DIRTY ORANGE BAS*ARDS!!

I don’t want to see any more orange strips. Not after Tuesday. No mum - ye cannae make me. Oh man! It was one of the best nights of my life and The Teddy Bears were REGAL, PHENOMENAL, CORUSCATINGLY EFFECTIVE AND DEVESTATINGLY RESOLUTE but there’s still no escaping one small unpleasant fact: I was pyoor KEICHING MYSELF for 92 minutes!!

“LIONEL” Messi?? Hoh! - my fekin PANTS were MESSI!!

Kakking my tent-sized skants. Combine that with the pee-pee widdling of myself when Cousin Danny and Brother Barry had wur two near-misses in the last quarter hour, AND the three cubic litres of perspiration which pished off my lardy-arsed physique from leaping to my feet and bouncey-bouncying and extreme arm-waving and hard-slappin hand-clappin every time we got as much as half a sing-song going in the stands (THE GERS WRE GETTING EVERY OUNCE OF ENCOURAGEMENT I COULD GIVE THEM FOR THIS ONE! I WANTED TO WALK OUT THIS ONE GUILT-FREE AT LEAST!) and Barca’s all-orange strip reminds me of one of the most nervous, and smelly, experiences of my puff.

Wouldnae have wanted it any other way. That liquid lamenting’s a price ye gladly pay. Feeling the jitters in extremis TELLS ye it’s a great occassion - and I would do it all again right now. But - MAN! - I was twitchy! We all were

So I’m a bit worried this Sunday’s game could effect a kinda Pavlovian reaction amongst the Bears: Okay, Dundee United go with black shorts rather than the entirely self-coloured kit the Catalans were sporting on Tuesday. Also the Tannadice terrors prefer a shade they like to call “Tangerine” (My arse! BIGOTS!!) rather than the daeglo outspan/carrot clobber which whizzed all round The Palace pitch with “Ronaldinho”, “Messi”, “Henry” etc wrote in gold on the backs. But it’s still too bloody close for comfort. Dundee United on the same pitch as The Gers: That bell’s ringing, this dog is salavating.

The Teds could be winning 3-0 after ten minutes on Tayside but we’ll all be sat bolt upright on our sofas in front of Setanta or with our knees tight under our chins in they stupit wee doll’s house seats in the auld Tannadice Main Stand with our nerves going through the shredder: Instead of the bouncey, we’ll be doing “the shakey” - and then “the flakey” as our conditional reflex to the sight of another orange-shirted opponent prevents us realisng we’re coasting to an away win: There’ll be no boasting, taunting or “this is so fucking easy”. Oh no. What we went through on Tuesday doesnae just dissapear from yer system in the space of five days: I don’t care how many we score on Sunday, from The Bears it’ll be more panic-stricken screams of “CLEAR IT!!”, “GET IT TAE FUCK, CHARLIE!”. “COME BACK, NACHO - COME BAAAAACKKK WEE MAN!!” and “WHIT YAE DAYIN, BARRY??!! - FOR FUCKSSAKE DON’T TRY TAE “PLAY FITBAW” - THAT’LL JUST MAKE THEM ANGRY - BOOT IT INTAE THE STAND, MAN!!!”

Oh, ya beauty. Oh, for fuck’s sake. LOL! Laugh out effing loud! Oh man - sorry, troops - but I’m killing maself laughing here just thinking back to what we went through; the SHEER FUCKING TERROR!! :-) It was fucking hilarious on Tuesday at times. Well, it is NOW, now that we can look back on it with the golden point in the bag and Ronaldinho’s free kicks are now back, being taken on the east coast of the Iberian Peninsula rather than on the Ibrox pitch (he could still probably bend one in fae there though!). Overhwelming relief soon turns to tears and then into manic laughter. Oh dearie me - Tuesday was funny. I’m just thinking about myself and some of the punters around me - all up on our feet ROARIUNG approval for a shy which we’d just won three yards fae our own by-line; Going ballistic with joy when we got out our own half, or sinking into a black pit of evil depression and gloom whenever we punted the baw up the park and, of course, it landed STRAIGHT BACK AT THE FEET OF A FUCKING BARCELONA PLAYER. Oh man - fucking hilarious. When I think about aw the heids in the four stands just sinking and everyone drawing in their breath again and digging the belief out of their guts to roar encouragement for facing another onslaught. Poor bastards - we went through HELL, ah tell ye! HELL!! And then heaven.

I’m thinking of all the things I called that pair wee Austrian ref. Not because of the poor decisions he made - we got the benefit of just as many of his dodgy doings as we suffered by. No, it was when the board came up saying 2 minutes injury time - which was a major fucking result in itself, by the way! - and I just started instantly calling him every name under the sun. I mean INSTANTLY! The clock said “2″ and that means 2 minutes - everyone on the planet knows the 4th official only deals in minutes - but I couldnae help myself. It was preternatural. I wanted that luminous “2″ to mean 2 seconds. I could only stand this tension for another two seconds. so that was it - it was time-up as far as I was concerned. I was trying to be the opposite of that nerdy bloke in HEROES who can make time stand still: I thought if I swore enough I could make it flash in faster.

