Milosevic is dead but we still have Rangers

Nearly-convicted Serb war criminal Slobodan Milosevic is dead (You know you watch too much football when you keep calling him “Savo” Milosevic. Some Villa fans might feel that guy’s scoring record in the Premiership was criminal but - hey - there’s a slight difference! What next? “that Adi Hitler - bit of a bigot but he made great trainers! He was never gonnae invade Britain though, not with Winston Bogarde in charge…”!) but atrocities continue to be committed in modern-day Europe and the perpetrators continue to be hunted down. Well, ye know, the easy-to-get-a-hold-of perpetrators: Ratko Mladic, the man who was IN Srebrenica in July 1995 - the man who physically orchestrated the massacre of 7,000 Muslim males - is still at large. But Europe managed to capture Milosevic, the man who sang the songs.

Does the UEFA Control and Disciplinary committee meet in The Hague by any chance? Naw - wait a minute - Dick Advocaat used to play for Den Haag, didn’t he. Better not. Might compromise the integrity of their investigation into our singing of offensive songs in both legs of our Champions League tie with Villarreal.

Although, despite SFA mogul David Taylor withdrawing from the committee, there’s far more concrete evidence to suggest this investigation is already compromised to the point of farce:

Like Jean-Alain Boumsong and now Paul le Guen, Rangers are a big enough club to be used by those who want to take on English football but first want a wee while acclimatising in a less-testing backwater. UEFA cower when a man called Zorro unmasks the racist abuse of Internazionale fans, when Paolo Di Canio reciprocates Fascist/”Roman” salutes with the Lazio Curva, when Sammy E’eto is monkey-chanted off La Romareda in Zaragoza or when Ashley Cole and whoever else with dark skin is playing for England against 70,000 middle-class nazis in the Santiago Bernabeu, the veritable Mecca of the European Cup itself. But then Spain’s horrendous racist problem - encapsulated by their national team manager’s open, barely-acknowledged and hardly-punished guttersnipe insulting of Thierry Henry’s roots - is maybe being used by the European games governing body as a tit-for-tat punishment of the FA.

Because, as we know, Anders Frisk can be forced to retire because of death threats over unproven and ineffective bias against Chelsea in last year’s Champions League tie with Barcelona but the Stamford Road club are fined the equivelant of the price of a penny-toffee to Roman Abramovich. Markus Merk, the affable face of German officiating, received similar hysterical, tabloid-encouraged vilification landing on his doorstep in the wake of his unbelievably crass decision to make a 50-50 ruling AGAINST England in their EURO 2004 quarter-final with Portugal. The punishment was similarly .. erm …was anyone punished?

But England is the home of the Premiership, now the richest league in Europe. It’s also home of The Coca-Cola Championship, the FIFTH richest league in Europe … and provider of games such as Wolves-Cardiff which was yesterday delayed by 15 minutes as Cardiff fans - surprise, surprise - battled toe-to-toe with police. Anyone whose ever been to ANY game south of Hadrian’s Wall knows there’s carnage or the threat thereof in the Burberry and Stone-Island infested streets around each ground. But England, like France, Germany, Spain and Italy, is just too important to the UEFA marketing … erm, sorry … the UEFA Footballing vision.

So what do you do when you need to be seen to be making an example - a REAL example - of any set of fans? Go to Scotland. Give Celtic fans a Fair Play award for getting pished in the streets of Seville and not murdering anyone. There’s no chance of them being back in a European final anytime soon to embarrass that choice and - hey - eeveryone loves a drunk Irishman, don’t they. And then go to Rangers, the politicise-by-colours choice as everyone’s favourite “right wing” club, for dishing out the other kind of medicine: Ignore the fact their fans took over the village of Villareal and sat side-by-side with the home fans in an un-stewarded stadium for the duration of one of the most important games in both clubs’ history and caused almost no trouble whatsoever: Naw, ignore the real, physical, life-threatening stuff - they threw stones at a bus window so maybe you can even get them on that score too - and get stuck intae them for singing songs which, even if any of the Spanish fans could speak fluent English, they’d have no chance of understanding because of the collective Glaswegian accent.

