Blooper Goalie Gets Sadistic Pelters From The Stotious! (GERS … 0 Inverness CT … 1)

Thought I’d just get in there first with the headline. Okay, Caley are far from a first division team these days and we didn’t lose by 3 goals to 1 in a defeat which will see our manager and his assistant sacked and we didn’t get punted out of the Scottish Cup …

… BUT …

Super Caley can certainly feel entitled to go as ballistic in the wake their first win at Ibrox as they did in the aftermath of their first win at Dark-head back at the turn of the century. They did a real “Glencoe” on us today, the Highlanders (talk aboot “bad manners”!! Ah don’t know! Ye invite somebody inate yer hoose and they slit yer throat while yer sleepin … in defence), and have always been difficult opponents for everyone else as well as Rangers since they came up to the top flight …

… AND …

… there’re more than a few loudmouth Bears who now think they want OUR manager and his assistant sacked and while we may not have been punted out the Cup there is a more-than-fair case for saying we’ve been punted out another, more important competition, this Saturday following Friday the 13th. The 2006/2007 SPL title could now be a picknick the Teds will be unable to attend. Ten points adrift of the league leaders - a fact made even more unbearable by the fact those leaders happen to be a creepy mob in green-and-white hoops - Le Guen and Colleu are now tasting their first pressure of the Rangers management job. I wouldn’t say it’s REAL pressure - just, by Rangers standards, a little grumbling, exacerbated the fact that their most publicised selection of personell happened to result in a mistake which led to Caley Thistle’s goal.

The playa-haters (Gers fans who love to hate Rangers playas - and managers - and chairmen!) were already primed for yet another revolt yesterday as the Murray Park press conference brought the earth-shattering news that Allan MacGregor had tested a nuclear bomb in North Korea … no - sorry - that’s noh right, is it? … erm - sorry - getting my horror stories the wrong way round. Paul Le Guen revealed that Allan MacGregor had been dropped in place of Lionel Letizi. A contentious decision? Yes. A cause for consternation, outrage and mutiny? Erm - nah.

Some claimed Le Guen was trying too hard to show he’s boss. Well, if he’d been doing that then Ferguson would never have started back so soon after his injury.

Some claimed Le Guen was favouring Frenchmen over Scots. SACRE BLEU - that’s SO unimaginative, SUCH a hand-me-down MOAN from the Advocaat-and-Dutchmen pish of five years ago! Where’s Ponroy then? Why then did Rodriguez get hauled off today??

Some claimed he was “biased” towards his own signings! Well, I should think he fu**ing should be! But, even so, is this claim not rubbished by the counter-moans as we entered our first Old Fim game of the season with only ONE Le Guen signing starting??!! Seems to me PLG actually thinks Letizi is a better long-term pick than MacGregor - STRANGE for a manager to go with what he considers his best option - but what would he know, seeing as he only sees the two of them in training every day and has watched far more of Letizi than anyone who supports Rangers.

The whole debate was purportedly given a definitive vote in the 71st minute of today’s game, when pair auld Lionel gave Bob Malcolm’s legacy a bit of a gallic twist and Fauxed-the-Pa.

Don’t think it’s QUITE that simple. But, don’t worry, there’s still plenty blame to be allotted. Even Murray’s Lap Dog here (he pays me apparently) is gonnae have a wee bit of a greet and a girn tonight.

That Graham Bayne’s strike was the only goal of the game is arguably down to another selection mistake: Kris Boyd never scores when he comes off the bench. So the moment he wasn’t in the starting line-up we knew someone else was gonnae have to step up and take the mantle of Rangers goal-grabber. Neither Dado nor Buffel nor Filip Sebo could mamange this from pseudo-striking positions and neither could Nacho Novo as he, like Boyd, came on as a second-half sub. Sebo was startlingly prominent by his absence from the business end of the action.

Barry Ferguson was our best player but his probing never resulted in anything from those in front of him. Stevie Smith was brutally fouled out the game, another sign of our lack of muscle and grit as we continue to soulessly sketch the outline of a team rather than fill in the whole picture. Rodriguez and Papac struggled to win high-balls knocked up to the Graham Bayne of our life and Hemdani, Adam and Bardsley all looked comfortable without ever producing much in an attacking sense.

