Trevor Steven’s middle name provides a clue to his Scottish roots. McGregor comes from his mother’s side of a family that straddled both sides of the border with England over recent generations.
“My grandfather was born in Ecclefechan and my middle name is McGregor, which was his name,” he explains. “He was a policeman and was transferred from Ecclefechan/Lockerbie [Dumfries and Galloway] across to Ashington [Northumberland]. My mother was born in Blyth and then he got transferred up to Berwick and that’s where my mother met my father and I was born.”
These days an eager SFA scout would be all over that ancestry and Steven sounded out for Steve Clarke’s squad, but back then he played for England schoolboys and later represented them at two World Cups, 1986 and 1990, that Scotland also qualified for without a mention of him swapping sides. “It was never raised as a question at all,” he confirms.
Yet Steven’s club career would eventually bring him to Scotland for two successful stints at Rangers, sandwiching an eventful year at Marseille. Before that, there was Burnley, where he perhaps first caught Graeme Souness’s eye playing against Liverpool’s captain in a League Cup semi-final, and Everton, where he was a key element of the team put together by the late Howard Kendall, one of the finest exponents of the 4-4-2 formation that British football has seen.
Steven was a central midfielder at Burnley, but Kendall saw something in his nimble skills allied to the stamina of a middle-distance runner that made him perfect as one of the wide midfielders supplying strikers such as Andy Gray, Graeme Sharp, Adrian Heath and Gary Lineker at Goodison Park.
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Bobby Robson adopted a similar approach at the 1986 World Cup finals for England, bringing Steven and Peter Reid, his Everton team-mate, into a revamped midfield after a defeat by Portugal and a draw with Morocco in the first two group games, sparking England’s run to the quarter-finals, where they lost to an Argentina side impishly inspired by Diego Maradona.
Everton won the FA Cup in 1984 and followed that with the league title and European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1985. A European Cup may have followed if not for the Heysel disaster and the subsequent blanket ban on English clubs from European competition.
“At that age, you don’t realise how much of a loss that was,” Steven reflects. “We’d just won the European Cup Winners’ Cup and the league, beaten in the FA Cup final by Man United, and were looking forward to the challenges of the next season and then it all changed. We should have won the league in 1986 but didn’t, when Gary Lineker played, and we won the league again in 1987 with not as good a team.”
Kendall left to manage Athletic Bilbao and Steven found himself going stale. By the summer of 1989, he wanted a fresh challenge and his choice was to replace Gordon Strachan on the right of Manchester United’s midfield, as Alex Ferguson fought to keep his job, or follow several other England internationals to Ibrox, where Souness offered European football.
This was before Ferguson won his first trophy (the FA Cup in 1990) and before wages diverged spectacularly between Scotland and England, so what would be a straightforward choice of Old Trafford now was far more complicated and Steven found himself caught between two dominant personalities both determined to land him.
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“I went with an open mind to speak to Alex Ferguson, but Graeme at Rangers was holding all the aces on every front. Alex’s coat was on a sticky peg because they hadn’t won anything. I did tell him I was going to see Graeme and they [Rangers] were just adamant that I should be staying there and signing. He did not want me to leave the building.
“There was the European dimension and Andy Gray was there at that time plus Trevor Francis, Ray Wilkins, Gary Stevens, Terry Butcher and Chris Woods, colleagues of mine in the England team, so it just made sense because you couldn’t see the long term playing in England, couldn’t see what was going to come next.”
It was Souness’s show but Walter Smith was in the background, smoothing relations between the players and their volatile, young manager with his wisdom. “Graeme never offered the floor to Walter as I can remember. Graeme would always be the one either patting us on the back or tearing our heads off.
“There was always a touch of arrogance about Graeme. The way he walked, he strutted, the way he held himself, the way he talked to the media, all of those things told you, ‘this guy wants to get somewhere really fast’ and he was still only in his mid-thirties.
“His reputation went before him and I was excited to see how he was as a manager, despite having little experience. He did absolutely dominate the dressing-room. Walter was the balancing act, much closer to the players in everyday goings on.
