EXODUS: MOVEMENT OF RA PEEPELLE

At the heart of it all was the Nou Camp. That was the main event of this main event - being at the Camp Nou - and, as I’ve already explained, in Big, Fat Barca-Boner, below, the camp Nou was impressive but not pleasantly so. Not a nice ground. Not an enjoyable arena. It really was, as my photo from outside the ground shows, very reminiscent of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Tower of Babel :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Brueghel-tower-of-babel.jpg

Oh, I’m glad I went. Definitely. Glad I was there. Would have topped myself if I hadn’t been there. It was one of those trips you didn’t even get excited about when the draw was made. It was beyond mere excitement: It was a mission. Before that wee bit of paper coming oot that wee plastic baw in UEFA-ville had even been properly unfurled, you’d started making arrangements to get to Catalunya. We’ve been in this Champions League mularkey for 15 years now. We know more than most what we want from those Swiss draws. So when we saw “Barce .., we were all like expectant fathers when our wife says “My waters just br…”: No time for pissing about with emotional nonsense - just GET THERE.

Yes, I’m proud to have the Nou Camp properly in my bloodstream now. I’ve Follow Follwed my club to one of the most famous venues on the planet, against one of the biggest clubs - sometimes THE biggest. But I did not enjoy. No - did not enjoy it much at all. Enjoyed the result more than I’ve ever enjoyed a 2-0 loss but when the core of the trip is unpleasant then the trip itself is indeed a tour of duty rather than a holiday.

So many Bears did not see it this way. I’m genuinely pleased for them - and jealous of them. For so many of The Gers fans in Barcelona last week, this WAS a holiday. This WAS an adventure - this WAS the trip of a lifetime. For me it was, more precisely, a fixture I had wanted to attend in my lifetime. It didn’t compare to Porto, say, or - especially - Villarreal. This latest Gers away match in the Champions League was, for Yours Bluely simply a box ticked.

Half of the reasons for this were down to me: I can’t handle the 24-hour, in-out job anymore. I’m too fat more than too old - I need to get myself on that scheme currently being run at Ibrox for obese Bears (Rangers sent me a letter, apparently, but it couldn’t get through the letter box because, you see, I take up too much room in my house. I’m not in one of the fattest postcodes - I just qualify for my own area postcode). But I couldn’t really afford even the 24-hour trip, never mind the overnight stay option. For nice enough personal reasons my personal financial circumstances - never a threat to Richard Branson at the best of times - will, for the next 8 months, be of no threat to even that guy selling the bookies pens outside Glasgow Central. Or, as I call him, Rockefeller. Christmas is on the way and I was feeling the pinch in my wallet as much as the pinch in my sides as I landed lucky with the middle seat on both legs of the flight. Trapped in airports and Nou Camp eateries, forking out 15 euros for a single malteser and a sip of drain water - this was a trip I couldn’t afford to miss but it weighed on my conscience that I couldn’t afford to do it either.

And another quarter of the reasons for my ambivalence were down to people ALMOST like me. People - Bears - who were just that wee bit TOO snobby and sniffy about the number of “tourists” within our number. As someone who hadn’t been to Belgrade or Podgorica or Lyon, I was feeling unusually self-conscious about my relative part-timer-ishness on the continental front. I’ve earned my stripes but you still get that pang of jealousy about the troops who are currently doing the full season, everywhere, every game. But combine this feeling with the fact that last week was the largest away support we may ever have taken to a European match, AS WELL AS THE FACT I seemed to be CONTINUALLY bumping into boys who do ALL THE ROUNDS, ALL THE TRIPS and add onto THAT AGAIN the fact that these lads were getting loud, snotty and almost beligerent about their comparative fundamentalism as the day went on … and I left every little bit of “attendance snobbery” on that miserably tiny little sweat-box of a Monarch Airways plane on the tarmac of Glasgow Airport at 3:30 last Thursday morning.

