Keeping up appearances (GERS … 2 jambos … 1)

I watched Channel 4’s 100 Greatest Tearjerkers a few weeks ago and, in the selction whcih made it to Number 16, I was reminded of one of the most horrific films I’ve ever had the misfortune of being forced to watch: Terms of Endearment. Oh, my giddy aunt! What a pile of girlie, slap-the-audience-with-overbearing-sentiment-til-they-cry shite. Jeezus! The things you have to do when you’re single and gagging fur it! Why I allowed myself to be dragged into that cinema to see that keich is beyond me - I suppose she must have been good-looking, whoever she was, and GOD knows I’d be desperate at the time, but some sacrifices actually leave you unable to “enjoy” the promised prize which caused you to undertake such suffering in the first place. When I can only remember the sickly-sweet mawkishness of that film and not the “date” who forced me t endure it, it was obviously a sacrifice too far. I mean I like Action movies, films about TOUGH guys - MEN, ye know! and … and … and …

Ohhh! RIGHT! Okay then - Okay then! I admit it! I LOVE Terms of Endearment! I LOVE it! ALRIGHT??!!! Happy now??!!It’s a GREAT film - one of my all-time favourites. It narrowly beats the Sound of Music and Sister Act 2, “Back in the Habit” into “Fat Eck’s number one FIlm I’ve EVER seen, ever! list. Okay - you got me. I went to see it on my own! I went to the cinema ON MY TOD to see Terms of Endearment and I went to watch it in the same cinema another FIFTEEN times in the next month. I admit it. No girl ever wanted me to take her to the cinema - I’ve never even had a “date”. In fact, what kind of Scottish bloke uses the term “date” anyway??!! It’s an American term - it’s a TERM OF FUCKING ENDEARMENT, isn’t it??!! Yeah , it is - and that’s because I spent almost every weekend evening of my teens and twenties watching American movies in the cinema on my own - I lived in a fanatasy world where I was the High School geeky girl nobody liked but one day the captain of the football team, BUBBAH, took an interest in me and TOOK ME ON A FUCKING “DATE”!!! Alright??!!! I have no friends of EITHER sex - I JUST ADORE RANGERS from afar (well, the back of The Govan)!! And when we don’t win the league or do well in Europe all I’m left with is my movies! And I have my favourite films, just like I have my favourite Rangers players. And Terms of Endearment is a personal favourite - I just Looooooove all that Emotion!!! I just LOVE a right guid greet!

Anyway - the scene they picked out in Channel 4’s latest splodge of lazy programme-making was the one in which Debra Winger (the daughter) snuffs it after a long HEART-RENDERING terminal illness and her mother, played by the ever-worthy, Shirley MacLaine, sees her daughter snuffing it right before her very eyes. It’s all very deliberately over-emotional but the Oscar-desperate performance by MacLaine sees her fall sobbing into the arms of her newly-widowered son-in-law (Oh yes, the WHOOOOOLE family’s by the death-bed) and declare how she thought it would be a relief when her daughter’s agony was finally over but - no -Shirley feels worse than ever knowing her daughter’s finally dead. Just one more second, just one more minute of having her alive would seem like heaven.

Shirley’s point was one which came rushing to the front of my noggin when Hearts took a 15th minute lead yetserday with their first and third-last attack of the game.

Everyone’s been waiting for Celtic to win the SPL. Everyone seems to have been waiting for Rangers’ “title bid” to finally be laid to rest, having been terminal since the turn of the year. It’s seemed like just a matter of time - every little victory we’ve picked up since Paul Le Guen’s departure has seemed like a rebuilding of confidence for NEXT season - a re-kindling of long-term hope in the face of an imminent short-term loss. Yes, we’ve been “securing second place” but that’s beneath Rangers. The moment we can’t win the League it’s officially a bad season for Rangers, every placing down the league we finish is just another degree of humiliation, and every Celtic slip-up in the last four or five weeks has seemed like nothing more than a tortuous delaying of an inevitable agony. Just let’s get it done and over with said some - just let’s have one week of having to look at pictures of Lennon and co traipsing round some park with the SPL trophy and lots of green-and-white scarves being chucked at them. Let’s get it out the way and be done with it and then we can all move on.

