The Dutch coach of Zenit St Petersburg, Dick Advocaat, will have a “happy hour” on May 14 when his team will challenge Glasgow Rangers for the UEFA Cup trophy.
“The final has already been billed as the ‘friendly final’ due to our close association with Dick Advocaat and a large contingent of the Rangers family will travel in good spirits to Manchester,” Rangers’ chief executive Martin Bain was quoted as saying by football365.com on May 6.

Bain was referring to the 1998/2001 period when Advocaat was manager of Rangers. It is not every day that the manager of one of the contenders has a soft spot for the other. And with Advocaat the spot seems really soft.

As Ewan Murray said in an article published in The Guardian on May 2, Advocaat has proclaimed himself to be a member of “the Rangers family” and is affectionately known as “Wee Dick” in Glasgow.

Having the coach of the enemy part of their family has left Rangers wondering mostly about how many of their fans will be able to watch the game.

The Scottish club has received a total of 13 000 tickets for the match and Bain worries that tens of thousands of its supporters would be disappointed, knowing that their team is playing next door but they are not able to watch it. Fans would able to watch the game live on a big screen at Ibrox, the club’s ground, he said.

Zenit also has some problems concerning their support. Because of the issue surrounding English fans trying to reach Moscow for the Championship League final on May 21, Russian fans are also facing visa requirements when trying to reach Manchester.

If history repeats itself, Rangers would not have to worry about winning the trophy because it was against a Russian team that they won their only European trophy, the Cup Winner’s Cup, in the 1971/72 season when the Scottish club beat Dynamo Moscow 3:2 in Barcelona. This was Rangers’s second attempt at winning the cup after the 1967 final when they lost against Bayern Munich in Nuremberg.

It is interesting to note that Rangers came very close to repeating the 1967 game this year because Bayern Munich almost reached the final stage. Rangers and Bain have Advocaat to thank for not letting the Germans advance to the final, because it was Zenit’s superb performance that stopped them.

On May 1, Zenit played one of its best-ever home games against Bayern Munich in the second semifinal in St Petersburg. Zenit won 4:0 against a surprisingly weak Bayern, and made history.

A problem for Rangers could be the poor record Scottish teams have in recent years. The last time a Scottish team won a European trophy was in 1983, when Aberdeen won the Cup Winners’ Cup against Real Madrid. 

On the opposite side are Zenit players, who have the example of CSKA Moscow, which won the UEFA Cup tournament in 2005.

The money behind Zenit is also a factor that cannot be underestimated in today’s football. Zenit is the richest Russian club, thanks to its sponsorship deal with Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned natural gas company, which runs in excess of 50 million pounds.

Rangers is also enjoying a good year financially due to its performance in the tournament. According to the club’s interim report for 2007, the turnover for the six months to December 31 2007 increased by 10 million pounds to 33.1 million pounds.

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