William Pullar Jardine (he was given the moniker 'Sandy' because of
his crop of hair of the same colour) was one of the few Rangers players
that profited from the cataclysmic Scottish Cup defeat at the hands of
Berwick Rangers in January 1967. Just seven days after that debacle,
Sandy donned a Rangers jersey for the first time, and for the next
fifteen years (see photo above contesting the ball with Tommy Burns in 1982) he was a mainstay in the first
XI.
Brought up in Edinburgh in close proximity to Heart of
Midlothian's Tynecastle Park, Sandy was just sixteen when Scot Symon
signed him for Rangers in 1964. After a couple of seasons toughening
himself up in the reserve team, Jardine eventually graduated to the top
team on 4 February 1967, taking his first-team bow at the age of
eighteen in front of 34, 307 fans. Ironically the team that Rangers
faced at Ibrox that day were Hearts, the team Sandy had followed as a
youngster, but the newcomer showed his idols no mercy as he played his
part in an emphatic 5-1 victory, a result that helped to soften the
hammer blow that had been delivered seven days earlier in Berwick.
Sandy
wore the number 4 jersey on his debut and played at right-half, one of
the many positions that he would occupy in the Rangers team before he
made the right-back position his own in 1970. In a remarkable display of
dexterity, Jardine, who had been signed as a midfield player, turned
out as an inside-forward, left-back, and even had a spell at
centre-forward in 1968/69!
The reason why Sandy fitted so
seamlessly into so many positions was down to the fact that he was a
skilful player with an abundance of stamina, but it was the astute eyes
of Willie Waddell that identified Jardine's strongest position,
deploying him at right-back at the start of the 1970/71 season, and
Sandy was rarely absent from that berth in the team until he left the
club twelve years later.
He was tailor made to be a full-back.
Cultured, strong and stylish, he was a modern day full-back, who enjoyed
marauding forward. He was blessed with an excellent turn of pace, which
meant that he was rarely caught out of position, and over the course of
the next decade he emerged as one of the finest players to grace that
position, not just for Rangers but for Scotland too.
Sandy won
his first senior honour in 1970/71 when he picked up a Scottish League
Cup winners' medal following a 1-0 victory over Celtic. The following
season, he was an ever-present, as Rangers stormed their way through to
the Final of the European Cup Winners' Cup, with Jardine netting the
crucial opening goal of the semi-final second-leg against Bayern Munich
at Ibrox with a rasping left-foot drive. This was sweet revenge for
Sandy, who had been part of the Rangers side that had lost out to the
West Germans in the Cup Winners' Cup Final five years earlier. This time
around, though, he got his hands on the trophy, as Rangers defeated
Moscow Dynamo 3-2 in Barcelona to lift the Club's first, and to date
(2008) only, European trophy. (Alistair Aird, Author of Ally McCoist - Portrait of a Hero)
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