Titilatingly temporarily topping the title tussle (GERS … 3 DEE … 0)

Okay. Can I just remind everyone that this website does not seek to go through the game in a blow-by-blow stylee. These are more match retorts than match reports. With The Teds constituting one half of the Scottish media’s obsession, you’d actually have to go to some lengths to avoid reading an in-depth regurgitation of all the main moves, shots and footballery incidents of any game played by the Gerlacticos. I’m working on the assumption that everyone knows the score - literally - and all the main talking points of any Gers game before they bother stumbling into my wee cyber boozer (no pictures of King Bill on the white Blackpool donkey over the gantry of this virtaul hostery - no. Just a Loudon-esque collage of 50 framed Championship flags and endless portraits of Gers legends, intermingled with pennants of EVERY club The Gers have ever faced. We DO sell Guiness and our jukebox has the kind of tunes you’d more likely hear at a big outside summer gathering in Glastonbury rather than Londonderry (unless fu**ing Coldplay or Travis have ever done Glastonbury - of course they have - GOD, they’re pish)).

Yeah, Gers@OpenFootie just seeks to give one fat Bear’s starter for ten other Bear’s musings and opinions on a game we all know the details of. I mention this again, now, only because, well, while I do always MENTION how I saw the goals and such like in any game, yesterday I didn’t actually see too much of anything in any great detail. Particularly in the first half when The Gers were shooting up the other end. You see, I didn’t … see, that is. Erm, to explain:

Scary thing is, I DROVE to the game and still didn’t click that I was half blind. I must know the road so fekin well now that I’m literally doing it on automatic pilot. Or, if you’ve heard of any fatalities along Shieldhall Road around 2:15 on Satuday afternoon - I’m yer fully fessed-up culprit. I thought the windscreen was just misting up a bit or the wipers were a bit clatty. Wasn’t till I got out the car and looked up the greater lenth of Shieldhall Road I do on foot that I realised I had the wrong contact lens in my left eye! I wasn’t quite as blind as a bat but imagine a bat with really thick specs and a squint and yer half way there.

It’s these disposable, monthly ones. The optician sent me a pack a few weeks ago to try out and dimwit here, with a different prescription for each eye, shoves in two right eye ones before grabbing teh scarf and the car keys! I can see okay for about twelve feet in front of me so when yer in the hoose it’s not a problem. Only when yer sat up the back of the Govan rear trying to see a midget Spanish centre-forward shooting at the Broomloan Road goal that ye realise, I CANNAE SEE A FU*ING THING! Combine that with the fact the work’s Xmas night out took place the previous evening (not much to drink but far too much to eat and far too late getting to my kip after walking up the road in a taxi-free Glasgow) and ye can forget any chance of me telling ye what any of our players were doing in yesterday’s first half … except ripping the heart out of Dundee before the visitors had even warmed up.

I got to my seat and there wasn’t one familiar face sat around me. Had the myopia got so bad that I’d picked the wrong row? Shit - perhaps I was in the Copland rather than the Govan. Jeezus - maybe I was in the wrong STADIUM. HELL AND DAMNATION … maybe I was at PARKHEID!!! But, the elderly gent to my right told me this was his first time at Ibrox in twenty years. “The time before that, Tiger Shaw was playing”. One unfamiliar face explained, my panic attack subsided and my fear of 90 minutes cheering Dunfermline’s reserves from the top of the new jungle dissapeared. The brain clicked into gear and I remembered the father-son combo sat to my left for the last three years had a contact at Goodison Park and were off to watch the Merseyside derby. The Ibrox pensioner - total gent - was passed a cup of tea by his son from a few rows down. On a day visit. The other bloke I usually bug with my inanity was obviously subject to Christmas financial restrictions - the same as quite a few other absent friends yeserday. “48,114″? Maybe in takings - not in bodies.

My bearings re-esatblished, I quickly lost the plot again as the protagonsits poured down the tunnel at one minute to three. Apart from the fact the two teams sporting away strips told my hazy gaze I was about to watch the Great Britain Rugby League team take on Coventry City, the new lumey atire worn by Mike McCurry and his assistants had me thinking all of the following simultaneously: (A) Borussia Dortmund would also be playing, making this the world’s first three-team soccer match; (B) there was a daglo-clothed troupe of really ugly cheerleaders leading the teams out; (C) Martin O’Neill’s whining had finally defeated the upper echelons of the SFA and the police were escorting both teams onto the pitch, where they’d remain for the duration of the match, lest Barry Smith be called a “Sellik reject” or some other such racist nomneclature. Yes - suddenly it was clear that all the spoliers of fun were sporting luminous yelow and matt balck attire: The Rock Steady stewards assist the Police in maintaining order off the pitch, the linesmen help the ref keep the players from degenerating into a full-on rammy.

