First German victory of the week - Gers@openfootie poll.

Yup, that’s right, troops. We asked you to name your most memorable moment of 2002 from four carefully selected choices and, after a month of almost semi-interested voting, the startling results were as follows:

Scottish Cup Final 38.78%

CIS Cup semi-final 8.16%

CIS Cup Final 2.04%

Germany getting to World Cup final 51.02%

FIFTY ONE POINT ZERO TWO PERCENT!!! A veritable Bavarian Alpine landslide! Sod The Rangers turning round our domestic fortunes by twice slaying the hooped infidel at Hampden! To hell with Bazza lifting his first trophy as Gers captain. Nope - The Gers@openfootie readers just couldn’t see past Rudi Voeller’s men taking their country to it’s seventh World Cup final.

Strange result for a Rangers poll eh! Wonder how that could have happened? Well, one explanation is a naughty Sellik-worshipper in New Zealand who felt it his moral duty to ensure the non-Rangers choice won (Zat noh right, Kiwi Mick??!! Hope the finger you used to hit the “Germany 2002″ button goes sceptic!! :-)) and the other explanation is that my finger will also be going sceptic from selecting the fourth option something like 200 times per minute for the last four weeks!

Yes, your very own editor - a Bluenose to his shortest nostril hair - wanted “Germany reaching the 2002 World Cup final” to win the last poll because (A) I bl**dy LOVE dem Germans so it’s an excuse for me to talk about them and (B), everyone with a red, white and blue heart (manufactured by Diadora) doesn’t need me to remind them of what happened in the three other options mentioned. If “Scottish Cup Final” had won then I’d only have felt obliged to go LABORIOUSLY through every detail of that day at Hampden in May when … well, you know what happened. Same if CIS Cup final or CIS Cup semi had won … I’d just be using it as an excuse to harp on about games we ALL now know inside out, I’d just be regurgitating old news … old hat … boring, really.

But NOW, because the Germany option has mysteriously proved triumphant, I can happily retrace Deutschland’s every step through last summer’s tournament. We’ll begin with the 8-0 thrashing of Saudi, move onto the 1-1 draw with Eire, then there’s the 2-0 win over Cameroon, the second round knock-out of Paraguay … USA in the quarters … South Korea in the semis. In fact -wait a minute - why don’t I do it right and go all the way back to Didi Hamann’s cheeky free-kick which made Germany the last ever winners at Wembley, in the qualifiers … ? What?? You’d rather hear about the Scotish Cup final again? Och, all right then ( but the German story IS coming - some time soon - yer noh getting away with it that easy …)

Here’s the match report from a certain Sunday last May.

Bl**dy hell - I don’t know where to begin. Every time I sit down to try and type something semi-coherent about this game my brain boots into overdrive, the emotions kick in and all I want to do is scream YYYYAAAAAAAAAAAA F*KIN BYOOOOOOOOOOOOTTTTTTTTTTEEEEEEEEEEYYYYYYYYYYY - GO ON RA TEDDY BEAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRSSSS!! GERRRRINTHEYAAAARRR!! Sweet, sweet, sweeter than … sweeter than … naw - not today - no daft metaphors and analogies today. This wasn’t “sweeter than a marzipan Shirley Temple”, this wasn’t “sweeter than a gingerbread man having it off with a sugar mouse in an ice cream bath” and neither was it “sweeter than slurping a toffee-coated strawberry through a candyfloss beard with yer marsh mallow teeth”. Nah, this was just the sweetest Cup Final I ever did see. This was Rangers back on top, this was a game which will live with us all forever … THIS … was bliss.

Ever had one of those nights where, no matter how hard you try, you just can’t get drunk?! NOPE, neither have I … but Saturday 4th May 2002 came pretty damned close. See, when yer already blitzed out yer skull on the rawest of positive emotions, I think the beer and the Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin Brut Champagne from Reims just evens-out the buzz. Far be it from me to advocate alcohol as a solution for anything but it certainly helped me keep control of myself last night … as opposed to most other nights on the lash when the Falling Down juice usually helps me lose all grip on reality.

What I saw yesterday at Hampden Park, Glasgow between the hours of 3pm and - Jeeze, I don’t know - when did they kick us out? 5:45pm-ish - had me higher than a Red, White and Blue kite flown form the top of a skyscraper (DAMN! Said I wouldn’t do that!). From the first kick of the ball til the last flash of that old lump of silver decked out in Rangers colours, before Bazza and the Bears took it down the tunnel, I went through more drunken highs and Delirium Tremens-ised lows than the hardest drinking alkey on the planet. We all did.

