THE CHILLY-OUT LOUNGE (East Fife … 0 GERS … 4)

What was that traffic like in Glasgow City centre at 6 o’colock tonight??!! And why the HELL didn’t I put petrol in the car BEFORE I drove into work this morning? And why did I have to get picked for a later finish on a WEDNESDAY … when I had a game to get to in bloody FIFE???!!!???

Stuck on Satan’s own junction, on that shelf of road perched above the M8 at Anderston, just down from the Abbey building. A set of traffic lights which go green for about as long as a Texas petrol head. A Royal Mail TRUCK righgt up my arse, a shit-scared electrican’s van in front of me - windows tinted so I cannae see beyond him: If I move one inch forward I’ll get my bonnet taken off by the stampeding automobile wildebeasts on their way INTO town. If I slip back by a millimentre the Roal Mail will deliver me to my maker.

And all the time the clock is ticking. And my temperature is rising. And Radio 4 is bleating. And Rock Radio - usually cheerfully cheesey at home time - is now just a pile of old soft-rock, pish-jock shite coz I’m not ganin’ hame - I’m ganin’ tae tha match, like, man. The petrol light is on and my brain can say only two things: “Where the FUCK is the nearest petrol station along the M8 eastbound???!!” and “I can’t believe I’m this worked up about a League Cup game against a Third Division side”.

Exactly TWO HOURS later I park my arse on the first available red bucket seat in the Norrie McCathie stand - and there’s QUITE A FEW available, believe me! - just as Nacho Novo runs onto the ball at the edge of the East Fife box. I know he’s gonnae shoot and, as soon as he does, sat where I am - with the ball heading down my throat - I know its going into the net. I’m back out that seat I just sat in, hands in the air, feeling the sheer, undiluted joy of seeing a Rangers goal scored right in front of you, so close ye can almost reach out and give Nacho a pat on the heid as it goes in.

THAT’s why I was so worked up about getting there on time. Top of the Clydsdale SPL against Top of the Irn Bru Third Division may not be an even match-up - but it’s a match. And it’s a match involving Rangers. And wherever Rangers go I want to be there. Whenever we play I want to see it in the flesh. I might not have the dough to go to every away game in Scotland or the Champions League - but when they send me a 16 quid ticket for the League Cup third round I fucking LAP IT UP!

It’s the bread-and-butter games which allow ye to enjoy the wine and caviar moments more fully.

The temperatures I’d experienced in downtown Glesgie plummeted into the scrotum-shrinkingly “nippy” Fife evening. Even the extra beads of perspiration inflicted on me by taking the wrong turn-off for the petrol Station at “The Fort” shopping centre, by a 40mph zone near Harthill and by a 30mph journey along the new Forth Road Bridge approaches, soon solidified into little scabs of ice when I hit Dun-ferm-e-line. On departing the motor there was a sudden and definite cooling down in my head - and all my other extremities (a nearly half-empty stadium, my stand is the emptiest - yet there’s still a MASSIVE queue for the life-saving human anti-freeze we call Bovril … and the internal radiator we call a Steak Bridie … and the sure sign of a fat gluttonous bastard we call a doughnut …) buy my cardio cockles were very warm indeed.

There is the old impetus, among traditional-type fans - ie old moaney buggers like myself - to feel that you only truly support a team if you take the crunchie with the smooth. You earn yer stripes when times are hard. Anyone can be a fan of a team picking up endless trophies and going on long uneaten runs. It’s sticking by them during the dry spells which disqualifies ye from yer Glory Hunter license - and the REAL dry spells, the truly bad times are the times when no-one even bothers getting angry or go “protesting” to the chairman. The truly bad times are when the crowds just dwindle and the passion starts to evaporate.

It’s not your fault if yer only in yer twenties and couldn’t follow Rangers in real bad days. Tonight’s match would, however, give ye a mock-up of those times. It would also remind old codgers like me of what we’re really NOT missing on the field but what we sometimes miss off it: When there’s no glory or glamour on offer - only the threat of humiliation provides any potential fervour - you’re left with no distractions to the key buzz of fandom: You just love watching your club play. You just like being with them.

I earned my stripes in the first half of the 1980s. Rangers haven’t endured times like those since. I hope we never do again. The last twenty years have been one long hand-job in a Swedish massage parlour by comparison. But tonight offered a plastic version of the ordinary life Rangers once endured. With Setanta, STV and the tabs all over us for any League game nowadays, Sky and the BBC over-selling the latter stages of the domestic Cups and The Champions League or UEFA Cup involvement always encouraging stratospheric, cosmic, intergalactic levels of media interest, you never really feel like you and Rangers get any time alone anymore.

Know what I mean?

As Sinead O’Connor hints at so heart-wrenchingly beautifully in her achingly fantastic and mesmeric rendition of Success Has Made A Failure Of Our Home, scaling the very heights you always wanted for your club can sometimes remove that little bit of cosiness in your relationship with each other. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=zVh81jnYpRE Going to fancy parties in your ball gown after a night at the opera is all very well and good - it’s the apex of your dreams for each other - but there’s so much fuss, so much self-consciousness, so much need for fitting in with the exalted company you now keep that you often yearn for the nights when yese were both skint, when you’d buy a Walkers Crisps variety pack and a bottle of Lambrusco and sit on the couch slagging whatever pish was on the telly. It was just the two of you - unsuccessful, broke but absolutely dedicated to and involved with each other.

