Ex-Rangers man Gary McSwegan on McCoist, Hateley and Celtic tackle

Signed for the Light Blues by John Greig CBE when he was just 11, Swiggy spent 11 rollercoaster years at the club he loves.

In a two-part Rangers Review interview with Iain King, he looks back over his Ibrox days, the horror injury that changed his life and THAT Champions League glory goal against Marseille.

Gary McSwegan heard the wretched snap and lay crumpled on the Ibrox turf in agony, knowing Celtic keeper Ian Andrews’ tackle had left his leg shattered.

Ally McCoist’s long-time understudy, reared in the Rangers Academy, was just 18 years old.

He’d been flying in pre-season, scoring 18 goals in nine games, and boss Graeme Souness and his trusted lieutenant Walter Smith had told the emerging talent that despite the presence of Coisty and new signing Mo Johnston, there would be first-team chances that season.

Then on August 26, 1989, in that fateful Old Firm reserve match Gary’s world came crashing down around him.

“I broke my leg in two places against Celtic in the reserves and I remember lying on the gurney in the Victoria Hospital devastated,” he tells the Rangers Review.

“Then a porter came up to me and asked me if I needed my shorts! I looked up and said: ‘Mate, I’m lying here thinking my career is over and the world has ended and you want my shorts? Geeza brek.

“I’ll never forget the incident, Ian McCall played me through and I was about 30 yards out.

“I didn’t see Andrews coming until the last second, I poked the ball past him and just as I did that he flew right through me and hit my planted leg. I went over the top of him and I knew my leg had snapped when I landed.”

In those days the Old Firm reserve game was played on one side of the city while the main derby exploded on the other.

That day a Rangers top team mired in a struggling start to the season emerged from the lion’s den of Celtic Park with a point thanks to a header from skipper Terry Butcher in a 1-1 draw.

Swiggy’s second-string side won 2-0 but the horror injury he suffered and the aftermath of it left a sour taste in his mouth that lingers to this day.

A year earlier Andrews had gone through his own Ibrox torture, the scapegoat for a thumping 5-1 Old Firm defeat.

“The next morning I read in the Sunday papers that Billy McNeill had said he was appealing the red card that Andrews got for that tackle,” McSwegan recalls.

“I would hope Rangers wouldn’t have done that. I didn’t get an apology, nothing."

“Seriously, I was lying there with my leg in a brace when Graeme Souness, Walter Smith and the doc turned up and realised I hadn’t had the operation yet.

“Souness about-turned down the corridor and within half an hour I was in the operating theatre at the private hospital at Ross Hall.

“That injury is one of the biggest regrets of my career, it happened at the worst possible time for me.

“I was plagued by hamstring problems for the rest of my career and I always feel that had its roots in the leg break. Still, I played until I was 38 so I guess I must have recovered to some extent!”

There are sliding doors moments in every young footballer’s journey. Sometimes fate smiles on you and an opening appears that you can stride through. On others, Lady Luck deserts you and that door slams shut in your face.

McSwegan would go on to have an excellent career, he helped write his own chapter in Ibrox folklore with a never-to-be-forgotten Champions League goal against Marseille and played and scored for Scotland.

That injury, though, ripped the guts of a year out of his career at a key time in what was already a daunting mission battling for first-team minutes.

“It was a tough school when you looked at the calibre of strikers ahead of me in the pecking order,” he confesses.

“Yes, I was learning all the time but when I look back on it now maybe I should have left earlier but I loved Rangers and still do.

“I broke my leg when I was 18, though, and that put me back to Square One at the club just when I was flying.

READ MORE: Dujon Sterling's inspiring Rangers journey through adversity

“I had scored those 18 goals in nine games in the reserves’ pre-season and I was on fire.

“I remember that I’d scored a hat-trick against Clyde at Firhill the game before the injury and I was playing in the company of players like Davie Cooper, Ray Wilkins, Ian McCall and Jimmy Nicholl.

“Walter Smith then pulled me after that Clyde game and told me he had recommended me for the Scotland Under-21s and everything seemed right in the world. Then I broke my leg and it was just a killer, the timing of it.

“I’d already fought it out against the likes of Kevin Drinkell, Paul Rideout, Colin West, Robert Fleck to be in the management’s thoughts.

“Then, of course, there was the McCoist and Hateley partnership and to have to start again at 19 after my rehab was just very hard. I walked out of Ibrox when I was 22 years old and I knew in my past I’d had a serious injury. I thought I might only have 10 years left in the game and I had to get playing.”

In this era of Rangers spotting talents young and ushering them into the structured world of the modern-day Academy, Swiggy’s pathway to the first team dressing room was vastly different to the one that is carefully mapped out for today’s hopefuls.

“I signed for Rangers when I was 11 years old, I was a Maryhill urchin who jumped over the wall to watch Partick Thistle play at Firhill,” the now 52-year-old says. 

“Tommy McLean was there one day watching Robert Fleck play for Possil YM in a Final and I ran on at half-time and dribbled around 20 stooges and scored!

“Wee Tam must have liked what he saw because he pulled me out and spoke to me at S Form training the next week and always kept an eye on me after that.

“Firhill was like my playground then and I watched a lot of great players there like Kenny Watson, Kenny McDowall and Mo Johnston who would all have an influence on Rangers in one way or another.

“I came through Possil YM and I knew the history the club had. Bobby Russell played there, Kenny Dalglish, Flecky, Tony Fitzpatrick who stayed across the road from me in Maryhill.

“When I look back, I was lucky because even at my kids’ team Rangers Young Boys, where I played alongside Scott MacKenzie who’d later star at Falkirk, I was with clubs that gave us a good start as players and people.

“I remember one time we played a team called Dalmarnock and the game was called off because we were getting pelted with bricks, we were 12!”

Four decades on when youth football is a more sanitised experience for kids those recollections would seem bizarre to a current Rangers Academy player.

Swiggy, though, prospered in that school of hard knocks alongside some other exciting young talents.

“It was an upbringing that helped me come through in a Rangers youth team that had the likes of myself, Eoin Jess, John Spencer and Sandy Robertson in it,” he reasons.

“Eoin was affiliated to us for years and I remember thinking it was bonkers that Rangers never signed him and let him become such a top player at Aberdeen.

“We also had Paul Hamilton who could have been a hard luck story in life. He was a great player but he broke a bone in his neck and had to quit at the top level when he was 17.

“Hammy, though, went on to work in player recruitment for Rangers and Everton and he is now the Senior UK and European Scout for Queen’s Park Rangers.

“Paul had a chance as a player and I’m thrilled he went on to be such a success in another area of the game.”

For 11 years until he made that gut-wrenching decision to quit Rangers, Gary lived and breathed the club he still loves to this day.

“My granda was Rangers-daft, he was a big figure in my life and that’s how I was brought up. It was just always in me. I always dreamed of playing for and scoring for the club.”

His moments in the Ibrox starlight may have been fleeting but he would go on to do just that.

Next in Part Two, Gary takes us back to when he announced himself as a Rangers player on the European stage on that unforgettable Ibrox night against Marseille.