Kenny Miller was back at Ibrox for a third time. But this was no longer the club he knew and loved. The standards set down by Walter Smith had long gone, buried under the rubble of financial collapse.
Craig Whyte had vanished off the radar. Charles Green had left the building with whatever he could scoop into his big Yorkshire hands. And Mike Ashley’s board was fighting a losing battle to keep Dave King from the front door.
On the pitch, Rangers were still attempting to pick up the pieces from starting out in League Two. Ally McCoist was put on gardening leave, replaced by Kenny McDowall. Stuart McCall then tired and failed to get the team over the hurdle of a promotion play-off against Motherwell. Mark Warburton came and went despite returning the club to the top flight after an angry fall-out with chairman King. Graeme Murty held the fort for a while.
And then, into this picture of perfect chaos, along came Pedro Caixinha and Progres Niederkorn. Miller’s time at Rangers was nearing an explosive end.
Speaking in the latest episode of the ‘Off the Record’ podcast Miller said: “It was hard at that time to see certain things go on at the club. You talk about the traditions and the standards but I’m talking about things off the field at Ibrox when you’re like, ‘Wow! These kind of things shouldn’t be happening,’.
“How you actually treat people round about Murray Park. There were certain things when you were like, ‘F****** hell! It’s not right!’.”
Accused by Caixinha of leading a dressing room revolt, Miller was banished to the youth set-up shortly before the Portuguese manager’s shambolic 229 day reign was brought to an end. Up stepped Murty for a second time.
And, despite initially being reinstated and made captain, Miller had a hunch it was about to end. Badly. He said: “What happened during that time is hard to explain.
"Everyone has intuitions, feelings and gut instincts but I felt when I got injured that something had changed in the building. I could just feel it. The team was going to Florida that January and Murts pulled me - and I knew what was coming.
“He said, ‘Look, you are not going to go to Florida,’. I went, ‘Why not?’ He said it was to do with me being injured but I went, ‘But there are other injured players going!’.
“I went, ‘Seriously Murts, there’s got to be a reason. Just give me it straight’. ‘No, no it’s not like that. Big Waldo is not going either’. I went, ‘Right, OK. No problem’.
“But there were other injured players that had gone over and at that moment I thought, ‘This is not right!’. I got myself ready for after the break and I was back for every game effectively. I started one of them.
“And I’m saying this with the greatest of respect, but you only needed to look at the guys that were playing ahead of me to think, ‘Oh wait a minute, there’s something maybe not right here,’ I started one game - it was the Dundee game - we won 4-0, I scored the first goal and that was the week before that Celtic game.”
As Rangers disintegrated further, eventually in the heated aftermath of a Scottish Cup thrashing from Celtic, Miller and skipper Lee Wallace could hold their tongues no longer. Both would pay for it with their Rangers careers.
Miller went on: “Forget getting beat, I’ve been in dressing rooms where teams have won and you’ve had players not happy about a situation or a performance or maybe even just an incident within the game where maybe standards weren’t met.
“I’ve seen 10 times worse. I have. I’ve heard of other examples.
“When you play until you’re 40 and for the amount of teams I’ve played over the years and the amount of players I’ve played with over my career, you speak to people. ‘What happened there?’. ‘Oh you should have seen it after the game! He was doing this and he was doing this, they were at it and he had him nailed against the wall!’. But there was none of that. None of that.
“And there were other people in the dressing room saying things as well. It was not as if it was just me out there saying this and Lee Wallace out there saying that. That’s just not how it was.
“I don’t know. You can only say that it felt like, ‘We can blame that or make a bit of a smokescreen to cover the fact that we’ve just been scudded again by Celtic!’. It fitted what they wanted to happen at that time.
“It ended me. I felt for big Waldo as he still had a year left and he had to go and endure that. I know it hurt him bad as well. But listen, it happened. It’s part of everything that goes into a career. Did it hurt? Of course it did. Was I absolutely devastated? Of course I was.
“Because it was over absolutely nothing in my eyes and I think in a lot of people’s eyes. There are always two sides, sometimes three or four sides, but after a result like that - in that game - would it have been different had it been a Super Ally or a Richard Gough era? If they had just lost 4-0 to Celtic in a semi final. I would imagine it would have been a bit worse!”
Both players were suspended. Miller left the club under a cloud at the end of the season. He said: “I always remember going to get all my stuff out of my locker. I had the same locker when I left as I had at Murray Park’s inception in 2001.
“Then I had a wee walk out onto the training pitch with my black bag and I thought, ‘This WILL be the last time I’ll probably set foot here … as a player!
“It was sad and did hurt because I thought about everything that the great man had instilled in us and what the club demanded of us back then. We had tried to continue that with this completely new group - there were a lot of foreigners as well who came in under Pedro’s time - trying to maintain those standards. Ultimately, it maybe went against you in the end.
“It was a sad way to end. It hurt, it hurt deep. It felt as if everything I had been built to be, to represent that place, was now part of the reason you were getting thrown under a bus.”
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