Rangers assistant Jimmy Nicholl: Big Jock once told me he would have kicked my backside all the way to America

JIMMY Nicholl has been the life and soul of Rangers’ winter training camp in Florida.

Brought in to be Graeme Murty’s assistant at the turn of the year, he is calling upon his previous Ibrox experiences to help the current squad.

He believes a little bit of old-school tough love can help to transform a side who have blown cold as often as they’ve been hot this season.

There are many in football who believe the days of sergeant-major-type managers like Jock Wallace are in the past, and should be left there.

But the Northern Irishman has nothing but good memories of the legendary Ibrox boss.

Nicholl has always been a man in love with the beautiful game, and he’s delighted to be back at Rangers.

He wants players to look forward to training in the way he did in his two spells as a player with the Light Blues.

Even a day that was nearly the worst of his career brings a smile to his face when he recalls a manager that inspired passion and intense loyalty in his troops.

He said: “In the last game of my first spell, Jock Wallace said he was making me captain for the day.

“It was against Celtic at Ibrox, and I was flying back to America to play in the NASL on the Monday.

“But I was sent off after 55 minutes. Thankfully, Bobby Williamson scored with an overhead kick to win it 1-0.

“So it was a case of straw hat and trumpets after the game.

“But right after the final whsitle, all the boys were there and Jock slammed the door.

“He’s shouting at me: ‘You’re the luckiest man in the world, I’m telling you. You let yourself down, you let the team down and you almost let the club down’.

“Then he says: ‘It’s a good job we won that game because I’m telling you right now – if we’d have lost that game you wouldn’t have needed a plane to get you to America on Monday.

‘I’d have kicked your backside so hard you’d have landed in America anyway. But I love you!’

“It was brilliant.”

Nicholl, a former assistant at Aberdeen, Kilmarnock and most recently Falkirk, has always had the gift of the gab, as the Rangers players who don’t know him have found out here in Florida.

He’s a straight talker, but always with a warmth behind even harsh words.

It’s another part of his life where he met his match in Jock Wallace.

He recalled: “He had these meetings on a Friday when he would ask you about football.

“He would go round everyone asking: ‘What’s football all about?’

“People are saying things like ‘teamwork’, ‘working hard’ and so on.

“By the time it comes round to you, there is nothing different you can say from the other boys.

“After about two or three meetings, what was in my head came out of my mouth.

“Big Jock spun round and said: ‘Nicholl, what do you think football is all about?’

“I said: ‘It doesn’t matter what we say because you never do anything about it anyway. We play the same way, we train the same way. I think it’s brilliant. I don’t know why we have these meetings. Look at you, you are so domineering. You just dominate everything’.

“My face turns bright red. I’m looking at the boys sitting behind Jock, who are all shaking their heads, wondering what I’ve done.

“Then Jock says: ‘Dominant? I’ll give you dominant. Get out on that training pitch!’.

“About six weeks later, we went to Majorca for four or five days.

“We go to the airport to fly back, and Jock is standing there. I can still see it. He shouts me over: ‘Nicholl, Nicholl, come here!’

“He says to me: ‘See what you said five or six weeks ago about me being domineering . . .’

“I thought he was going to hit me! But then he goes: ‘What you mean is that you’d rather listen to me, and what I’ve got to say?’

“I said: ‘Aye!’. And he grabs me in this headlock, delighted. I loved him.”

Rangers fans are desperate to see a better quality of player and they want men with a genuine enthusiasm for the club.

They have that in Nicholl, and he knows that it can be a winning formula.

He saw it during his earlier spells at Ibrox, and was part of the Souness revolution in 1986.

Nicholl recalled: “Graeme Souness had demands, Walter Smith had demands. It was standards.

“Graeme surrounded himself with good players, and Walter, who was his best signing.

“Then he got the England goalkeeper, Chris Woods, the England captain, Terry Butcher, and he surrounded himself with good players, who he expected to know their jobs.

“It was simple – if you don’t do your job for four or five weeks, he’ll go and get someone else.

“Every week you were playing, but knowing the standards were bang, bang, bang.

“I remember one Friday morning in training, and wee Durrant hit Graeme in a tackle. Then Graeme gets up and hits Durrant – then Derek Ferguson hits Graeme because he hit Durrant!

“So Graeme gets up, and says to Durrant and Ferguson: ‘The two of you, come on then!’.

“Walter walked over, picked the ball up and said: ‘Away in, it is getting out of hand now. It is finished’.

“He finished the session. But it wasn’t evil, it was just bang, bang, all the time.”

Nicholl’s 61st birthday came and went recently, but he still has ambitions to be successful in football.

And this more than 20 years since he took Raith Rovers into Europe after beating Celtic to win the League Cup.

Nicholl continued: “All I want is players who say: ‘I am going to enjoy my day’s work. I don’t care what it is, I am going to go in because I really enjoy it’.

“It’s not going to be brilliant all of the time. There are unhappy times, but the bulk of the time you want to leave your front door to go and work.

“So it is about all the wee things that it takes to help create that environment.

“You can feel it snowballing and then things fall into place.

“At Raith Rovers, the hardest thing to win was the first thing.

“If you are an average player and you think: ‘I haven’t won anything’ but then all of a sudden you win the First Division, you think: ‘I must be better than average’.

“You have to try to win things, to achieve things.”

Nicholl had a second playing stint at Rangers after meeting Graeme Souness on a flight back from the World Cup in 1986.

He eventually lost his place to Gary Stevens, but that led to him cutting his teeth in coaching.

In his world, there’s a silver lining to every cloud.

There’s still a feeling of frustration and uncertainty surrounding Rangers, but Nicholl thinks back to the early 1980s and wonders if things are really that bad.

He said: “You can see how things have turned around.

“I remember games with 12,000 at Ibrox, and big John McClelland saying to me that I couldn’t go out the front door because they were waiting for us outside.

“Now players should appreciate where they are at this moment in time. There are 50,000 inside Ibrox every second week, 5000 or more away from home.

“That’s brilliant.”