BECAUSE I WAS AWARE of the – how to put this? – sensitive relationship between Celtic and Rangers, I decided to throw a bit of oil on the fire. It was my official presentation in the Ibrox press room, May 2000, and I was up for a laugh. And I got the perfect assist to score that goal; ‘receiving the ball on your tie’, as we say in the Netherlands. Scoring had never been so easy.
‘Fernando,’ one of the journos asked, ‘what do you think of Celtic?’
‘Celtic?’ I answered with a frown. ‘What’s that?’
Diabolical laughter filled the room. I’d made my point. My God, those sports hacks went mad! But not because the joke had been that brilliant. No, they were completely taken aback by the fact that this newcomer had the guts to say a thing like that. Basically they were laughing the tension away. They hadn’t seen that goal coming!
I could fully understand them. There aren’t many things as boring as the presentation of a new player. Most of the time it’s a matter of producing some prefabricated quotes such as ‘I am very happy to be here’, after which the new purchase puts his scribble on a piece of paper and grins in the photographers’ flashlights.
Instead, I decided to put on a show – without thinking about the consequences. Typical me. I didn’t realise that with one innocent little joke I had instantly made millions of enemies.
From that moment on, they hated me. And that was no joke.
According to the green hordes, I needed to be punished.
From then on, whenever I walked into a shop or just down the street, I would be verbally abused by Celtic fans. It was only then that I grasped how serious the hatred between the two clubs’ supporters was.
This was unheard of in Holland. Who in Amsterdam would give a toss that I was playing for AZ? And what about Limburg, with its four professional football clubs? As a Fortuna player I had no problems at all walking the streets of Maastricht or Venlo. Locals would even wave at me.
Not so in Bonnie Scotland. Celtic fans even spat in my face. Yelling, cursing, swearing, it happened over and over again. And not just to me; Graciela was a target too. For her, all this verbal abuse took the fun out of shopping.
Most of the time we just walked on, ignoring the shouts of ‘fuckers’, ‘wankers’ and ‘bastards’ that buzzed around our heads like bluebottles. Not because I was scared. I was never scared. It’s just that I didn’t want this to turn into something major. I knew it was provocation. They wanted to see if they could annoy me enough to receive a few well-deserved whacks. That, then, would have given them the right to hit back.
I believe that their anger was fuelled by some of the scumbags of the British press. During the aforementioned press conference I had also talked about my aims and ambition at Glasgow Rangers; not a single word of that statement made it into the tabloids. Instead, all they wrote about was the ‘terrible’ way I had ‘insulted’ Celtic, and in headlines the size of doughnuts.
But it wasn’t an insult, it was meant to be a bloody joke! Nobody believed me, of course. And from that moment on I was the bad guy.
Then, things got a lot worse. I wasn’t just hated by Celtic fans, I was hated in the rest of Scotland too! I’ve no idea how they managed to get my number, but I started to receive horrible phone calls – at horrible hours.
‘I know which school your child goes to.’ That was about Wim, my barely ten-year-old stepson. They even called him, poor kid, and told him they would come around to ‘visit’ him.
A little boy. How low can you sink?
I was terrified now, but I couldn’t show it. I had to be strong for Wim and Graciela. If I had shown fear they wouldn’t have felt safe any more. So I acted as if I didn’t care, went into everything’s-fine mode, and managed to suppress my fear and my anger. Until March 2005 ...
What happened then was beyond belief. I was checking my fan mail, like any other day. I always received lots of letters, confirmation of the fact that you’re a popular player. I loved them: the requests for an autograph or a photo, the long, hand-written letters some people sent and the occasional pair of panties. Yeah, I loved my job!
But this envelope, on this specific morning, shortly before the League Cup Final against Motherwell, obviously contained something else. I noticed it the moment I took it out of my locker. This was not your average letter. And I was right: inside the envelope was a bullet. A bullet! And a note intimating that this would be my reward if I had the guts to play well in the Final and that if I excelled I would be ‘floored by the IRA’.
