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lot better at training. ‘I got the shit kicked out of me at Rangers,’ he admits. ‘They didn’t believe I was born in Glasgow because of my Stratford accent, and I didn’t fit in with their lifestyle of playing pool, getting pissed and eating pies.’
    Meanwhile, Gordon’s elder sister, Diane, had persuaded her parents that she should be allowed to stay at college in Banbury, near Stratford, after all. The family was falling apart. And Gordon thought it was all his fault. The only way he could make amends, he believed, was to make it into the first team and become a success. Failure suddenlywasn’t an option. He had to make it so he could buy houses for his parents, his brother and his sisters, the way you read that other footballers did. Gordon Ramsay, always in a hurry, was more ambitious and resolute than ever.
    ‘I was a pretty determined player and I was becoming pretty nasty,’ he says when asked to describe his game back then. ‘They called me “Flash” because I was fast and if I were to compare myself with any more recent footballers I’d say I was most like Stuart Pearce.’ Whose nickname, of course, was ‘Psycho’.
    But after a few reserve-team games Gordon realised he wasn’t the only person in the squad with a temper. Whenever he is criticised for the way he treats his staff in the kitchen, he says what he does is nothing compared with the way managers and trainers treat their teams at half-time. And at Ibrox he met his first management role model: former player Jock Wallace. ‘He was fucking ruthless, a Scottish version of Mike Tyson. When he wanted to rip your arse out, he would crucify you,’ is how Gordon remembers the overall mood in the dressing room. And, while he admits the stress of fighting for selection made him physically ill, he was still thriving on the pressure and riding with the punches.
    Now he really was on the brink of making it big. He got into the main 18-strong squad and by the end of his first season in Scotland he had played two first-team games, one against St Johnstone, the other against Morton – the club that years later he would be rumoured to be buying.
    ‘The St Johnstone friendly was the first time I played with Ally McCoist. Davie Cooper, Ian Ferguson and Derek Ferguson were just through in the year above me,so even though I didn’t play the full game it was all a dream for a kid like me.’ But very soon it was all going to turn into a nightmare.
    Just as Gordon was getting ready for his third first-team appearance and was cementing his position in the main Rangers squad, he smashed the cartilage in his knee and was out of the game for 11 long weeks. Then he made matters worse by ignoring the medical advice he had been given about letting the joint rest. ‘There was no such thing as keyhole surgery in those days and I tried to come back too soon after the accident. Seven months after it had happened, very stupidly, I played a game of squash. I tore a cruciate ligament and was then in plaster for another four months.’
    For a professional sportsman, this kind of long layoff is almost unbearable. ‘So many things go through your mind, your confidence is wiped out and you become paranoid,’ Gordon said of his own experience. He was convinced that his former colleagues were moving forward while he was falling back. He was terrified that a newcomer might steal his place on the bench. And, worst of all, he was afraid that he might never regain his old match-fitness.
    Unfortunately for Gordon, it looked like he was right about his fitness. When the plaster was taken off his leg and his rehab was finished, he threw himself back into training, desperate to prove that he could recover and pick up where he had left off. But deep down he knew his leg no longer felt the same. He spent hours in hot and then cold baths after training sessions, trying everything he could think of to dull the new pains and pretend they didn’t matter. Mentally, he was determined to be