Cooper gave Rangers the lead — no refusing to celebrate a goal against your former club on this day — but second-half goals from Jim Bett and Charlie Nicholas secured the points for Aberdeen and inflicted a first league defeat of the season on the visitors.
Unsurprisingly, Rangers were furious. The midfielder, rated as one of the brightest prospects in Scottish football, continued to battle back to fitness and eventually made his Rangers return in , when around 30, fans turned up to Ibrox to watch him play in a reserve match.
My whole game changed. I never had the spark that I used to have. I lost a few yards, which was a big part of my game. I had to adapt and use my left foot more than I did because of my injury. I was predominantly right footed.
All I did in training was kick the ball with my left foot. It is hard not to think of what might have been though. There was one certainty surrounding the whole affair: the uneasy relationship between the two clubs was now at the point of no return. The Simpson challenge on Durrant is often seen as the tipping point. Rangers, a football club in Scotland, entered financial difficulties during the late s. The Rangers Football Club plc entered liquidation on 31 October As of , Rangers have won 55 and Celtic 51, while no other club has won the title on more than four occasions.
The two clubs are by far the most successful and popular in Scotland, and the rivalry between them has become deeply embedded in Scottish culture. The very foundations of the two Glasgow football clubs are built on the religious division between Catholicism and Protestantism.
CelticThere have been twenty-five winners of the Scottish Cup. Celtic have won the trophy most often with 40 victories. The second reason for a lack of support from Rangers fans towards the Scotland National team is the sheer dislike and abuse the fans receive from supporters of other teams. The paecan rarely gets sung in full these days, but the chorus alone is enough to cause outrage among the Rangers support.
How low can you get? If that all strikes you as part of the standard fare that one might expect between rival fans, some of the initiatives taken to feed into, or off, the folklore of bitterness have verged on the irresponsible.
In , one Aberdeen hostelry, The Paramount, came up with a novel way of taking the piss out of their Glasgow foes - or to be more precise drowning them in the stuff - when it installed miniature TV screens in the latrines, playing footage of Rangers on a loop, thus inviting its patrons to relieve themselves on the faces of the enemy.
The owner soon thought better of their big idea when the pub was targeted by Rangers supporters. During the s the red card count slowed down, but incidents continued to increase, often pushing the bounds of good taste beyond belief. In , an Aberdeen fan threw a golf ball embellished with a nail at Ally McCoist during a defeat at Ibrox.
Three years later, Aberdeen fans sank as low by jeering a minute's silence for Rangers legend George Young. Worse, one Aberdeen fanzine published an article celebrating the death of Rangers winger Davie Cooper. At official level, the clubs have done much to distance themselves from such incidents, and in recent years co-operation between the two has reduced outbreaks of trouble to a minimum.
However their past records are not entirely unblemished: in , Aberdeen were forced to remove obscene messages about Rangers from their official website, while three years earlier, Rangers issued an official apology after a matchday programme referred to Aberdeen supporters as "scum".
A stroll through the grey streets of the Granite City on matchday offers little evidence of all the bile, poison and rancour that has come to envelop this fixture. What looks like a relatively small police presence forms a green line on King Street, one of the main drags, along which many Dons fans make their way to the ground. The East Neuk pub, a Rangers bar, sits on the frontline, but a couple of hundred Rangers fans are hustled, furtively, into the back entrance.
The ground's setting does little to suggest that what is about to unfold will be any kind of hate fest, either. Banked on one side by a golf course and on the other by a cemetery, the prevailing atmosphere outside Pittodrie 45 minutes before kick-off verges on the funeral.
Even son, a visiting Ger explains that "These days, we just want to get in there, see the game and get out as quickly as possible. Ricksen is the current bete noir of the Aberdeen support. In , he confirmed his early reputation as a wild child by attempting a kung fu kick on Aberdeen's Darren Young at Pittodrie.
The incident in itself was probably enough to earn him a place in the fixture's pantheon of villains, but it was his subsequent boast on his personal website, that Young had needed to be "sorted out", that ensured he remains on the Red Army black list. The 18, crowd is several thousand short of capacity and before the game most of the noise seems to be coming from the 4,strong travelling support. It's only when the Aberdeen announcer begins to read out the teams that the home support start to take an interest.
But his minor piece of mischief goes largely unnoticed by the Aberdeen fans who are too busy clearing their throats to boo Ricksen. When he arrives sporting the coiffure equivalent of a mixed metaphor - a peroxide blonde Mohican - he receives by far the loudest jeer so far. It sets the tone for what's to follow. The Dutchman is, by common consensus, a tamed version of the wild-eyed beast of his youth, but he's still clearly up for it, ever keen to show that no amount of heckling will knock him off his stride.
He is, almost inevitably, one of five players to be booked in the first half as Aberdeen race into an unexpected, but thoroughly deserved, two-goal lead. Captain Russell Anderson opens the scoring, with a goal custom-made for this encounter. Rampaging up the field, he pops up at the far post to produce a brave diving header that earns his team the lead, and himself a blow to the head from a flying boot. The act leaves him prostrate and briefly concussed.
Steve Lovell doubles the advantage from close range, but Rangers pull one back through Croatian striker Dado Prso shortly before half-time, and as the teams head for the dressing rooms, the Aberdeen faithful don't know whether to celebrate their lead, or fret about a seemingly inevitable second-half comeback.
Dons fans have become accustomed to watching leads vanish - particularly against the Old Firm - so there's no sense of euphoria just yet. And sure enough, within moments of the restart, Rangers winger Peter Lovenkrands produces a spectacular bicycle kick to level the scores. Here we go again," despairs the Aberdeen fan on FourFourTwo's shoulder, but her afternoon is about to get a million times better.
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