We had to take the threats seriously, especially one of this kind. At the same time, I said to myself: it simply isn’t possible that somebody would be crazy enough to kill a bloody football player! I mean, I admit I am a complete lunatic and I like to provoke, but in the end I’m just a lousy footballer! A simple sportsman who only wants to win a trophy. That’s all.
Full of confidence I entered the arena. Felt sharp as a knife. All I wanted to do was win the bloody game, which, in the end, we did. We trashed them 5–1, with one goal scored by yours truly – a free-kick after 33 minutes, which gave Gordon Marshall no chance. From over 30 metres it went straight into the far end of the goal like a real bullet. Unlike the one the ‘IRA’ had in mind for me, thank God!
And that’s how I dealt with the death threat, ladies and gentlemen. Maybe someone else would have run away. Not me. The idea of letting all those magnificent Rangers fans down never crossed my mind.
And, no, I never regretted my little joke at the press conference. Because at that moment it genuinely reflected my mood. I was happy, overjoyed, to be part of the big Rangers family, and proud to follow in the footsteps of legends such as Paul Gascoigne, Graeme Souness, Ally McCoist and Brian Laudrup.
That presentation, by the way, was just for show, for the press. Sitting between David Murray and Dick Advocaat, I signed the contract. Well, a piece of paper. The real autograph had been signed three months earlier. In secret.
It was a three-year contract, which made sense. The period was long enough to see whether I would adapt to Rangers, long enough to achieve something in terms of prizes and long enough for the club to work out if I was making any progress.
Which I didn’t in the beginning. The prelude to the new season had barely begun, but I already had doubts about the transfer. Three years at Glasgow Rangers: would I be good enough?
This was, literally, a completely new ball game!
With AZ, I’d always been the main man. Everything I did, I did well. Out of ten passes, at least nine and a half reached their destination. But in Glasgow? In Glasgow, all of a sudden I was crap! An amateur. A bungler. I couldn’t even kick a ball to a guy who was practically standing next to me.
What had happened? I felt like a total jerk. And I was close to desperation.
What had happened, of course, was a change of skill level. After all, the gap between Glasgow Rangers and AZ is as deep as the Grand Canyon. Three years earlier, I was playing in the Dutch First Division against the likes of Telstar, Haarlem, TOP Oss and RBC, the local pride of Roosendaal. Now I was kicking balls on behalf of the mightiest club in Scotland. And to any reader who thinks the Scottish competition is a Mickey Mouse League, well, think again! You simply don’t get it tougher than in the land of the brave. It’s a battlefield there.
So, I was struggling – big time. Undisputed low point: the pre-season match against Livingston, which we lost 1–3. All three goals in the Almondvale Stadium were made by my direct opponent that day.
And that wasn’t even a turning point! I continued to play like a sack of potatoes, in matches as well as on the training pitch, and I started to ask myself: why oh why did you come to Rangers this early in your career? Despite that magic word in the club crest, you aren’t ready for it yet. Or are you? No, you aren’t! Hell, you should’ve stayed at AZ, you moron!
On top of that I still didn’t have a satellite dish, so I couldn’t watch Dutch television. All my certainties had gone. I missed home.
And then, five matches into the season, there it was: my very first Old Firm game! Too early? Maybe not. After all, Dick Advocaat still believed in me. I knew I’d played crap against Saint Johnstone, Kilmarnock, Saint Mirren and Dunfermline, but Dick never let me down. Well, that’s what Dicks are for, eh? Seriously though, he kept supporting me. Never failed. ‘You’re doing fine, Fernando. Don’t despair, it’s gonna be all right.’
So I was in the team on that memorable day of 27 August 2000 at Celtic Park. I knew it had to happen there and then. I knew that playing well in the only game that really matters would make life with Rangers a lot easier. All I had to do against Celtic was bring out the Fernando from previous years. I simply had to be able to play the way I did before the transfer.
Easier said than done. The night before the game, I could hardly sleep. Largely thanks to some Celtic supporters who kept sneaking into our hotel to set off the fire alarm! Every single time, we had to get out of bed and stand on the pavement in our pyjamas. Well, the last two times I thought, screw you, and stayed in bed.
