celtic vs rangers

[crying-charlie]

Hi MissJ, it all started in 1872 with two brothers, Peter and Moses McNeil, and two friends, Peter Campbell and William McBeath. who called the club “Argyle”. "Rangers" came from an English rugby club.

Since they shared the first League Championship with Dumbarton in 1890-91, Rangers had never finished lower than fifth in the table. Now they stood on the threshold of greatness.

For not only were they to win their first Championship outright. They were also to achieve a feat which has been beyond every other club side in the world.

Rangers, under the watchful eye of their match secretary William Wilton, uniquely won every single League game in the 1898-99 season.

Eighteen games, eighteen victories, a maximum 36 points. They scored 79 goals at an average of more than four a game, conceding just 18.

Runners-up Hearts were 10 points adrift in the days when a victory was worth only two.

Rangers began with a 6-2 annihilation of Partick Thistle.
The captain Robert Hamilton, who still holds the club record for Old Firm matches with 32 goals against Celtic, scored a hat-trick.

Hamilton, a schoolmaster, was to find the net a further 18 times that season.

With 10 straight victories under their belt, Rangers' away game at Hibernian was the crunch. Hibs were being touted as the only serious rivals for the title and looked like it when they took a 2-0 lead.

Rangers squared the game in the second-half then conceded another goal. As the match see-sawed, Hamilton came to the rescue to make it 3-3.

With just seconds to go, Rangers were awarded a penalty. Up stepped Neil to ram the ball home. They had won with the last kick of the match.

Rangers inflicted some devastating scorelines on their opponents. Clyde were beaten 8-0 and the Championship was wrapped up with a 7-0 humiliation of Dundee.

With four games left, the only question was could Rangers continue to be invincible? Next up were Hibernian at Ibrox on Christmas Eve.

There were to be no Christmas gifts from Rangers. Hibs, the team who had been spoken of as title rivals and who had run them so close at Easter Road, were demolished 10-0, still their record defeat.

In the end, everything hung on the last match away to Clyde in January. Conditions were icy, but Rangers won 3-0 to achieve an incredible perfect League season.

However Celtic, who finished third and had been polished off with 4-0 and 4-1 defeats, were to thwart Rangers' dreams of the Cup.

In the Scottish Cup Final, Rangers had an early goal disallowed for offside and Celtic took the trophy 2-0. Rangers would have to wait 29 years to do the League and Cup Double.

Wilton was rewarded with his appointment as the Club's first Manager as Rangers formally became a business company. Rangers Football Club Limited was established in March 1899 and appointed its first board of directors under the chairmanship of James Henderson.

Later that year they moved to New Ibrox - site of the present stadium - just up the road from the old ground where they had played since 1887.

This increasingly professional approach by the club paid handsome dividends. Rangers retained the title for the next three seasons making it Four-In-A-Row.

These momentous times were marred, though, by the first of Ibrox's tragedies. A section of the western terracing collapsed during a Scotland v England match in 1902. Twenty five people died and 500 were injured.

The season of 1919-20 was a golden one for Rangers. The previous term they had been pipped for the title by just one point by Celtic. Now they were ready to reassert themselves.

They won 31 of their 42 League games, drawing nine and losing just two. But it was the manner of those victories that impressed. Rangers scored 106 goals and conceded just 25.

A vital factor had been the emergence of a man who had joined the club in 1914 as trainer. His name was William Struth.

Together, manager William Wilton and right-hand man Struth began a period of Rangers domination that was to last until the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.

Sadly, Wilton was not to enjoy this extraordinary success which saw Rangers take the title 15 times in 21 seasons. With the Championship back at Ibrox, Wilton - the club's first manager - died the day after the last game of the season in May 1920, drowning in a boating accident.

Struth, who was appointed his successor, lived to become a legend. He managed the club for 34 years, winning a glittering array of trophies - 18 League Championships, 10 Scottish Cups and two League Cups.

And one player in his squad created a curious record. James Gordon, who was with Rangers from 1910 until 1930, became the only player ever in British football to appear for his club in all positions from goalkeeper to the old-fashioned outside left.

