Cousin shites it from The Shire

Daniel Cousin is doon at Fulham as we type, negotiating his personal terms for the Premiership transfer which was on the cards from the first moment he joined us and looked a class above. While not as big a hit as Boumsong, Cousin’s half-season tenure - like buying an old flat, doing it up and selling on six months later for a tidy profit - is becoming a regular little scheme at Ibrox. It’s a scheme which profits all parties involved:

We, the punters, get to see another decent player in our strip for six months, the player gets to learn the lingo and the British style of play in an easier league than the Premierhsip, and Murray International Metals FC get a massive profit on a short-term investment which has given Walter and the Rangers team a head of steam in the SPL race and a bit of respectability in the Champions League.

We don’t qualify for the knock-out stages of the Champions League? This means we don’t have the money to keep him? No worries: We get that money in by selling the player before we even kick off in the UEFA Cup: Cousin’s got a great showreel - his portfolio includes Champions League results against Lyon, Barca and VfB - anyone in England who doesn’t respect playing well in the SPL, can’t argue with positive ECL experience: Sold! Books balanced - everyone’s a winner.

The fee is reportedly 3 Million squid. That’s almost trebling our initial outlay to Lens for the gargantuan Gabonese goal-getter. In a few games he was undoubtedly lazy but in far more he was undoubtedly classy. His goal in Lyon and the ball he sent up to DaMarcus Beasley for the third in the Stade Gerland will live with me always. His winner against Gretna last Wednesday may go a long way towards winning us the league this season.

He won’t be missed until we have a bad day in front of goal - he was the kind of player the idiots just couldn’t appreciate but, more than that, he just wasn’t here long enough to get into our hearts. He never intended to be. I won’t bother wishing him all the best - he’s perfectly capable of looking after himself, he gives not one shit about Bears like me and I’ve no doubt the “mis-translated” slagging of his team-mates late last year was a very unsubtle tactic designed to start paving the way for his desired January transfer, like Di Canio insisting Celtic’s directors had insulted his honour, blah-blah - but I wish Daniel no harm. When he came hurtling towards my area of the ground in celebration at Motherwell last week, I very nearly risked arrest to run on the pitch and kiss him.

Be interesting to see if we do spend the dough, on the likes of Aston Villa’s Luke Moore. I think we’ll need another big, strong, skilful through-the-middle finisher like Cousin. But it’ll be even more interesting to see if The Darche can regain full match fitness and play full nineties from now til the end of the season - his introduction to the latter end of the games has been the common factor in our last two victories.

Although, the rumour is, Cousin wanted to leave before the East Stirlingshire game, lest he got found out by the mighty Shirey-Pirey.

I’m loaded with the cold/flu/tuberculosis/whatever. I’m sat here, at the computer, with a big box of hankies - but this time they’re for my nose. I got all cocky today and walked the full length of my front steps - both of them. I was LOVING the fresh air so decided it’d be safe to at least stride out to the end of the street and back. By the time I got to number 18 I was ready to bring up my lungs on Mrs Whatshercoupon’s yappy poodles.

I have to be honest, troops - I’m almost HOPING today’s rain gets heavier and heavier and leads to the Shire game being rescheduled again - coz I don’t think I’m gonnae make it and I don’t want to ruin my 100% attendance at the Ibrox classes Rangers have been giving this season.

Yeah - I know - it’s unbelievably selfish of me. Yet another postponed match could have a cataclysmic effect on our team’s already claustrophobic fixture schedule. But I just hate the idea of a game at Ibrox going ahead without me. Always have done. Especially when it’s this kinda game - very different opponents and a semi-empty stadium let ye contemplate yer club for its own sake rather than watching us being subsumed in and judged by the Daily Record/Setanta claustrophobia which only allows ye to exist in terms of whatever competition gets most TV coverage …