It was murder: I’m in the queue to get on the plane TO Barca that morning. We’re boarding the thing. And the man with the face of a fifty-year-old but the dress sense of a 14-year old - all Stone Island jumper and Aquascutum baseball cap with bursting blood-vessels and triple bags under the eyes - is giving it big licks about “How mental was it in Belgrade?!!”, “what were they cunts like in Montenegro!!” and “d’ye think this pilot’ll be any better than the wan we had goan ower tae Lyon?”. His mates and he are looking round, asessing the loyalty of all those around them. Fuck that. I like to name drop as much as the next man but I know people who’ve been to one Rangers game in their life and have more love for and faith in our club than some who travel home and away every fucking week for fifty years. Simply, you give what you can and you do if for you and the club. I’ll defend myself when my loyalty to Rangers is questioned and regular attendance certainly qualifies most for better knowledge of the club and shinier badges of loyalty. But, as long as they’re there to blindly cheer on The Teds, I see no big deal in how many games anyone DOESN’T usually attend. This was a huge game, a phenomenon, and it was nice to be a part of that.

Or it should have been.

As we were kept waiting for fucking ages, all dying with thirst and hunger and tiredness, at Glasgow airport Passport control, 20 hours later, ON THE WAY BACK INTO OUR OWN COUNTRY (!!!!), I saw a Bear I recognised from a previous trip. He’d almost been arrested by the local cops for objecting to the fact the driver woudln’t let him on the bus back to the airport from the ground. The allocated bus had been changed during the game - it had fewer seats and the local driver wouldn’t let anyone stand up. No seat - ye were off. I tried to intervene - was almost arrested myself. When we got to the airport I went in and out the driver in my best pidgin. When I got into the departure lounge the Bear in question was sat there waiting for us all. Laughs all round. Sense of community - great memories. This time, however, he was looking right through me as he growled “Aye - I’m sure it’ll be THIS busy when we come back fae Stuttgart! Aye - RIGHT!!”. Polis and immigration officals - not a good place to start a ruck. I could just have sat on him and fallen asleep. But I just wanted to get to my fucking bed.

And, inbetween times, as I stood watching Rangers from the hghest vantage point of my life, the six foot two bloke in front of me stood on his seat. One thing we did not need in this ground was to get any higher but he wanted to raise himself above the rest and I soon knew it was a more symbolic than practical gesture: He was better than us. When he announced “This is worse than the Club Deck” I stupidly believed he was referring to the nose-bleed altitude of the perch. Nah. Oh nah, nah nah. As usual with cunts like this, there was a little grey-haired midget fuck alonsgide him who was starting all the Bear-bashing: The wee ones are always the mouthiest when they think they’re safe. “Aye - it’s the Club Deck Loyal up here. It’s like a fucking library! Yese are aw here tae see Barcelona!” And when a song WAS started - and, by fuck, we sang a few - “Oh aye, ye finished yer prawn sandwiches have ye?! Didnae know yese were here, ya part-timers”, etc, etc, ad nauseum.

Said midget was stood on the seat directly in front of me but, thankfully, never turned right round to face me when making one of his sad little comments. I was tempted to ask him why he was protesting so much, why he wasn’t concentrating on the game, why I’d NEVER SEEN HIM BEFORE IN MY LIFE, AT ANY RANGERS MATCH, HOME OR AWAY, IN 30 YEARS OF FOLLOW-FOLLOWING???!!! I should have asked him why he was using an analogy invented by a former Celtic midfielder?.But I just knew that, as tired and emotional and tense as I was watching my team trying to avoid what could easily and suddenly turn into a record gubbing, one direct question to me about my loyalty to The Teds would have seen me apply an uppercut to his perfectly placed chin. It was that way, ye know, where ye can actually FEEL what it’ll be like when ye crack yer fist off his melon. And, with the negligible size of the wee fud, and the rake of the Nou Camp stands, I’d have sent him down onto the fucking pitch.

And the Guardia Civil don’t like Rangers fans on the New Pitch.

Luckily - what with it being a foreign country and the Polis not liking us that much - one of the Bears in front of him saved me a 1 hour Catalan jail-term and a lifetime ban from Ibrox by turning round, standing up and asking Mekon Man the receding grey-haired mouthy midget, and ALL OF HIS MATES, if they’d like to join him downstairs in the concourse for a go of the very squarest nature. They shat it. They shut up for most of the second half then, into injury time, started asking some other guy who’d scored at Fir Park the previous week in the CIS cup. I’d had enough. I was gonnae become one of those nutters who FIGHTS WITH FANS OF HIS OWN TEAM. I moved. I went and stood next to two ex-Gers players still playing pro. I suddenly felt even fatter than I had on the plane. But everyone was safer.

