Two In A Row - Thirteen More To Go(Pars … 0 GERS … 1)

Ye can win the UEFA cup with nowt but draws so I’ll not even bother totting up the number of European games from which we’d like to come out succesful this season. I’ll just say that’s Walter won his first two games in charge - with a total of six goals scored and none conceded - and there’s just thirteen more matches in the 2006/2007 domestic season for Rangers.

Even with forty five points from his first fifteen league games in charge of post-Millenial Rangers, The Divine Cardigan will not win the league but he’ll guarantee the second Champions League qualifying spot and make Celtic’s title-winning margin a TAD less humiliating. In the scheme of such a sequence of wins, no-one will care about the narrowness of today’s win or the number of chances we squandered to both make it a more handsome victory and give me the chance to have a headline along the lines of “Rampant Rangers Wreak Rabid Revenge”.

So, like the “six goals in two games and none conceded” stat, let’s not so much tell damned lies but frame this result, this performance at East End Park in a wider, kinder context. When a new (as in, “latest”) managerial regime takes over a club apparently in freefall, the first thing it must do is steady the ship. At this stage, performance is still a secondary issue. You look to see an instant improvement in results. You want to see the kind of instant surface momentum under which you can build real lasting quality. You need the new management team to get instant wins. Walter, Ally and Kenny McDowall have done just that. Considering how bad we were performing, this is - as everyone on the busses back from Fife is no doubt saying - the kind of game we would have lost earlier in the season. Dundee United at Ibrox was the type of clash we would maybe have drawn - or lost - in PLG’s early days (seven months in is still early days). Under “Walter II, Return of the Hero”, We’ve won both fixtures. Job done.

PLG presided over a two-goal comeback in our first home SPL meeting with United this season. We drew. In his first trip to Tannadice we lost. Walter makes his second Ibrox debut against Dundee United and he thrashes them 5-0.

Against Dunfermline, at East End park, PLG oversaw an easy win in the CIS Cup but a poor draw in the SPL. In the match between his departure and Walter’s reinstatement, we went 3-0 down at EEP before eventually losing 3-2 in our only Scotish Cup match of the season and easily our most shambolic away performance for years. No-one’s blaming Ian Durrant - quite right - but plenty are probably blaming PLG for that and so, under Walter, another five-goal win at the same venue against the same opposition, just 14 days later, would have proven that Cup shambles was all Pancran Potato-caused, Breton Bampot-induced. Well, we won - we were nowhere near even half as poor as we were 14 days ago and we were certainly up for the entire 90 minutes as opposed to just the last half hour - but a five-goal win did not materialise and, by the end of the game, any kind of win was looking seriously shaky.

Apparently I’ll get my ass sued if I play music over this blog. Ye know, if you click on this site and suddenly some music comes across yer PC speakers. Apparently this will not only stop folk reading it because they only read Gers@OpenFitbaw at their work (Fair enough. I mean, who the hell would want to read this in their OWN time?!! :-)) and, more importantly, record companies would sue me faster than Metallica landing a writ on Napster’s doorstep. I’d thought it would be a nice wee gimmick, if I could shove a mood-matching tune down yer ears as well as my badly-typed words doon yer eye-balls. Don’t worry no Sash-bash stuff - I was thinking more along the lines of “Vesti La Giubba” for an old firm derby defeat or Kool and the Gang for an Old Firm win - some Biggy Smalls for an Old Firm derby build-up piece … ye know. Today, for example, I’m thinking Roxy Music and Dance Away would have been applicable. Not just because Bryan Ferry is posh, arty, smooth and genius - just like Ra Teddy Bears - but because that particular track is all about a decision to put a bad loss behind you in a way which gives no cheer but just enough assurance of your powers of recovery to let you carry on.

Hey - if you’ve got a bit of Roxy M in yer CD collection or ye can access it via yer PC, and you’re one of the true connoiseurs who reads this site at home, bang it on just now - listen to Big Bry, no doubt wearing his Welsh Guards trousers (MAN - they were cool!) givng it “Nooo-ow I know … I must waaaa-alk da line … Untiiiil I find … an ooopen door …” and ye can hear how I feel about this 1-0 win over the Pars.

Oh Yeah.

But trips to East End Park are always dominated by one particular tune. Aye. Rangers today went INTO THE VALLEY where we’d found Scottish Cup death and, unlike two weeks ago, this time we didnae hit THE SKIDS. We are getting better - we will continue to get better and the desperation of some of our defending was, at this stage of a recovery programmne, more an encouraging sign of a Will To Win than a depressing indication of our frailties.

