No BIG result tonight, thanks!

Well, not unless it’s at Dens Park ….

Okay. Seeing as how this is gonnae be brief in length, I’ll try to make it cavernous in depth.

Of course, I can’t do that off my own bat. My brain’s as small as the very thing you assumed I was referring to when ye read the start of that big sentence in the previous paragraph. So I’ll leave the input of depth to a couple of folk with absolute whoppers … of brains:

Wittgenstein - yes, I’m quoting WITTGENSTEIN - he was in my house for a cuppa tea and a Wagon Wheel yesterday and he said that “understanding suffers bruises from bumping its head against the limits of language”.

(I said “aye but ah’ll be bumping your HEID against the limits of THAT EMULSIONED CONCRETE WA’ BEHIND YE if ye keep getting crumbs on my carpet, Wiggi boay!”)

Wur auld friend Freddy Nietzsche said, through the voice of his Emu-esque glove puppet, Zarathustra, “The champion of knowledge must not only love his enemies, he must also be able to hate his friends”.

(And then he would make Zarathustra flick my tie, pull my papers out my hand and ruffle my hair - “ooooh, he iz zooo naughty!! Ztop it zis inztant, Zarathustra - Gott in Himmel! Leave Eck alone, you bad Zarathustra - you untermensch!!”)

Aye. So there ye have it. Real deep stuff. It’s intended to add the impression of more weight to what really is a tiddler of a match preview: And it’s intended to fend off the very reaction that such apparent lack of consideration of this evening’s CIS Cup match would elicit from the many fans of this evening’s opponents.

I know there are at least ten and a half thousand East Fife fans who read this blog on a daily basis. And if I say to them “I really like your club and am dead excited about the prospect of seeing them on the same pitch as The Teds” they might be inclined to feel I was being a tad patronising. I’m NOT meaning it that way. Honest.

But if THEY said “The Old Firm are ruining Scottish Football - fuck off to England”. I would see that as a bit insulting. Only in its phrasing, however - not in its central message. Coz I agree with the central message:

Rangers ARE too big for Scottish Football and we should start working our way up through the English pyramid system - using our size and money to get us a lift up only as far as the Blue Square Premiership rung. Where yer East Fife fans would say “Aye - we’ll see how ye like it when ye cannae get oot the Champinship, never mind win the Premiership”, I’d say it would indeed be a struggle but that’s the very reason I’d so enjoy it.

I want to see myself and my fellow Bluenoses suffer as East Fife fans have suffered. I wnat us to be about the quantity of quality football rather than the quantity of trophies we can syphon off clubs far too small to ever offer us testing and bettering competition for more than six Famous Five-, Terrible Trio- or Alex Ferguson-inspired years.

So many Bears just want “A” piece of silverware guaranteed with their season ticket. I’d rather a proper challenge on all fronts was guaranteed. As its stands, in Scotland we are so much bigger than everyone else that losing any domestic match to anyone but the sans-biscuit tin hoopies is a fekin DISGRACE. Thats’ not much fun. Yer either gonnae win as expected or lose and be a laughing stock.

I’d rather have one day at the top of La Liga, Serie A or the Premiership than one SPL title. Maybe then we could experience the PURE joy which a distant and dwindling generation of Fifers once knew.

(Hope yer getting the connection with the dead-deep-and-intellectual quotes here, by the way)

Look at St Johnstone last season. No - I mean it - LOOK AT THEM! Ye have to force yerself now, don’t ye! The memory of their League Cup win at Ibrox means we now can’t stand the name St Johnstone - once a byword for polite indifference in the eyes and ears of all Bluenoses.

And, while we’re getting all the senses inolved, how do you think St Johnstone fans now FEEL about Rangers??!! Okay, yeah, there’s the undeniable, ever-lasting basic contempt they feel for us and our green-and-white hooped friends simply because we steal all the best players and the best part of their support etc etc, blah, blah. But, ever since that quarter-final victory at The Brox last season, offically the worst defeat of our history, Saintees will feel a little tingle of warmth and joy at the mention of “Ibrox”. For ye can only enjoy a win like that, the way the Barbour-jacketed Perth people did that awful night, when yer overcoming a foe so long unvanquished by the men you follow.

The waiting made it all the sweeter, is what I’m trying to say. For us, the fact of never having to wait makes so many of our victories so disposable.

And so, tonight, I hope to hell I ain’t driving away from East End Park or a League Cup match for the second season in a row feeling as if my insides have been mistaken for a punch bag by Ricky Hatton. I want East Fife fans to have NO warm memories of Rangers to dilute their sense of injustice at following a club so permanently rooted to the bottom two divsions of the Scottish game. I watched the worst Rangers result of all time in last season’s final League Cup match featuring Rangers and I watched the worst Rangers defensive performance of all time in last season’s final Scottish Cup match featuring Rangers - also at East End Park.

This is our third successive cup game at EEP in just over a year, under our third different manager.

I’m gutted East Fife moved it to Dunfermline. I’ve been to their new one-stand Bayview for a derby v Cowdenbeath. I went just to say I’d been - just to get it off the list of every league ground in Scotland. But I also went to pay my respects to a PROPER club.

I never made the old, original Bayview - that seriously bugs me because, from there, one of the most amazing success stories in Scottish football evolved. It’s a tale which proved there IS romance in the Caledonian Cups: Scot Symon - soon to be a legendary Ragers manager, cut his coaching teeth with the East Fife team of the forties and fifties which won THREE League Cups before anyone else managed it.

In 1953, Rangers had won the League Cup twice, Celtic hadn’t won it at all, Dundee had won it twice - and East Fife had won the thing THREE TIMES IN SEVEN BLOODY YEARS!

This was also the club who, of course, had won the Scottish Cup in 1938 as a second division team.

Over the last few years, as I’ve ticked grounds off my anorak list, I’ve watched East Fife at Brechin, Cliftonhill and Firs Park in the East of Stirlingshire. For a lower league side they have one of the larger supports. A proud history brings its own pain if the glory days aren’t repeated. All in all, East Fife had sixteen brilliant years spread over the not-so-brilliant Second World War.

I don’t want them reigniting their Cup glories this evening. I want them to keep loathing Rangers in the rawest of fashions. After the Scotland win over France and The Gers’ brilliant opener in the Champions League Group stages, I don’t want a third successive Wednesday night of being sucked into a massive vortex of a result. I want business as usual this particular mid-week. But I want the mean and fans from Methill to know that it’s nothing personal - it is indeed just business

Yeah - fuck it - I’ll end with a Vito Corleone quote.

But I can’t. Because if we beat East Fife tonight it IS just business - business as usual etc. It’s all BUSINESS. The Methil men are cashing in from a bumper “home” crowd - the on-field performance is a bonus. The viability of Rangers to potential buyers will be mainatined but not enhanced by an away win. This all seems very cold and unromantic. It’s that rich-and-poor divide which I thought was bringing Rangers down at the beginning of this short rant. Yet, if the last two Wednesdays have been so mesmerically exciting, was it not chiefly because of the quality of the opposition which was overcome? Have I not, this month of Wednesdays, just had two nights equal to or better than topping any of the big three leagues in Europe for a day??!! I think I have.

So, maybe the Scottish system is PERFECT for Rangers - and for the national team. Maybe ye can stick yer Blue Square Premiership right up yer GM Vauxhall Conference as I rediscover the fact that The Scottish way is a good enough way if we just believe in it. If East Fife can defeat the team which defeated the champions of Germany then this country’s domestic set-up is one of the best on the planet.

Time to hate my friends - time to DESTROY EAST FIFE!!