By the time the 1927-28 season came round, Rangers had already won the title five times during the seven seasons that Struth had been in the hot seat. And this was to be their best yet. The year they won their first Double.

Rangers, the current Champions, showed their mettle from the start, winning their first six League games. Some victories were sweeter than others. Rangers shared the spoils with Celtic - each team winning at home 1-0 - but their 7-2 triumph at Airdrie was their first success there in six years.

Rangers set themselves a new League goals record, finishing with 109 as they won 28 of their 36 games, drawing eight and losing four.

Meanwhile, Rangers were making confident progress in the Cup which they hadn't won since 1903.

They cruised through the first round, winning 6-0 at East Stirling. Home victories followed over Cowdenbeath (4-2) and King's Park (3-1). Then a 1-0 defeat of Albion Rovers away put them into the semi-finals against Hibernian.

The match, played at Tynecastle, was a comfortable 3-0 victory for Rangers with goals from Archibald and Fleming plus an own goal by Hibernian's Wiseman.

A record crowd of 118,115 packed into Hampden for the Final against Celtic and a goalless first-half gave no clue to the drama that was to come.

Early in the second-half a Rangers shot was punched off the line by Celtic defender Willie McStay. Penalty!

Skipper Davie Meiklejohn - not a normal penalty taker - stepped up and made it 1-0. Bob McPhail scored the second and Sandy Archibald made it three with a blistering long-range shot.

With five minutes to go, Archibald drove the final nail into Celtic's coffin. Rangers' arch-rivals had been vanquished 4-0 and the Scottish Cup was back at Ibrox for the first time in a quarter of a century.

There was no rest for the heroic boys in blue. Within three days they were facing Kilmarnock in the League. It was a walkover. The score was 5-1, the title was theirs. Rangers had achieved the Double at last.

It didn't stop there. Rangers retained the Championship for the next three seasons making it Five-In-A-Row and won four more titles (1932-33, 1933-34, 1936-37 and 1938-39) before the outbreak of war.

By now Rangers were making up for lost time in the Cup. Having gone so long without leaving much of an impression, they were to lift it six times in nine years. There were further Final victories in 1930 (Partick 2-1 after a 0-0 draw), 1932 (Kilmarnock 3-0 after a 1-1 draw), 1934 (a 5-0 thrashing of St Mirren), 1935 (Hamilton 2-1) and 1936 (Third Lanark 1-0).

Even the Double, which had eluded them for so long, was becoming easy for Rangers with the victorious teams of 1930 and 1934 making it three in seven years.

There were a few disappointments, perhaps the strangest being in the 1931-32 season when Rangers scored their record number of League goals - 118 in 38 matches - yet finished runners-up in the Championship to Motherwell. Soon they were to score 118 in a season again - but this time it was in that Double year of 1933-34.

The Thirties provided an almost unbroken period of fabulous success for Rangers, highlighted by yet another record in the last Old Firm League match at Ibrox before the war.



On January 2nd 1939, the biggest crowd ever to watch a League football match in the British Isles turned out for the traditional holiday fixture with Celtic. Ibrox was bursting at the seams as 118,567 fans crammed in to watch Dave Kinnear and Alex Venters give Rangers a 2-1 win.

Within months, however, players and fans would be uniting to face a common enemy, fighting against Hitler's Germany. The Scottish Championship was suspended, though clubs continued to play in regional leagues.

Rangers won all their wartime competitions in the Southern Regional League - including one match in which they gave Celtic an 8-1 beating.

When Scottish League football returned in the winter of 1946, William Struth would still be in command at Ibrox and Rangers would maintain their winning ways.

[crying-charlie]

Hi MissJ, in answer to your e-mail, Celtic was formed in the eastend of Glasgow in 1888 by members of the city's large Irish population, and was defined from the outset as both Irish and Catholic. Rangers, who had come into existence sixteen years earlier, had no such strong identity.

