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When the Blue and Green saw Red - Mo Johnston's historic transfer two decades on

Sean O'Conor

Twenty years ago this week Maurice Johnston joined Glasgow Rangers.

The news that the 'Gers had pipped arch-rivals Celtic to sign Scotland's top striker should have been a cause for celebration, but instead TV cameras captured fans burning their scarves and season-tickets outside Ibrox in anger. "I'm devastated," I remember one intoning with stentorian Scottish vowels. We were all shocked. Former Celtic players just did not join Rangers, especially if they were Catholic.

Mo was not the first Catholic to play for Rangers, whose red, white and blue colours betray their club's traditional allegiance to the British crown, but he was the most high-profile Glaswegian defector, and his transfer came at a time of tension in neighbouring Northern Ireland.

That province is almost an extension of Scotland's largest city (or vice-versa) when it comes to soccer allegiance. Glasgow's Catholics are of Irish stock, historically massed into the East End of town, the home of their club, the green and white Celtic. The Irish tricolour remains Celtic's flag as much as the Union Jack is Rangers'. Despite the rise of Scottish nationalism in recent years, the Saltire (St Andrew's Cross) is hard to find at Old Firm games (and invisible at the Celtic end), where the political history of Ulster splays out before you.

The Glasgow derby remains about the world's fiercest because it sucks in ethno-religious and cross-national history, and not just of the British Isles. In what other derby are Israeli and Palestine flags flown by opposing fans in a country in another continent? By comparison, the biggest derby in England's biggest city is Arsenal v Tottenham, little more than a clash of postcodes and playing styles.

The Old Firm explodes the lie that football is only a game. It is an inferno. The colours fly all around you like a medieval army's, the scarves of segregation do not hang idly around the neck but are brandished defiantly aloft. The chants are bleated out with a shameless nihilistic roar, the mutual vitriol immutable: Another pyrrhic victory for multiculturalism? Or just a theatrical performance? Do they kiss and make up at the station afterwards then have a laugh over a drink?

1989 was a tense time in Scotland let alone in Northern Ireland. Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives were being wiped out north of the border after England's Boudicca had treated Caledonia as a Roman province. In using Scotland to experiment with the hated poll tax, the Iron Lady unwittingly revived the dormant flames of Celtic nationalism, which finished up ten years later in the form of a Scottish parliament when Labour retook Westminster. In much of post-industrial Glasgow, hopelessness ruled. But football, as in another fallen port city Liverpool, remained a passionate and colourful refuge for the people, a weekly escape from the doldrums all around.

Ulster too was in a bad way. Thatcher's 'no surrender' stance had only poured petrol onto the fire of a divided society, leaving two communities polarised and feeling mutually ignored by London. Her handbag was no match for Northern Ireland's hydra-like ability to regrow its sectarian heads. And Glasgow remained a short hop across the Irish sea. The hands really are across the water, as many sectarian slogans proclaim.

Johnston grew up in North-East Glasgow and attended the Roman Catholic St Roch's Secondary School, north of Parkhead but still within Celtic territory. After establishing himself at Partick Thistle and Watford, he scored 52 goals in three seasons for the Hoops before two years in France with Nantes. At the end of the 1988-'89 French season, Johnston announced he was rejoining Celtic. But the deal in reality was far from done.

When it became clear that the Bhoys couldn't make the final £700,000 payment promised, 'Gers boss Graeme Souness, tipped off by Johnston's Rangers-supporting agent and with the OK of chairman David Murray, no stranger to sectarianism himself, made his move. “We agreed that a Catholic had to be signed at some stage, and it was never going to be a token transfer," Souness recalled, adding that the three of them discussed the religious angle in depth before committing to grab Johnston.

At a small cafe outside Paris airport a secret deal was struck on the 7th of July and broken to the press three days later. Glasgow erupted and Johnston's u-turn became the biggest story in football south of the border, and in all news to the north. Souness himself sat above the furore. His only mission was to make Rangers No.1 in Scotland and a force in Europe. He cared nothing for the religious symbolism of his club, and nor did Johnston, but a bête noire had been born in the shape of the strawberry-blond striker, one for both sides to spit at. On his debut, the boos from Rangers fans were deafening. On his Old Firm outing since re-signing, the Celtic fans joined their enemies in song for once.

In committing a crime against cultural identity, Johnston had inadvertently united both sides of Glasgow in hating him, until his goals won over the blue half. The morons who burnt their season-tickets soon regretted it and relented, or shuffled off into the distance.

But Celtic fans never forgave Johnston fully, and he employed 24-hour security and made Edinburgh, not Glasgow, his home, until signing for Everton in 1991. The residues of hate were enough for him to reject a new contract.

"Every time there was a Celtic-Rangers thing, something would crop up and somebody would throw something at your car or somebody would be spitting at you," he remembered.

It would be wrong to suggest Mo is still a wanted man in certain parts of Glasgow. He might have enraged both Celtic & Rangers fans for a while, but the fact he remained the goal scorer for Scotland's national team helped cool the tension. And time heals wounds. Celtic and Rangers fans have many subsequent wins and losses to bicker over.

Johnston's signing might have been made for financial reasons alone, but it did help chip away at the ugly walls of Scottish sectarianism and end Rangers' moronic avoidance of signing Catholics (only a handful had worn the blue since 1886). A flood of Catholic players have joined Rangers since, as well as an R.C. coach, Paul Le Guen (Celtic had for some time recruited Protestants, including their talismanic star Kenny Dalglish).

Northern Ireland has cooled too, but the fires are yet to burn out. Bigots remain at Ibrox, with their evil ditties about the Irish potato famine, and pro-IRA songs are still sung from the other end, but the 1688 posturing now looks increasingly ridiculous as most of the paramilitary weapons have been handed in, the watchtowers dismantled and Catholics are crossing themselves after scoring for Rangers.

The man in the eye avoided the hurricane then and has hardly mentioned it since, but like George Best, an Ulster footballer who united Irish Catholics and Protestants in admiration, Mo Johnston probably never took religion or cultural identity that seriously. In the end that was a good thing. He must have wondered why he should have been such a totem of treachery when all he wanted to do was score goals, but the storm he sailed into served a purpose in the end.

It was a hullabaloo that is hard to conceive of today. But Britain was a more emotional place in the 1980s. A player and now coach in Major League Soccer since 1996, Johnston has led a life far across an ocean from the extraordinary and historic maelstrom that blew up around him twenty years ago.

The past for him at least, really is a foreign country.

Mo: Maurice Johnston Story

Sean O'Conor

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