Free The Gallant Pioneers: Rangers 1872 by Gary Ralston

‘The other day I read in a spiritualist paper that games were played in heaven and I earnestly hope that is the case, for a heaven without games would have little attraction for me. And if there was football beyond, then assuredly I would get the old Rangers team together and we would challenge the old Vale – and I could tell them the result beforehand; the Vale wouldn’t be on the winning side.’ Vallance reflected on a period soon after their formation during which the youthful nomads of Rangers finally established themselves on the map of the burgeoning Scottish football scene. They were helped to a huge extent by the three games it took to settle the 1877 Scottish Cup Final, and even if they eventually went down to the men from Leven’s shores, they attracted an audience they have never lost since as ‘thousands of the working classes rushed out to the field of battle in their labouring garb, after crossing the workshop gate when the whistle sounded at five o’clock.’3 Rangers have played countless crucial Championship, Cup and European matches in their long and successful history but, even now, few games have been as important to the development of the club as those three encounters, two played on the West of Scotland Cricket Ground at Hamilton Crescent in Partick and the third and decisive head-to-head at the first Hampden Park.
  As a fledgling club, effectively a youth team with no ‘home’ to call their own, Rangers were not invited and nor did they apply for membership of the Scottish Football Association in March 1873 when eight clubs came together at the Dewar’s Temperance Hotel in Bridge Street, Glasgow, to form a sporting alliance. Each club – including, of course, the mighty Queen’s Park – contributed £1 towards the purchase of a trophy for a newly established Cup competition – the Scottish Cup. Rangers secured membership in season 1874–75 and in their first Scottish Cup tie, on 12 October 1874, saw off a team called Oxford (from the east end of Glasgow) 2–0 on the Queen’s Park Recreation Ground, with goals from Moses McNeil and David Gibb. In the second round, played at Glasgow Green on 28 November, Rangers drew 0–0 with Dumbarton but lost the replay a fortnight later 1–0 to a controversial winner. The consensus of opinion in an era when goal nets were still a brainwave for the future was that the Dumbarton ‘goal’ had gone over the string bar, rather than under. However, the umpires and referee signalled the goal to stand and Rangers were out of the tournament – for the first time, but certainly not the last – in controversial circumstances.
  The backbone of the team in the early years, of course, came from the Gareloch connection – Moses, Willie and Peter McNeil, Peter, James and John Campbell, Alex and Tom Vallance, as well as other friends including William McBeath, James Watson (who became president of the club in 1890), John Yuil and George Phillips. Queen’s Park were regarded as visionaries and pioneers and regularly undertook tours across Scotland to teach the new game to interested participants. However, the great Hampden outfit initially refused to face Rangers in its infancy, citing the new club’s lack of a permanent home as the principal reason. They agreed instead to send their second side, known as the Strollers, but Rangers wanted all or nothing and refused their offer. They wrote again to Queen’s Park in July 1875, and this time the standard-bearers slotted in a game against them on 20 November, with the £28 proceeds from the fixture, a 2-0 victory for the more senior club, distributed to the Bridgeton fire fund. The charity pot had been established to help the eight families left homeless and the 700 workers left idle following a blaze at a spinning mill in Greenhead Street, which was recognised as the biggest ever seen in the city to that date. Amazingly, there were no casualties. An official publication on the history of Queen’s Park,