This season, If we get Real Madrid, a Premiership club or we get to Manchester or Moscow for a final, I’ll go. Other than that I’ll stay away from Euro away games in 2007/2008. But it’s mostly for financial and physical reasons. I’ll lose money easier than I’ll lose weight but I think there was one more wee personal reason for my lack of fun in Barca: I’d been there before. I’d been for a week, as a tourist. Luckily, unlike my dad - who had his LapTop nicked from his motor when he worked in Barca, or my Mum who had her bag snatched as my dad booted fuck out the other Catalan clepto who’d jumped them in the Bari Gotic on a holiday trip - I had a fucking WONDERFUL time when I was first there. It is a beatiful, vibrant, emotional place is Barcelona. I had such a perfect week-lomg stay in this city a few years ago that I wasted valuable drinking tome last Wednesday by getting my fat ass up to the Sagrada Famiglia again. Had to do it. You don’t forget stuff like that. When I do a European City on me hols I know I truly love it if I’m saying “I’d love to come here with The Rangers” and if I’m doing a great trip with Rangers I know it’s cool when I say to myself “I’d love to come back here on a holiday”. I’d always sworn I’d come back to the Catalan capital with my team if they ever had to go back to the scene of our European trophy win, but to be somewhere you’re just not wanted is a bit of a dissy. When you’re not wanted in a place which holds so many special personal memories, it’s extra gutting.

On my way from Las Ramblas to Gaudi’s unfinished organic masterpiece of religious architecture, via the passeig de Gracia, deliberatley incorporating more of Paseig de Saint Joan than I had to and cutting across a wee bit of The Diagonal, I was restored to the mood and time of that holiday. There were only a few Bears kicking about up here, up this end of town. But, just as I began falling in love again, I saw the little newsagents shop and I saw the papers all laid out on the outside counter: My cataln is even worse than my Spanish but teh words were all to do with “Trouble”, “security”, “Drunkenness” and “worry”. The photos weren’t of Bluenoses with their beer in hand, smiling for the camera - the photos were of anyone they could find with their beer gut hanging out of their top as they puked on a pavement or fell over the steps of a monument. THIS, it was clear, was the local angle. Well, the media angle anyway. Depressing enough in itself - but even more so when it’s shitting on a dearly-held memory of one of the happiest weeks of your life.

Still - that’s what we all do on holiday: We let reality and cynicism take a back seat. I don’t think this experience will ever stop me fulfilling my promise to self to one day see Rangers play at the Franz Hohr stadium in Favoriten, Vienna. But it brought it home just HOW unwanted we were in Barca. Don’t get me wrong - the pubs, cafes and supermarkets never ONCE stopped us purchasing their bevvy by the bathfull - but there was sone sneer too many from the local citizens for my liking. I’m well aware of the fact drunken Nothern Europeans are a pain in the ass for Latin cities - even ones with a great football passion - but it was never a problem in Oporto or Villarreal. And if the Tartan Army are so fucking cuddly, what’s the problem with us when we’re actually LESS of a pain in the arse than the kilted exhibitionists? We overwhelmed the Placa de Catalunya and Las Ramblas. But we were all happy there and we just partied.

It’s okay. I KNOW what the “problem” is. Was just being a wee bit rhetorical there. No one likes us and, frankly, I fucking love it - but I sometimes naively hope that it’s the relative objectivity of a foreign view which will allow people to see how we BEHAVE rather than what we’re “supposed” to stand for. So many pnters in this country are determined to piant Bluenoses as unremittingly evil. We love it. We love that no-one except us knows how nice it is to support Rangers. We like the cloak of nastyness because it barrs mawkishness or pretentiousness ever infecting The Rangers Family - we’re nice in REAL terms, in a GENUINE way. But every now and then I’d like the twats who invade this blog and other such outlets in order to paint us as some sort of Waffen SS battalion because, in two days of sustained interaction with a foreign city, one Bear said something about the pope (well, I don’t suppose Benedict ever actually made it nto the actual SS :-) but ye get my point about the hypocrisy of it all) to be told by a “Neutral party” that The Gers on tour are no worse and mostly a wee bit better than most other Barbarian hordes on the football circuit. I’m quite happy to have idiot Celtic hystericals make a fool of themselves with their muck-raking and dedication to teh minutae of every Rangers fan’s every trip abroad: They show up themselves and tarnish their own club more than ours with that kind of desperation. But it’d be great if the crassness of that anti_rangers mind-set could occassional be evideced by some hard facts from the locals inhabitants of the cties we visit. The Rangers brick through a bus in Villareal was just as big and dangerous as the Celtic bottle through the bus in Milan. Coming from a Rangers fan, incredibly, that’ll never be believed by some Celtic fans - coming from a Villarreal or AC Milan fan we might have a chance of REALLY embarrassing these hate-mongering tits.