It was really not until the inter-war years that the religious divide between them became apparent: the bitterness of their rivalry in the years before the Great War was attributable more to national than to religious sentiment. Celtic's almost instant success was seen as Irish achievement, and many Glaswegians looked anxiously for a truly Scottish club to challenge them. Queen's Park were the obvious candidates, having long fielded the strongest side in the land, but their resistance to professionalism made their eventual eclipse inevitable, and it was Rangers who emerged as Scotland's champions against the Irish upstarts. As time went on, the Catholicism of Celtic came to be mirrored by the Protestantism of Rangers.

However, it was neither national nor religious feeling that underlay the riot of April 17th, 1909. On the contrary, Rangers and Celtic supporters fought side by side against authority. The riot broke out after a Cup Final replay which had, like the first match, ended in a draw. When the referee blew the final whistle, a number of players remained on the pitch as if in expectation of extra time. Encouraged by this, many of the spectators also stood their ground. Extra time, however, had never been planned, and the players who had lingered on the field drifted off to join their colleagues in the dressing rooms. A rumour spread around the terraces that the result had been pre-arranged to secure a third lucrative pay day, and when the uprooting of corner flags by a groundsman made clear that there would be no further play, the crowd spilled on to the pitch in an angry mood. They appeared to be on their way to the dressing rooms with the intention of persuading the teams to come out again to play extra time. The police barred their way, and the players quietly left the stadium.

The spectators on the pitch now turned their wrath on the constabulary, the only visible face of authority, and a full-scale riot was soon in progress. Wooden barricading torn from the terracing was set alight on the track around the playing area. It was even reported that whisky was used to fuel the blaze. The goalposts were uprooted, the nets slashed and the pitch cut up when some of the rioters tore up and down it with a roller. The fire brigade was summoned when pay boxes were set ablaze, and police reinforcements arrived from all over the city. The rioters slashed the hoses of the firemen and abused and obstructed ambulance men trying to treat wounded police officers.

Arrests proved almost impossible, with the police constantly having to rescue isolated and endangered colleagues. Knives, stones, bottles and fragments of wood were used as weapons, and a hundred people suffered injuries, mostly head wounds. Even when the fans were finally forced from the ground, they continued to attack the police outside, and set about breaking windows in nearby houses and smashing street lamps. The riot went on for two hours or more, and damage was estimated at 800 [pounds sterling].

[Marti33]

I have only been amemebr for a few days, so bare with me.

Is it my imagination or is there a preponderance of Rangers supporters and a lack of Celtic fans who post these boards.

I suppose the answers if any to this if they were to come from Rangers fans will be someting to do with a lack of intelligence and ignorance in IT, which we who are not ignorant know to be false.

So why is it then? Or am I mistaken!!

[joachim]

Thank U for your post and welcome to http://www.scotland.com !!

Yes there'r a few Rangers fans , but also others of course .
And Intelligence & ignorance has nothing to do with the football club , which everybody supports .
Just my oppinion...any sport fans are very welcome !!!!

[crying-charlie]

Welcome Marti, as you my know, I'm a big Rangers supporter and I would not say Celtic fans had a lack of intelligence or that they were ignorant (maybe a wee bit missguides).

LOL

Only joking, I would welcome any supporter from any Scottish team.

[lizwest]

Hi Joachim and Marti

I can see where you're coming from Marti.
Even although we live in Oz my husband and myself
are still big Celtic Fans. The reason that there
are more Rangers fans in Scotland is that the
ratio of Catholic/Protestant in Scotland is
approx five/one. Is it no wonder that there
are more Rangers fans than Celtic?That makes sense
I think. We believe things are now changing
radically though. At one time neither team would employ
a player of a different religion; that has now changed
enormously as we all know and much for the better!!
Religion should be no part of sport as it is in Australia
(including schools) I am a Aussie Rules Footie supporter
also and our teams are directed purely by the area or
district in which we live and so much more fun. Bigotry is
a thing of the past. C'mon the Celts!!!
Lizwest

[Rascal]

All i can say to you is HA HA HA HA ..... because recently Celtic lost there first match of the season to my beloved Aberdeen F.C. I am proud to say that Aberdeen out played Celtic in all aspects of the game and definetely deserved the victory. Once more HA HA HA HA.

Rascal!!