It’s 10 past 8 on Saturday night as I type this shite. The fact that my social life is so poor should be put to one side as I point out I have yet to see the 10pm lack-of-production-values-fest that is the FULL SPL (Horror) from Satan,ta sports. I’m working from memory here - a memory blurred by the effects of wearing a jumper coz it’s the middle of October but discovering it was like a fucking summer’s day as I sat sweating and stewing among the t-shirt-clad regulars up the Govan Rear - BUT it seemed Letizi was clearly at fault for the goal we conceded. Ironically, my early criticism of McGregor this season was that he couldn’t hold shots - as he’s sorted this out, he’s droped for a man of far superior experience and, one would imagine, temprament … who then fails to hold one of the four shots which came his way and is a tad slow getting up to recover the flaw before Bayne can put he ball in the net.

Had Dargo’s initial shot been of better quality and gone straight past the returning French keeper and into the pokey hat at the first attempt, the criticism of Le Guen on the shit-stirring home of the hysteric, the radio phone-in, would hardly be less rabid. But the fact Dargo’s shot was indadequately saved - SAVED, mind! But inadeqautely so - means the “I tellt ye Le Guen Was a Diddy” Mob actually have an A-B-C, Colour By Numbers incident which, to them, fully substantiates every gripe they’ve ever had about anyone and anything EVER!

It also means I’m doubly pissed off because I had Dargo in my Herald Fantasy Football team and I missed out on jumping a couple of thousand places in that league thanks to the wee bastard’s sudden decision NOT to score against us!! (”HE can joke about it!!! - HANG HIM!!” “Naw - fuck that - he reads the Herald - SPEIRS writes for the Herald - HANG HIM FOR THAT!!!”)

Sebo’s inclusion over Boyd said to me that PLG doesn’t believe, as Walter Smith didn’t believe against France or the Ukraine, that we’d enjoy enough posession or get enough good balls into the box to merit the services of a penalty box poacher. Fair enough - he’s obviously been watching both Inverness AND Rangers of late. Inverness just put those two banks of four behind the ball and waited for a break and we’re missing three - count em - THREE wide players due to injury. What we’re looking for then is some sign that the forward players the manager DOES select can be more creative or energetic than Special K. Filip Sebo’s contribution was as useful to our attacking trident as a Jack Straw pronouncement is to easing racial tensions in Britain. THAT, for me, if yer gonnae focus on ONE aspect of this game and of the manager’s first XI, was far worse than the Letizi incident in selling this game and the attendant three points .. and, YES, possibly the SPL title. Inverness Caley Thistle had absolutely no problems defending against us. A team of journeymen out-fought and out-muscled and out-tac-ticked us.

If we score twice, Bayne’s goal is a consolation. It’d still be the centre of consternation for the Aggrivated Loyal but, infinitely more important, the Gers would be three points better off.

If we don’t play Boyd in Europe - fair enough. THAT’s the level at which his lack of all-round creativity can be a hindrance. Against everyone else, against the entire SPL, his very presence in the box is every bit as creative as his actual goals. Boyd knows enough about rumbling up Scottish defences to keep them far better occupied, far more stretched, than anything we had up til the 59th-minute substitution today.

The possible exception to this rule - the rule I’m now gonnae call Boyd Should Play From The Start in EVERY SPL Game Rule is Celtic. They’re so sorted right now that they were comfy against Boyd a few weeks ago but, even then, I don’t think Prso and Buffel with any other possible third striker could do any better than Kris against the Smell. Boyd must play from the start in the SPL - even when he did come on today, the first thing he did was slip a great pass out wide from the 35-yard mark and the second was win a header at the edge of the box. It was all as if to prove his lack of depth is a myth.

But, it’s all about Letizi today. And, of course, he got booed. Been through this before on these pages - you boo a Rangers player, you’re not a Rangers fan. Unless that Rangers player has deliberately scored a goal against his own side or obviously committed an act of WILFUL harm to Rangers, I can’t see any justification for such treatment. I get folk on here telling me I’m not a real rangers fan because I publicly admit we’ve got a sectarian aspect to our support (this despit ethe fact I freely admit I am a part of that sectarian aspect) and we had a LOVELY (!) e-mail from Rangers this week telling us that Rangers fans had grassed up fellow Bluenoses for sectarian behaviour. UEFA and Jack shiyster McConnle have decided what songs we should sing and some Bears are getting others banned from Follow-Following because outside forces have dictated that’s what we should do and yet folk tell ME I aint a real Rangers fan and then they BOO FUCKING RANGERS PLAYERS???!!! If anyone wants to get another Bear barred because of unacceptable behaviour - behaviour which runs contrary to the general understanding of what it is to be a proper Rangers fan - then there’ll be upwards of ten thousand season tickets being withdrawn next week: Surely to boo Rangers is as un-Rangers as it gets.

