“Dick was a football fanatic,” Mols says. “Football was, and is, his life. He knew everything about an opponent. Watched every game, even if it was an amateur team from Iceland. He liked to control everything, even the kit. He asked for our shorts to be made shorter once because he thought it would make us quicker. I didn’t like it so I asked the kit man for an old, longer pair. Dick saw them and gave the kit man dog’s abuse. That was Advocaat.”
Mols tells a story about his time in Glasgow. The back-drop was this: he had joined Rangers from Utrecht in the summer of 1999 and from early on he looked a pedigree striker. He scored two goals on his debut against FC Haka in the Champions League, scored four against Motherwell and scored two in a 4-1 rout of a PSV Eindhoven, external team that had the celebrated pair of Ruud van Nistelrooy and Luc Nilis playing up front.
After scoring 13 goals in his first 20 games, Mols was a star. Then a terrible injury against Bayern Munich, external in the first week of November cast him into darkness. He missed the rest of the season and struggled to make much of an impression for the two seasons after that before being told that the then Rangers manager, Alex McLeish, wanted to offload him.
“It was hard because I had to play in the U-21s, I needed the stadium, I needed the excitement. You see the team sheet and you’re not in the squad and those are hard moments. At the end of the season the manager came to me and said, ‘You can leave if you can find another club. We won’t make it hard for you.’ I went for a trial with Sunderland.”