Insomnia aside, that Celtic–Rangers would be a game I’d prefer to forget. I blew it – completely. After no more than twenty minutes, Dick took me off the pitch. He could see that I didn’t stand a chance against Bobby Petta, Celtic’s Dutch left-winger. So, instead of growing into the match I was more or less growing out of it. Not a single bit of confidence did I gain that afternoon. And when I saw my substitute, the Turk Tugay Kerimoglu, peeling off his training suit, I totally lost it.
‘Why, Dick? Why the fuck are you doing this to me?’
Within eleven minutes the score was 3–0. And all of the goals had started on my side of the pitch. Credit to Bobby Petta, who did a wonderful job and provided Chris Sutton, Stiliyan Petrov and Paul Lambert with solid support.
Still, I was cursing when I noticed my number on the substitutes’ board. ‘Why me?’ I grumbled.
No need for an answer there, really. I’d played like a damp newspaper, but there were still about 70 minutes to go. Plenty of time for me to turn the tables. Things could change, couldn’t Dick see that?
No, he couldn’t.
It was the biggest humiliation in my entire life. I can still hear, no, feel the whistling from the stands. To make things worse, being a right-wing defender I had to walk all the way from the far side of the field to the tunnel. It felt like a lifetime.
I got a handshake from Dick, but that didn’t cheer me up one bit. On the way to the dressing room, I smashed a door to pieces. One of those beautiful old ones, pure craftsmanship – hope they still had the receipt.
I was furious at everybody. Everybody but me, predictably. It was everyone else’s fault, not Fernando’s. Hell no! I was Fernando Ricksen, footballer par excellence. It wasn’t me who’d messed it up; it was my fellow teammates, the filthy press hounds, the supporters and, above all, Dick Advocaat, who had been stupid enough to take me off the pitch.
It was Jim Bell, our incomparable kit man, who managed to calm me down. He put me under the shower, and minutes later, along with the hot water, my anger went down the drain. But it was one very shitty day. The Hoops gave us one hell of an ear-bashing. In the end it was 6–2, and Barry Ferguson had been sent off.
The game was dubbed the ‘Demolition Derby’ – and it was!
On the way back, in the coach, I kept my mouth shut. For once, I knew that saying nothing might be the best thing to do.
How different things would be six months later, on 11 February 2001!
Once again I had to face Bobby Petta in yet another edition of the ongoing soap opera called the Old Firm. I hadn’t forgotten our first confrontation. How could I? The Scottish press kept reminding me about the Demolition Derby. They didn’t stop writing about what a complete waste of money I’d been. So I had told myself that whatever happened, I wouldn’t let Petta make a fool out of me again. Once was enough!
By this time, I was a completely different player – stronger, full of confidence. So I made a plan to stop Petta. The plan consisted of two words: whack him.
So the moment he wanted to sneak past me, I hit him. Hard. It was my way of giving him a wake-up call. Didn’t want to cripple the guy, no way. It was just a reminder: not today, Bobby!
I never really did have any scruples when it came to booting the odd pair of hairy legs. Ask Derek Riordan. If he still can talk, that is. Let me take you back to Thursday, 5 February 2004, and the League Cup semi-final against Hibernian, at Hampden Park. I elbowed the guy. And I did it so hard I swear I could hear his nose cracking like a bag of crisps. It looked awful, like a piece of modern art with splashes of red paint all over the canvas. Riordan was out, no doubt about it.
Well, I thought he’d asked for it. I was already past him, with the ball, but he kept pulling my shirt. And if you pull my shirt, I have to get free. And if I get free, chances are you’ll connect with my elbow. By accident. Or at least that’s what I always said to the ref. This time, Kenny Clark didn’t even give me a yellow card. There was just red for Riordan – all over his face.
Guess what? Despite the fact that Riordan was floored, screaming like a pig at a slaughterhouse, we were allowed to continue playing. No intervention by the ref! So Shota Arveladze could play the ball to Michael Mols, who managed to score. Too bad we didn’t make it to the final though. Out we went on penalties, with Frank de Boer missing the crucial one.