Aye. well. Anyway - we could probably play The Shire on Sunday, after we play St Mirren. The Shire can cancel their game on Saturday and reschedule it for a European night - seeing as how they finished bottom of their Champions League group this season and are free most Tuesdays and Wednesday from now on. We could field our reserves … shouldn’t be a problem … and I’d be well by then … and … and … oh, fuck it - we need another game before the St Mirren game, don’t we. I know it. I said so on Sunday after we lacked sharpness against Inverness. Fuck it - the Shire game HAS to go ahead. We’ve got a new pitch laid special and EVERYTHING! Fuck it - I’m gonnae miss The Shire at Ibrox. Unless any of you can spare me some steroids …

Just to prove I’m ill, here’s the laziest possible “preview” of this week’s mid-weeker: It’s a simple cut and paste of the preview I wrote before the original Sunday date. Youse can just swap all the This weekends for this midweeks and all the sundays for wednesdays - I cannae be bothered …

(Huh! - Charming! That’s “customer service” for ye these days, eh!)

SHIRE HORSED?

There is a whisky-thin, average-height man of indeterminate middle age and he wears a brown leather jacket you might call a bomber. And he wears overly-white and young trainers with overly black, drainpipe corduroys and a ridiculously incongrous replica football shirt which peeps below the bottom of the bomber. And he has a beard. Oh yes, he has a beard. I’m tempted to say the beard is wild - like that picture of Walt Whitman on the wall which Robin Williams wants you to describe to the rest of the class - but though this man I refer to, like Walt, has a grey beard, it is longing rather than long. His pate is also grey and only slighly unkempt. The mane has enough spare to blow in the gust of a shallow highland football terrace or a decaying Edinburgh grandstand but it will never get in his eyes. His hair isn’t too untidy. No, the wildness comes from his eyes rather - the wildness is in his eyes … and the white Tesco poly bag he carries. Carries everywhere. This weekend, he’ll carry it to Ibrox. And he’ll quite possibly be so pissed that his carrier bag will end up carrying him. You may see this man, twixt Broomloan and Govan. And, despite the testicle-twisting high-pitched shrieking from the 20,000 five-year-olds who’ll be there on Sunday, you may still hear him sing his song. You may hear him do so as he walks into your Paisley Road boozer. For he sings a song as wild as his eyes. He carries a tune as loosely as he carries his carrier. He cares as much about his personal safety as he cares about sartorial elegance. Grey haired, Tesco bag man will burst into The Grapes Bar on Sunday, as he sings “SHIIIREY PIIIIREY, SHIIREY PIIREY - oh way, oh way, oh Way!!…”

To the tune of “Championeees” or “Super Ally”: SHIIIREY PIIIIREY, SHIIREY PIIREY - oh way, oh way, oh Way!!…”

The real East Stirlingshire anthem is, one suspects, Tom Waits’ Misery’s The River of the World, but the song East Stirling’s away support sings most passionately is the Shirey Pirey remix. My mate and I can’t quite get our ears round it - and we’ve always been too scared to approach any of them to ask: We decided it would make more “sense” if they were singing “Shirey Pony, Shirey Pony, oh way, oh way, oh Way etc” because, ye know, there’s a sort of cute pun in there.

Shire ponies?…

Okay, it’s maybe not that obvious a pun to those of you who don’t use drugs but the people who follow East Stirling clearly do and, I dunno, maybe it’s the Falkirk accents, but they seem to be saying “SHIREY-PIREY”. It’s quaint - the first fifty times you hear it.

And, on my quest to see all the league grounds in Scotland, completed this season, my fellow anorak and I visited Elgin City’s Borough Briggs stadium in September, when East Stirling were the visitors. That was the first fifty times we heard “SHIREY PIREY…” . The second fifty came at Meadowbank Stadium, in this same Scottish Cup run which sees them arrive at Ibrox this weekend, when The Shire came from behind to beat Edinburgh City 2-1. We’d never done Meadowbank stadium when Meradowbank Thistle played there. The word is it will soon be knocked down. So off we headed to Embra on a Rangers-free Saturday in october and, as we enjoyed a few pre-match beers with squads of Hibees in the boozer right across the road from the old Commonwealth games venue, in came the Tesco bag man and his Elgin entourage: “SHIIIIREY PIIIIIREY! SHIIREY PIIIREY!” broke the peace of the Easter Roaders about to down their last gulps and head off to the SPL visit of St Mirren. It also broke the “romance of the cup” vibe for my mate and I.

