As part of a weekly piece, I’d like to reflect on players who should have been better for us – with everything that’s gone on in the past 5 years, and the barrels we’ve scraped in terms of players in the shirt, we may even find that some of these “failures” will be seen in a different light!
This week – one of the biggest disappointments we ever had, Nuno Capucho.
Capucho was a signing from Porto in 2003, which had all of us very excited. We’d seen him rip Celtic to shreds not long beforehand, and he was part of the Porto side which had won the UEFA Cup – even at 31, he was surely going to be a cracking player for us.
Unfortunately, he’s best remembered by Rangers fans for those performances rather than anything he did in a Rangers shirt. Or for getting his cock out in Trash and scaring women so much they had to be taken to the First Aid room…
Capucho was with us for only a season, one where we were pretty poor overall and didn’t win a thing. He replaced Caniggia, who at 37 still looked great for us but, his time was coming to an end, and on paper, it was a great signing. He cost us less than £1m, had shown real ability at a high level and brought some cracking experience with him. Various trophies with Porto, international caps for Portugal – this was certainly the type of player we’d kill to be able to sign at the moment.
The warning signs were there early though. He came on in a pre-season friendly and looked well off the pace. We put that down to him needing to get fit and sharp again, but it turned out he had lost any sort of pace, and he certainly didn’t look very motivated either. He played around 28 games overall and scored 5 goals, and the fact we won nothing that season, qualification for the Champions League was as good as it got in truth, just heightened the focus on his overall performances, which were poor. He was a “marquee signing” who was pretty much past it even though he was only 31.
His biggest contributions were a late winner in a league game (I’m sure that was against Kilmarnock away from home, but I could be wrong), and setting up Emerson for a goal in the Champions League away to Panathanaikos in a 1-1 draw (Emerson will almost certainly have one of these articles as well). Aside from that, my memories are pretty much sparse. No moments of skill, no great goals or game-changing performances, pretty much nothing at all. A player with that pedigree and amount of proven ability should have been great for us.
As mentioned though, I believe most Rangers fans will remember him in the same way I do, with no memories relating to his time with us and only ever celebrating him for how he played against Celtic with Porto. It says a lot that he left us after a season, went to Celta Vigo for a season, then retired at the age of 33. He had clearly had enough of football by the time we signed him, and it showed in his performances.
The biggest headline he made in Scotland was the aforementioned drunken flashing, with his infamous “jiggy jiggy?” phrase being both funny and horrific in equal measure. Exposing himself and getting hammered – it was almost a metaphor for our season back then. I do have to wonder though, just what the hell was he rocking that he managed to scare someone so much in a dark nightclub by simply whipping it out?
As I said earlier, we would be ecstatic to be signing players with Capucho’s pedigree now. We certainly can’t blame McLeish for signing him back then, because he was more than worth taking the chance on. We were burned by quite a few players that season who had looked excellent elsewhere but were pretty much done by the time they played for us. In truth, given our situation now, he’d probably look good for us in the current squad, but we had been spoiled by a great team just before his arrival, and he didn’t live up to his reputation at all.
What should have been? He should have at least given us some performances we could point to and say “maybe we just never got the best out of him”. What we got was a player not only past his prime, but past his ability to play at any sort of level, and he’s infamous among Rangers fans as being an awful player for us even though we’ve had far worse.
What memories do you have of Capucho? Anything more positive than mine? Tweet us @rangersnewsuk and we’ll be happy to share them!