And, only the avoidance of one such all-in tag-wrestling match convinced me our 1st minute penalty MUST have been a legitimate award. I was blind, yes, but - hey - Auld Maw Nature was also becoming the mother of invention and heightening my other senses. The bovril consumed by that guy ten rows down smelled great, the vibration of an Azzure Catering pie slipping from the grasp of a man in the Broomloan Stand and hitting his irate wife’s Timberland boots coursed through my bones and Stefan Klos banging his boots on the posts to rid them of muck and grass seemed to puncture my eardrum. I just KNEW that Nacho had been illegally flung to the ground, probably with a few kicks to the head and a quick knifing for good meausre, by one of those Dundonian brutes.

I also felt a strange, eerie sixth sense telling me the ball had indeed gone into the net from the wee man’s resultant spot-kick. It’s difficult to explain if you haven’t experienced for yourself this almost psychcic cognisance, but there was something about the way 40,000 or so people were yelling “YA FU**ING BYOOTAAAY” at the top of their voices which made me understand without the use of my eyes. Strange …

And then I saw the wee man firing the ball back across the face of the Dundee box and Big Dado rattling in the second. Ya dancer. Game over - probably.

Yeah, I couldn’t see their faces or make out the numbers but this Gers team are becoming so familiar in their tactics and deportment that it was pretty bl**dy obvious who was who. Prso’s hunched, head-down running - Nacho’s dancing, flailing legs, Nando’s straight-backed manic athleticism, Stef’s different strip to the rest of the team and his standing in our goal for the entire match - I know them all so well! Except the boy knocking about the lovely incisive passes from midfield. I didn’t catch the team’s being read out pre-match and only a bit of sleuth-like deduction told me it had to be Mladenovic. Because, for a man out so long he really did look like a full-fit, truly classy orchestrator, one step ahead the whole time.

As usual with such an early barrage of goals, The Rangers took their Big Club foot off the gas and, between some flamboyant, damnably decadent moves, managed to create some scary moments of defensive indecision. Best ball of the game might well have been the one sent by Fabian “Chubby” Caballero to Steve Lovell which resulted in a wastefuly tame shot at Stef. The best miss of the game was defo the header from six yards which went straight to Stef’s chest. He’s like a magnet, our goalie … a magnet that’s pish at kicking the ball and was yesterday a bit unclever on a couple of cross balls. We’ll put it down to the missing Jean-Alain Boumsong.

I might have been blind but I wasn’t deaf to McLeish’s Radio Scotland dig at our French sensation. A pre-match interview heard the Ginger Gaffer tell Chick Young, the Jaundiced Journo, that Boumsong was basically “being a bit French” about his dead leg. McLeish made it clear our star player of the season so far was not as apt to play through an “injury” which McLeish himself would have been dissapointed to come off the park without during his days at Aberdeen. One man’s hammer blow is another’s warm up.

Big Marv and Bob Malcom coped well enough, however, and the auld fellah next to me was bemused in the extreme by the tannoyed sample of the Sponge Bob Square-Pants theme tune which greeted Mr Malcolm’s moment of the match. If Jock Shaw played today he’d no doubt have one of his Iron Cutain tackles serenaded by a burst of “Eye of the Tiger”. Shaw’s present day equivelant had a shot from the edge of the Dundee box - it hit someone in Dark and Light Blue stripes and rebounded back into Bob’s all-white path: WHAM! Volley, rigging - Rangers back on top of the table with all but two minutes of the second half remaining.

I might have been partially sighted at the time but even I could see Stef’s magnificent point-blank save which Michael McCurry deemed never to have happened. I know it was an unbelievable stop from Dundee’s Barret but that ball obviusly hadn’t pushed itself round the post. Mike just refused to believe what he was seeing: I was delighted with what I couldn’t see.

With ten minutes left on the clock, the terror and isolation which my disability can inflict was again taking hold. The Subway Loyal deserted the ship. Up the back of The Govan, no-one can hear you cheer. But I did. All the way home and all the way up to the bog where I popped both lenses out and slipped the specs on.

Then another sixth sense … this time in my bowels .. a sickly, bilious feeling of impending verbal attacks from a small-minded man with eye sight even poorer than my own: I hadn’t HEARD the Scottish Cup draw, but I just KNEW …