey jars before hand. For two pints of 80 I could quite easily buy a nice cheery winter-scene crimbo card all the members of my family ... who still talk to me.
Nevertheless the strangeness of walking onto a comparatively roomy underground compartment was compounded when two loud-talking English chappies - from the South East judging by their voluminous accents - sat nearby and availed myself and the rest of the company of their previous and intended ground-hopping exploits: One was off to see Coventry next week , the other was really looking forward to seeing West Ham v Arsenal in mid-December - a guy at his work had got him a ticket. The other, not to be out-done on the corporate-contact front, recalled how he'd enjoyed, via a former job, free access to a Loftus Road executive box for two or three seasons "a few years back" when QPR had a really good team: Trevor Sinclair, a post-Gers Ray Wilkins, Gavin Peacock and Les Ferdinand.
Now there was something in this bloke's tone - something in his keenness to be heard which made me doubt him. I knew all these players had been QPR men at some point or another but I began to wonder if they had indeed all been there at the same time and then he began to talk loud of his excitement at the prospect of seeing Ibrox for the first time - I almost envied him that virginal thrill. On the way onto Copland Road these two met up with another pair of friends from whom they'd obviously been seperated on the tube. As I climbed the incline up to the 1873 shop I realised they still had their very own tube factor with them as their conversation took a turn for the louder and for the more ridiculous.
Tube 1: (Looking at his newly aquired "fee-shell" programme) :"Bl**dy 'Ell - I didn't know Claudio Caniggia played for Rangers!!!"
Tube 2: "Yeahrr - they signed him from Dundee United"
Tube 3: "Who's Claudio Caniggia?" (these guys are in their thirties, by the way!)
Tube 1: "'E was that guy during the World cup - oh ye know - three or four world cups ago ..."
Tube 2: "Three world cups ago"
Tube 1: "Yeahrr ... wat was it? - 1986?
Tube 2: "1986 - Italy"
Tube 1: "Yeahrr - he was that guy who played up-front with Maradonna at Italy 86 who was really fast and had long-blonde hair up in a bun"
Tube 3: "Nah - don't know him"
Tube 2: "He scored against Brazil and Italy and ...?"
Fat Eck: (thinks) "Argentina??!!"
Tube 2: "...and...and...Cameroon! Yeah, that was it - Cameroon. He scored against Cameroon in the Semi-final but got sent off and missed the final"
Tube 1: "Yearr - that's right - I remember now"
Tube 3: "Nah - still can't remember him"
Tube 4: "So WHO does he play for now?"
The overwhelming temptation was to turn round and (a) tell these guys to shut up before the assembled grumbling Bluenoses gave them a kicking for their ignorance or (b) take some time out my schedule to put them correct on every single amazingly incorrect fact they'd just peeled off. I managed to stop myself, however, on the basis that (a) if I was seen talking to them I too might take a toberin' , (b) if I attempted to correct all their factual inaccuracies I would still be standing there when the PSG game kicked-off on Thursday, (c) if you took all the things they'd said, threw them up in the air and let them land in a different pattern, they'd probably end up with something nearer the truth anyway: They essentially had the facts - they just didn't have them in the right order.
However, the collected tubes' talk of "seeing Ibrox for the first time" had made one decision for me: Instead of getting to my seat early and watching The Gers warm-up as I fed my face on Coca-Cola and Snickers bars, I was going to take a trip round the old lady they call Ibrox.
For the first time I can recall, I noticed bouquets of flowers resting at the foot of the wall between The Copland and the Main Stand which has the bricks with the names of so many Rangers fans engraved upon them. I'd considered getting one of these bricks for my sister/wife/in-laws/whoever as a WACKY birthday or Christmas present - how stupid I was not to realise they'd come to mean so much more to the families of so many departed True Blues.
And, in case I hadn't thought hard enough about what Rangers FC symbolise, what the name of our club connotes - before football - to so many bereaved relatives throughout the world, I was soon walking in the shadow of the John Greig statue which remembers those who died at Ibrox in 1961 and 1971.
The sculpture itself is unbelievably imposing - as a statue of JG should be - and if you get close enough to read the names of those who passed away at Ibrox it looms over you all the more dominantly from it's high position on the pedestal. The picture of the seventies Bears down the front of the old Rangers end, the old Copland Road, is a beautifully honest touch.
I bought my copy of the Rangers Historian from a bloke standing just a few yards from the statue. For a £1 I could read recollections and see photos of the clash with Moscow Dynamo in 1945 - and back then one part of Ibrox was largely the same as it is today...
It was grey day on Saturday - there was a real winter look about the skies but the temperature was comparatively mild, barely even bordering on the crisp. In short, it was perfect football weather and it's also the kind of backdrop which shows off the red-bricked facade of the Main Stand in the best relief. I walked over the Edmiston Drive roads, politely pushing through the punters who congregate on the central island and walked alongside the wall and fence which encloses the astroturf eleven-a-side pitch. If there was an amateur game on today It was over when I got there - a bunch of kids played shootie-in - but when I turned to get the best view of that giant frontage I inwardly scolded myself for not getting to Ibrox earlier EVERY time The Gers have a home game. WHAT A SIGHT!
Suddenly I wanted to go back and find those English guys - not to slag them like some childish smart-arse but to make sure they walked RIGHT round our ground, to make sure they saw our pride and joy, to ensure these football fans, no matter how ignorant of the game's back-catalogue, were allowed to see what must be THE best combination of history, elegance and sheer magisterial power to be witnessed on the outside of any football stadium in The World. I'm biased, yes - but I'm also anal enough to be fairly well-informed about these things. I might be wrong about our Main Stand's righful place being at the pinnacle of this planet's soccer stadia frontages ... but I'm not FAR wrong.
The suited-up dignitaries and well-to-do chancers of the world all headed in through the main doors and everyone else headed for their turnstiles or mobbed the badge and scarf seller over toward the Broomloan end of Edminston drive. I carried on round toward the Broomloan, walking slightly up-hill and glancing through the blue-belled gates toward the sneak view of the hallowed interior between the Broomloan and Main Stand. It still gives me that same buzz of anticipation I got more than twenty years ago when first glimpsing a look at the "new" Ibrox.
On through the veritable portico which is the covered walk you can enjoy under the Broomloan's overhang - as per the Govan and the Copland - and I noticed a few black, white and red scarves heading for the corner nearest the Govan. I'd never really noticed the big black-on-white placard reading "Away Fans" because, well, I ain't no away fan at Ibrox and, as I decided to nip into the top deck of The Govan via the turnstiles at the other end of "my" stand, I've never beeen happier in all my life to realise I was very much at HOME.
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4 Jul 08 
Liverpool Football Club