The Skid Mark of Champions (ICT … 0 GERS … 1)

The cruel irony of games such as today’s is that a 3-0 win, all done and dusted before half-time, actually proves less about your title-winning credentials than ninety minutes of near-indifferent play capped with a cloth-touchingly late winning goal which most uninformed observers thought we’d never see. Comfy wins, in our current situation, at this time of the season, prove nothing - unless they’re against the team in second place. Grinding one out against grinders, however, says it all. So as a game like today’s progresses bleakly from kick-off you are left with a Sword of Damocles scenario: Hope for your team to suddenly rattle in three goals before the break, avoiding all nervousness, gaining the points but not REALLY discovering if your side is able to dig out a result when up against it; OR; blatantly HOPE for your heroes to play completely shite up until, say, the EIGHTY NINTH MINUTE and then hope for a goal which, although it must arrive within two or three nerve-shredding minutes, will be a goal which screams “We’re Gonnae Win the League!” Follow me? Mmm? You dig?

What was hinted at with the nervy win at Fir Park on Wednesday was thoroughly confirmed on this cold, clear Highland afternoon: Our SPL away form has thoroughly improved. But you’d only know it from the results - and it’s results which win ye LEAGUE CHAMPIONSHIPS.

So, yes, of course, when we had but two attempts at the Inverness goal in the first half today - and thoroughly tepid, half-arsed attempts at that - I was sat in front of the telly screaming “GAWN YERSELF, DANNY BOY! - Brilliant, son! - we don’t want a goal the noo, mate - AND WELL, DONE STEVIE WHITTAKER! - MAH CAUCASIAN!! - YOU DAH MAN! - pure pish shots straight at their goalie - That’s how WE roll!”. Och, aye - you know it. I wiz pyoor LUVIN it, so ah wiz. Every time Chris Burke decided to blatantly dive instead of actually risking receipt of a genuine foul tackle I was SO PROUD. I didn’t want the ref giving us any free-kicks - not until injury time anyway.

Whenever Charlie Adam played in one of his horrendous “crosses”, to no-one in particular, I was out of my squelchy sofa seat singing “We’re Gonnae win the league. We’re gonnae win the league!”. Half time-whistle goes and we look garbage - I go intae the kitchen and pop the Moet in the ice bucket: Seventy five minutes gone and Barry Ferguson gets his second touch of the ball - and it runs away from him for a by-kick - I’m on the phone ordering party hats, streamers and “Champions 2007/2008″ banners. Charlie Adam has a perfectly legitimate goal chalked off for a non-existant off-side, I’m breathing huge sighs of relief. Same as when he hits that one off the bar a few minutes later: “Fuck’s sake - we nearly blew it there!” I says to myself.

And when The Darche turned and twisted his body like a yoga guru playing twister to expertly guide the ball into the back of the Caley Thistle net I had to do a quick double-check of the stopwatch before I could be sure we were allowed to celebrate. It said 89th minute. Yup - that’s late enough. I gave a wee cheer and barely bothered getting out my seat. Well, like I say, by that time I knew we’d do it. The game had been so bad it was never gonnae go any other way.

Cigar, anybody? They’re Cuban …

Aye - okay - maybe it didnae quite go like that in my hoose from 2pm today. Maybe I was actually about as self-assured as Kevin Keegan’s demeanour in his recent interviews when he tells us he can turn the Geordies around. Maybe I was trying to convince myself this trip to Inverness was going to a pre-arranged script and maybe I wasn’t doing a very good job of convincing myself because I seemed to be biting great lumps out the sofa before we scored. Maybe a 3-0 win would have proved we were thoroughly brilliant and stick-ons for the title. In fact, a 5-0 win would have cancelled out even Celtic’s goal-difference advantage. In such circumstances I’d be on here saying that Wednesday’s win against Gretna was the ground-out victory which gave us the confidence to steam-roller everyone else.

We cannae get too cocky either way: Even if Hutton, Thomson and McCulloch have still to come back, we still have two trips to Parkhead this season. It IS only January. And, furthermore, while Gordon Strachan might be pretending Celtic are the best attacking side in Europe and have just been “unlucky” in front of goal recently, it seems to me that Celtic are themselves now grinding out some results during a sticky patch. In their case, that’s already a sign of champions - reigning champions.

