Fact stranger than fiction in the topsy-turvy world of women’s football

 

 

Rangers Ladies of Glasgow are that rare beast in the women’s game: a club three times older than their male ‘parent’!

 

That’s because Rangers men entered liquidation in 2012 then started a brand new Rangers club, right at the bottom of the pile.

 

Many of the characters involved in Rangers, old and new, have a whiff – no, a stink – of criminality about them. Think “antagonist in TV’s Taggart“.

 

The male club died a grubby, cheat’s death. But Rangers’ vibrant women’s section proudly lives on, with much about them to admire.

 

Since their 2008 formation, it’s always been about the football for them. A club where all are welcome. No perma-raging riotous fans, no dodgy far-right politics, no hating Catholics. Universally respected as friends and rivals.

 

In other words, nothing like their deceased parent!

 

In this day and age, the quaint nomenclature ‘Ladies Football Club’ doesn’t always sit right. It’s just a bit twee. Celtic don’t use it anymore. In fact Celtic’s female section are so right on they won’t even use ‘Women’ to separate themselves from the male club. Which is fine … except no-one knows what to call them.

 

But ‘Ladies’ is a good fit for Rangers, harking back to the brown-brogued rectitude which was the old club’s self image.

 

This season past the Ladies were inundated with messages praising the work of young manager Kev Murphy and all at the club. The team’s star player is even named Erin – the Irish word for Ireland!

 

In the upcoming men’s game Celtic’s second-raters will wipe the floor with the third-and-fourth-raters playing for Rangers. That’s a given – if this version of Rangers even last that long.

 

But far away from the noisy crowds, the cruel hilarity on one side and impotent, delusional bigot-rage on the other, the real contest is just warming up.

 

Next season’s Scottish Women’s Premier League will see an altogether more authentic meeting of genuine ‘Old Firm’ rivals, where good football is sure to win the day.

 

Rangers and Glasgow City

 

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One of the old Rangers’ many unsavoury stunts was their orange away kit in the early 2000s.

 

Redolent of the Catholic-hating Orange Order (a sort of 17th Century version of the British National Party) the offending items clumsily pandered to the worst elements of the support. It was a huge seller!

 

Glasgow City LFC had the same kit, and just like old Rangers they knowingly smirked it was ‘tangerine’.

 

There is no evidence of any Scottish sectarianism at Glasgow City – ever. But questions remain over their grotesque orange kit choice. In the west of Scotland it represented a dog whistle, if not a clarion call, to knuckle-draggers.

 

The successful women’s club quietly dropped their ‘royal blue’ trim a few years later and replaced it with black. But the orange, now acknowledged as such, remains to this day.