Hey - Rangers ain’t in the G14: They won’t give us Big Wigs any hassle and no-one outside Glasgow will miss them if they’re gone. We’ll just ignore the fact they were one of the devisors of the Champions League, the competition which so lines our pocket, and we’ll set in motion an investigation which may actually have them kicked out of that very competition next season. Basque clubs are allowed to have ethnic-based signing policies but Rangers were out of order for not signing Catholics (We fucking were too!). However, now that they’ve rectified that to the point of probably just appointing a Catholic manager, we at UEFA must look at the songs they sing.

Spanish Police’s sticks and aimed-at-buses stones may hurt me, but loudly-sung words will get you banned from Europe.

Okay. Enough. Of course it’s a farce. Of course it’s unfair that we’re being picked on. I wonder what UEFA thinks of the English clubs whose fans chant “murderers” at Liverpool supporters because of Heysel. I wonder, for that matter, what they think of the Liverpool fans who used to sing “Who’s that lying on the runway…” with regard to the Manchester United team devestated by the Munich air crash half a century ago. But I’ve covered the palpable hypocrisy in UEFA’s decision to possibly make some sort of example of Rangers - how about we actually take some responsibility and decide to do something about it ourselves.

Like the way Channel 4 sold us the “hit series” Lost as a “cult ” show, there’s nothing more likely to put customers off than when the mainstream attempt to appropriate the underground vibe. As Rangers fans, the more we’re told by authorities or those who would seek to be in authority that we’re out of order for singing sectarian songs then the more romantically disenfranchised we’re likely to feel - the more we’re likely to sing those very songs all the louder. Football fandom, like the beautiful game itself, can consist of a pretty grim underlay. Just as there’s a hundred thousand broken dreams and shattered livelihoods for every Champions League footballer, so every stadium-wide rendition of “you’ll never walk alone” is prefaced by interminable drunken, aggressive yobs pishing in the streets and yelling every kind of obscenity they can get their addled brains round. When the “Tartan Army” - a bunch of perma-pished, ugly-as-sin, attention-seeking weans in mens’ bodies flashing their baws fae under their skirts and badly reciting the lines of an Australian-born American actor at every opportunity - is held up as the best football support in the world, and probably fucking is too, then ye get an idea of the reality of that “family day out” at the football.

Kids, women and fragile pensioners with their thermals and tartan rugs: These are the people for whom we’re constantly trying to modify the football experience. Yet the majority of money and life behind soccer spectating, particularly in the British Isles, comes from men capable of throwing a decent punch and emitting bile-filed invective with frightening speed and frequency at the most seemingly-innocuous of targets (like, for example, a bad pass by a player from their own team who, in later years, they will readily tell their grandsons was a guy who “never put a foot wrong - a hero of mine he was”). Most of the kids think this aggression is impressive and most of the pensioners wish they still had the energy for it. Some of the women are every bit as capable and love the whole experience of unremitting un-lady-like-ness. Football fandom is THE visceral experience for people who have to suffer the slings and arrows of a working life every other day of the week.

Social pressure valve? Yup - I’m afraid I agree with that one.

But. However. Nevertheless. BUT. It’s a thin line between football giving us a necessary vent for our spleen and that venting actually creating more social pressure. Just exactly where did the ugly nationalism that the likes of Milosevic and Mladic exploited begin? On the football terraces of Belgrade, Split and Zagreb. It is, in fact, the singing of songs which starts it all off - which keeps the hatred alive.

When we sing “Fuck the Pope” we’re asking to be hated and we’re encouraging hatred. I have no time for the Pope, for organised religion of any kind or for the Queen or for notions of nationalism/Unionism/anything-ism. I wouldnae even join a golf club, far less the masons or the orange order. But I fucking love my football team and the minute I see 8,000 plastic Paddies in the Broomloan Road stand singing “roaming in the gloamig” I want to sing something which’ll REALLY get on their tits. But I really do mean it as a RANGERS insult to fans of CELTIC FOOTBALL CLUB. It seems now is teh time to admit this still isnae enough of an excuse - this is the time to modify that behaviour. Even if I want to form some half-arsed political stance on Northern Ireland or if I’m suspicious of anyone who believes in a big ghost in the sky, the football really isn’t the place for political or religious debates.

