Old Firm video evidence is conclusive

What about The Rangers team when Sellik went into their wee huddle before kick-off? Rather than look at that shower of shite (BIGOTRY, surely?!! - Ed), I let my eyes fall on The Gers players to see how they passed their time until their opponents finished their wee girls netball team “Rah-Rah! Rah!”. McLeish’s men were making a conscious effort to turn their backs on it in a flurry of hanshakes, pats on the back and “good luck” high-fives.

From the climate now established by Martin O’Neill, The Huddle is an act which would undoubtedly be described as provocative in the extreme if The Gers ever tried such a pantomime as the ref was trying to start the game. So, that established, I would be quite happy to provoke any reaction from these gits with any “sectarian” response we could muster: Fire a few of the spare footballs into their backsides as they “huddle up”; Ensure every Gers player turns his back on them; Have every Rangers player corss into the Celtic half and spit. What the hell! We might as well give them what they want. If we’re going to be accused of bigotry and incitement every time we deny Celtic their way we might as well enjoy ourselves in the process!

Seeeeeeeeee-eriously, though: While the Scotland Rugby team’s famous response to Western Samoa’s Hakka during the 1991 World Cup (All link arms and approach them in a line, slowly encroaching into their half) is an option I often consider, I think The Gers look best when simply keeping their self-respect and acting like adults. The Smellies want a wee extra cuddle before the game - coz they’ll have fuck-all to celebrate DURING it - then let them. Their sentimentality and faux team-building shite (the huddle worked well for Tommy Burns and John Barnes!) demonstrated by this pre-match mass bend-over, fosters that kind of sickening lack of perspective which, in teh flick of a switch, turns unbelievably nasty - most of the time it’s celtic it damages moe than anyne else (Wim Jansen and Jock Brown never did get to enjoy a huddle did they? “Ye’ve won us the league, Wim - huddle up and give us yer resignation letter”). The Rangers, pre-match? We’ll just have a hand-shake and a laugh, thanks.

Loved Nacho’s reaction before, during and after the penalty he won and converted. He is determination personified and haring right up to the front of the Broomloan was good enough for the rat bags after Hartson’s bee-line and “get it up yese” to the West Enclosure ten days previous. Raul’s successor couldnae be stopped as he bounded down the touchline at the Govan and, there he was again, as all hell broke loose after the Lovenkrands “decapitation” incident with Monkey-face Thompson, walking down that same side of the stadium urging the punters to up the noise level - as everyone else urged the players to calm down. This, as much as the studs into McNamara and Pearson and the fact he’s never missed a pen, show why Novo has the steel we craved so much last season: Everyone else is trying to break up fights - wee Nach is turning to the Bluenoses, pleading with them to crank it up a notch . The Setanta cameras pan back and there’s the entire Govan stand - me included - ABSOLUTELY FUC*ING ROCKING! EVERY SINGLE Bear and Bearette is bouncing up and down, giving it laldy.

THIS is why Neil Lennon tried so damned hard toget a reaction from us - he couldn’t have so many Rangers fans simply singing their hearts out with joy; It HAD to be turned into a “shame game”.

But even the First Minsters positively Victorian presbyterian reaction to Satuday’s RIGHT GOOD RAMMY (celtic are becoming so damned right-wing and conservative in their public pronouncements don’t ye think) can’t spoil the TV memories of Dado coming down the tunel with a bandaged napper - obviously anticipating what kind of game it would be - and then slapping that same bandage with his hands in front of the West Enclosure, saying “This put ball in net”. Deafening noise - the cheers for both goals were scarier on TV than they were at the actual game - ye could hear the raw, orgasmic emotion in the three stands - but behind Dado all you can see is a sea of quietly sitting green people.

They weren’t sitting so quietly when Nacho stepped up to take his penalty and the camera in the Broomloan shows a swathe of green-and-white scarves being whirled above heads to distract The Wee Man. Hedman knew which way Nach was going but he was powerless to stop a shot of such conviction. HOW QUICKLY THOSE SCARVES GO LIMP AND FALL - all the camera can see then is a wee fellah in blue running away to take the acclaim of his adoring public.

And, again, as Lovenkrands is lying on the deck and Thompson is bursting out of his mattress face with rage, the cameras show the first two rows of the Govan in the background but in great detail as they close up on the protagonists of the first red card incident: There’s a Bear and a Bearette, standing side by side - they MUST be married - who just looked absolutely beautiful to me - and stil do when I rewind the tape to watch them again and again: Both are leaning as far over the Govan’s advertising hoardings as they can manage, repeatedly sticking their twos up at Thompson as if their life depended on it. When Kenny Clark’s red card goes up, they explode with joy and the viccies are redoubled - dare I say they pump their arms up and down a million times faster than the Celtic manager did on the pitch an hour or so later. The woman’s lovely pink scarf gives the whole scene a homely, feminine, maternal feel.

Henri Camara. Vignal definitely has a bite of him as they go down but what chance has the Senegalese striker of escaping trial by televisin when he insists on wearing GOLD boots?! The only way the linesman missed his kick into Gregory’s knee is that the sun pouring over the top of the Main Stand roof glinted off the 24 carat footwear of Celtic’s usesless striker and blinded the official.