The Porto fans applauded us out their stadium. The Villarreal fans sat side by-side with us in sporting friendship in El Madrigal. No-one here ever acknowledges this. But maybe the Catalans - faced with the biggest travelling Gers support ever - would finally give us the kind of praise no-one could ignore. But, no. Once again the facts told the real truth - no arrests! But, just like the fact Rangers committed their fewest fouls of any game this season during the loss at Camp Nou yet were descrbed as “brutal animals” by a Spanish newspaper, no-one outside of Beardom is interested in the nice, boring facts about Rangers fans. Their newspapers castigated us. The pizzeria at the Placa Catalunya end of Las Ramblas where my two cousins and I spent 20 euros per round of three drinks did not seem in any hurry to close. In fact, they seemed desperate only to restock their kegs of Estrella Damm and Heniken, lest these thousands of smiling, singing people in long-sleeved retro 1972 Cup Winners Cup Final jerseys moved somewhere else for their imbibement.

Yes, Catalans are much more politicised than yer average European punter. Yes, they’d know all about the Union Jacks and our stereotyped clumsy role in this twat’s-politics rivalry with “Republican, Irish” Celtic. And, yes, the idea of us being seen as the vanquishers of Franco’s henchmen after the 1972 CWC final was most definitely swamped by the notion of us as “Those bastards who ripped up our stadium in 1972″. Fair enough. Fair enough. But there were no arrests last week. There would have been no flipping atmosphere at the ground had it not been for us. There was nothing but excitement and joy wherever I went among Bluenoses in Barcelona. But we just weren’t wanted in any way shape or form and a club and a city as big and beautiuful as Barcelona should be classier than that.

As I scrambled with hundres of others round a badly-lit bus-park at the end of a dug-up darkened road which was indicated only by one Thomas Cook rep waving an a4-sized folder, I knew I’d get home alright. These people alongside me, in Red, White and Blue were not ones for leaving anyone behind. So what if there were buses for Cambuslang Travel, for Gerona, for Thomas Cook, all numbered 1-10, all mixed up and all miles away from where every Bear had been deposited outside Nou Camp. So what? We’d all see each other alright because We ARE The People. It just troubles me that some day, guys like the young fellah sat next to me on the bus we eventually found, chatting away to me in giggly terms about the old woman in the town centre who’d said to him and his mate “You and me go pumpy-pumpy, si?”, will one day find themselves on the end of something much worse than a hunt for a lost bus. And this simply because no-one in Europe can police football like the English. And because no-one in Europe will ever be allowed to think Rangers fans are just football fans.

Fuck it - some clubs want to be a cause. We just are. I cannae blame the Bears who got snotty about the number of trips they make. They’re taking their lives in their fucking hands every time - they’re largely behaving - and they’re coming home to villification.

Scottish fitbaw fans. Fuck the colours or the attire - we’re ALL the same. Start criticising BEARS for pishing up a Gaudi close or puking over a plate of Paella and yer only getting into a cyclical discourse on the psyche of the Northern hemisphere male. I can’t stand it when it’s Tartan Army types and I can’t be bothered with the same behaviour when it’s Rangers fans but, by and large, Gers fans do tend to be more knowledgeable of and interested in the ACTUAL GAME ISTELF and, with a few exceptions, 25,000 Scotsmen in Barcelona SAW THE WHOLE GAME.

That’s probably the same amount who’ll see this Saturday’s game - at 52,000-capacity, sell-out Hampden.

But this Saturday, as per last Wednesday, is not a time for snobberry about our fellow fans or for harping on about the social, anthropological problems which have dogged this country for centuries. As per Scotland hosting Italy, i was excited to be seeing a world great on the pitch in front of me in Barcelona, but I was an am more excited about knowing my team can COMPETE with them. I saw my club side hold Barca at bay for all but two goals over 180 minutes. Now I want to see my country hold the World Champions at bay … before we score the greatest winner in the history of our national game.

If that game needs Rangers to be the bad guys in order to flourish then it’s absolutely fine and dandy by me. We’ll leave the rest of the world to figure out why so many thousands follow us and why so many greats play for us.

Barcelona? I shit ‘em.