Returning to the scene of the slime

At Pittodrie we have the classic example of the kind of environment where REAL DAMAGE is done without ever neatly falling into any of the labels which tabloid-wary executors wish to apply.

As I usually say at the beginning of a five-day alcohol, cocaine, prostitute and kebab binge - I’ve just got time for a quick one, troops. (Everything on, please. … what the… ? No, not you, doll - I was talking to the donner man there - it’s everything OFF in your case. And could I have a mars bar with that. What the ..? Naw, not you, mate - I was talking to my lady friend there …).

It’s been a busy few weeks since the season started and we all deserve to sit back from the world of Teddy Beardom and draw breath. Ye never get away from The Gers - even if ye wanted to ye couldn’t - but sometimes ye have to lay off the Gers Forums, pound a bit more gently on the keyboards and change the topic of conversation. Even if just to allow ye to get yerself revived and fully alive for such things as, oh - I dunno - how about A RAZOR’S EDGE-BALANCED CHAMPIONS LEAGUE QUALIFYER, THIRD ROUND, SECOND LEG, IN BEL-FEKIN-GRAAAAADE, SERBEEYAAA???!!!!!!

Ahhhh. Yes. No more illin for a few days - just chillin. Time to rest on the pleasantly jaggy laurels of a very positive start to our season. Time to use International week to give ourselves a wee sesh on the cyber bevvy, down on internet beach, snorting World Wide Web designer drugs and maybe even collapsing into the arms of a Broadband babe (Okay, I know, I know - I’m just being silly now - I mean, whoever heard of people using the internet for sexual gratification??!! Sheesh! As IF! As if anyone could design a PC which takes money off you and shows pictures of naked women! Maybe in, like, a THOUSAND years time! That’ll be the day!!!) Time to Reeeeelaaaaaxxxxx.

Really looking forward to seeing South Africa on international duty. But Scotland have only gone and arranged to play them at Shittodire, haven’t they??!! So I’m having to work me danglies off to get away from me Glesgie desk at Lunchtime on Wednesday and then it’ll be sunrise by the time I get to my kip before work on Thursday. My time, as they say at the clinic, is at a perineum.

Okay, I have absolutely no problem with the SFA taking these friendlies on the road - it’s the right thing to do both morally and financially. Spread the gospel, keep the costs down, etc. The only problem is, well, I have a MASSIVE PROBLEM with the SFA taking these friendlies on the road.

As ye know, I’m a fully-paid up memeber of the anti-Tartan Army squad. I pay my Scotland Supporters Club membership and I go to all the Hampden internationals. I love the Scotland Football team and I want to retain a part of following our country’s XI for the fans who DON’T think that not stabbing rival fans is something to be proud of rather than just a GIVEN. I want to see Scotland play … I just want to SEE us play, and not have my sightlines obstructed by pished-up estate agents fae Helensburgh who would rather stagger onto their Timberland Booted feet on top of their seat and twirl their English-invented kilt and tilt their demeaning See-Me-Timmy hat and wig combo to their mates up the back of the BT stand in an effort to achieve their primary aim of the day - ie, to be considerd (a) a “lad” or (b) a “Right character”. I personally consider them all total (Cs), more interested in being what the English want them to be than actually giving two flying Sporrans about the team they pretend to “support”. Scotland games for too long have been an exercise in middle-class tourism - patronising shite the lot of it.

Okay.

Calm.

Standard Pro-Scotland, Anti-Tartan Army rant over.

Two paracetamol, a slug of Smirnoff and a quick line of charlie off this lady’s finely-bronzed buttock aaaaaaand … I’m calm again. Quick mouthful of donner meat and chilli sauce, and I’m back on a calmer topic:

See, thing is, I’m also a total fekin anorak. I like to spot, photograph and note-down as many footballing trains and busses as possible. For example, Elgin City’s Borough Briggs stadium is the only league venue in Scotland I haven’t attended. Northern Ireland are the only one of the four UK nations I haven’t seen playing at home (and getting a ticket for Windsor Park has been fucking IMPOSSIBLE since the Lawrie Sanchez reign). Barcelona, Benfica and SV Hamburg are the only winners of the European Cup I haven’t seen in the flesh. Man City and Ipswich are the only British clubs to have played in a European final who Fat Eck hasn’t witnessed on a pitch, right in front of him, playing in the same air I’m breathing. (well, there’s also the London XI Select which played in the 1958 Fairs Cup final but they aren’t a “club” as such. Anyone hears of a London Select playing in some kinda charity game or something, though, gonnae let me know!).