Okay. Rant over. Booing yer own - For a lot of people it’s a simple expression of general frustration, misplaced (and a wee excess of bevvy can, APPARENTLY, make ye too emotional) but if we’re gonae slate a Rangers player or manager for misplacing a ball or a name on a team-sheet, we can’t be so random with our own actions.

Luckily, however, the vast, VAST majority of the Bears today soon realised that it wasn’t Letizi’s fault - IT WAS LE GUEN’S!! :-( - and the booing abated whenever he enjoyed his next two or three moments of worrying Franz Beckenbauer impersonations. Letizi clearly has character - he was out heading balls clear and tackling on the edge of the box - maybe this is why he’s preferred to AM - but we then had to enure the less depressing but equally embarrassing phenomenon of the reverse-boo, the stadium-wide applause for a player whose just committed a howler! It happened to Konterman, it happened to Lorenzo, it’ll happen to future Rangers players and we’ll keep on winning leagues thereafter.

However, not everyone who watches Rangers is blessed with patience, sense or even information. From EuroSport TV to World Soccer magazine, respected commentators the world over spent the entire first half of this year expressing their slight consternation that Le Guen chose to come to the SPL - rather than simply Rangers - because he had so many better offers from so many rich clubs in so many better leagues. He’s feted as the best young manager on the continent and suddenly, within a few months of being at Ibrox, he’s a prime dunce as far as too many of our fans are concerned.

This WAS crap today. This was abslutely NOT what we want to see from Rangers - in fact it was pretty much the opposite. In one way or another, in between the moments of high-drama victory, we’ve been watching shit football at Ibrox for the last six years. Today, even without the loss of the goal and all the points, I would still have gleaned as much entertainment from staying at home, slapping up a coat of dulux emulsion in the living room, swithcing off the telly and parking mah fat ass on the sofa - sans beer, coke or even tea - observing every last molecule of liquid dissipating from the treated wall opposite.

But if ever there was a way to address that problem - the problem being that we can get good enough to steal the odd title but not to be consistently convincing for entire years at a time - then it would be to hire the best fucking coach available. We did. And, even than, he really shouldn’t have been available to us at all.

Le Guen “lost it” by dropping MacGregor? MacGregor isn’t that good. He’s better than he was previously and would undoubtedly continue to improve but he’s no Stefan Klos and I’m not so sure that, once everyone’s settled down, he’s better than Letizi.

Le Guen lost it by not playing Boyd? I too think PLG should play Kris but I can see his point about Boyd.

Le Guen lost it by getting stern with a reporter today? Le Guen is still mastering the finer points of the English language (and if ye’ve read this far ye’ll know he’s not alone!) - he was resorting to the only method of emphasis available to his unrefined vocabulary. Anyway, Strachan loses it with reporters every bl**dy time he’s interviewed and that’s when they’re on a good run!

Fat Eck’s lost it by making excuses for Le Guen? I’m a Rangers fan - I’ll ALWAYS stick up for what I think’s best for my team. (although, speaking about himself in the third person is usually a sign he’s lost it generally.)

The SPL - Rangers have lost it? It’s only fucking October. And even if ye want to write this season off - I still think it’ll be worth it….

For me, it’s the difference between having a Can of Coke and a Mars bar or hitting the fresh fruit and tap water. The fizzy juice and chocolate will give ye a short, sharp high and let ye go on a quick burst of energy that can creat JUST enough momentum for you to wearily drag yerself forward when the high wears off and the calories kick in. The Apples, pears, grapes and water, however, taste pretty boring and - even worse - if ye stick tae them they’ll initially flush aw the cola and chocolate oot yer system in the form of big nasty plukes but, EVENTUALLY, you’ll be sorted - and you’ll be sorted for the LONG HAUL. You’ll be IN THE ZONE at all times rather than just long enough to carry ye over the finishing line and ye’ll lose the pounds so ye’ll be GOOD TO LOOK AT as ye do it.

Furthermore - water’s a hell of a lot cheaper than Coke so even the moaners who wanted Murray tae spend less than more then less and still complained when he did it will maybe finally be happy …

I kinda gave up on the metaphor there didnt I? I had it, ye see - but I dropped it.

Booooooooooooo…

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Published:
10.14.06 / 9pm
Category:
News