Rangers v RB Leipzig: Can Rangers rise to biggest Ibrox occasion for 50 years?

Rangers are seeking to overturn a first-leg deficit after Angelino volleyed a late Leipzig winner in Germany Venue: Ibrox Stadium, Glasgow Date: Thursday, 5 May Kick-off: 20:00 BST Coverage: Updates on BBC Radio Scotland DAB/810MW and BBC Sport website & app

Fifty years ago last month Rangers saw off the Bayern Munich of Franz Beckenbauer, Paul Breitner and Gerd Muller in front of 80,000 folk at Ibrox to make their way to the European Cup Winners’ Cup final.

For half a century it has stood alone as the stadium’s most significant game – until now.

There’s been all sorts of other wondrous occasions in the years since – massive Old Firm encounters, memorable European nights – but Rangers playing RB Leipzig on Thursday will stand above all of them.

After the shadow boxing of the first leg, this is knockout stuff. With a winner to be confirmed on the night, a Europa League semi-final second leg is the second biggest game Rangers could possibly play in their own place. Only a Champions League equivalent would top it.

So that’s how far you have to go back to find a match to live with it in terms of importance. Bayern Munich, 19 April, 1972. Against opposition from the same country, how Rangers fans will be hoping for the same 2-0 result against Leipzig. Is there a Sandy Jardine in their ranks? Is there a Derek Parlane?

There’s also the emotion of having lost their great club man and friend, Jimmy Bell, earlier in the week. There was a power to the tributes and all of it will pour from the stands on Thursday night.

This will be Rangers’ 60th game of a season that could yet bring five more if they overcome Leipzig – three league matches plus two cup finals. Sixty five games would be a historic high. As it stands, they’ve played more matches this season than most, if not all, other teams in Europe.

They’ve played 11 more games than Leipzig – an extra 16.5 hours in the legs. A triumph on Thursday would spark extraordinary scenes. It’s not just the players, manager Giovanni van Bronckhorst and his coaching staff that would be deserving of acclaim, it would be the Ibrox strength and conditioning people as well. They must have worked their fingers to the bone this past month.

The players’ reserves of energy have been tested to the max, the pair of back-to-back 120-minute games against Braga and Celtic, the majority of a league game against Motherwell played with 10 men, the majority of the match in Leipzig spent on the back foot followed in quick order by an Old Firm derby at Celtic Park in which, somehow, they looked fitter and stronger the longer it went on.

A side as experienced as Leipzig are not likely to be spooked by a thunderous atmosphere at Ibrox – many of them have played in a Champions League semi-final and most of them went to Dortmund last month and won 4-1.

The point about the Ibrox vibe isn’t so much what it does to the opposition but what it can do to the home team. Not always – it didn’t happen against Malmo or Lyon this season or Slavia Prague last term – but Ibrox is capable of injecting adrenaline into the bodies of its players. When team and crowd combine it can be a heady cocktail.

Rangers will give Kemar Roofe every chance to prove his fitness after the striker’s three-game injury absence Is the pressure telling on Leipzig?

And it will need to be. Leipzig will be every bit as covetous of a European final as Rangers. As a club, they’ve spent about £200m to get this talented squad in place but, as yet, they’ve won nothing. They made the German Cup final in 2019 but lost 3-0 to Bayern Munich, they made another final in 2021 but lost 4-1 to Dortmund. In between, they lost a Champions League semi-final 3-0 to PSG. They’re now down to fifth in the Bundesliga and up against it to make the Champions League next season.

Winning the Europa League would give them that spot and also silence those in Germany who mock them as manufactured and soulless.

With a 1-0 advantage coming to Glasgow they’re favourites not just to progress on Thursday but to go on and lift the trophy in Seville, but there’s pressure on them to do it and recent signs show they’re not at their best right now. They lost to Union Berlin, weren’t that convincing against Rangers and lost again to Borussia Monchengladbach on Monday.

Their stellar record on the road ended when Gladbach, down to 10 men, beat them 3-1. It was the first time Leipzig lost away from home in nine games stretching back to February when they went down 3-2 to Bayern. They were flat for much of it. There were big gaping holes in their defence and a lack of intensity going forward.

Their manager, Domenico Tedesco, took out a metaphorical blowtorch and let his players have it. “Now we need to find brand new ideas and we also need new personnel, too,” he said. “Tiredness was no reason for this defeat. We were so far out of it in the first half that I might as well have taken the tactics board and thrown it in the bin.”

You can read this any way you want. The defeat was a positive for Rangers because it’s an illustration of Leipzig creaking under the pressure or it’s a negative for Rangers because having received a blast from their manager on Monday they’re unlikely to put in another low-key effort so soon.

The heat on the manager to deliver a trophy must be enormous. He knows that the rest of Germany will laugh like hyenas if they were to falter in Glasgow. The smart money still says Leipzig, it still says they will score and that Rangers will need two goals and that’s a reach. Van Bronckhorst gave nothing away on the Kemar Roofe front on Wednesday. How he needs him now.

Priceless rewards on offer

When there’s so much glory on offer, you hesitate to raise the vulgar subject of money, but the two are inextricably linked in European football. Outside of TV market share, Rangers have already made just shy of £10m from their Europa League run in performance-based payment and will get another £3.9m if they make the final and another £7.2m on top if they win the thing.

We’re projecting way further ahead than Van Bronckhorst would want, but winning the Europa League would put them into the Super Cup final with the winners of the Champions League – a minimum of £3.2m – but the big one would be automatic qualification for the Champions League group stage. That’s another £30-40m in guaranteed money.

Rangers are two successful results from immortality on the pitch and a bucket of cash away from it that could come in at more than £60m. Call it a guaranteed £50m and that’s probably being conservative given the extra TV revenues at play.

The Rangers players won’t give a damn about that just yet. All they will see ahead of them is the biggest game of their lives and the most heavyweight occasion at Ibrox since Smokin’ Joe Frazier was world champion.

“I wasn’t a big guy,” Joe once said. “People thought the big guys would eat me up, but it was the other way around. I loved to fight bigger guys.”

In financial terms, Rangers are fighting a bigger guy on Thursday. If they can summon the quality of the Dortmund games they’ll have cause to use that old mantra about the bigger they are, the harder they fall.