And like most alcoholics, the moments of clarity spoke an overwhelming truth (OTT? - you betcha!!): Rangers have not only put a halt on our own slide under the latter period of Dick Advocaat’s reign, we’ve not only halted the one and a half season-long domination of the Scottish game by Celtic, but we’ve now completely REVERSED the momentum of power. McLeish joined in on the act at the half-way point of the season - he can’t be blamed for the distance we were behind our greatest rivals in the League Championship - all he could do was try to win the two other Scottish trophies available to him. He did just that and along the way he DESTROYED the seeming infallibility of O’Kneel’s numpties.

We halted the acceleration of their drive to the League championship. Two draws in Eck’s two Old Firm League games displayed a fight and lack of respect for the hooped Herberts which had been sadly lacking in our previous FOUR SUCCESSIVE defeats in the same SPL tussle. The League Cup and Scottish Cup were the only fields available in which to out-do Celtic in Caledonian Calcio and let them know we’d mean business when the next full League Season came round. What’s more, we’d have to beat Sellik on the pitch along the way if we were ever to win these two trophies as no other team in Scotland is capable of beating Fartin Martin’s side when it counts. ET VOILA ! - in two Hampden showdowns Rangers have fought, bit, snarled, ran ’til their legs dropped off and expended every avialable joule of energy til they’ve overcome a Sellik team which was, basically, given a free ride in 2000/2001. What better place than Hampden, Scotland and Glasgow’s “neutral corner”, to exert the two monopoly-smashing gubbings in CIS League and Tennent’s Scottish Cup which put us back in the driving seat, heading straight to the top of the Tartan pops.

However, it’s not just the overtly machismo, determined, aggressive features of the Hampden doings of Sellik which have turned round the balance of power in the Scottish club game. It’s the sheer quality of our FOOTBALL. It can never be showbaoty in an Old Firm match (though Baz tried that as early as the first half with his “back-calfing” of the ball by way of a perfect lay-off to Nando) and the flow of our game hasn’t been PERFECT in these encounters … but it’s been downright GREAT TO WATCH.

From the very first minute yesterday Rangers were clearly both the most willing AND the most able. Despite the continuing polyglot nature of our team, this was perfect SCOTTISH LEAGUE football - the driving, relentless, pressuring of opponents in all areas of the field, combined with the maximisation of every skill in our footballing repetoire. We weren’t prancing around the edge of their box, we weren’t simply “looking pretty”, we were cutting through them, steam-rollering their defences, sucking the very life out their self-belief and hitting them where it hurt, WHEN it hurts most. Never has the phrase “WE DESERVED THIS” been more apposite for a Rangers victory … and this is one of THE most famous of all Rangers victories.

Don’t get me wrong, though. Much as I knew we were playing Sellik off the park in football terms, I also know this is never enough in itself to win most Old Firm games. The self belief has to be unending, unyielding. Celtic are, quite rightly, League champions, and, as we Bears all know only too well, with that topping of the table comes a culture of grinding out results when sometimes you haven’t played to your best. It’s as though you simply can’t help winning, no matter how well the opposition plays, purely because it’s become a HABIT during the course of attaining the title. Celtic could easily have clawed another goal out of Balde yesterday had the game gone to extra time. From our nine-in-a-row years, all Rangers fans have heard the whinings and bleatings of many a runner-up who felt they’d “played the better football” or “who didn’t deserve to lose after playing so well against the League Champions”. We all know, as do the players, that the best football is ALWAYS the football which WINS. Just because our product was the most obviously aesthetically attractive yesterday didn’t give us any automatic right to win the Cup.

All through the match I DREADED this being another heart-broken runner-up tragedy. The better we played, the harder we fought, the more I remembered all those times in the mid nineties when we went to The Piggery and let THEM play fotball all around us but stopped them scoring a winning goal. We HAD to score a winner yesterday if ANYONE was to believe we were really back. Runners-up medals count for NOTHING when you’re trying to let Sellik know they’re second best again. I didn’t want the sympathy - I wanted The CUP!

