Keeping us on a short Leish (GERS ..1 Pars … 0, still!)

(Warning: Cult film reference coming up. If it means nothing to you, don’t worry - just go past it and you’ll find everything else is football related)

Did you have a problem with Dunfermline’s tactics on Saturday? I know I didn’t.

Yet sections of the media would have you belive there hadn’t been such an evil display of “tactical necessity” since Withnail told Uncle Monty that Marwood was a “toilet trader” just so he could get a free weekend of grub and booze in the countryside.

A few newspapers seemed to scream “How dare Dunfermline come to Ibrox and not go with four men up front??!!”. Yes, the visitors’ strategy made for an unpretty game but since when has ugly football ever been anything other than 75% of the fare offered in Scotland.

As per Saturday’s rant on this here blog-tastic website, most of us “cheated” Rangers fans were so sure the Athletic men from Fife were gonnae play a 9-1-0 formation that we were tailoring our pre-match gambling towards such proceedings.

Dunfermline came to Ibrox with an 8-1 home defeat by Celtic still haunting their every move. There was apparently some criticism of Jim Leishman, arguably the most legendary figure in Dunfermline’s history, for deploying his side at Hampden two weeks ago with an obvious determination not to collapse anywhere near as completely against the same opponents.

Some Pars fans complained: They had their big day out at the CIS Cup final ruined by the sight of such premeditated damage-limitation. But then, the Pars support at Hampden was probably three times their average home support for SPL matches. Your day-trippers would be the ones making the noise down the Daily Record phone-line.

Goram bless the Rangers support, though. All we do is blame Rangers. Okay, Chrissey Burke made a wee statement to the effect that he preferred playing against more open, attacking sides but there was no bitterness in his statement, just an admission of how much easier it is to have a go when your opponents do the same. But The Bears and Bearettes - Oh My God - there was no doubt who they were blaming for the lack of goals in the first 69 minutes on Saturday: The Rangers!

Some clubs and some fans may trot out the tired old line about “it was obvious what they came here to do - I can’t understand why a team would set out to simply steal a point” and then, within a few weeks be heard celebrating the gaining of a point at some fortress of an away ground. But The Teddy Bears don’t work like that - not the fans, not the management: When Dado Prso made a mazey run around two or three Pars on the wing and then failed to find a team-mate with his cut-back, there was absolute uproar: HOWLING at him, they were - some of those Bluenoses.

If you can name me one guy who has given more in a Rangers shirt, in terms of sheer physical effort than Dado Prso then you’ll be talking about John Greig, Stuart McCall, John Brown, Richard Gough etc - you’ll basically be talking about legends. Dado’s not been here long enough to be a leg-end but, fuck’s sake, he’s as honest as the day is long and, at that point - after an hour - he was the one guy who’d come closest to breaking down Dunfermline’s fifteen banks of five. His first half shot off the post was from a distance from which you don’t ever see Dado shooting: He’ll adapt to every scenario laid out in front of him, the big Croat. He knew what was happening and he knew it was time to try something different.

Bazza, our captain (He’s injured remember) had a one-on-one shot saved by the impressive Bryn Halliwell but it was the second half which brought out the real tension. We knew Hearts were drawing with Falkirk but the cheer which greeted that wee half-time result was quickly swallowed by the realisation the Jambos up by Grangemouth would all be cheering at the same time, as the half-time score came through from Ibrox.

As we watched the Ibrox pitch being SWAMPED by kids of all ages in all sorts of neo-Rangers strips doing all sorts of exhibitions of their developing skills, we knew we would have to break this Dunfermline mob down. Why couldn’t we beat them 5-1 as we had earlier this campaign?

I remember Dunfermline coming to Ibrox in their first season in the Premier League. Back then still under the tutelage of Jim Leishman, they tried to adhere to a hair-raising, roller-coaster style which Jock Stein imposed on them in the sixties and which the Pars imposed all over Europe as they reached the semi-finals of the Cup-Winners Cup and twice the quarters of the Fairs Cup. They put us out the Scottish Cup in 1987/8 employing that same game plan. But in this trip to Ibrox on league duty Trevor Francis and Graeme Souness - both at retirement age - put on a two-man buddy show of “this is what we learned in Italy”. The Gers won 4-0 and if Trev and Sooooness hadn’t been so busy showboating it would have been another 8-1.

After more than a decade of yo-yoing between the first and second divisions, Jim Leishman was so close to the club he loved he wanted to celebrate their first season back where they belonged - and in the eighties The Pars had a support which justified that claim - by giving it a right good go. They did but they went down. Leish learned from that. They came straight back up and defended. They stayed up a season longer this time. Went back down but came up for longer spells. Now we think of Dunfermline as an SPL team and that’s because of their ground and because Jim Leishman has returned and knows how to make them screw the nut.

Alex McLeish said post-match - and I loved him for saying this - that Dunfermline only played at Ibrox as we ourselves had played in Porto. Spot on. Some commentators may have looked over to the little corner twixt Govan and Broomloan and blamed the size of the travelling support on Leishman’s current tactics. However, the very same tactics earned us that draw in Do Dragao. And that draw led to a situation wher the Spanish town of Villarreal was overrun with hordes of delirious Rangers fans and El Madrigal was almost a 50-50 split between Spaniards and Champions League-crazy Bears. Our support didn’t diminish coz we defended deep.