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“When it turned to Walter being the manager, you could tell he was kind of thrown into that at a very difficult period when we were trying to clinch the title [April 1991]. That was pretty hard for him, to take that step away from the players and not lose anything. He did it brilliantly. He was a totally different character from Graeme, except they both absolutely wanted to win football matches. Walter could be as fiery as Graeme, but less frequently. Walter always did it at the right times and Graeme was off target a few times.”
Smith clinched the title and the job, but that same summer Marseille offered £5.5 million, equalling the British record at the time, for Steven. He’d just signed a five-year deal at Rangers, where he was happy and playing well, but the chance to move to one of Europe’s elite clubs then was tempting. “Walter said, ‘We’ve some uninvited interest and it’s up to you. If you want to go, it’s great for the club. If you stay, it’s great for the club’.
“I had to take my passport in every day to training because deadline day was coming and we didn’t know if it was on or off. On the last day, I arrived back from training to nobody in the house, was putting the kettle on at two in the afternoon. My wife was out shopping and I got a phone call from my agent, ‘Marseille are flying in, deal’s done, but bring two passport photos’.
“I got in the car, still hadn’t spoken to my wife, and went to Edinburgh airport. I pulled the curtain back, got my photos, they looked all right, put them in my pocket, jumped back in the car. The deal got over the line at quarter to midnight and I only told my wife when I got home. How mad was that? She said, ‘Where the hell have you been?’ and I said, ‘I’ve just signed for Marseille, here’s the story...’.”
That set the chaotic tone for his time at Marseille, where the club were owned by the charismatic Bernard Tapie. “He was a charming man. A powerhouse. He’d come in on a Friday afternoon on his yacht to the quayside of Marseille and there would be crowds clapping him in like a superstar, a god. Then he’d be in the hotel with us and on the bus with us going to ground. He’d sit next to you, pat you on the knee and say ‘en forme, Trevor?’, I’d say, ‘oui’ and he’d say, ‘ah, tres bien’.”
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Sparta Prague were behind Steven moving back to Ibrox a year later. After eliminating Rangers from the European Cup, they did the same to Marseille on away goals, forcing Tapie to sell stars. “He’d look at it as if Marseille were going to win the Champions League then work backwards financially. We were paid off a budget that hadn’t actually arrived yet, so when we were eliminated everything hit the fan. They had paid £2.5 million and owed £2.5 million. They wrote that off and I went back to Rangers on the same contract I’d signed 18 months before.”
More success followed under Smith, who stepped out of Souness’s shadow to be his own man. The same task now faces Michael Beale, who recently returned to Rangers as manager having previously been first-team coach under Steven Gerrard.
Steven acknowledges the similarities, but also accepts that Smith enjoyed an era where Rangers outspent Celtic and that’s no longer the case. “Celtic have improved dramatically under [Ange] Postecoglou. Great recruitment.
“In Glasgow, you’re always going to be compared, every second of every day, to your local rivals. It’s the name of the game. If it [the points gap] goes any wider than it is now, you start to think, with the form of Celtic, that it’s just an impossible task.
“This is a key moment in what Rangers are going to be for the next couple of years, what happens in this next three or four weeks. It’s going to be a big pointer to what can be achieved, if it goes well. If it doesn’t go well, it’s going to knock the stuffing out of this season and then you have to make sure your recruitment is right, you’ve got to keep the fans with you. They only stay with you at Rangers if you’re winning games. That’s key.
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“You can waste money in the transfer market, that’s easily done, so you have to credit Celtic. They have had a lot of successes out of their recruitment policy, players that make differences in games. Postecoglou’s done a really good job.
“If you’re a Rangers fan or follower, it’s a ‘no excuses’ policy really, you don’t really give the manager the benefit of putting it all down to money. It’s about how you pull a group of people together, get them working consistently and having a winning mentality, to win games when you’re playing badly. We had a lot of that when I was playing.”
