the clubs, a fee of £4.5 million was agreed and Ferguson rejoined Rangers just before the close of the transfer window. Ferguson later said that the fee Rangers paid was actually £100,000 plus the fees Blackburn owed from the original transfer. Ferguson's second debut for Rangers came in a League Cup semi-final victory over Dundee United. He was a 69th-minute substitute for Alex Rae during the 7–1 win. His first goal after his return was the opening goal in a 1–1 draw against Inverness CT on 5 March 2005. Ferguson played in the 2005 Scottish League Cup Final and was part of the Rangers team that won the league title on the last day of the season. At the start of the 2005–06 season, manager Alex McLeish re-appointed Ferguson as club captain. McLeish had not wanted to remove the captaincy mid-season from Fernando Ricksen. Ferguson played the latter part of the season carrying an ankle injury as Rangers ended up in a third-place finish in the Premier League. At the end of the season, Ferguson revealed that he had snapped ligaments and confessed that he should have undergone the surgery sooner. After an incident in the dressing room at Caledonian Stadium, Inverness, on 27 December 2006, it was announced on BBC Radio Scotland's New Year's Day broadcast of Sportsound that Ferguson had been stripped of the Rangers captaincy after a meeting with then manager Paul Le Guen. He was also dropped from the squad for the next match. Later Le Guen claimed Ferguson was undermining him. "I'll go on record as saying I never had one bust-up with him, never had one argument with him. I don't know where all this comes from," explained Ferguson eleven years later. "No disrespect to Inverness Caley – they had good players, no doubt – but we we're Rangers here. We were dropping points against teams that we should be beating. So, I let it out a wee bit. There was no arguments, nothing in the dressing room. After I had said that, we flew back down to Glasgow. We were playing Motherwell next, I think, and I came in the day of, or the day before, the Motherwell game. I came in, put my bag down, Yves Colleu, who was the assistant manager, comes in and says, 'Paul wants to speak to you'. I went into his office and went to sit down,