The helplessness of life as a fitbaw fan - I’ll sing my head off, bang my feet and clap my shovels for all I’m worth and NEVER slag a player of ours during a game, all just to increase the pro-Rangers karma in the ground by even that slightest fraction which might influence the game in our direction … but largely it’s a job in which you’re helpless - combined with an adolesence endured in the dark years of the early-mid eighties, has made me UNBELIEVABLY pessimistic when watching big games. The more we deserved to win yesterday, the more I felt sure Sellik would nab a late third goal.

So see when WE nabbed a late winner … man - it was more than I’d ever DARED hope for. Fate-tempting, and the clinically thorough avoidance of it is also a part of my deranged fitbaw-spectating persona and while all through the match I felt I was watching an event laced in Rangers magic - this was CLEARLY to be a famous day in our history - I never dared admit such ancillary positive vibes were flying about … especially to myself and, most obviously, not to my fellow Bears and Bearettes, be they munching a pie alongside me or phoning on the mobile. At half-time the chat was all, “we’re playing brilliant, we deserve to win … BUT I BET WE DON’T!!”

As if to prove the necessity of this manic superstition I expressed delight when I saw Balde was starting for Sellik. I see him as a walking gap in the Sellik defence when we have such pacey, skilful front-men to run through his hapless two left-feet. Exclaiming “YES!! - Balde’s playing” is clearly fate-tempting and, I’m sure you’ll agree, the reason Sellik scored their two goals:

Amo claims it was his bad back which stopped him getting up to put in a remotely effective challenge on the Sellik centre-hawf for both their goals but it’s clear to me that I am personally responsible for both the way Dianbobo out-jumped Amo in the 19th minute to get on the end of Petrov’s corner, nod it down off the deck and let Hartson head in from two yards out with Steffi a mile behind the line and the 50th minute outjumping of Amo at a free kick to head straight past Klos from six yards. Mea culpa, mea culpa - mi dispiace.

BUT I also fretted that Lovenkrands SHOULDN’T be going through the middle. With Sutton playing as the middle centre-half in Sellik’s three-across-the-back, I wanted a man with more ability to run with the ball at his feet and dribble - this would be the best way to expose a guy who’s played at centre-forward for all but a handful of games in the last two years. I complained out loud that Lovinpants should be on the left and Neil McCann - as he sometimes did with Rod Wallace - should switch to go through the middle. Luckily, the fate-tempting works both ways (As long as I dont abuse the superstition and do it on purpose , ie “Och Rangers will NEVER win the Champions League, Neil Lennon will NEVER break his own legs etc) and the “out of position” Peter Lovinpants scored two of the most famous Rangers goals of all time and the “misused” Neil McCann set up the most glorious winner of any Scottish Cup Final in Rangers history (sorry Kai - you scored yours too early … as did you, Jaws!) and generally performed like Maradonna meets Pele on a good day.

Oh, the sweet, sweet feeling of seeing a great Rangers performance rewarded with a great Rangers result.

And WHAT A PERFORMANCE! We were mesmeric at times. I marvelled at the sheer effort and energy of ALL our players. As I say, it was a game where you just KNEW something special was afoot.

Christ, even seeing the teams line up: We were ONE to ELEVEN while Sellik stuck to the haphazard and untidy squad numbers. Staright away, before a ball’s even kicked, you’re thinking that THIS Rangers side are wearing the same numbers as the team who won it in 63, 66, 73 … WE were on the history vibe.

When Sutton filthily cut down Caniggia, who had just outpaced the thirty-years-younger Lennon from a standing start, that numerical continuity of shirts was broken and so was the blank score-sheet. Smelltik scored against the run of play with nineteen minutes gone while we had ten men on the park. By the time we got Shota on in place of Claudio, it was one each!

Rangers EQUALISED with ten men on the park: Bazza picked up the ball deep in midfield and sent a long, high cross up to the edge of their box, where Peter jumped with Sutton and Mjallby. They made an arse of it, it dropped to our ever-alert Dane, he took it inside, he hit it first time and from around 18 yards beat Douglas at the near post with a drive of unerring accuracy and RIGHT THEN, COMING BACK LIKE THAT, WITH A MAN LESS ON THE PITCH, SHOWING SUCH COJHONES, we all KNEW this was to be a special day!

Hartson elbowed Moore in the face but Oz didn’t complain, he just waited and nailed Hartson with studs down the knee-cap in the second half. Neither player was booked for either first offence - but, hey, Dallas is still a mason who wears a Rangers jersey under his ref’s shirt! Craig Moore’s presence, despite lack of fitness, was a salient tactic of Big Eck’s.

