Six games that shook the Old Firm: the shame of 1999

A toxic mixture of ingredients - the historic bragging rights at stake, the misbehaviour of players on the field, and the all-day drinking offered by the last-ever 6.05pm kick off and the public holiday weekend - all combined to produce an occasion which was more than just a football match. Scottish football was quite simply a different place afterwards.

No fewer than 360 police incidents were logged before, during and after this 3-0 Rangers victory, a total of 113 arrests shared out between the ground and the city centre. When these two teams had drawn on a wet, cold night at Ibrox that January, there had been only three.

While more than 300 fans clashed in Duke Street, and a stabbing took place on Shettleston Road, while referee Hugh Dallas finished the match with four stitches in a head wound caused by a coin thrown from the Celtic end. That shocking incident, not to mention the four intruders who invaded the field of play trying to reach him, illustrated outright antipathy towards the match official, who had sent off three players in all - Stephane Mahe and Vidar Riseth of Celtic, and Rangers' Rod Wallace - and awarded a hotly disputed penalty in favour of the visitors. The Dallas family home in Carfin was raided by one of his neighbours that night, while even officially Celtic cast aspersions against the whistler. Chief Executive Allan McDonald resigned shortly after claiming that body language expert Chris Lewis had effectively proved Dallas was biased.

Reliving the footage on youTube is akin to entering a time warp but for the major protagonists the intervening 16 years have done little to dull the memories. With the hype machine in overdrive - the back page of a morning tabloid proclaimed 'Park Dread Crunch' and invoked the memory of the 1980 Scottish Cup final riot - it didn't take long for the players to sense that even by the standards of the Old Firm fixture this would be an extraordinary day. "There were so many drunk people everywhere," recalls Riseth.

In truth, the odds were always likely to be stacked against Dr Jo Venglos and his side. Of the squad which routed Rangers 5-1 in November 1998, injury and suspension deprived him of Craig Burley, Lubomir Moravcik, Johan Mjallby, Tom Boyd, Jonathan Gould and Marc Rieper. Scott Marshall was pressed into a debut. Rangers sensed blood.

"I can still remember vividly what it was like going in on the bus," said Neil McCann, given the nod to start up front alongside Gabriel Amato. "There were no nerves among the Rangers players. Just a belief I had never experienced before. We knew what we were going to achieve."

It took just 12 minutes for Advocaat's scheming to pay dividends. Giovanni van Bronckhorst fed Wallace down the left, and his low cross was turned in by McCann.

By 30 minutes, the red mist was descending, fast. The anger coalesced around the figure of Dallas and his apparently malign involvement with Stephane Mahe. The combustible Frenchman had picked up an early booking in a tussle with Wallace. While he complained bitterly that the Englishman had elbowed him in the torso, in truth to watch the incident now is to see a player out of control, aggressively confronting the referee.

"Stephane was a little bit too high," recalled Riseth. "He wanted to go out there, tackle and win everything, but he gave a little bit too much. You could see it before he went out on the pitch."

When - with 31 minutes on the clock - the same player reacted angrily again to a tackle by the backtracking McCann, his fate was sealed. The Scotland winger was booked while Mahe received a second yellow, requiring to be cajoled and man-handled away from the referee and off the pitch by his team-mates and assistant manager Eric Black.

"You could tell the Celtic players were keyed up," said McCann. "Stephane was right on edge. He cut back in and I caught him, foot-sweeped him. I put my hands up to say 'sorry ref' but he was coming at me so I got a wee bit antsy as well and I got booked. But he just wouldn't calm down. He went absolutely crazy and I think it was down to the sheer occasion."

It was then that a strange level of anarchy took hold, chaos reaching a crescendo as Van Bronckhorst stood over a free kick near the corner flag. No sooner had the first of the day's intruders been apprehended than Dallas was down on all fours, blood streaming from his hairline.

There was no respite from the bedlam. The resultant free-kick finally arrived, only for the freshly patched-up match official to deem a rather innocuous piece of grappling between Riseth and Tony Vidmar at the far post was worthy of a penalty. A bemused Paul Lambert is captured walking over to the ref, vainly suggesting his head injury might have been responsible. "I don't remember so much about that," said Riseth, "but I could see the ref was struggling after he got the coin off his head."

Sandwiched between two more pitch invasions, Jorg Albertz swept in the penalty. Half-time mercifully arrived, shortly after a Celtic fan fell from the upper tier and was stretchered off to hospital, ignoring medical advice by waving cheerfully to all and sundry.

"The place was an absolute ferment," recalls Willie McDougall, the watching SFA security chief, who also had one eye on the upcoming Scottish Cup final between the two teams later that month. "I was there as security adviser, I am taking notes on all this, and I was thinking 'what are the implications here if this match was abandoned?' I thought we were very much at that stage. All credit to Dallas, and I told him that after the match, for getting up and keeping going, because if the fourth official had had to come on it would have deteriorated."

"As soon as the first few fans start coming on, that was when the alarm bells start ringing," said McCann. "Listen, for a referee to get struck on the head, or to be attacked, there is no place for any of that. I was thinking 'how many more could come on here?' What if a few hundred come on? We had all seen the footage of the 1980 riot and I knew my family were up there in the away end. All these thoughts are racing through your head."

McCann recalls feeling 'untouchable' that day, and his own day at the office would only get better. After some more close things - including one long-forgotten incident when he blocked a Stewart Kerr clearance, leaving the goalkeeper standing, a metre outside his area, clutching the ball, only to be booked - he was running through on goal once again. He made sure to avoid the keeper's wing span, finished crisply, and before long his momentum was taking him round behind the goal, Dallas even giving his jersey a wee tug to steer him from the stands. "All I could hear was Hugh Dallas shouting 'Neil, you are on a booking, I am going to send you off if you start anything'," McCann recalled.

There was further carnage to come, though, the normally becalmed Riseth the man on the rampage. First was a wild challenge on Rod Wallace, only for the enraged Englishman to be sent packing, before his own dismissal was confirmed with a crazy lunge on Claudio Reyna in the right back area.

"I went in for the tackle, so I couldn't really understand why Rod Wallace was sent off," Riseth admitted. "As for my sending off, I just remember I didn't even look at the referee. I was so sure it was a red card I just headed directly for the tunnel."

Soon Rangers players were doing likewise. Their ill-advised post match decision to provoke the home supporters with an improvised huddle led to them sprinting for safety in a hail of missiles.

"Although we had started it in front of our own fans in hindsight it wasn't the smartest thing to do at Celtic Park," said McCann. "We had to make a run for it. Then I almost had to get a human shield from two security guys just to get onto the bus."

After a title party and overnight stay in a local hotel, McCann would awake the next day to find his family home in Livingston vandalised and his big moment tarnished. "I felt a wee bit deflated because we had just won the league, achieved a massive bit of history, and most of the headlines were all about the shame game," he said. "What we did that day was almost forgotten. I remember a wee tinge of sadness about it."

**Neil McCann is an expert analyst for Sky Sports and works across SPFL, Scottish Cup and Scotland internationals