Had Dunfermline equalised today at the end of the game, had Allan McGregor not pulled off a fantastic save while lying prone on the deck from an un-blown foul, or had Charlie Adam or Karl Svensson’s first half hand-balls been awarded by a ref who also failed to send off two Dunfermline players for brutal assaults on an equally nasty Rangers team, Walter’s “new beginning” would have had all its momentum sucked out of it in only the second game. We’d have become the first team in something like half a dozen SPL games to concede a goal to Dunfermline Athletic. We’d have dropped two points to a team on the very brink of relegation. We’d have looked like re-confirmed muppets instead of soon-to-be heroes.

Such is the fine line between glory and calamity at Eebrox.

Charlie Adam was our most influential player today and David Weir was our newest. Well, when I say “new”, at 36-years old, I mean he’s a new SIGNING. Within a few minutes both men had done their job. Svensson made an absolute arse of a simple clearance but, unlike a fortnight previously, in the worst defensive performance of Rangers history, it was not fatal - David Weir came in and, basically, wiped Karl’s arse for him. The old head tidied up the young eejits’s mess. In the ninth minute of the match, Nacho Novo skinned down the right, put a lovely ball across the six yard box and Charlie, sliding in at the far post, got the ball just the foot off the ground it needed to be to squeeze beautifully between prone goalie and flailing pars defender and into the opposit corner of the net.

Weir never looked as though he was comfortable with this defensive set-up but he always looked as if he knew how best to sew us up at the back and as if he’ll be the perfect leader and reconstructor of the back line. He’ll improve us no-end.

Charlie continued to get into great positions and win the ball from Dunfermline players in key areas but he would, for the remaining 81 minutes, always choose the wrong pass or mis-hit his shot. Like Weir, we’d have lost without him but we wouldn’t win by much as he could only do enough to drag us to a victory rather than drive us to a romp.

For now, that’ll do.

It was Sunny in Fife two weeks ago - this part of Fife - and we were devestated. This time it was rain and cold and undramatic. There was so much bitching and nipping on the pitch today but it was great: Rangers gave as good as they got and the signs of spirit and revival are there. We’re moving away from the Le Guen path - a path I feel would have ultimatley led us to glory, untold glory, in a very different style - but we’re clearly taking the Walter and Ally short-cut route to domestic success, to a weekly steadying of the short-term ship. Rangers will begin to roll out the minimum requirement once again - beat everyone in Scotland.

As for Europe - well, that’s where Walter, like every other Gers gaffer, can really convince me of his aptitude. By then we’ll hopefully have a few more signings and a lot more cohesion of what is, admittedly, already a more concise unit singing from a simpler hymn-sheet.

One sad aspect of today’s game was Walter’s failure to recognise the meaning of “SEBO TIME!”. Filip only comes on when all is lost or the game is sewn up. Today, at 1-0 up with twenty seconds of injury time remaining he had his one and only touch, surrendering posession straight to a Dunfermline boot, turning a Rangers move in the Pars half into a Pars attempt at an equaliser. Maybe Walter will soon recognise, harshly, that there is no time for Sebo at Ibrox.

We won. Walter has yet to concede a goal or a point in his second spell in charge. In Paris, at the Parc des Princes, Paul le Guen won only his second domestic cup game of the season - his other being that CIS Cup win at East End Park where Hemdani first played at centre-half and today, at the same ground, Brahim played his first game back in midfield under Walter and will probably never play defender again. PLG led men in Red and Black socks to a victory over a second divsion team in the yellow and blue of the old St Johnstone away strip. PSG beat Gueugnon 1-0 and are through to the last 16 of the French Cup. Midweek they had a steadying 0-0 league draw with Toulouse. So PLG hasn’t conceded a goal in his first two matches at his old/new club either. And they have a UEFA Cip last-32 match coming up in February too.

I’ll be watching events in Paris with interest. I’m watching events at Rangers with assurance, that we’ll be good up to a point. If Walter takes us further than PLG takes PSG in this season’s UEFA Cup, then I’ll know that we don’t just have to content ourselves with the kind of dometic dominance which got Walter to resign last time.

Today was good. But, for Rangers, it’s all about significance and context. Today was good because we’ve been so bad and because so much has changed so very recently. Right now we’re all happy to believe the tide is turning. What would be faults at any other time are now seen as merely the kind of blemishes nature awards the youngest, freshest complexion. There will be a reckoning and it’s all about how long Walter can delay it. I reckon it’ll take one league title before a 1-0 win at East End Park is seen as a bad thing by The Rangers support. So enjoy it now, Gers, coz maybe 18 months from now this just won’t be enough.