After Balde’s goal at the beginning of the second half Rangers simply upped the momentum and were quite breathtaking in their persistence and skill. We SWAMPED the midfield and overran them. By the end of the game, Agathe couldn’t get past Neil McCann, never mind Arthur Numan!

When Balde almost snapped Amo’s neck in the 69th minute it set up a free-kick at the edge of the Sellik box. What happened next was the stuff of folklore. Whether Barry Ferguson stays or leaves at the end of this season, this goal will STAY WITH THE BEARS FOREVER:

A crisp, clipped, curled, cultured shot over the Sellik wall and away into the corner of the Sellik net … Douglas flailing … the net shaking as the ball burts it … Christ I cannae type about this … it’s too much … it was just TOOO good … WHAT A GOAL! … WHAT A F***ING GOAL, Bazz!! What a captain’s part, what a moment for REAL CLASS to shine through! Timing, skill, belief, SHINING REGAL BRILLIANCE!! This was a goal fit to grace any footballing stage in the world.

He’d already hit the post, with Douglas beaten, from around thirty five yards during open play. Bazz was covering EVERY inch of the park and ordering the more experienced players about like Butcher, Shearer, Amo, Gough or Greig in their pomp. Bazza and Neil McCann were THE embodiments of the Rangers spirit yesterday and the rest of the players were right alongside them as Barry Ferguson made it two-two with twenty minutes left and jumped those hoardings and ran to the sea of delirious Union Jacks like a man possessed.

…possessed … possessed of a belief that we had our name on that cup .. a depth of belief which saw us TWICE come back from behind(”No-one ever comes from behind to win Old Firm games these days!” - BOLLOX TO THAT, says Baz and the Bears - It’s OUR CUP and we’ll win it any way we see fit!!) and which saw us grind Sellik into the turf as we searched out that winner. Larsson was a ghost, Lambert was a liability, Lennon was lost, Mjallby was an accident waiting to happen - Celtic’s only real threat was a hulking mas of muscle who’ll paralyse someone if he’s allowed to defend with his arse through the opponent’s vertebrae any longer - and Rangers were a CERTAINTY to take the Scottish Cup and it was ALWAYS gonnae be dramatic.

I think we were a minute into extra time when Baz launched the ball forward and Mjallby was seen to push Peter to the ground inside the box. No penalty - despite Dallas’s love of the masons - but no mumps or moans from the Rangers players. They just kept going. Extra-time? Sod that!

I saw the board go up with the number 2 picked out in fluorescent red dots. I had my mobile set on the stopwatch function and when Neil McCann went down that left wing I knew it was the last attack of the game, I knew there were only 12 seconds left and I even thought about Clive Thomas and Zico!!!

Brazil v Sweden at the 1978 World Cup in Argentina and Zico scored in the dying seconds but, being the pedantic sh*t he was, Welsh ref Thomas blew for time as the cross which Zico eventually buried was still in the air … for THAT was the exact second when the injury time ran out. As a result of the controversy caused by this incident, all refs now wait ’til an attack has visibly petered out before blowing, even if it goes a second or two over time. This is why I KNEW Neil would be allowed to get his cross in. This is how you break down vital seconds of a football match and turn them into EONS!

It was great cross - it was an inswinger - it was well weighted - Peter was coming in on the end of it at the far side of the box - the cross had cut Douglas out - that’s nice - it went past Sutton - better - and didn’t get to Mjallby - very interesting! - Peter got his head on the end of it - that was good - it bounced down off the turf - that was also good - Douglas didn’t seem to be getting it - it went over Douglas - this was all very promising and better than anything I’d dared hope for - there was nothing now between the ball and the back of the net but I was in the South Stand, maybe my view was deceptive - maybe my eyesight was skewed by the tightening knot, the size of a rugby ball, at the centre of my gut - maybe the ball would bounce past the post … maybe it was actually bouncing over the bar …

The net bumfled at the near bottom corner. The ball was doing the bumfling. And the ball was on the IN-side of that net.

At this point, it all gets a bit hazy.

All I remember is this certainty that Celtic didn’t have the time for another attack. This was THE most perfectly timed goal I’ve ever seen Rangers score.

We waited til the last second of the last minute of injury time of the last meaningful match of the season to score the goal which won the Cup Double and which hammers the last nail in the coffin of our recent troubles.

Rangers are back. Rangers are bold. Rangers are BEAUTIFUL.