A total TIRADE it was too. A tirade of filth. Fucking ashamed of myself but I really couldnae help it. “BLOW, ya cunt - FUCKING BLOW ya baldy wee Austrain bastard!!”. I mean thd fourth official barely had the thing in the air and I was straight intae “TIME YA BASTARD YE - THAT’S TIIIIIME!!!”, “HOH! FUCKING BLOW YA CUNT!!!”!, “BLOOOOOOOOOOOOOW!!!” …”YA CUUUUUUUNNNNNTTTAAAAH!”. Waht the fuck! Where was this stuff coming from. I hudnae swore at CELTIC like that two days earlier!! And it was so unfair too. I mean, I’m nearer kojak than Russel Brand in the hair department myself, my obesity is legendary and I’ve been to both Salzburg AND Vienna AND seen the Austrian national team at Hampden - I LOVE that country and generally am against insult by any kind of stereotyping (I like to be more imaginative than that!) but for two solid minutes of Ronaldinho-Messi time-wasting, that ref was the baldiest, fattest wee Austrian bastard who ever lived.

And as for his mother …

Yet the SECOND he raised his arms - towards the Govan by the way: I’m sure he heard me - and blew that Zauberflote of a whistle, I could have ran doon there and snogged the face of the hunkily hirsute, snake-hipped, slender, educated, urbane, stallion of an Osttereicher BABE!!

Oh man. Dearie, dearie me. The things ye do at times like that. Fucking pathetic…and I LOVED it!

Thing is, the PLAYERS were the same. Our players of course. They wurnae scared - not one bit of it; one of the bravest performances I’ve ever seen from a Rangers teanm - but they succumbed to the extreme role-reversal of the whole evening as much as we did. While the punters infamous for their impatience stood hollaring their worship for a 0-0 draw and a side which could get a touch every twenty minutes, while we all sang our approval of any Ranger who could punt the ball into the front row of any of the stands rather than attempt to hold the thing or “beat an opponent” (CRRAAAAZY TALK!!!), our heroes themselves spent the first 80 minutes forgetting how to pass. When ye only get two touches in the entire game yer accuracy is bound to fade a bit though.

Aye, of course, there were a few grunts and groans from probably, the same 200 folk who left five minutes from the end (WHY? please - WHY??!!) but 49,000 Bluenoses COULD NOT HAVE CARED LESS if Kevin Thomson suddenly couldn’t hit a coo’s arse wi a banjo or Barry Ferguson hit a cross which misseed Cousin by a mere 200 yards. We KNEW what our lads were up against and we knew how mesmerising it was to WATCH Barca from the stands, never mind actually being down there amongst them, trying to remember yer name and what year it was. We were just glad our lads could stop the Barcelonians whenever they got to the point of putting the thing in our sacred net.

And, the thing is, by the end of the game we’d found that pace, we’d absorbed that pressure and we’d started to eek out enough glorious chances that Barcelona - that’s BARCELONA! - decided they’d best just run down the clock and take that point because THEY really dindae want to make US angry!

Fucking brilliant.

But, the chaces are, we’ll have something very real and apparent to worry about on Sunday. We “only” got a draw out of Barcelona - Dundee United have played them FOUR TIMES over two seperate competitive European ties and Dundee United have BEATEN Barcelona ALL FOUR TIMES. I was there, in fact, on the old steep covered terrace of Tannadice in 1987 when a Graham Roberts goal allowed us to defeat a Dundee United side which, just four days previously, had won 2-1 in the Nou Camp and thus eliminated Barca from Europe with a home and away win for the second time in Tangerine history.

We’ve still got our trip to the Nou Camp on the horizon and while ye always believe, ye always know what’s possible too. It’d be heart-attacks all round among The Bears in Catalunya a week on Wednesday if we get a draw over there too - I just can’t see it being anything other than a slaughter (but I’m going to the game, so …) - but I’d give my kebab hand to see us do what United did in the same super dome twenty years ago … and then 20 years before that too.

So this Sunday we’re facing a team which has a hoodoo over Barcelona - scary enough. But they also have a fucking hoodo over Rangers! The thought of us winning by three or four at Tannadice is now just that - a thought. For, no matter how many managers they or we go through, or how hard we shaft them in CIS Cup semis, or how close they are to relegation from the SPL, Eddie Thompson’s Dundee United just can’t stop taking points off Rangers.

In these “United game preview rants” I used to do a wee list of the games in which they’d recently done us - just to sober up any Bears who thought the league positions mattered a fuck when it came to playing United. But there’s no need now as it’s so blatant a factor in our domestic life and there’s no TIME anyway - the list is so long I cannae be bothered rattling it off. let’s just say we all need to be on our toes again on Sunday.

It’s easy to say we can’t be as focussed or up for Tannadice as we were for Barcelona at Ibrox but this has been our problem so far in the SPL: We’re dropping points before and now after those big midweek continental successes. It IS impossible for Rangers to be as psyched for this game or any SPL game as we are for Lyon away, Stuttgart at home or Barcelona anywhere - but we have to find A focus, A mentality which lets our players ride the white lighting in Europe one day and then ride the arse off whoever we play in Scotland the next.

Daeglo orange or matt tangerine - doesnae matter; Coz BLUE IS THE COLOUR and, now that the whole world knows it, I think it’s time we reminded the occupants of Tannadice Street, Dundee.