Personally, I’ve never been one for surendering anything until it’s completeley and offically out of your grasp. The way we’ve won our last two league titles has proved the validity if not the wisdom of this POV. However, not everyone shares this mindset. Especially in the Ibrox stands where at least half of The Rangers support have an all-consuming fear of backing anything other than an instant-gratification certainty. Players, managers and anyone else in Red, White and Blue who is not an instant 100% success gets very short shrift and the idea of “emotional investment” is completely alien. All that counts for half of The Rangers support is “knowing better” and “telling it like it is”. This they do by slating the team they purport to love and, when things are against The Teds, mocking any attempts by fellow fans to BACK THE TEAM.

At times it seems as if The Rangers support isn’t there to boost confidence - it’s there to destroy it. So anyone shouting “come on, Rangers - let’s not hand the league to those bastards on a plate” would probably have been greeted with know-all arseholes retorting that “we handed it to them months ago, mate”. What, it would seem to these fly-by-night plastic Rangers fans, was the point of beating Hearts on Saturday when Celtic were only going to win the League on Sunday anyway.

We can only hope that when Hearts scored the opening goal, these idiots got the message. It’s one thing to watch something die - it’s another thing to have to switch off the life-support system yourself. I would never have been “happy” to lose this season’s title-race but it woudl at least have been worth it of it’d given PLG time to bed in, sort out the slovenly primadonna idiots in the dressing room and then get us tight like a military unit for an assault on all fronts, with Europe already proven to be a piece of piss to teh Frenchman. But the loudmnouths in the stands have no paitience and no imagination - and no love for The Club. When you stop wanting to win on all fronts, it’s just a matter of time till you start losing everything. I dread the fact we’ve given up even TRYING to get round the problem of being a big club in a tiny country. The arrival of Souness proved that anything can happen to change our club sensationally and it can happen in the blink of an eye. But if you ain’t going forward, especially in football, you is going back. And right now we’ve swapped a complete reformatting of the training, mentality, fitness and tactics - something which would take at least a year - so that we can just win more SPL games than Celtic! Walter drops his third and fourth points in three months to Inverness and is BOOED OFF THE PITCH. You can enver avoid setbacks so to go forward long-term, you have to LOOK forward. Some defeats - or DRAWS! - you just have to let go. But no. Now it seems the only way Rangers can maintain some sort of overall optimism is to win every bloody game we play! Celtic picking up the league this weekend is Paul Le Guen’s fault so we can write that off - but if Walter Smith’s side had lost to Hearts then partial blame for the entire season’s failure would be passed onto him by the “boo now - think later” crowd and we’d all be fucked, spending a close season unsure if even our third manager in a year would be staying with us. Walter doesnae need this kinda shit anymore!

PRIDE is an over-used word in football circles. But it’s what the game is all about. “Playing for the jersey” is all well and good when you’re cruising to titles and cups and when you’re 2-0 up with ten minutes to go. But when the “Prize” is to ensure Celtic win the league with four games to spare instead of five, then that’s when the real pride comes in. That’s when another of those over-used but no-less appropriate words comes into play - CHARACTER!

At 1-0 down it would have been so easy just to say “fuck it - it’s over anyway - and we’ll secure second place without even trying - let’s just pack up and go home”. But The Gers kept fighting on, they pressed and pressed and despite going in 0-1 at the interval, and everyone hissing at Gavin Rae for not being Lionel Messi despite having played somethng like two games in a decade, fought back to win a game that let Celtic do their own dirty work and allowed Walter Smith to continue the momentum of his arrival into the post-split period. We’re one game away from securing the second Champions League spot and we’re four games away from remaining unbeaten in the SPL under Waldo’s Second Coming. When HIbs or Dunfermline beat Celtci in the Scottish Cup Final and, hopefully, we give them a going over in a couple of week’s time, all this kinda stuff will add to the ludicrous pressure being put on Gordon Strachan by Celtic’s equally myopic fans (I thought we didn’t want to be like them??!!). That’ll take our main domestic challenger out the game by December and next season, yeah, we’ll probably win the treble.

But so fucking what?!