Is it just me or does Marvin Andrews like to impersonate a hat? He sometimes goes up so high in the air for a heder that he actually becomes VERTICAL across John Hartson’s balding ginger heid. We thought Trinidad and Tobago didn’t seriously need him for their “walkover” fixture against St Vincent and The Grenadines but with the big man’s country only recording a 2-1 win we can be sure he was almost as much a “superman” as his leaps indicate, in managing to play tww such draining fixtures in such a short space of time, on opposite ends of the planet. Thanks for the effort, Marvellous Marvin.

Still ashamed of Lovenkrands for his reaction to Thompson’s “head-but”. We had them beaten anyway but I much preferred the stance taken by that Spartak Moscow player who Newcastle nut-job Craig Bellamy really did butt, full-on, in a Champions League match two years ago. The guy just stood there and smiled, walking towards Bellamy as if to say “you’re going off and you didn’t even hurt me”. Bellamy was actualy visibly relieved to be getting a red - it saved him having to remain on the pich knowing a guy with a concrete head would be after him.

Lovenkrands’s raction reminded me of the kind of thing young bickering siblings do at the dinner table. One merely pokes the other in the arm and the recipient will below “Aaaaoooowwww - STOOOOOP IT - THAT HURTS” while looking over to mum and dad, PRAYING their rval will be reprimanded or, if it’s a second reprimand, sent to bed early. But, when Celtic have proved to be such weans in the aftermath of our second goal on Saturday, we should feel little guilt about the subsequent victimisation of our ugly sister:

But let’s not fall victim to the hatred Martin O’Neill would love to stir up: We all know that, before the media went to town and O’neill gave them all the food they needed, the vast majority of those at the game on Saturday went home either a bit pissed off or with an extra reason to feel happy. We - the real football fans of whichever end of “the divide”, not the tourists and po-faced hacks - were all simply bit more sheepish or a bit more buoyant at work this week, dependant on which team we supported. For fuck’s sake - can we all please remember how we’d feel if O’Neill HADN’T lost the plot, if the papers, radio and telly weren’t all telling us exactly how much we love to stab each other. It IS only a game and the real punters instinctively know this - if it was like real life we wouldn’t be interested.

We played sellik off the park on saturday and they cracked. The Blue parts of Ibrox smply bounced with joy and, whatever the rest of his season brings, weve had an absolutely smashing time of it since our wee trip to Portugal.

Talking of Europe - here’s what I said about Thursdays UEFA Cup opponents back when the draw was made:

“Ak Graz, Grazer AK, GAk or Liebherr GAK - whatever you want to call the Champions of Austria (Libeherr is their sponsor’s name - if Arsenal fans are miffed at having to name their new stadium after their new sponsors, they should think of the Austrian Fussball public who constantly have to endure their entire club being renamed after endless fly-by-night corporations. Thing is, in my very bad German, “Liebherr means “Love man” or “Man Love” - wonder exactly what type of product provides the financial backing for the team who share the Arnold Schwarzenegger Stadium!!), the hardest team in our group after Auxerre are, thankfully, the other opponents we play at home. From pot 3 I’d have preferred Athletic Bilbao (1977 Uefa Cup runners-up) or Dynamo Zagreb (1963 Fairs cup runners-up, 1967 Fairs Cup winners) but we got the team currently 4th after 11 games in the T-Mobile Bundesliga.

“AK Graz actually won the Austrian double last season, pipping the mighty FK Austria (a.k.a. Austria Vienna) for both titles - by one point in the Bundesliga and 5-4 on penalties after a 3-3 draw in the Osterreich Pokal final. Just to round it all off, their man Kollmann, finished as the league’s top scorer with 27 goals. Ronald Kollman is the bloke who hit that very easy shot which David James failed to hold for England against Austria in Vienna in this year’s World Cup qualifyers.

“I suppose now we’ll have seen both the Graz teams and here’s hoping for a repeat of the home form when we met Sturm in the Champions League a few years back - 5-0. But, as they’ve arrived in the Uefa Cup via a 1-0 Champions League qualifying win at Anfield (Liverpool won 2-0 in Graz), I cannae quite envision a night like we enjoyed when The Little General watched De Boer, Mols, Dodds, Albertz and Gio bang them in.”

Since giving this vastly inadequate assessment of Grazer AK I can only add two things: They have a big Croatian centre-half who will probably mark his international team-mate, Dado Prso and, as I walk to my work from Charing Cross station every morning, I pass a cement mixer sat on Bothwell street which has “Liebherr” printed on the side of it. This si obviously a sign from god that something bad is gonnae happen in this match: Perhaps our next Euro opponets are sponsored by cement mixers - this would be apt considering what they’re almost certain to do - pour a smothering, hardening mix over our attacking abilities.

AK will come to Ibrox to defend and, although a win would all but put us through to the knock-out stages, I think a 0-0 is the most likely outcome.

Thanks god that, with The Smell having FINALLY won an away point in the Champions League at their NINTH attempt (Hartson’s gola a mile offside. The ref allowed it but that ref was Lubos Mijhel and we’ve never tired of hearing from O’Kneel how shite an official he was in a certain Uefa Cup final), we’ll be allowed to get on with playing in another a competition against another team from another country without being accused of being the devil’s spawn and Adolf Hitler reincarnated .. simply for trying to win.

Exaggeration? Aye, well - it seems to be the way to get attention this week.

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Published:
11.25.04 / 1am
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