Neither let us cast our last two fixtures so easily into the realm of “formalities”. Gretna have shown since the onset of winter that they are improving at a scary pace. The return of Kenny Deuchar has augmented this upturn and their 2-0 win over a buoyant Falkirk yesterday put our Wednesday win in a more flattering light. Yes, they’re bottom-feeders - we should always win these games - but we’d played once in over two weeks when we met a Gretna side fresh off a Scottish Cup wake-up call at Morton.

Similairly, Inverness Caley Thistle are one solid, battling unit. They’ve given us nothing but trouble in all their seasons in the SPL and, probably the biggest indicator of how much confidence Walter has instilled in this Rangers side, we have now beaten them three times in this campaign - and conceded no goals. If they make the top six I’ll be chuffed for them but I’ll be scared shitless of what they’ll do to us after the split. It was their record home crowd today and I was just waiting for their fairy-tale 1000th goal to be a winner or last-gasp equaliser against the mighty Glasssgoew Rrraynchurs. Inverness beat Celtic on the same ground only a few weeks ago and all today’s lack of involvement from Brahim and Bazza was, I feel, a testimony to ICT’s modus operandi. Walter knew that if we tried to go through the middle of the pitch we’d get picked off. Caley Thistle’s speciality is turning the midfield into a quagmire - they’re great at it and it’s admirable - so we tried to go round the sides. For a long time it didn’t work but we showed even more pluck than our plucky opponents. We kept going, Winston Churchill style (although we didn’t have to shoot any miners).

It’s no coincidence that we beat Celtic 3-0 earlier in the season but can only beat ICT and Gretna by the odd goal. We’re at the stage where our team is perfectly capable of winning an open game - we’re brilliant in attack IF the other team thinks they can out-gun us. The problems usually come in when, having sussed our style, smaller opponents decide to try and snuff out our attacks before anything else, play for a draw. No hard feelings about this - these teams SHOULD try to stop us whatever way they can. To be fair, ICT and Gretna’s policy seemed to involve having a go when appropriate - it was far from ten-men-behind-the-baw. However, it was stodgy and ye need to be able to beat these kinda set-ups if ye want to win titles. That’s why the last two results are so heartening.

What then does Walter do on Wednesday night coming, against East Stirlingshire? Coz I think a few of those players we saw today could do with another game under their belt just to get them back up to speed after a long lay-off. The Alan Gows, Kirk Broadfoots and Dean Furmans of the world (If it’s plurals, should I be saying “Kirk BroadFEET” and “Dean FurMEN”??) will still get their chance but I’d rather we didn’t drop all the big names - in fact keep the majority of them in our next Scottish Cup starting line-up. Not that the Scottish Cup is our priority but that we need to keep these fellahs sharp - sharper even - for the visit of St Mirren on Saturday. Another stodgy game - and look what the Buddies did to Motherwell yesterday! I’d be more inclinded to rest some players against Hearts in the League Cup semi the following week - if we can start the new Year with four straight SPL wins, keeping ourselves top of the table throughout, then the momentum will provide its own energy: What we need now is sharpness.

The basic fitness seemed to eventually tell today as we created increasingly more chances as the game progressed. Of course the better technical ability EVENTUALLY started to tell too. Darcheville’s half-time introduction was the start of a slow turning of the screw. By the final whistle the patern of play coudl be painted in a light of which even Benjamin Britten and Henry James would have been proud (Literary and Operatic reference alert!! “The Turn of the Screw”. Anybody? COME ON??!! The Turn of the screw??!! Nah? fair enough) but for long spells you just couldn’t see it happening. So the match-fitness, the “extra yard in yer heid” needs to be refound. One more SPL game should do that - Wednesday night’s re-scheduled Cup game should be the training session which keep’s today’s winning momentum simmering nicely. It’s SUCH early days that any cold water poured on our league form could be fatal.

Oh yes, while I’ve always been pretty sure we’d win the league this season, this title-race is clearly “gonnae go all the way”.

And, do you know, I’m so fucking BORED by that prospect. What I want to see, for the first time in eight years, is a Rangers team CRUISING to the title. I want it over by MARCH! I want it done and dusted before the clocks go forward. This is a fantasy, of course. The state we’ve been in domestically for the last couple of years means we’ll be grateful to win the title by one goal, scored in the 95th minute of the final day of the season, by the ref. But let’s not pretend I’m “loving the excitement of another tight race!”. Fuck that pish - that’s for neutrals and English folk. It’ll be a fucking trauma and, apart from the law of averages which says Celtic must win ONE final-day decider sometime soon, I’ve had one too many of them this century. It’s been eight years since I was HAPPY to be at a meaningless SPL Rangers match. It’s been far too long since Rangers winning the league and Rangers parading the SPL trophy have taken place over TWO different games in the same season. Know what I’m sayin, troops??!!

