final variation on a theme (Pars … 3 GERS …3)

I usually find it harder to write stuff when I’m happy. Vctory kind of speaks for itself with Rangers. It’s what we’re all about, historically…domestically.

Currently, we’re all about inconsistency on the home front. Our team cannot, in fact, do the talking for us. This is usually where I come to the fore. Suddenly I’m needed - suddenly I feel I have to get my various half-thoughts up there on the website. When Rangers struggle - if we ever truly struggle in the sense most other clubs can - you’ll find there is a definite need for perspective. Most of our fans know only continual success and they criticise all the way through that so by the time we have an bona fide reason to moan these folk want the manager, board, Scottish Executive and the Moderator of the General Assembly all sacked … maybe executed. These Rangers fans, in my sad little opinion, need calmed down. They need to be told how lucky they are.

In times of Rangers woe, the more rabid types among the Celtic hordes start mouthing off, gloating, pretending they have a sense of humour, pretending Rangers have always been shite. They need reminding otherwise. They need to be asked where they were last May, whene Dalglish and Barnes were at Parkheid, for the years between 1988 and 1998 They need to be put back in their little hidey-holes.

In short, When Rangers fuck up, I usually have something to write about - I can usually go on, and on, and on. Well, we fucked up yesterday alright. We fucked up, big-style, in Fife. And I have nothing to say. I’m at a loss. I’m at huge, big, horrible, gut-wrenching a loss - not for words, but for the energy to express them. I’m just too gutted to pound the keyboard.

The result means Alex McLeish has to resign. He wont - but he should. The result speaks for itself. The result, the share of the points with a club bottom of thr SPL, was the final nail in the coffin of our domestic season. But that’s something we’ve already dealt with on these pages. The fact that one more slip-up in the SPL would put Alex McLeish in an untenable position - and maybe even give some credence to the arguments of those Bears who’d oust David Murray - this has all been predicted at length in the postings and rantings on this site and many other throughout Beardom. We knew beating ten-man Cetic 3-1 in the first Old Firm game this season wasn’t enough to show we’d sufficiently built on last season’s title win and moved onto another level - we knew beating Killie by only the odd goal in five, in the first game after Eck’s job reprieve, was an insuffucient reaction.

We knew Dunfermline yesterday was going to happen - maybe not at Dunfermline and maybe not yesterday, but it was always gonnae happen. So it’s not much the actual result which floored me on Boxing Day.

It’s not the defensive disasters either. Our defence has been shite in SPL away matches - and quite a few home ones - for months on end. We saw nothing yesetrday we haven’t seen before from this current Rangers side. Marvin Andrews and Sotirios Kyrgiakos, the pairing who stroked the ball so masterfully between themselves for five-minutes solid at Easter Road in May, look as if they’ve never met each other. Dunfermline couldn’t score at home to Livingston a few weeks ago but they put three past us, the team who held Porto and Inter to 1-1 draws.

Neither is it the latest possible timing of the concession of an equaliser. Three minutes past The Ninety. We’ve exceeded the prescribed amount of injury time and we can’t finish up because we’ve conceded yet another corner, we’ve invited the opposition onto us with a set piece yet again. Darren pig-face Young didn’t equalise with “the last touch of the ball”. Bob or Barry had the last touch - because the ref has to let the game kick-off after a goal, no matter how late it’s scored. We, those of us still stood in the sea of red bucket seats by this point who weren’t trying to fight Rock Steady stewards, had to watch the team come back up the park towards the half-way line. We had to let that painfully pathetic voice in the back of our noggins emit a “maybe we could punt it straight up into their box and if they’re too busy celebrating we might ..” just as Bazz touched it forward and the ref blew as he signalled towards a tunnel which hasn’t been in the middle of the East End Park main stand for quite some time now.

It was horrible to concede so decisively so late - but we could see it coming. We’ve all watched Rangers throw away so many leads this season - we’ve watched us collpase late-on so many times - we’ve all watched so many FUCKING DRAWS during 2005/2006 season (not all of them bad, either) that the way the game ended couldn’t have been too big a surprise.

Nah - it’s not all that stuff which had me ready to drown myself in the mud of the coach park at the back of the north enclosure/stand at 5pm yesterday.

It was Burkey’s goal. It was our second-half barrage of football in the Dunfermline half of the pitch. It was the excitement, the euphoria, the joy of the comeback. It was the two goals we scored in two minutes, to go from 2-1 down to 3-2 up. It was the Red, White and Blue pandemonium that brace of goals wreacked in the away end - away HALF - of East End Park. It was all that stuff - ALL THE BEAUTIFUL RANGERS BRILLIANCE which runied my Christmas.