So, point is, I LOVE to see them foreign nations in the flesh too.

Basically I’ve seen 36 of the current 53 UEFA-affiliated international teams/associations. I’ve also seen the USA and Australia - but, and here’s the rub, I haven’t seen CANADA because we played them at Easter bloody Road and I was, as always, so bloody skint that the train fare took it just out my reach. I haven’t seen NEW ZEALAND because we played them at soon-to-be-flats Tynecastle - again, I just couldn’t find the time or extra dough to get through tae Auld Reekie for a midweeker. So my train-spotting attack on the CONCACAF and Oceania international confederations has been severely hampered by this “taking it to the regions” policy. The fact Australia have just jumped into the Asian qualifiers means I now haven’t seen ANY team from the Oceania confederation - THANKS A LOT, SFA!!!

It maybe wouldn’t be so bad if Gordon Smith’s employees could at least back up their decision to give Hampden the odd night off. I phones up the SFA’s dedicated “South Africa tickets”phone line (08700 13 14 15) on Monday to see if I could pre-book my ticket for Wednesday’s visit of Bafana-Bafana. I’m too late to have it posted out to me - that’s okay. But I’m also too late to pre-book and pay by credit card over the phone. You can’t just collect your ticket on the night - you have to pay for it on the night too. Okay - bit inconvenient but that’s my fault for leaving it so late - so I double-check where the ticket office will be. Ye know, in case the traffic’s bad and I get there a bit too close to kick-off time. IS it in the front of the old Main Stand at Pittodrie I ask. “Oh - we don’t know that here. We’re in Glasgow, you see. And the game’s in Aberdeen”

WHAT THE FUUUUUUU….??!!

The lassie on the phone, and no-one in her office she consulted with when I started laughing at her, could tell me whereabouts in Aberdeen their on-the-night ticket sales would take place. Okay, it’ll be easy enough to find out - Coz I KNOW WHERE PITTODRIE IS and I know how football matches like this work - but when the PEOPLE WHO’RE ORGANISING THE GAME don’t know where they’re selling their tickets from, you HAVE TO SERIOUSLY WONDER about how we’re ever gonnae be anything other than a third-rate nation on the international stage. Can you imagine phoning the DFB headquarters in Frankfurt and they can’t tell you where you pick up yer tickets for that night’s international game at Berlin??!! In fact, can you imagine phoning Halfords head office and them not being able to tell you where their Birmingham branch is located??!! Okay we have more problems in Scottish Football development than the SFA’s ticket office but, fuck me, if this is how they get the money in, what chance improving our quality of player for the future??!!

And, as for Africa, my notepad ambitions have been DECIMATED by our governing body’s policy on venues against nations of that particularly rich footballing continent: Nigeria and Egypt - both MASSIVE in the African Cup of Nations - both played in Scotland during my adult years - both mid-week at PITTIFULTODRIE!! AGGGGGHH!!!

So, anyhoo, it’s off to Pittodrie I go, even sooner than the 22nd December Gers fixture for which I’ve been allocated a ticket. It’s a place with few pleasant off-field memories for me - and a LOT of seriously unpleasant on-field recollections too. I was attending every Gers away game during the early eighties to the early nineties: So I saw us go TWELVE YEARS with only one win at that Grampian Graveyard and I also sat under a hail of South Stand coins as Ian Durrant had his leg brken by Neil Simpson and Charlie fucking Nicholas scored the winner. Dont get me wrong, we’ve committed our fare share of GBH in the Granite Grubber over the years but stuff like that puts ye off a place - even if it is one of the most atmospheric stadia in the country.