I actually remember Rangers fans who said, during Nine-In-A-Row that they were thinking of handing back their season tickets because we were winning the league - and this is a bona fide quote - winning the league “too easily”. TOO EASILY????!!!!! Winning the league TOO easily? That only happens when there’s no other teams in the league - and ye win it by default … and even then I’d be closely inspecting the reasons for every other club’s absence before I declared our title win un-celebrateable. Too easily? Fucking arseholes. I’m sure, fourteen-fifteen years later, the sickening sight of half-a-dozen Celtic championship wins, and all the “wha’s like us” passive-aggressive, hypocritical, sanctimonious pish that goes with them (Bitter? Moi? No, no, NOOOOEEEW!! I felt exactly the same way when Third Lanark won the title in 1904 - all that “HI-HIs” PISH! Telling ye - Cathkin basturts - I was the one volunteering for a rifle THAT day … know whit ah’m sayin, troops!!!), has disabused them of that part-time, plastic-bear attitude of self-delusion. “Excitement” only comes into it when ye aren’t far-enough better than yer opponents. My personal understanding of football “excitement” is seeing my club win and win and win with a predictability that everyone outside our club calls “dull”. That, for me, is domination and that’s when ye know yer club is giving it their best.

The last two SPL titles we have won have been more “down to the wire” than a drunk, naked trapeze artist. I’ve had all the last-day “excitement” (Call it what it is - It’s just fucking NERVES!!) I need for one life-time. Ill take the cake-walk option from now on. We’ll keep the “excitement” for Europe, where, if we’re to win anything, we’ll always eventually come up against someone who should be so much better than us we could only ever beat them in “exciting” circumstances.

Did I mention the word “excitement” enough for ye there? Did I put enough inverted commas around it?

But, right now, we’re on the up. We’re recovering still from a malaise on the managerial front, from an era-defining sacking of a manager after eight months. At Rangers, my Rangers, that kinda shit just never happened. Now that it has we’ll have to pay our dues in sweat if we want the title back so quickly. Reigning champions always have a psychological advantage in close finishes to a title contest. So we need to get further away from Celtic than we currently are. It’d be such a classic Brian Wilson MP-romanticised illustrated story if Celtic overhauled our lead at the top of the table by winning three Old Firm games in the space of a month. So I want a bit more daylight in the table. Not because I think we’re THAT good but because I think that’s what we’ll need when we go to the piggery twice - enough distance to help us overcome the doubts which first-time title-winning players will always be heir to when an inevitable set-back suddenly highlights all their previous belief to them as naivety.

Talking of naive. I heard today, in glorious surround sound, that “Big Jock Knew” hasn’t gone away. It was wheeled out again at Fir Park on Wednesday too. This is pathetic. This is shaming. Maybe only a title win will convince these arseholes that there is something better to concern themselves with than misinformed, twisted hearsay and assumption about something which has nothing to do with football. What we DO know about Big Jock, apart from his immense footballing achievements, is that he was out there on the Ibrox pitch on January 2nd 1971, helping with the care of the injured and the tending to the dead.

When you concern yourself so deeply with the besmirching of another club - a club which sometimes has absolutely no problem besmirching itself: imagine the hysterical hooped reaction to some of the reffing decisions we’ve risen above in the last two games - then you’re of no use to Rangers. You’re NOT a Rangers fan first and foremost - you’re a Celtic-hater. When will people learn that these are two different things? I don’t like Celtic. They kinda get on my tits. But such sporting familiarity is bound to breed contempt at some level and I hope I always keep it nice and immature (as shown above and in countless other rants by Yours Bluely) because I wouldnae watse my hatred on them - especially when there’s so many Celtic stars I’ve thoroughly admired and so many Celtic supporters whose company I’ve thoroughly loved. I’ll just try to help Rangers beat them at football … and stay at least four points clear of them in the league.

About this entry

You’re currently reading “The Skid Mark of Champions (ICT … 0 GERS … 1),” an entry on FatEck.co.uk

Published:
01.20.08 / 6pm
Category:
News