Gavin Rae will always regard his time in the light blue of Rangers as a story of what might have been.

The former Scotland midfielder, fondly remembered by fans of Dundee, Aberdeen and Cardiff City, saw two serious knee injuries bite two years out of his Ibrox career.

Yet he still played for Alex McLeish, Paul Le Guen and Walter Smith and he was at the centre of one of the most controversial episodes of Gers’ recent history.

Here in the opening instalment of a two-part Rangers Review interview Gavin lifts the lid on the dramatic day Le Guen named him the captain of the club.

Barry Ferguson is no longer the Rangers captain, you are, and you are starting tomorrow.

New Year’s Day, 2007, Gavin Rae sat in Paul Le Guen’s office at Gers’ training HQ and stared at the under-fire manager in disbelief.

The Frenchman was rated one of Europe’s top emerging coaches when he was lured to Glasgow by chairman Sir David Murray but had crashed and burned as Rangers manager.

What would be a disastrous 200-day reign as the club’s shortest-serving boss was in its dying embers.

Yet there was still time for one last defiant gesture from a man who felt backed into a corner by dressing-room discord and what he saw as an orchestrated campaign to derail his attempts to change the culture at the club.

Le Guen identified skipper Ferguson as the lightning rod for the disaffection within the playing staff and he banished the iconic no.6.

Scotland midfielder Rae was dragged into the eye of the firestorm on the eve of 2007’s first Premiership game away to Motherwell.

And he recalled: “The manager had spoken to Barry before and I just remember Fergie came out of the office gutted and raging and no wonder.

“Then Le Guen’s assistant Yves Colleu called me in and Paul said: ‘Barry is no longer captain, you are Rangers captain now and you will start the game tomorrow.’

“I came back into the dressing room shell-shocked and the boys were all around Barry consoling him.

“I remember Baz came to me and said: ‘Just go for it mate, enjoy the experience.’

“It was one of the craziest days of my career, we were all in a state of shock and then we had to get our heads in the game the next day.

“I was sitting there thinking: ‘What is happening?’ I got stitched up a little, thrown into the middle of it and it was nerve-wracking.

“I remember just praying that we would win at Fir Park and Kris Boyd scored a penalty and got us through it in a terrible game at Fir Park.

“Le Guen was gone not long after that but that spell was hard on me for sure.”

Boyd’s gesture of holding up six fingers to salute his axed pal Fergie’s jersey number after his match-winning goal at Well spoke volumes.

Le Guen hadn’t just lost the dressing room, this was now a full-scale mutiny.

After seven months in charge and 31 games when he tasted victory just 16 times Murray’s promise of a "moonbeam of success” under his stewardship would haunt the chairman.

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The French coach was sacked and Gavin would wear the armband once more in a hurtful 3-2 Scottish Cup defeat at Dunfermline under caretaker manager Ian Durrant before Walter Smith left the Scotland job to arrive to the rescue.

Rae, now 45, and happily settled in charge of his own digital product consultancy firm in Sydney, Australia, reflected: “It was an amazing honour and I guess I can say I wore the armband at Rangers.

“I’m fully aware that this, though, was the manager making a stand, this was his line in the sand to say: ‘I am doing it my way or I am going to go. I will survive this or I won’t be here.’

“It proved to be the latter. At that point I wasn’t playing, I wasn’t even in the leadership group of the squad.

“I was a good pro who always trained with everything he had every single day but now I had all this pressure on me.

“It was a strange appointment to make me captain of Rangers, I 100 percent agree with that. But what was I meant to do?

“I was a pro and I had to take the job and do what I could.

“At least I can look back now on my professional career and say I captained every club I played for!”

As a player, Gavin was always one of the those you enjoyed sitting with as a journalist, for club or country.

Intelligent and considered, I always felt and still do that he would thrive as a Head Coach or perhaps even in a Sporting Director role.

Like David Weir, now such a positive influence as Technical Director at English Premiership side Brighton and Hove Albion, Rae had a calm ability to cut through all the bluster and clichés.

Looking back now on Le Guen’s ill-fated Rangers reign he reasoned: “People forget that Rangers landing Paul was a massive coup at the time.

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“He had done so well at Lyon, there was even talk of him going to Real Madrid and we managed to get him.

“It was a massive appointment, a typical showbiz David Murray moment. He had pulled another rabbit out of the hat.

“As players we were all excited at first, he was a renowned manager after all and we all looked forward to working with him.”

Le Guen’s recruitment record is starkly illustrated by the fact that of the 11 players he brought in only fans’ favourite left-back, Sasa Papac, remained the next season.

Libor Sionko, Karl Svensson, Filip Sebo. All names that make fans of a certain vintage shudder now.

