Cast as worst among equals

WHILE the surviving members of the Berwick Rangers team who famously defeated the more illustrious Govan variety of Gers will gather again at Shielfield for the clubs’ Scottish Cup re-match tonight, two other veterans of the day will be miles away, secretly hoping that the misery they found in January 1967 is visited upon the Ibrox stars of today. It isn’t only Sammy Reid, who scored the goal which caused the marble staircase at Ibrox to crack and the portraits in the Blue Room to weep, whose career has been reduced to one solitary afternoon.

The only possible avenue down which closure can arrive is for this shock to be trumped. Until then George McLean and Jim Forrest, the Ibrox strikers who failed to strike at Shielfield Park on that fateful day, will never be allowed to forget the part they played in one of Scottish football’s most resonant results. They reside in the same hall of infamy as the Aberdeen Bon Accord goalkeeper, and poor old Frank Haffey. Neither McLean or Forrest played for the club again, despite a haul of goals in that and previous seasons which these days would have seen them set on plinths outside Ibrox.

Instead, McLean now resides in Australia, exiled along with the hapless Haffey, while Forrest, who scored 99 goals in the two seasons prior to the Berwick game, owns a bar in the shadow of the club he is supposed to have disgraced 35 years ago. The Clachan’s walls in Govan are rimmed with pictures depicting great Ibrox deeds, but there is nothing pertaining to a day Forrest would rather leave to the memory thresher. "It always comes back to Berwick," he says, and he isn’t talking about the tide at Spittal beach.

You can understand the bitterness. After all, Forrest went on to play for Aberdeen in their 1970 Scottish Cup triumph, and continued to score at a gallop. Only 22 at the time of the Berwick game, he could ill-afford to let his career stop the way the clocks did around Govan that day. And neither could McLean, a mere year older than his strike partner, and, like Forrest, a glutton for goals. Before Berwick, he had scored 82 goals in 116 league and cup games for Rangers. However, not all on the terraces were convinced. Ibrox historian Robert McElroy remembers McLean as a "very controversial" player. "He was a character," says McElroy. "Always falling over his own feet. I have never seen anyone miss so many easy chances. He divided the Ibrox support straight down the middle. Although on paper it seems an extraordinary decision [to transfer him] a lot of people agreed with it."

McLean signed for Dundee three months after Berwick, and proceeded to become the Dens Park club’s leading goalscorer the following season. His haul of 30 goals included all Dundee’s strikes in a 4-1 Fairs Cup win against Standard Liege in Belgium. He won a solitary Scotland cap in a friendly against Holland in 1968 and went on to play with Dunfermline and Ayr United. McLean retired in 1974 and worked in double glazing before moving to Sydney with wife Liz to be near their twin daughters, Mandy and Sandra. However, his roads still lead back to Berwick, and a game when the ball did everything but nestle in the back of the net.

"We hit the post, we hit the bar, we did everything but score," McLean says now. "Obviously someone had to get the blame. And since we were the strikers, we got the blame." It is not hard to feel the injustice, even so many years later. McLean, an irrepressible character off the field and who gloried in the nickname "Dandy", was able to move on, but he knows a great wrong had been done. "Even when [Graeme] Souness was manager they got beaten by Hamilton Accies in the Scottish Cup," he points out. "Yet hardly anything was said."

INDEED, not too much was said in the direct aftermath of the Berwick result either. There is the famous story of Rangers centre-half John Greig turning to Berwick captain Gordon Haig with five minutes remaining, and remarking bleakly: "If we don’t score, it’s the gas chambers for us." The players huddled in the cramped away dressing-room at Berwick, feared the worst. While some seek to bury the awkwardness of failure beneath a heap of words, manager Scot Symon proved economical in his post-match summary.

"He came in and said ‘that was a bad one today, there will be hell to pay for this’," recalls McLean. "That was it." For McLean and Forrest, the worst was still to come. They were the ones who would pay for the team’s dismal failure to overcome Second Division opposition. Neither the manager nor chairman felt they should be the ones to inform the pair of their fate, however. Instead, Mclean learned of the end of his Ibrox days from the back pages of the Evening Times.

"The chairman John Lawrence made a statement to a local reporter, to the effect that myself and Jim Forrest would never wear the blue jersey again," says McLean. "We did, but only in the reserves." In fact, both players resumed their goalscoring feats for the Ibrox second string, something which caused Rangers officials considerable discomfort, and prompted the club to increase efforts to sell the pair. "We were scoring all the time in the reserves," remembers McLean. "We were actually embarrassing them by scoring two or three every week. The first team were losing a few games, and the crowd were getting on their back. The newspaper men were stirring it up, and wondering if they were going to bring us back. I think the club thought: ‘we’d better get rid of these guys quick’."

INITIALLY Forrest had been lined up for a move to Dundee, in a swap deal with Andy Penman. He instead decided to leave for Preston North End five weeks after the Berwick result, perhaps sensing that fleeing to another country was preferable than simply another county. In April, McLean departed for Dens Park, with Penman finally arriving at Ibrox.

Rangers may have believed they had washed their hands of the affair. However, the subsequent 35 years of trawling over the most celebrated giant-killing act in Scottish football history suggests otherwise. The Ibrox club, to be fair, have not sought to banish the day completely from record, and sent an autographed ball to be auctioned at a dinner in Berwick celebrating the 30th anniversary of the result.

McLean, though, has most successfully consigned the past to the past. While Forrest only broke his long silence on the match to a tabloid this month, McLean seems free and easy about the day that cost him his Rangers career. "I would love to have stayed on to play at Ibrox, but it didn’t work out that way," he says now. "There is no point in looking back. At every team I went to after that I finished top goalscorer, so life went on."

He harbours no ill will towards the club, and, indeed, was present at a Rangers dinner/dance event near Bondi in Sydney on Saturday, when tonight’s return to Shielfield was discussed in great detail. Also present were Mark Hateley, Stuart Munro and Sandy Jardine, who burst into the team after Berwick, along with Forrest’s cousin Alex Willoughby.

"Once you are a Ranger, you are always a Ranger," McLean says. "I played for five teams, but people remember you as an ex-Rangers player. Not ex-Dundee, not ex-St Mirren. It’s funny that."

McLean’s 18-year-old son, also George, plays for Northern Spirit, the Sydney club owned by Rangers. McLean is hopeful that George junior might yet make it to Ibrox, and carry on the work his father was robbed of the opportunity to finish.

Taken from the Scotsman