Still, it wasn’t game over for me. Not long after the final whistle I found myself at the police station. The thing is, referee Clark hadn’t seen anything unlawful, but the television viewers had ... especially those who slept in Celtic pyjamas. Until that moment I didn’t know that in Scotland you can declare a crime anonymously, which is exactly what half of Glasgow did! For them it must have been Christmas and Saint Patrick’s Day all in one: not only did their beloved footballers beat their sworn enemies, they could also kick one of them in the nuts. And how eager they were to do so! Luckily the coppers just warned me to ‘Never do that again, son.’ And out I walked, a free man again.
Still, that wasn’t the end of it, as experts from the Scottish Football Association started to analyse the footage of the clash. The outcome was that I had done it on purpose, so four weeks later I was asked to pay a £10,000 fine. And I was banned from playing the next four games.
All this for an incident that I hadn’t even been reprimanded for by the referee ... Well, not quite. The punishment had everything to do with my past.
I still had a conditional sentence from an incident in November 2000 when I had left Aberdeen’s Darren Young in a bit of pain. Back then, that skirmish cost me five matches. And that was well deserved, I admit, for I don’t think I’ve ever hurt anyone more than when I put my studs into Darren Young’s flesh. Not very nice of me, I agree, but just as with Riordan it was a case of: he asked for it!
Darren was an irritating opponent. Very irritating! The Ricksen type ... But there was one difference between us: I never tried to harm anyone on purpose. Well, until that Sunday in November, that is, in Aberdeen’s Pittodrie Stadium. That’s when I encountered Darren Young, a guy with an unhealthy appetite for hurting people and causing pain and misery, just for the sake of it.
This afternoon was no exception. He was bugging me non-stop, with nasty tackles from behind: both legs, and always aiming for the calves instead of the ball. I kept telling him, ‘Please stop it, or you will regret it!’ No reaction. Being a proper hard bastard, he continued kicking me. And after the fourth assault I had had a gutful. I told myself, He’s gonna get one! Always hitting me from the back only, I thought was cowardly. Be a man and have the guts to face me, for Christ’s sake!
I knew Young would go after me for round five, so I kept an extra eye on him. I also knew it would just be a matter of time before he regretted the fact that he’d tried to break my legs. So, the next time he came after me like a bloodhound, ready to bite my legs, I counter-attacked in style: with a backwards kick the world hadn’t seen since the halcyon days of Bruce Lee. Bull’s eye!
Okay, it had nothing to do with football as such, but it was just a matter of getting even. He’d kicked the shit out of me for God knows how long, so now it was payback time. And I did a pretty nifty job, as referee Mike McCurry didn’t even give me a yellow card!
Too bad the match was shown on television ...
So there I was, suited and booted, at the SFA headquarters. ‘It was self-defence, gentlemen!’ I piped up. ‘Nothing but self-defence! It was him or me. He was determined to kick me out of the stadium, so I had to do something before he could achieve that!’
I could see they weren’t too impressed, so I added something to my personal plea. I told them how weird it was to punish a player purely by checking television footage. ‘If you do that, why not study it to see whether it was a penalty or not as well? And how about all this fake diving? It’s easy to give that a second look on the telly too!’
I think they felt I had a point there, as in the end I was only suspended for two games. Case closed? Oh no! Within days I was suspended for another three matches. The reason: my comments on www.icons.com. On that website, frequented by a lot of footballers, I had written that Young was a mean bastard ‘who only wants to hurt his opponents’. And somebody like that, I vented, simply needs to be kicked himself.
It was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But the SFA weren’t going to tolerate it. Hence three more games without slipping into my boots.
I was stricken by this punishment. Didn’t get it at all. Here I was, facing a woman who sentenced me to three more games on the bench. A 70-year-old woman, more to the point. ‘Respect?’ I growled at her. ‘What has this got to do with respect? How dare you punish me like this? On the strength of a comment on a website? You don’t even know what a website is! You don’t even know how to write the word website!’
And then I totally lost it. I went off on a tirade – about freedom of speech and how the Scottish version differs from the British one.