Gavin stressed: “I actually felt that midfielder Jeremy Clement, who would go on to play for Paris Saint Germain and Saint Etienne, was a really good player but too many of the others struggled.

“There were a lot of changes in how we worked as a team.

“For instance, when we grew up as players in Scotland we were always used to having a laugh and a joke when we were doing our warm-up together.

“Now that was banned, we were told to be silent and focus and concentrate on our stretching.

“All those little details were there, no baked beans and ketchup in the canteen.

“That was Paul’s culture and he wanted to instil it at Ibrox. I had been through something similar with our Italian coach Ivano Bonetti at Dundee.

“The way we would train and prepare during the week there was so different, we had more tactical and strength and conditioning work than I ever had before at Dens.

“Yet the main difference on a Saturday was that at Dundee we played good football and got results and with Le Guen at Rangers we didn't.

“If it had worked and we had been consistent then everyone would have gone with it but we just weren’t.

“There is huge pressure at that club when you are not winning and we soon felt that.

“Listen, nobody likes change and footballers are no different, if we’d had that bounce we had at Dundee then players would have accepted it the same way at Gers.

“There wasn’t enough evidence to suggest that the new approach was working.

“Then there were the signings, players like Karl Svensson and Flip Sebo who didn’t hit the ground running.”

The feud between Le Guen and Ferguson will go down as one of the most divisive chapters in Rangers’ recent history.

As one of the unwitting supporting actors cast in a footballing drama, Gavin believes the Frenchman under-estimated how much Gers meant to so many people.

He said: “I remember John Rankin scored late on and we got beat 2-1 at Inverness and it was an unacceptable result for Rangers.

“It all kicked off in the dressing room afterwards, we were raging with each other and I will never forget that Le Guen was telling everyone to calm down and relax.

“That didn’t sit well with some of us, we were in a pressure-cooker club and we knew we simply had to win.

“So perhaps it was inevitable that it would all come to a head, what was going on wasn’t Rangers standard and there is no city like Glasgow when things are going wrong.

“Scotland is such a small place, yet you have two of the biggest football clubs in the world and two major national tabloid newspapers at that time who were obsessed with the Old Firm.

“There is no scrutiny like it, I discovered that when I moved on to Cardiff City in the English Championship.

“I’d been in the goldfish bowl for three and a half years and then life in Wales was so different.”

For Gavin it is a bitter pill to swallow that a career spanning almost two decades should be relatively injury-free either side of his Ibrox years.

When Alex McLeish paid £250,000 to Dundee for his services in January 2004 it was seen as a sound investment on a rising Scottish talent.

Rae sighed: “My time at Rangers will always be one of frustration because of the injuries.

“I worked so hard to get that move, from the youth team at Dundee right through to establishing myself as a Premier League player.

“I did my hamstring in a 3-0 Old Firm defeat at Celtic Park on my debut and then I had two really bad knee injuries that cheated me of two full calendar years of my career.

“That’s so much football to miss and before and after that I was the guy who played every week.

“So for those two years to come when I was a Rangers player? That’s so disappointing because I wanted to win trophies at that huge club.

“I would watch the boys training at Murray Park and it was such a tough time mentally for me.

“I was lucky that we had Doc Ian McGuinness and the medical team there.

“I did my cruciate ligament first in my left knee and then when I was coming back from that I had to have a tendon in my right knee debrided which means they remove damaged tissue there.

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“I had severe tendonitis and my knee wasn’t functioning. I couldn’t walk and I owe the Doc so much.

“He found a specialist in Sweden who saved my career. He was the expert with the Swedish Olympic team and I went there for the operation that meant I could play again.”

These days Gavin is content to be the taxi driver for his children Jacob and Gabriella to ferry them to their football games and training Down Under.

He is taking a break from coaching himself after impressing in charge of National Premier League One side Hakoah Sydney City East.

Rae still relishes watching his old club in action and he maintained: “Winning that last Old Firm game 3-0 at the end of the season was massive for Michael Beale, don’t let anyone tell you that any of those games don’t matter.

“I got injured on my debut in a 3-0 defeat at Celtic’s place and it was a nightmare, it felt horrible.

“It is a staggering match to play in the Old Firm derby, you just can’t explain it. You are five metres away from team-mates and they can’t hear you.

“I had some Old Firm draws, never a win, just the way it worked out for me but I will never forget the buzz of it all. I still love watching them all – even at midnight in Australia!

“I was at the Oceania Rangers Supporters Association (ORSA) event with Jorg Albertz and Mikey Mols recently and I just thought: ‘We are on the other side of the world and look how much it means to people.’ 

 “I have also been there with the Sydney True Blues cheering the team on and I live on the other side of the planet now.

“You look around on nights like that and that’s when you know you once played for a truly big club.”