I believed in us yesterday - I’ve desperately believed in McLeish’s powers of survival for the last fortnight. I desperately abandoned all my cynicism and harsh reality biting yesterday - I let hope supercede experience yesterday and started totally enjoying myself when we went 1-goal up against ten men with a whole 23 minutes of normal time remaining.

Why now? Why get silly now? During the Nine-In-A-Row era I remember biting my nails to the knuckle in the East Enclosure because we were 4-goals up against Celtic and there was still more than 5 minutes of the game left. You know when a game’s crazy. You know when a Ragers team is unreliable. You know when an opponent in unpredictable. You know that football - ALWAYS - has little respect for the expected. So, when you get past a certain amount of time spent watching football matches - five minutes, say - you know that there should only have been any real celebration from me yesterday when Rangers went two-goals up, with 1 second of injury time remaining and the ball in the Dunfermlien six yard box.

But I let go of my reason before that. I lost myself to footballing ecstacy yesterday. I don’t apoligise - there’s no crime in forgetting the difference between supporting your team and truly believing in their abilities - but I paid the price for doing it too early.

I know why I did it. I know why I was determined Chris Burke’s goal was the point of no return for Dunfermline.

(1) BECAUSE IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL GOAL:

He was out wide, then on the edge of the box - always wriggling, always ducking and diving, always caressing that white, leather sphere between his dainty wee feet. All the time, a plethora of all-blue passing options were raining down on the Dunfermline goal - he just had to pick one out. As he left Scott Thompson for dead one last time, Burkey hit the by-line. He seemed to have given himself enough space only to calmly decide which of his team-mates he’d pull it back to. But he just shoved it straight into the net. From an angle so tight geometry can’t record it, he put the ball between Bryn Halliwell and the near post. Maybe there was a deflection, maybe it was a flukey touch - I haven’t seen it on the TV yet - but at the time, it was magical. Twist, turn, razzle-dazzle - swish, swoop, feint, dink, net rustles - a pause of realisation from everyone in the ground - then bedlam.

(2) BECAUSE OF THE TIME IT ARRIVED:

We’d gone one down after barely quarter of an hour - to the simplest goal you’ll ever see. But if we thought Andy Tod’s dispatchment of Noel Hunt’s cross was embarrassing, it was nothing as to the timing and simplicity of Mark Burchill’s strike: We equalised through a quite brilliant hit from Lovenkrands - it wasn’t a dead ball but it was definitely on a life-support system when Peter struck it from outside the box. The swerve was just enough to put it inside the post and inside the net Alan McGregor would usually be minding for The Pars…but he’s a Loan Ranger and we saved his Goals Against sheet here by forcing him not to play because no goalie on the planet would have saved Peter’s strike. But from kick-off Dunfermline seemed to just walk up the other end again and split our defence in two with one simple pass. Did Burchill score against us for Dundee? If so he’s netted against us for four different teams. But the half-time period didn’t see anyone in Blue panicking. So when the stand-side linseman who’d been taking dog’s abuse all day for seeming too flag-happy suddenly decided a Dunfermline hand had cleared off their line, we had an equaliser from the spot, a one-man adavantage, a striker who’d just notched his second of the game and his 8th goal in the last five and that interval of patience and faith had been rewarded: All the aces were in our favour - we just needed one more goal to make this a great day and - BOOM - less than two minutes after that surge of relief and optimisim came Burkey’s goal - so magical and spectacular it almost seemed preordained by a higher power. That power was, of course, confidence - to see it reap such rewards showed we were indeed on the right road for those eleven straight domestic wins Eck needed to restore full, long-term faith in the team and his ability to make us greater.

(3) BECAUSE OF WHERE I WAS SAT:

East Stand of East End Park. A ticket purchased outside the Dunfermline end of ground just one minute before kick-off - from a shadey-looking prick, sans-colours, who I embarrassed into giving it to me for face value because he’d just taken �40.00 from another, more “fervent” Bluenose for the �22.00 seat next to mine. So many away games see Bears wafting great fans of spare briefs in the air - but these are only the games where ye already have one yerself. I’d spent Crimbo Day and overnight at my in-laws in East Lothian - they and my Better Half were relieved to get rid of me over the Forth Road Bridge for the afternoon and, after negotiating the Edinburgh city bypass and the A90 and still ending up heading down the M8 towards Glesgie, I finally made it into Parsville, where I thought the most-heart-breaking thing I’d see all day would be the Greggs and Dominos Pizza outlets next to each other on the way in - BOTH CLOSED!! Then I thought the lack of available tickets could cleft my heart in twain: I haven’t been locked out a game since MoJo’s home debut, v Spurs, in the Summer of 1989 (and they say Rangers fans are anti-Catholic! First time we sign one Ibrox is a sell-out!!!).Was texting a mate on his bus and edging depressingly towards the increasingly black-attired, easternised accents of the home end (when yer as fat as me, the scarf-up-the-jumper looks like just another fold of flesh) when I struck ticket gold. Such luck, such a sunny sky over Fife, such a wonderously magical goal. All this was wrapped up in and embellished by the location of my touted seat: Right behind the goal, at the away end and right on the aisle. Know how I said last week I hated Keane - well, I love Steps! I love to run down them steps if my team celebrates or scores their goal in front of me. Row M - right next to the exit, but about ten steps up from the balcony-like red railing in front of that exit. There’s about five more rows in front of that waist-high railing. When Andy Tod scored, I felt as if I could have cleared it off the line if I’d tried harder - I was closer to getting it than our defence! When Burkey scored, the tannoy warnings about how slippery the East Stand steps were and the sight of so many Bears going on their arses as they went for a pish and a pie, were dispelled as I headed down that little flight and, with a steward to my left and two polis behind me, I leaned over that metal (sturdy iron!), shook my fists like a dervish and ROARED wee Burkey back along that by-line and into that corner between the East Stand and the Main Stand. At that confluence of two of our three sides of the ground (we really have killed off Dunfermline’s support over the last 15 years - their ends were disgracefully un-filled), The Rangers players, in all-blue again, joined with those in front of me, below me, across from me, behind me and aboive me to set up a little diorama of Rangers Heaven which will always stay with me. It’s a sight and feeling which - for some strange reason - reminded me of the secenes around that equaliser in Oporto. I felt this was the kind of scene which had to be preserved forever in a wider happy context.

I’d started to believe there would actually be a renaissance of domestic form under Eck. Something so beautiful HAD to be parenthesised by glory. A winning game and a winning season was surely the frame for this picture of a perfect Rangers moment.

But nah. I’d forgotten my own rules. It ain’t over til it’s over. More than that, I’d forgotten that this was just another day in 2005/2006 season in which Rangers were conceding goals from start to finish. This was Pittodrie and Bratislava all over again - this was what Rugby Park could have been - we were always more likely to fail in Ayrshire that day than run riot. Did I not say that this Rangers side couldn’t win our complete faith til it fucked a team good and hard - til it kept a clean sheet at one end while banging them in at the other? A few oohs and ahhs in front of Dunfermline’s goal later and I soon began to realise what was being played out in front of me. Just another beamer in the inevitable Scottish failure of this season’s Rangers side - we went from shite to great and back to shite in the space of an hour. Steven Thompson should indeed sign for Aberdeen - that was one fatal miss too many yesterday … we should have known it at the time: When Rangers don’t make it 4-2 these days, it’s always gonnae end up 3-3.

But I know that Rangers under Alex McLeish will not win the league this season. I’ve always known that Rangers under Alex Mcleish will win trophies, will be exciting in individual games and singular moments, will win the SPL every second year. But we’ll never retain the title under Eck, we’ll never move to the level of true excitment for Rangers fans - that level which is long-term exciting but short-term predictable, which sees us suck the notion of competition from every tournament we’re in. Real joy for a Bluenose is a boring 2-0 win at East End Park, following a boring 2-0 win at Killie and at home to Hearts. Under Alex McLeish we’ll never threaten to dominate the Scottish game to the kind of level which meant the biggest Dunfermline noise yesterday - as per Rigby Park two weeks agao - came from the stadium announcer, with the back-up of his PA system. Walter Smith and Dick Advocat’s Rangers made a mockery of the Scottish game and killed off a generation of provincial supporters - I want to do that again.

That little cameo from Burkey yesterday took me back to another festive-season game, another away tie at a “D” town, some twenty one years ago. Between Christmas 1984 and new Year 1985 we beat Dumbarton 4-2 at Boghhead - Ted McMinn scored direct from a corner and, with other results going our way and a couple of good performances before that, we all went nuts as the Tin man took a bow to every side of that amazing now-gone ground. I got myself all optimistic and over-excited: Maybe we’ll win the league, I thought. We finished 4th.

Two decades on, finishing 4th is again looking seriously possible.

These types of up-and-down, share-of-the-spoils matches with relegation strugglers are inevitable in any Rangers campaign. They’re the kind of one-off games which just serve to remind you how lucky you are to be following a team which just keeps winning. But this game, at Dunfermline, wasn’t even remotely resembling a one-off - this was just a variation on a theme we’ve been expounding all season. Chucking it away.

You have to resign now, Alex. But you wont.

Oh, look - I did manage to say quite a lot … but I ain’t cajolling anyone this time. I’m not taking the time to tell anyone to calm down, to tell anyone to cheer up or even to fuck off. I’m just too bloody gutted to do anything other than moan. This is now officially serious shit, folks. Rangers are seriously shit and yesterday was the final boot in the nads. I’m just fucking gutted.The final, final, final fling of Eck’s dice has produced zilch (Quite hard to do with dice, I know, but he’s managed it)