The only audible song from the Celtic support at Ibrox last August was “I. I. I-R-A!”. But straight away I can tell you that not only was it barely half the Celtic support which engaged in this little ditty but the only reason they did so was because of the horrible state of their FOOTBALL TEAM at the time. We’d just wrested the title from them on the last day of the previous season and not only had the saviour Martin O’Neill left but his replacement was looking like the half-arsed diddy choice we all thought he would be - Celtic had lost 5-0 in Bratislava and surrendered a three-goal lead to draw at Motherwell all within a few weeks of their arrival at Ibrox, where their captain spent the entire game trying to get sent off. Like me in the aforementioned scenario, the Sellik folks were so pissed-off by the ineptitude on the park and the Rangers taunting from the other three stands that they just wanted to say something as nasty and incendiary as possible: They probably didn’t even give a shit about the IRA, half of those singing that little three-syllable song, they just thought it would wind us up.

Well, it didn’t … not half as much as turning round and leading the league by fifteen points anyway!

Just as the signing of Maurice Johnston actually increased attendances at Ibrox rather than instigating the predicted mass walkout of our thoroughly bigoted support (a walkout predicted by many a Rangers director, that is!) so a sudden suppression of sectarian chants at Ibrox would encourage as many people to buy a season ticket as it would to burn them on Edmiston Drive. When the baggage is taken away for us it’s always the love of the football which wins through. What we should really do is make sure it’s US, The Gers support, who decide we’re gonnae rid ourselves of the bilious songs - and the Billy Boys songs??!!

But it won’t be.

For a start, like I say, we don’t want our fandom sanitised by any authority figures and when ye have the editor of your biggest fanzine telling the press he has “no idea what a discriminatory song is or which part of the Rangers repertoire could possibly be viewed as such” then ye get an idea of the kind of blanket shutout of outside opinions, even to the point where ye willingly make yerself look more stupid than ye ever could be, which take hold. The likes of Jack McConnel and Donald Gorrie have decided to make political gain from something which only requires a few quotes over the phone and the Daily Record has yer name up in lights - a lot easier than sorting out the NHS or child obesity - but if one of them ever dares delve further than “demanding a meeting with the directors of both clubs” we may end up with a legal case and the very flammable truth: That very few of the songs sung by Rangers fans are actually offensive in any objective or legal sense.

Don’t get me wrong - I know that the Sash offends people. I know that “Derry’s Walls” offends people. That’s why I don’t walk about my work or down my street singing these songs at the top of my voice or humming them under my breath. But there is a strong case for saying these are indeed folk tunes - only as necessarily incendiary in themselves as Flower of Scotland. Furthermore the mere wearing of a Rangers strip offends so many people. You only have to read some of the desperately bitter posts on this site in the wake of anything which could be conceived as anything like “good news” for Rangers and you’ll see that, for so many fans of Celtic and for some of other clubs, Rangers will always cause offence by their very existence. We have to turn to some sort of arbitration in order to differentiate between offence in the hysterical sense which greeted the publication of a few cartoons in Denmark recently and offence of the sort which is beyond any claims of over-sensitivity. Vehement, mass claims of victimhood are often the most insidious form of bullying and oppression in existence these days. Rangers are continually portrayed as the establishment club but, really, when we’re not allowed to sing our songs or receive world-wide criticism for bringing out an orange away strip, are we not really the disenfranchised in this minority-conscious era. White, working-class, Protestant - NOT a lot of sympathy for us on the go because, apparently, we ARE the government. Please - pull the other one - it’s got an orange sash on it. Maybe, after all, UEFA are the very body to tell our detractors what they have a legal right to complain about.

I find the music of Coldplay so offensive it literally turns my stomach. It’s a far bigger threat to human rights than anything ever heard at IBRD - yet it goes on un-impeached. People need everything pigeon-holed for them: So many football fans seem to have an inability or a general lack of desire to think for themselves - the only qualification for the word “bitter” in the West of Scotland seems to be a Rangers fan in the Orange Lodge. A fifteen-paragraph e-mail telling us why this was the easiest Champions League in history this season, why Paul le Guen wil be a failure and why David Murray’s deal with JJB will be a finacial disaster is therefore exempt from the description “bitter”. The sooner everyone can take a look at the real emotion and motivation behind all their actions, the sooner we can all calm it.

