A week on death row (Cancel your Setanta subscription)

PACINO: “So you never wanted a regular-type life”?

DE NIRO: “What the fuck is that? Barbecues and ball games?!”

PASTEY FACED PUNTER FAE SCOTLAND: “Erm - well, no, Bobby. Actually there is NOTHING regular about a life following ball games … and If you’d just stop punching my face for a second I’d tell ye why ….”

See, I’m also currently kidding myself that I’m really looking forward to the summer, to the days of not having to worry about Rangers.

Between actually getting to the game, enduring it, getting back home, spewing my “match report” onto the web then arguing with everyone who doesnt agree with my unbelievably sharp and witty opinions on all matters Rangers, a regular season can be quite exhausting. The weekends are only half weekends. For all football is technically a leisure industry, a pass-time, a hobby - we all know it most often feels like a calling, a duty, a curse - an addiction and affliction. This season has left us all very, very weary.

A European Championship or a World Cup means we go more Lukewarm Cicken than Cold Turkey in the summers of even-numbered years. This June and July, however - give or take a Scotland double-header in the World Cup qualifiers - I really do need to get away from it all.

We have the first of the two European finals tonight (Come on the CSKA! Yeovil are already champs of League Two and, if Sporting Lisbon win their first UEFA Cup, you can’t help thinking it’s “coming in threes” for green-and-white hooped hopes) and they usually signal the start of the summer for Yours Bluely. I’m telling myself that Saturday - sitting watching Dennis Bergkamp in the FA Cup Final against Manchester United - will be the official start of the “warm-down”. It’s football but it’s football about which I have no particular affiliations - I can just enjoy the game. This unwinding, after Sunday, will lead to eight or so weekends of cinema, knitting, piano lessons, opera workshops, boozers and barbecues - my emotions free of the stresses and strains of Rangers fandom.

But it’s bollocks. As I said in one of the articles below, a few weeks ago, the real pain of losing a close-run championship does not kick in until the weeks and months after the chilling denoument. I feel 100 times worse about the final day of the 1997/98 season now than I did seven years ago. So, with me so convinced Rangers and Motherwell will not pull off the miracle needed this Sunday, the days leading up to it are a tortured journey of unrealistic hope, leading to a cul-de-sac of dissapointment and regret.

May into June is exam time. College, School, Uni - all the exams take place around now. When you’re as thick as me, when you’ve been put back a year so many times yer actually going to The Savoy in short trousers, you sit a lot of exams and Sunday is definitely the one I didn’t study for. You focus on the fact it’ll soon all be over - that’s what gets you through the days before it and into the exam hall - but the inevitable failure (Once again I’ve failkd to nail woodwork) is what will in fact ruin that summer you thought you were going to enjoy.

And then there’s the fact we’re losing itto Celtic: As usual, the more rabid elements of their support are whipping themselves into a frenzy of conspiratorial paranoia - led by their esteemed manager - and this makes losing the league all the more unbearable. It’s a topic we’ve touched on in a little rant of mine posted underneath this one. The desperation to claim “it’s jist noh fair” at even the hint of a set-back makes the empty vessels of the green-and-white hordes impossible to reason with.

They’re like the middle class teenager returning home for summer after their first year at University: They’ve had a crash course in political awareness but their immaturity lets them see only the wildly romantic side of politics - freedom fighting: So they see injustice everywher, wear the badges, get the hair-cuts and the clothes and nail their little personalities so rigidly to these empty noises that they daren’t back-down. So much of the identity of the Celtic supprt is based upon their belief they’re bringing down the system they’re too scared to admit it’s all a lot of pish. The establishemnt hates football fans of ANY sort - but Celtic always have to feel they’re different, … despite being a multi-milion punt corporation the same as the rest of us big clubs. Not so much handykarma as handypara.

When they win the league this Sunday it will be particularly pathetic to see the mass outbreak of self-justification which creeps across the tricoloured masses. When they win it’s “I told you so”, when they lose it’s … exactly the same.

And then there’s good old Setanta. I don’t have a ticket for Easter Road - no-one does apparently - so once again this season I turn to my

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Published:
06.26.05 / 6pm
Category:
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