When it seemed as if Rangers were gonnae actually switch off the life support, yesterday - when we were trailing to Hearts - I realised I’ll never shake off the Rangers drug. No matter how bad they become, no matter how backward or introverted our “ambitions”, as decreed by The Rangers support and those who try to feed them, I know I’ll never be able to walk away. I’ve had seasons before where I didn’t renew the season ticket but I just ended up spending most of my week ensuring I got a ticket for the Saturday - or, on the Saturday, I’d be running around trying to find a radio or see ceefax to get the latest score. That was during some good times - when I knew Rangers didn’t need me. I think you realise in the BAD times just how strongly you feel about your club and when I thought we were gonnae trudge off that pitch having ignominiously handed the title to Strachan, instead of making the sweaty wee bastard go through the mill at least once more, I knew that it wasn’t actually Celtic or Strachan who were annoying me but, as always, my own team - the team I need so much. I wanted us to show more pride, I wanted us to FUCKING WIN. And I always will.

But its wrong to exploit that base need. It’s wrong to stick only to arenas of warfare in which you know you’ll probably win. That makes the victories, no matter how frequent, totally hollow. Right now, Rangers do not look like doing anything I haven’t seen them doing before. Right now, Rangers are making absolutely no effort, on or off the field, to be anything other than champions of Scotland. I enjoy being champions of Scotland - it’s the minimum requirement from Rangers - but I’m disgusted that the passing, petty myopia I just demonstrated with my references to Strachan and Celtic has actually become the basis for Rangers’ wider strategy. JUST BEAT CELTIC AND WIN THE LEAGUE is what they should have above the Murray Park gates now. When it’s something we’ve been able to do so often, so easily, and will inevitably do again, what the fuck is the point of making that the limit of our ambitions??!! We need to be trying to find someway to make Rangers the Champions of bloody Europe. I’m sorry but that’s what we have to be aiming for and anyone who says we shouldn’t be thinking so ambiyiously is SURENDERING to a life of wallowing about in our Old Firm shite. As Dear Old Oscar said, “we’re all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”. Right now we’re looking at the five stars on our crest and thinking “ach - that’ll do” when we should be looking at the five stars on the LIVERPOOL crest and thinking “We won’t stop til we’ve got them too!” Jeeze! - if yer winning European cups then ye HAVE to be winning yer own league as well, almost as an afterthought. And if you don’t even TRY to win European Cups you’ll never get past the preliminary rounds.

The unforgiving small-mindedness of Scottish life suits football oh so well - but only up to a point of giving Rangers (and others) a MASSIVE support from such a tiny population. We need to at least back Chairmen and board members who have a world vision, if we the fans can’t be trusted to maintain one ourselves.

Gavin Rae equalised yesterday after a fine run and cross by Allan Hutton. Fantastic stuff but Hutton was DESPISED by so many Rangers fans for so long and the bloke behind me turned to his mate yesterday and said “Is that Rae’s first goal for Rangers? Well, I hope it’s his fucking last!”.

Nice.

So, if Gavin Rae’d gone on to score a hat-trick, the guy behind me - the “Rangers supporter” behind me - would have been enraged??! This is what our club is up against: An avowed lack of ambition wrapped up in a contempt for anyone who isn’t the best player on the planet. No fucking wonder Dado Prso wants to leave. A guy whose knees have given way was the best player on an SPL pitch yesterday and we all wonder why he can’t stay on for another seasn at least: Well, Dado knows what happens to players who hang around Ibrox too long - they eventually become hated by their own - tehy eventually have fans who hate them for scoring goals for their team!

And those who are hated, as Barry Ferguson was by so many before Christmas, can only become loved by behaving as narrow-mindedly and perversely as the supporters who refused for so long to acknowledge their talents and their love of the club. Bazza’s love of the club was demsontrated by the delight he took in scoring a sensational winner yesterday but he’s just a stupid boay in the heid and he was allowed to mastermind an overthrow of the Rangers manager in January - that’s no way to run a club which wants to be “simply the best”.

Ferguson’s sensational winner meant we didn’t committ suicide yesterday but I can’t say we arent slowly killing ourselves as an entity beyond the tiny insignificant world of Scottish Football.

PSG…4 Nantes… 0 PLG has them three places off the relegation zone now.