The depressing thing about Mark Dingwall’s aforementioned comments - apart from the fact that they played right into the hands of Rangers-haters and took the emphasis of the very valid and pertinent points he went on to make about Rangers’ fans overall behaviour in the last twenty years - is that they are the very antithesis of what is for me one of the defining factors of Rangers fandom, of which we should be so proud: personal responsibility. We slag ourselves at Rangers as much as we slag anyone else; When things go wrong at Ibrox we don’t blame anyone else - even if we sometimes should - we just get ripped into Rangers in our search for answers. Okay, Follow Follow’s editorial line may be “fuck yese - we WILL look after ourselves” but they should at least give the press a hint that we actually KNOW what an offensive song is, what a discriminatory song is - or that we know what OTHERS would describe as discriminatory songs.

The reality of the situation is that most Rangers fans sing “offensive” songs for inoffensive reasons. Perhaps it’s the biggest indictment of our support that some of the ditties so hated by Celtic fans - sorry, I mean “other” fans and right-thinking citizens are instinctively viewed as “RANGERS songs” by us Bears. “up to our knees in fenian blood” is the most-quoted line in the media these days: This is the phrase which has come to symbolise the depths of our offensiveness. And, yes, the prospect of wanting to be knee-deep in Catholic blood is horrific. But, apart from anything else, it is the use of the term “fenian” which is so hated. Fair enough but I, in turn, never want to be called a hun or an orange bastard ever again. And, up goes the cry “Aye - but fenian’s much worse”. Well, of course it is - to YOU!

I’d like to think the prospect of me being up to my knees in any kind of blood is so ridiculous as to be laughable and the Celtic fanss rendition of “Ha-ha.Ha-ha” to the same tune is surely the best ever riposte to such stupidly bravado lyrics. Yet the real point for me about this song is that the “up to our knees…” line is the most rushed and consistently mumbled part of the song. The real power of this song for The Gers support comes from the “HULLO” HULLO!” chant � the rest is just so much detail which most of the Gers support doesn’t even understand: Half of them, myself included until very recently, think “Billy Boys” refers to followers of King William of orange when, in fact, it refers to someone who everybody could agree was a criminal - on a much smaller but perhaps more disgusting scale. I would have absolutely no problem changing the lyric to “up to our knees in toast and cheese for we are the big fat Rangers boys”.

…but then there’d probably be reports to UEFA because the tune REMINDED people of the former lyrics …

It’s the same old problem for The Gers fans: The club needs to come out and say “Yes, historically we are a Protestant club” but it needs to come from the fans too in some sort of “cultish”, street-wise”, “zeitgeist”, law of the - aherm - jungle manner: and then everyone, including non-Protestants like myself, can get on with the business of acknowledging that identity in a legal and non-offensive manner. Without any true declaration of identity it gets pushed underground and left to the extremists to make the biggest noise from their empty vessels - everyone else then falls in line behind the lowest common denominator because, hey, when you’re trying to get a big song going to get yer team through the Champions League last sixteen, ye don’t have time for socio-political debates with the guy stood next to you: ye just sing a song of Rangers.

What happens presently is we get confused hints from the boardroom, like the orange away strip, the England-away strip, the Union Jacks on the pitch before kick-off: We’re unionist? We’re orange? What the hell, we’ll just hate catholics and that’s all the bases covered. So much of the perceived politics at Ibrox are so confused and half-arsed that the only thing left to “unite” the fans is just to hate celtic in as many ways as we can. And, for so much of the celtic support, it would be an absolute fucking DISASTER if the repertoire at ibrox was suddenly squeaky-clean: The vast majority at parkned are there to be outraged at some sort of perceived oppression. How shit will it be being a rebel when there’s nothing to rebel against?

But there are enough on both sides who want it to be made good. As an Irish Celtic fan so wisely said on the radio last night, “it’s all about divide and conquer”. His excellent point - and one I continually advocate - was that there is very little difference between the circumstances of your modern day Rangers and Celtic fan but the establishment (which Rangers, I’m sorry, so obviously do NOT represent) wanted us to keep warring so as to take our minds off the decaying social system around us both.

As George Orwell said on behalf of future governments, give the proles their beer and their football and they’ll be happy. What he also knew was “give them a reason to hate each other and they’ll be even less trouble to us”. Let’s decide for ourselves what’s offensive and then we can fight for our right to party tunes.

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By ra Way, the “Match retort” on the Killie game is below - who knows, maybe I’ll even get a chance to talk about our new manager sometime!