On nights like tonight, you can pick a seat in the very front row of a mostly-empty stand so that when Kris Boyd pokes home his 50th Rangers goal, whilr wearing thr captain’s armband, you can hear the swipe of his boot as he does it and the delighted yelp of Big Kirk Broadfoot - proud to be involved in the build-up. As the ball sinks into the netting, Boydy probably sees you jumping up out yer seat - thus YOU are the confirmation, the witness to his wee moment of triumph. He gives you a wave - you raise yer arms and give him a clap of appreciation and respect. THIS, ladies and gents, is Rangers. This little diorama is every bit as valid to what our club is about as Charlie Adam and Alan Hutton combining for the goal of the season against the Chamions of Germany in the world’s most important club competition, with 50,000 in the stands and millions watching on telly.

The papers won’t make much of Boyd’s first goal tonight, the TV will show but the merest highlights and no-one else on the planet will be in any way bothered about how many Rangers put past East Fife … except a few hundred thousand Gers fans .. and of the Rangers Diaspora, only 5,000 saw this goal live … and you were one of them … and of them you were one of the dozen or so who were close enough to know it was a goal before even the East Fife goalie.

Kris Boyd completed his first Gers half-century tonight and, although I was only slightly closer physically to the execution of that moment than I was to his heart-breaking miss against Villarreal in Spain, tonight’s event was infintely more private.

I, of course, have reservations about The Rangers Trust because they’re trying to infiltrate Rangers rather than just relate. It’s an ego trip by some of these people, a formalising of expressions of bitterness but, perhaps the Rangers Trust exercise is just a twisted, misguided form of trying to bring the club and fans closer in a way which - frankly - watching them in shit, meaningless games in half-empty stadia used to.

We don’t want Rangers to be crap. So, when you’re top of the Scottish Premier League and off to a flyer in the Champions League, these kinda games are actually the rarity - the real gold dust. We’re a good team right now - so we need to play teams way below us in the gobal pecking order if we want even an impression of what it’s like to be back in the bad old days. And YOU NEED REMINDING FOR JUST LONG ENOUGH TO HELP YOU APPRECIATE WHERE YOU ARE NOW - so you can stop, take stock, and MOVE ONWARDS AND UPWARDS. I want the excitement achieved while beating Stuttgart last week to be regarded as “the bad old days” by the next generation of Bluenoses … but I want them to know what it’s like to feel as close to your team as we all did last Wednesday too.

East Fife may wear a Penarol strip but there the comparisons with Rangers end - and there their ambitions of beating us end. We have a great first team right now so the only way to make it seem like the Craig Paterson - Dave McKinnon - Gregor Stevens days is if we deliberately leave out some first-teamers and get the fringe players in. Roy Carroll was absoltely untested in goal. Big Ugo got a run out of cold storage. Amdy Faye had yet another warm-up - but this time not while we were being pumped by an SPL side. Nacho and Boydy started the game and finished the contest before half time. Thomas Buffel started his bid to prove he’s a new player by coming off the bench to win us a penalty - Boydy made it 51 Gers goals from the spot. And between times, Big Carlos Cuellar - who I would have thought was due a rest - popped up for his secnd Rangers goal: Ajax and East Fife.

The East Fife fans filled the Main Stand. Appropriae that they were allocated the oldest part of the ground. Their scarves are wonderful - the old-fashioned, honest bumble-bee bar scarves; they look like a club straight from the 1950s, which is when they were last THE big Fife team. Dunfermline have two Scottish Cups and a few runners-up domestic finals to their name. But East Fife have one Scottish Cup, three League cups and a few more losing Scottish Cup finals to their name. Raith Rovers have one League Cup in their history books but the Methil club must feel aggrieved that Dunfermline are seen by the youth of today as the only really worthwhile Fife club. They gave it big licks tonight.

But, for them and their very gruff female stadium announcer, this was an event the like of which we will experience against Barcelona in a few weeks. No-one expected them to win and they just wanted to enjoy the big stage. For Rangers - so uncaring that we even wore WHITE SOCKS - this was a night to let punters like me wander from the front rows of the Norrie McCathie stand in the first half to the back rows offering a better view of the far away goal in the second half … and, later, as the freezng Fife weather really kicked in and I began to understand the allure of thermals, to stand and watch the game amidst the alien corn of empty red plastic bucket seats.

I’ve never been in that part of East End Park before and I haven’t paced about in a big space, while watching Rangers in the flesh, for some considerable YEARS.

Ironic that Kris Boyd is the new face of the Big Plus campaign for improving numeracy among Scotland’s adults. Coz he was certainly making us all do a bit of maths in our heids tonight. His 51 goals have come in very few games - especially if ye condense all his actual playing time into blocks of ninety minutes. Ally McCoist was just starting his phenomenal tally when I last watched a Rangers team truly struggle in the Scottish game. Now that we’re back to our superior best it’s nice to get a reminder this evening - as manufactured as it might have been - of what we’ve come from together, Ally and the fans. The old steps of Dens, Tannadice, Easter Road and Tynecastle - so open, so empty sometimes. Cold, wet and often depressing. But me and Rangers got tight back then. We still are - the celebrations and emotions enjoyed in our great nights in Europe now, on our final day league title wins, are so much deeper because they’re underpinned by what we forged together in those listless early eighties. It’s just that we don’t have time to chat much anymore.

But tonight we chatted - we chewed the cud - we chilled. And we won easy.

Rsustle around in the glove compartment for an appropriate CD - glide over the Forth Road Bridge listening to Motorcycle Emptiness.