Home Away From Home

The good news from last week was that no Scottish side lost in Europe across three fixtures. The bad news is that no Scottish side won in Europe across three fixtures either.

The good news is that Rangers got their draw away from home. The bad news is Rangers home game is going to be away from home too.

The good news is that the game at Hampden is live on BBC Scotland with a 7.45pm kick off. The bad news is that this seems to be only one that’s live this week without doing pay per view streaming.

Rangers last gasp equaliser in Poland last week thanks to Cyriel Dessers after Andriy Yarmolenko’s first half opener didn’t really tell the whole story of a relatively even match. Maybe these highlights will though.

The last time Rangers came back to Scotland with a 1-1 draw from the away leg was in the round of sixteen of the 2020/21 Europa League, and unfortunately for Rangers that ended in a 2-0 defeat at Ibrox to Slavia Prague.

In better news, of the seven times prior to that where a Rangers side brought a 1-1 draw back to Ibrox, only one of those ended in defeat and that was 3-1 to Valencia in the Cup Winners’ Cup second round. We’ll skip over that to the interesting bit though.

Three of the six wins, because none of them have ended in a draw, all came when Rangers were on the road to Barcelona in the 1971/72 Cup Winners’ Cup!

In the first round, Rangers won 1-0 against Rennes having drawn 1-1 in France. Then in the quarter final, Rangers won 1-0 again, this time against Torino having drawn 1-1 in Italy. Then the semi final saw Rangers return from Germany with a 1-1 draw before beating Bayern Munich 2-0 at Ibrox to reach the final.

So that’s an excuse just to post this whole road to Barcelona video!

The remaining three wins came in the 1966/67 Cup Winners’ Cup first round where Rangers won 4-0 at home to Glentoran (and that’s also another time that Rangers went on to reach the final you’ll note), the 1967/68 Inter-Cities Fairs’ Cup first round where Rangers won 2-1 at home to Dynamo Dresden, and the 1998/99 UEFA Cup first round where Rangers won 4-2 at home to Beitar Jerusalem.

I could only find video footage of the last of those three though.

When Dynamo Kyiv last came to Glasgow to face Rangers, albeit at Ibrox, Rangers won 2-0. Mark Falco (rock me Amadeus) levelling the tie and Ally McCoist winning the tie, since Rangers were 1-0 down from the first leg in the then Ukrainian part of the Soviet Union.

As said many times now, tonight’s match will take place at Hampden rather than Ibrox due to the well documented issues with ongoing stand improvement work there. However, while this will be the first time Rangers have hosted a European tie away from Ibrox, it’s by no means the first time that a Scottish club has played their home European tie away from their own home.

Celtic, for example, have done it several times. The most famous would be when they beat Leeds United 2-1 in the semi final of the 1969/70 European Cup to reach their second European Cup final in three years. One of the best battles of Britain, and one that set an attendance record for a European tie that has never been beaten at 136,505 (officially at least), an attendance they couldn’t have got at the smaller Celtic Park.

However, Celtic would play at Hampden Park twice more, albeit without the huge attendance. In 1971, Celtic beat Ajax 1-0 in front of a “mere” 90,000 (another attendance not possible at Celtic Park), which unfortunately wasn’t enough to overturn the 3-0 defeat way from home in the first leg. Ajax went on to win the trophy that season.

Then in the 1972/73 European Cup first round, Celtic beat Rosenborg 2-1 in the first leg before finishing the job in the second leg. No big crowd this time, this was more necessity as Celtic Park’s main stand was undergoing work at the time.

So the good news for Rangers is that’s three games and three wins for Scottish sides playing in Europe at Hampden so far! Tonight will be the fourth, the other games I’m going to mentioned took place elsewhere.

Celtic have played three other home games away from Celtic Park. The second leg of the Cup Winners’ Cup tie against Rapid Vienna in the 1984/85 season was replayed at Old Trafford after Celtic had apparently knocked them out in the original fixture after winning 3-0 to turn around the 3-1 first leg defeat, only to be made to replay it because Rapid lied about their player being hit by a missile from the crowd. Rapid won the game 1-0 and the tie 4-1 on aggregate thanks to that and went all the way to the final where thankfully the cheating Austrians lost to Everton.

Still, UEFA did come through for Celtic on another occasion where they didn’t play at home. With Celtic Park on Commonwealth Games opening ceremony duty, Celtic decanted to Edinburgh for a couple of games. The not so memorable match where Celtic beat Reykajvik 4-0 at Murrayfield in 2014 was followed by Celtic losing 2-0 to Legia Warsaw… only to win 3-0 on an administrative technicality as Legia brought on the suspended Bartosz Bereszynski for the final few minutes of the game. The standard 3-0 was especially useful given Celtic had lost in Poland 4-1, and so Callum McGregor’s away goal was the difference. Celtic were back at home in Glasgow before they lost the next round to Maribor.

Murrayfield was also the home for Hearts in European competition for two season, both in the 2004/05 and 2006/07 seasons. In the former, Hearts beat Braga 3-1 in the UEFA Cup first round before losing 1-0 to both Schalke and Ferencvaros in the group stage, and in the latter Hearts beat Siroki Brijeg 3-0 in Champions League qualifying before losing 2-1 to AEK Athens and dropping into the UEFA Cup where they lost to Sparta Prague 2-0.

So let’s enjoy the 3-0 win in Champions League qualifying, still the only time a team other than Celtic or Rangers has had that chance since the European Cup’s rebranding in the 1990s.

Curiously, in both of those seasons, Hearts weren’t the only team playing home games away from home. In 2004, Dunfermline Athletic used McDiarmid Park to play FH of Iceland on grass instead of the the UEFA backed trial of an artificial pitch but lost 2-1 and went out. Whilst in 2006, Gretna took on Derry City at Fir Park rather than the unsuitable Raydale Park and got roundly pumped 5-1.

And finally, let’s definitely not forget that time Raith Rovers hosted Bayern Munich in the UEFA Cup at Easter Road in 1995 because Starks Park wasn’t big enough to meet the demand for this huge match.

I’m just going to indulge myself now and post the away leg too because mind that time Raith Rovers were beating Bayern Munich in Germany after Danny Lennon put them 1-0 up at the Olympiastadion?

Okay, back to tonight. Dynamo Kyiv got the weekend off before the first leg to help them out with Champions League qualifying, but still had to play the weekend between the two legs so what even is that about.

They beat Veres Rivne 2-1 away from home (of which I can’t find any highlights) and after tonight they’ll go to Karpaty Lviv this coming weekend. They’re seventh in the league, three points behind leaders Zorya Luhansk, but Dynamo Kyiv have only played one match so far so that doesn’t mean anything.

Rangers got their Hampden stint off to a winning start on Saturday with a 2-1 win over Motherwell, putting them fourth in the league after two games and two points behind leaders Celtic. They’ll host St Johnstone at Hampden in the League Cup second round on Saturday evening.

The winner of this tie will face whoever wins between FC Twente and Red Bull Salzburg. That second leg kicks off at 6pm oor time in the Netherlands, with the Austrians 2-1 up from their home leg. The loser of this tie will be in the Europa League group stage draw, skipping over the playoff round.

Good luck to Rangers tonight!