THEN, on Sunday last, even Wee Gordon Strachan - legend of the 1983 Cup-Winners’ Cup team - found himself on the wrong end of that post-Sir-Alex desperation to get themselves hated which fixates all Pittodrie regulars. Looks as if the wee ginger gaffer and his assistant were, at worst, just returning some of the venal abuse they’d received from the very intimate North Stand - and they were returning it in something far less than kind. And I have to agree with Tommy Burns’s take on the situation as a whole. If football fans aren’t gonnae take themselves seriously enough to watch their mouth in public then they shouldn’t be getting all uppitty and faux-offended when they get some back from the targets of their abuse.

I mean, if my door bell rang this evening and I answered it to find Pope Benedict the 16th standing on my front step with one upturned finger in my face, screaming “FUCK YOU TOO, YOU HEATHEN CU*T!!”, I’d just have to take it and say fair dues, you’ve risked a lot more than me by sinking to my level.

If ye dish it out - ye must take it. Or else we’re all gonnae end up analysing the songs of rival supporters just so we can grass them up and make ourselves look even more pathetic than folk thought we did when singing “fuck the pope” in the first place.

Strachan is an eejit in his dealings with the press but in this case seemed like he had a point - and then some. It draws attention to the fact that there is a fucking PANOPLY of ways in which one can behave “unpleasantly” or “anti-socially” or whatever the hell terminology the SFA wants to use to punish what is now a bona fide minority of Rangers fans for singing sectarian add-ons.

Did the Celtic fans sing something about Masons at the same game? So what??!! Masonry, like Catholicism, like supporting Rangers, like being a fat bastard like me who ate almost all the pies - is a CHOICE. If you start being offended by people’s dislike of a choice you’ve made then there’s no hope for you on this planet as I’ve understood it.

Anyway, if we’re offended by a group of fans merely enquiring “who is the mason in the black” then surely we’re the ones agreeing that it’s insulting to be called a mason? This means we, as Rangers fans, think the Masonic Lodge is laughable and to be a member of such is automatically worthy of insult. The song wasn’t “FUCK the Mason in the black”, was it? And if Charlie Richmond IS a Mason - we’ll never know because it’s a secret - then the answer to the song was quite simple and uncontroversial. If it comes down to a fight between the Masons and the Catholics, mind, my money’s on the boys in P2.

Fucking the Pope, like, for example, showering insults on Jews or Protestantas or Seiks or Muslims is ninety-nine-times-out-of-a-hunner a purely offensive act. DISAGREEING with someone’s religion or lifestyle is NOT an insult - it’s the way you do it which can be deemed offensive. Some people are born into a religon and, while they may not believe in it, they take any insult of that religion as an insult to the members of their family who DO believe in it. Let me just also say this applies to anyone who insults Rangers - it insuts a lot of my friends and family - so we can ALL play the over-emotive “family” card if we wish to. But if you make your protest or objection intelligently and articulately and objectively and without preaching violence then you may go in peace - it’s your right.

Disagreement can take the form of naked abuse but it never achieves anything other than polarising society further.
Being born black or Chinese or Pakistani is the kind of thing no-one has a choice in or should ever have to worry about and is therefore as worthy of insult as being born white, middle-class or rich. But the subjugation of so many people for their very birth means that insults cast at people because of their race is truly offensive. For me, if ye stay off that kind of stuff you shouldn’t be getting prosecuted - but ye SHOULD be ready to take the full brunt of any retaliation. Coz you thoroughly deseve it.

At Pittodrie we have the classic example of the kind of environment where REAL DAMAGE is done without ever neatly falling into any of the labels which tabloid-wary executors wish to apply. The Pope is inulted in Inverness by a couple of hundred drunks - the Masonic lodge is, well, MENTIONED, by a couple more hundred unfortunates in Abeerdeen. But a legendary player is personally abused by the fans whose best years were so largely attributable to his skills and, when his colleauge tries to turn it into football banter, albeit misguidedly, it’s suddenly a public order issue??!! Now THAT’s what I find REALLY OFFENSIVE.

Take some fucking PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY. And get me a good seat among the South Africa fans for Wednesday night while yer at it

Hang on - there’s a huge Ice cream van just pulled up outside my hoose and someone’s swishing down my front path …

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Published:
08.21.07 / 5pm
Category:
News