‘Please, Fernando, behave,’ whispered the Rangers officials, who were sitting next to me. I pretended not to hear them. Instead, I went on and on about the ‘British banana republic’ and how I had the goddamn right to write what I felt, as long as it was the truth. And this was the truth. Young was a foul player who always wanted to do you harm, so it would be unthinkable that I would ever apologise to him and ...
It was a waste of time. They were not impressed. So that meant a total of five suspended games. What a shit season!
And now an edifying word to the youth. No, Uncle Fernando isn’t an antisocial arsehole. Please, listen. I know I’m a tough player, but playing tough is part of the game. It has been for years. In the past – to be precise, the early seventies – there were my fellow countrymen ‘Iron’ Rinus Israël and Theo ‘The Tank’ Laseroms, who formed the heart of the Feyenoord defence. If they clashed with you, you could retrieve your bones from the terraces. And don’t forget: that little fellow Dick Advocaat was a meanie too! It’s just that we had about one camera per game back then – and not even all matches were captured on film! So lots of their antics remained unseen. When I hit somebody’s ankle it’s captured by God knows how many cameras. What they did in the past was just as bad – sometimes even worse – as what we do today. But we have the disadvantage of having everything televised. Fernando Ricksen was not the guy who invented the death kick, okay?
So, back to my second Old Firm game and back to the moment I floored Bobby Petta. That was not to do him any harm. Why should I? Bobby was a top guy. We even went out for a drink once in a while. Unlike Young, Petta wasn’t a crook at all. Oh, Young, there we go again ... At one point I was called ‘The Meanest Footballer in Scotland’. I still don’t get it; I wasn’t half as irritating as that Young bloke.
Okay, back to Bobby Petta – again! Couldn’t touch him too much after our little bump, as referee Hugh Dallas had given me a yellow card. So I had to play carefully for the rest of the game – and that was exactly the instruction Dick Advocaat gave me.
But ‘Ricksen’ and ‘playing carefully’ simply don’t go together and shortly before half-time I gave Tom Boyd a ‘little cake’, as we say in the Netherlands. Well, that was it. Second slice of cheese from Mr Dallas and off I went, to a premature shower. Again. Just like six months before. With one significant difference: no handshake from Dick Advocaat this time. He didn’t even look at me when I walked past him. Well, I couldn’t care less. I was fuming. Not with myself, but with the big, bad world, the world that was always against poor little Fernando.
Dick, of course, was part of that world. More to the point, he was the leader of the pack, my biggest and baddest enemy at that very moment. So, as soon as he entered the dressing room at half-time I went for his throat. I literally jumped over the masseur’s table to try to punch him in the face. But he didn’t back off, oh no. He stood his ground and started growling at me. He was just as angry with me as I was with him. Dick did his best to stay calm and said, ‘Come to my office tomorrow, so we can talk about this like grown-ups. But not now, as I have a team to coach, in quite an important match.’
I couldn’t wait that long though. I wanted to confront him that very moment. Okay, I don’t really think I would have punched him, but I was totally up for a verbal battle. Hence my yelling and cursing. Why, for Christ’s sake, couldn’t I play every week? I would be so much better if I could, so much more in shape. Why the hell did I have to sit on the bench for 90 minutes when we played the same Celtic side four days earlier, in the semi-final of the League Cup?
It was as if all my pent-up frustration had made me erupt like a volcano. After all, it had been a disappointing six months. Times were so bad that I seriously thought about quitting football. I couldn’t deal with the pressure any more. I was dreaming of going back to Limburg to become a bricklayer. God, I loved the idea of a nine to five job! Do your thing in the daytime, have your dinner at six and spend the rest of the night watching telly, without millions of people looking over your shoulder. To hell with all the money I was making as a footballer! As a bricklayer I would have less cash, but less worry!
Never did it, though. I was a professional footballer and I had a contract. With Glasgow Rangers. But I played badly, very badly, and I kept being sent off. I blamed others for that, especially my coach, Dick Advocaat.
So I kept screaming and screaming at Dick, ‘You don’t give me any confidence at all!’ Which, to be honest, wasn’t true. Dick was one of the few people who were good to me. It’s just that I didn’t see it, because I was wearing blinkers.
It was about time to take them off.