Alex Rae - He Is The Peepelle!

Always liked Alex Rae. ALWAYS. Naw, I did - honest. Now - come on - you cannae accuse me of trying to re-write my opinions on a veteran simply because The Gers are suddenly about to sign him. If I was gonnae go OTT on a dodgy-looking signing simply as an exorcise in spin, then I’d surely have fake-orgasmed at the arrival of Frank de Boer, record-cap holder for one of the world’s leading football nations and a man with two Champions League finals, a World cup and European Championships semi-final on his CV. But I didnae. I wis very downbeat about the younger De Boer’s arrival - wasn’t I? - remember?

Well, ye can laugh all yese like but I have been scouring the papers for months now, hoping upon all hope that The Teds would eventually get round to answering Rae’s almost pathetic “GONNAE BLOODY SIGN ME, McLEISH” plea from earlier in the season.

He was on Lunchtime Sportscene, ahead of some big Premiership match - probably when Wolves beat Man U, actually, and he had an absolute blinder - and talked of the time Sooooooness had to let him go from the Ibrox ground staff because he just wasn’t proving he was Rangers class. This plainly BROKE THE GUY’S HEART and led not too indirectly to the boozing etc which blighted his later life and career.

Durig this interview he said the words “I’m a Rangers man”, in an effort to explain just how distressed he was to have failed in his first attempt to live the dream. To hear a player coming out with an open admision of his love of the Teds, when he’s in a fairly comfortable footballing environment as is, seems to be something which doesn’t happen all that often. My gut instinct upon watching this interview was to phone McLeish and tell him to get down to Wolverhampton and bring Alex Rae up on the same Taxi he got down (but, of course, I couldn’t just rmember McLeish’s phone number at the time).

Why that gut instinct? Because, while we can and do still argue about whose to blame for and what should be done about our club’s financial plight, it doesn’t change the fact that we’re in a FINANCIAL PLIGHT! We’re SKINT, troops. So I, like the rest of you, have bypassed the whole “is this all we can afford/is this how far weve fallen?” stuff and turned my attention to thinking of ways and means to make a Dolce and Gabbana handbag oot a sow’s lug.

It’s obvious the all-foreigner approach is on its way out. We don’t have the dosh to afford decent foreigners and now that we’re down the pecking order a level or two, the likes of the de Boers and Ricksens of the world are eyeing up moves elsewhere - like Quatar. These guys are not going to settle in Scotland and so they’re not overly committed to The Rangers. What we need is a couple of expensive foreigners in key areas (Klos, Boumsong) and surround them with Scottish/British players who are more likely to be swept along by the tribal side of Rangers life, the knowledge that this is something they’ll never be able to move away from or live down if they fail. If we can only afford semi-decent signings then we need extra ways of making them play extra good - noh? Locking into their emotions is McLeish’s only hope of making Rangers play above the sum of their parts.

We have The Thompsons, Huttons, Burkes and GAVIN Raes (why the pluralisation of individual men? I don’t know - it’s a football talk thing!) who’ll all know exactly who they’re playing for but their youth and relative inexperience of life must be augmented, not by some want-away mercenary but by guys like Alex Rae.

He’s got the experience - of all aspects of life you’d imagine: He looks like a fekin WBO lightweight belt contender - and he so obviously has the passion. In the dressing room he’ll be every bit as vital as on the pitch. Scotsmen, Englishmen, Irishmen, Welshmen - they’ll all understand perfectly wher McLeish is coming from and every nuance of his instructions, in a way Arteta or Ricksen never could. If we successfully peruse the official talks which Director of Football Business Matrtin Bain has admitted Rangers are having with the Wolves midfielder, Alex Rae is a guy who can help execute McLeish’s directives on the pitch and, as Jim Duffy said on BBC Radio Scotland tonight, imagine him going into a fifty-fifty with Neil Lennon!!! THIS IS WHAT WE NEED.

I remember, for example, when Eric Cantona did the old Kung-Fu bit of community policing at Selhurt Park, some newspaper interviewed Rae, who was at Milwall at the time. He said that if Cantona had tried that at the Den, neither the Frenchman nor any of the other Man U players would have got out the place alive. This might sound irrelevant but to me it shows Rae’s played for a club whose fans don’t like to be messed around and who can turn nasty (although it’s been a wee while since The Bears’ nastiness has been anything other than verbal), it shows he’s played happily in that kind of environment (218 appearances and 63 goals for The Lions) and that he has a down-to-earth, almost gallows humour about the “pressures” of the game.

Plus - and this is callous but I think very important - 2004/2005 will almost certainly be his last season in football and this is a guy whose recovery from whatever addictions he had is obviously tied very deeply into his self-esteem. A huge part of that self-esteem comes through football and he’ll have an almost religious regard for the prospect of playing for Rangers - the team of his heart - as a crowning glory to both life and career. Combine that desire to play his heart out for personal pride and the “One day at a time” mentality inhabited by most people with Rae’s past off-field problems, and we have one absolute belter of a signing in this guy.

He’s two months younger than me so he can’t be that old! Or maybe that’s why I’m thinking he’ll do the biz - because he’s a 34-35 year -old Bluenose like myself. You kind of feel that a guy like that, a guy who remembers how p*sh we were in the early eighties and how brilliant we were in the nineties and what EXACTLY that all means to so many folk in Scotland and beyond - can go into the dressing room and onto that pitch and say and do the things you’d say and do yourself if you only had the ability.

If we can’t have players who’lll take Rangers to their rightful place on the world stage, we should at least have players who fully understand what that place is and why this club desreves it. Come on home, Alex - you’ll do for me, mate.

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Published:
04.21.04 / 10pm
Category:
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