Mama Cass, Montserrat Caballe, Chaka Khan, Jessye Norman …

Abdel Aziz Rantisi became a martyr and Paranoid Martin earned another stripe towards his sainthood. FABBY weekend all round, really. Israel and Rangers bombed like nothing else.

Still, the thing I have discovered over the decades of watching Rangers’ monopoly of the domestic scene occasionally interrupted by those cheeky celtic chappies, is that you learn exactly how much you love your own team when watching a rival club stealing their thunder.

I’m old enough to remember the days when Aberdeen and Dundee United won four league championships between them in the space of six seasons. The other two campaigns of the early eighties, where Celtic finished champs, were by far the nastiest to endure, but unlike half the lads at my school I never felt the need to suddenly support a team from the opposite corner of the country because they had a less than 100-1 chance of winning the title. It just made me love the Teds all the more - hardened my ardour so to speak (Way-hay!)

Today I feel pretty much the same and also have a new found understanding of why the Bears I know who, unlike myself, are old enough to remember Celtic’s nine-in-a-row, are even more inextricably blue in hue. With trophies, absence really makes the heart grow more desperate but in that deep, dark romance which only football can provide, Rangers in trouble are always more loveable than Rangers in glory. When the championships and cups are rolling in, The Gers don’t need us True Blues - all the part-timers come out to lap it up, pay the bills etc. But now, when things are sticky, Rangers will turn to their truest friends.

I love the fact we Bears all get ripped into ourselves when things go wrong. I never felt the need to join the Masons for a place where I knew everthing would be kept in-house. We don’t go looking for others to blame - we seek the culprits from within our own midst.

So, I suppose now’s as good a time as any to tell you regular readers of this here wee site that your fat editor is bringing out another book with the esteemed Mr Ronnie Esplin. Hopefully it’ll be in the shops by the end of next month and the reason I’m telling you is that the subject is one Mr Dick Advocaat’s time at one Ibrox stadium under the stewardship of one Mr David Murray. We’ve spoken to Dick, Dave, Johnny McClelland and the rest of the gang so you’ll forgive me if I fight the urge to start blabbering on AGAIN about the legacy of the Advocaat/Murray tenure. I’ve been dealing with nowt else for the last six months-year and my half-arsed thoughts on the same will be printed alongside those of the men themselves all too soon (I’ll see yese all right for free copies).

At this moment in time I’d just like to look at where and why specifically it all went wrong ON THE PITCH this season.

I know we have Celtic fans reading this site and many of the hooped persuasion will seize any attempt to discuss the reasons for a downturn in Rangers fortunes as excuse making. But there has to be some explanation, other than “youse are huns so youse are sh*te”, of why 2003/2004 saw us chuck away a treble in under twelve months.

We surrendered our League Cup crown to a young, determined and talented Hibernian at Hampden. A Hibernian who showed the guts to beat us on penalties, despite the best efforts of Scotland’s Player Of The Year elect Stefan Klos (That’ll tell us how many Selts are reading!) but a Hibernian who showed how beatable they were by losing the final to Livingston, a side they currently reside with in the bottom six of the SPL.

We failed to win the Scottish Cup for only the second time in six years thanks to having one shot at goal in ninety minutes at Parkhead in the quarter-final, against a Celtic side who had just one shot which went in.

And we exited the European stage with a dramatic but slightly humiliating 3-1 home gubbing by Panathinaikos, a side we’d previously thought to be the worst we’d ever faced in the Champions League … even when they fought back to take a point off us with ten men in Athens.

The Legue Championship? Well, Rangers have won previous league championships with the points tally they’ll accumulate by the end of this campaign. As I’ve said often over the last few months, Celtic have been awesome this season. Now, that’s never an excuse for us - Celtic were pretty awesome last season too and we still won the title then by being even awesome-er-er. In 2003/2004. though, O’Neill’s numpties took it to an even higher level of consistency - and that included three straight leaue wins over our good selves.

So, for me, it’s pretty simple. The Rangers problem this season has been the colours GREEN and WHITE! Hibs, Sellik, Panathinaikos … anything with Shamrocks, clovers, Harps and a green and bl**dy white strip has spelled death-knell for the Teds. Just plain bad karma - that was all that went wrong.

What? Come on?!! Do you REALLY expect me to start listing everything which REALLY went wrong this season?? We’d be here ALL WEEK!!!

Emerson.

Capucho.

Mols staying a season too long.

Twenty three hundred different line-ups and never the same one for two consecutive games.

Bazza, Amo, McCann, Numan.

Arteta’s fragility.

Lovenkrands’ spinelessness.

Coming back from Old Trafford knowing they’d sh*t it on the biggest stage.

Ricksen going backwards … in as many respects as you’d care to mention.

I could go on but I can’t be arsed.

The only worthwhile question now is what Big Eck can do in the close season and how that translates into the pre-Christmas portion of season 2004/2005.

What with the money side of things being what they are and Marvin Andrews being our latest signing (Would people stop comparing him to Bobo Balde, by the way!!! - I know they’re both big centre-halves and, on recent evidence, Marvin could well have the better future, but this comparison is so fekin obvioulsy influenced by the fact both guys are black) I’m now seriously looking at Motherwell and Dundee United’s results and imagining Ian McColl or Big Tel as our gaffer this time next season.

McLeish is, as we all know, followed around by this perception (spouted as keenly by me as anyone else) that he has a great 18 months to two years at a club before things start going badly wrong and he quickly moves to a better job JUST before his reputation is irredeemably damaged.

Save an earth-shattering phone-call from the Old Trafford boardroom, The Ginger gaffer’s fulfilling that pattern to the letter so far and we all have to hope he can buck the trend. In fairness, if he’d had this season a year ago and last season this year then it would have all made more sense - even if this sentence doesn’t. We can call this term his “rebuilding season”, especially now it’s officially sh*te, and maybe we should think ourselves lucky that he grabbed those five trophies in his first eighteen months so as to dispel any illusions he’s a complete dud before he started sending out Rangers sides which looked like … erm, complete duds …

Just over 27 years ago, on 2nd April 1977, I attended my first ever Rangers match. We beat Hibs in front of something like 10,000 disinterested Bears at Ibrox. The team was on it’s way to winning nothing - Celtic were about to claim the double. But we’d won the treble the previous season and we won all three gongs again the following term. Apart from the fact I’ve obvioulsy been a fu*ing jinx since I first set foot in Ibrox, this hints to me that we should get fully behind Alex McLeish for the next six months.

Jock Wallace pissed off the Bears by keeping us at bay while in goal for Berwick in 1967, before he won a European Cup-Winners’ Cup as our coach/assistant to Willie Wadell before winning a treble, then another. Eck McLeish pissed us off by shoving Rangers firmly into the shadows of a great Aberdeen side with whom he too won the Cup-Winners’ Cup, as a player, before winning a treble with Rangers …

We should learn from our history - and, giving the victors their place this week, ensuring Martin O’Neill finished a season with nothing may, in future years, come to be seen as one of the most singular managerial achievements at any SPL club. We shouldn’t be too quick to judge oor Alex on one bad season.

He’s got til November.

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Published:
04.19.04 / 11pm
Category:
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