Yer real football fans don’t give a shit about style - they just want results. When we played in Portugal this season, our side ravaged by injury and domestic strife, we offered not one attacking option until Porto scored. Then, as Dunfermline did on Saturday after they’d conceded, we went up the pitch once and a certain Chris Burke (I wish teams played more open football!) set up Ross MCcormack for one of the sweetest moments in my Rangers-supporting life. There were 15, 000 Bears in that stadium that night, all of us HOPING Rangers woudl defend like hell and eeek out a draw!

The half-dozen Pars fans who made the trip to Govan on Saturday would be celebrating as we had in Portugal that night and their numbers would multiply wildly for their next visit to The Brox if it hadn’t been for Stefan Klos.

Back in because Waterreus had a tummy bug, Stef’s two CIS cup blunders against Celtic when he was rusehd back in too soon, were eased away by two decisive blocks at each end of the second half. “TWO blocks”? Yup - Dunfermline actually attacked MORE than we did in Oporto! The first save was professional goalkeeping of the highest order as he rushed out to block Gary Mason’s run onto a great through ball. The second was world class as, with the clock in injury time and The Gers hanging onto Hearts’ coat tails, he tipped a great Tod edge-of-the box volley over the bar.

Had Stef not been so ready to execute his minimalist genius once again - in 90 minutes there’s two opposition shots on goal:he gives us two brilliant saves - then we could have had a 1-1 home draw with Dunfermline almost as painful as one we suffered just over eight years ago. An outgoing Walter Smith wanted to leave us a tenth consecutive championship - those two points cost us the title.(the crowd was two people more on February 7th 1998 than it was on Saturday and Sergio Porrini scored our goal that day- just as a foreign defender scored our only goal on Saturday) An outgoing Alex McLeish wants to leave us with a Champions League qualifying berth. Those two saves from Stef make it at least possible.

But the games are running out. We can’t keep the Jambos on as tight a leash as we want. If Hearts were going to falter against anyone other than us or Celtic before the end of the season then Falkirk on Saturday was the place it would happen: After the sacking of Rix this, their first game under Romanov’s latest puppet, would show any fissures. It didn’t and, with only seven games left, the six point gap seems ominous. All the Jambos have to do is match our result five more times.

And, in the midst of this challenge, I’m reminded of something I read about another foreign Rangers goalkeeper. Eric Sorensen was a mainstay of the Gers side which lost only one league match in the whole of the 1967/68 season. That match they lost, after such a massive unbeaten run, on the very last day of the season, was at home to Aberdeen and - incredibly - our players were booed off the Ibrox pitch by the home support: The Danish keeper said at the time “I know now what it is to play for Rangers”.

We lost the league to Jock Stein’s Celtic by two points as a result of that 1968 set-back (the goal-difference meant we’d have lost the league even if we’d won that day - it was a handful of drawn games which cost us the title - one of them being a 0-0 at home to Dunfermline!) and, I worry that our traditional treatment of our team may lead to another late pipping at the post - this time for second place. It’s a bit of a balancing act, this refusal to acknowledge what any player has done for us in the past - even in the past two seconds - and just barrack him insanely if he makes a mistake: Sometimes it can get the players wound up enough to sort themselves out but at other times - particularly when facing a Dunfermline side who Jim Leishman freely admitted he’d asked to play in such a way that the RANGERS crowd would start agitating the RANGERS players - maybe we could be shooting ourseves in the foot.

A wee bit of encouragemnt never goes amiss. When I can’t bring myself to encourage then I just shut up. When Lovenkrands came on for Buffel at the weekend, some guy at the end of my row was going fucking nuts with the abuse: “Yer a fucking clown McLeish!”. “That’s a fucking disgrace!”. He booed the substitution and all sorts. Lovenkrands then duly waltzes down the wing and sets up the only goal of the game! I have my way of supporting Rangers and other folk have theirs - and I understand some frustrations and concerns must be vented in the stadium or else some folk’ll burst: Ye’ve paid good money and ye have the right to complain. But, when ye’ve nailed yer colours so defiantly to the angry mast - hoping Eck will never “play The Dane”, or subb the Belgian - How can ye then celebrate the goal which comes from that very substitution? You’d feel as akward as a guy who had �200 to be won by someone other than Kyrgiakos scoring the first goal. Aherm.

Had Pete not set up Soti for that precious breaching of the opposition’s forest of defenders, Dunfermline’s support would edge back towards its massive scale of the eighties but The Rangers support will still be maaaaasseeeve, even more so, next season - as long as Paul Le Guen comes! What miracles will he have to work to garner enough loyalty to coast through a few bad games abuse-free? One of them is sure to be the continual breaching of even denser defensive formations than we saw on Saturday. As our star rises, you can be sure our local rivals will be even more wary of a tanking at Ibrox. This was just the prelude, folks. This was just a warm-up.