When Hong Kong football made history – 50 years since the first Western pros landed in Asia to play for Rangers
- Derek Currie, Walter Gerrard and Jackie Trainer launch a new era of professionalism in Hong Kong and Asia after they sign for upstart side Rangers
- The trio were unwitting guinea pigs in team owner Ian Petrie’s experiment to bring in overseas pros, beating a path to Asia for a flood of foreign talent
Fifty years ago on Thursday, Derek Currie, Walter Gerrard and Jackie Trainer stepped off a plane on to the tarmac at Kai Tak Airport – thousands of miles from their Glasgow homes and without an inkling in their hearts or minds of what they were about to achieve.
Signed by Hong Kong football pioneer and fellow Glaswegian Ian Petrie for his rising Rangers side, the Scottish trio were looking merely to pursue their football dreams.
What none of them knew was that they were unwitting guinea pigs in an outrageous experiment as the first Western foreign professionals to play in Asia. Failure would have meant humiliation for Petrie and his recruits. Success, for that era, would be measured in trophies for a side who avoided relegation the previous season only because the First Division expanded to 14 teams.
As the years and decades passed by, though, the metrics for success evolved to break every parameter imaginable. The impact Currie, Gerrard and Trainer had on Hong Kong football beat a path for some of the biggest names from British football to play in Hong Kong – George Best, Bobby Moore, Charlie George, Willie Henderson, Gordon McQueen, Tony Morley and a string of others.