For the “Loveable minnow” cliche soon wears itself out when yer sat in a 7000-capacity stand, in a crowd of less than 200 people, yet yer still having yer viewing and hearing spoiled by the “loveable rogues” who’d rather spend the entire 90 minutes behaving as if they, rather than the football, were the main attraction.

Mind you, when ye see the football they have to watch, ye can understand why they make their own entertainment. If we don’t win by six on Sunday it’ll be a far greater disgrace than the last time I watched Rangers in thr Scottish Cup against a team in black and white.

In fact, I saw Elgin win 6-0 against The Shire that September day in the highlands. I saw non-league Edinburgh City push them all the way one month later. But, most of all, bumping into them intermittently over the years as I completed “the 42″ (a task I consciously began at Firs Park), I saw an unbelievable array of “characters” following this hopeless team all round the country.

Aside from Tesco Bag Man, this season there’s also a young girl - late-teens or early-twenties - with her frizzy hair in a tight top-knot, ala Ghetto-fabulous divas. She has the Dolce and Gabbana hand-bag, the Mary J Blige earings .. and the all-red with Blue trimming Shire away strip.

There is a man who takes his toddler to the games with him. Strange enough that he takes a kid too young to appreciate any football to watch the Shire but even stranger that he takes the kid’s BIG, RED, PLASTIC FORMULA 1 PUSH-CAR too! I assumed he was an Elgin fan when I saw him at Borough Briggs, shoving his wean around the terracing and grass banking, but - no - there he was in the queue outside Meadowbank Stadium one month later, ready to push his tot all the way round an olympic-sized running track!

There is the plump, middle-aged man who, afraid to say, I assumed had some sort of learning difficulties when, amidst abuse from his fellow supporters, he stormed from front to back of the steep-as-fuck Meadowbank stand in some sort of half-kidding huff. He had the Gola bag for his pieces, the parker, the ill-fitting away strip and a ridiculously small Baseball cap planted on the middle of his enormous cranium. The glases were milk crate-thick. We felt sorry for him … until we saw him at full time with his GLAMOROUS AND FIT-AS-HELL PHILLIPINO BRIDE AND HER SISTER/OLDER DAUGHTER!! Both ladies were dressed like millionaireses and both looked thoroughly delighted that the Shire had done the business. I overheard him saying he’d try to get his autograph book filled and then he’d meet them at the car …

And then there’s the family of wee stocky blokes who all wear the Queens Park-eque home strip. No number on the back, just a black square waiting to be filled so it looks like a rugby shirt and they look like prop forwards rather than footy fans. They’re usually pissed and destroying a pie and/or mars bar each and trying to unfurl a very small flag. But one day, many seasons ago, as the ref called an end to a rare East Stirling away win, I passed them on the way out of Links Park, Montrose, as they regurgitated the Soul II Soul classic at full time: “Back to The Shire - back to Reality! ”

Now THAT was funny.

These are the people who keep the game alive, apparently. I don’t know so much. But I’m glad the game lives at that level coz I love reading about it in my daily papers and I cherish the stadiums and I enjoy dropping in on it a few times a year and I enjoy it dropping by Ibrox once or twice a season and I’m glad it lives for them, for those people. “Shirey Pirey” and “Back to the Shire” are certainly a helluva lot more agreeable than “Big Jock Knew” and “we are the UVF”. So I hope these people enjoy their day out on Sunday. But I hope that enjoyment is limited to the thrill of a different venue and an added lustre to their team’s latest humping.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Tw-u2X5EaGY&feature=related see them rowing in their black-and-white hooped home strip.

About this entry

You’re currently reading “Cousin shites it from The Shire,” an entry on FatEck.co.uk

Published:
01.22.08 / 7pm
Category:
News