SELFISH IN BED

Two things we know about life. Firstly, it’s all about me; Secondly, Four Weddings And A Funeral collapses in on itself at the point Hugh Grant rejects Kristin Scott Thomas for Andie “Shot-putt” MacDowell.

This is a blog - a web log. Don’t be confused - I’m a Bluenose and I write about Rangers here. Click on my URL and you are, without doubt, entering a world of Staunch. However, the views expressed in the slightly darker blue bit of the screen (Coloured like a wet Rangers shirt in the November sleet of Firhill), above the lighter-blue thread of posts (hued like a hot, dry Gers top baking in the August sun of Rugby Park), are my views and mine alone. There’s enough Rangers fans expressing a passing, half-formed desire to kill me to make that plain. Anyone who posts on here regularly will have had me fall out with them on at least one occassion, no matter how much I normally love you or your posts. We don’t all think the same and however much common ground there is between me and other Bears, the first rant on this blog is always solely what Alex “Fat Eck” Anderson (24 Hour Plumbing Solutions) thinks. Okay, “thinks” might be over-stating it, but ye know what I mean.

What I’m eventually gonnae express, at the foot of this page, in italics, about Saturday’s game is therefore an entirely personal opinion which, may or may not be shared by an unknown number of Bluenoses, and is one I’m not necessarily proud of. I thunk it, I wroted it - mine. But it is an honest opinion - or it was when I first formed it on bank holiday Monday - so at least there can be none of that paranoid “Aye but what dae ye REALLY think, ya big Hun, KKK member ye” pish or “You’re a Tim in disguise ya self-hating embarrasment ye” shite in anyone’s reaction to it. It’s a blog, I’m a blogger - this is how ME thinks.

Saturday? What’s Saturday got to do with it? We’re all so ingrained in our dislike of each other that the result should make no difference. Zat noh how it goes? Nah. Is it fuck. The reality is, if one of the clubs falls away their support falls away in relative terms. If it was truly “all about religion” either there would never have been empty seats or sparse terraces at Ibrox or Parkhead at any time in the last century or, like churches across the land, there would never be a sell-out crowd no matter how well either club were doing.

Saturday IS all about football and that’s what scares the shit out the hate-mongers, tiny-cocked big mouths, wannabe genocidals and, most of all, the media. Saturday is all about Walter Smith hopefully playing the same starting eleven as last Saturday except Novo starts instead of McCulloch. That’s what I SHOULD be grand-standing on this blog. Saturday SHOULD be all about the fact Celtic will be top of the league if they win and all the hooped hysteria about Strachan will suddenly be shown up for the ungrateful, knee-jerk pish it really is. The guy’s a wank but he’s also a damn good manager - only a moron can’t see that. On Saturday, personally, I reckon the game will reflect the two clubs’ respective winning styles this season - we’ll score early and defend our lead, Celtic will get their first goal late in the second half. 1-1! So all week I was thinking “draw” but so many people are now saying a draw will do Rangers that I reckon this makes Celtic even hotter favourites to win the game - the game of FOOTBALL. A game of football between Champions League last 16-ers and UEFA Cup quarter-finalists. A fucking GREAT sporting prospect.

But - don’t panic. It’s okay - yer safe - I know how it “really” works. The sporting spectacle is just the smelly, jaggy shite pushed out by two political and religious polar opposites giving each other indigestion. The game is so little of what it’s all about. Right lads??!! S’awright - I know how it goes. Celtic think we’re naive for denying there’s a conspiracy - we think they’re naive for believing there is one. We’re evil for living by it - they’re evil for propogating it. Everyone is content in their ain wee self-righteous world of Staunch, of Faith, of Loyal, of Liberal, of what they want to become Hate. And the Daily Record knows how to treble its sales with one headline.

Scotland’s often an insult to backwaters when our media gets going. Scotland v Croatia at Hampden - a marvellous managerial debut for a headily and steadily improving Scottish national team despite many absences and opposition provided by one of the top teams in the world. And Pat Nevin says “yes, I think Rangers came out best in this game”. For Fucks Sake!!! He had to say something about the Old Firm game coz Dougie Donnelly asked him the question - it’s not me having a go at “wee Timmy” Pat for being wee Timmy Pat. He’s obviosuly so much more than what church or school he went to or what team he supported when he was nine. I’d like to think we all are. I’ve more against his meandering mumbling style of yabbering than I’ll ever have against his background - and I hold Chick “Love Street Lodge number 1690″ Young in much greater contempt for crimes against reporting. But on a great international occassion, we’re totting up how it affects the Old Firm. Fuck me.

But first, here’s Ken McRobb with a look back at Wednesday night’s fashion highlights:

Croatia need more red and white cheques in their strip, dontcha think? Maximise the Sahovnica vive, guys - all over the shirt and half the socks is not enough: you gotta gingham-up the shorts too! Chequered Balkans please! Last night I nearly relapsed into that eye infection which stopped me going to Rugby Park in February! Slavan Bilic looked like Walter Smith from a distance but then I realised the Croat gaffer was sporting a style-defining grey bobble hat without the bobble, complete with suit and open-necked loose tie look. If anyone can get away with it it’s the man I’d most love to see walk through the designer doors of the Ibrox management salon whenever Walter decides to hang up his Luis Vitton. Bilic has the eyes of a murderer, the haircut of a ned and the PR skills of Henry Kissinger and Elizabeth The First’s love child. Our players would KILL for that man! Dado as his assistant - we’d ALL kill for those men!! (£10E/W on Croatia to win Euro 2008)

Hampden was very wet, enjoyable and encouraging as well as half-empty with a crowd half full of half-full folk with no interest in football but I really started enjoying myself when I got home and watched Eurosport highlights of all the friendlies:

The MIGHTY Deutschland - great new strip and a great new goalscorer in Mario Gomez - he could be the new Gerd Muller …except he’s already 132 career goals behind Muller at the same age. Switzerland out-fashioned, out-styled (£70, OUTRIGHT WIN, GERMANY, EURO 2008)

Holland - Austria: Whit a beamer for the other co-hosts - they would have held onto that lead if they’d stuck to their white and black home togs - and what a beamer for Holland in that away strip, proving that red, white and blue does not always look good to Rangers fans. What happened to the trad white tops and orange shorts, my little tulips? In fact, I’d walk down Holland Street with nothing on but my clogs if I could see them Dutch boys go back to their traditional Orange-Black-Orange home combo. Mind you, it always looked better with the three stripes down the sleeves … two if you were called Cruyff and had a boot deal with Puma.

Portugal lose at home to Greece, agaaaaain!!! Otto Rehhagel keeps alive his love affair with Lisbon and gets to keep Big Fil Scolari. AND Portugal, like Croatia, like the Dutch, were proving that Nike will have a sartorial disaster on this summer’s Alpine catwalk. The current cut of the Nike strips is a disaster - they’re doing ugly collars, unecessary trims and disastrous embellishments of the crests. Quelle horrible! Greece, like Deutschland, like the Tres Chic Frenchies raining all over fashonista Beckham’s granny-up party, proved that no-one can compete with The Three Stipes - ADIDAS ROCKS!! If Adi Dasler didn’t make it, darling, it just isn’t gonna make it. (£5 WIN, outright Greece, EURO 2008)

Brazil proved again that only the Sons of the Samba can look good in Nike and that everyone, no matter how poor or ugly, has a fighting chance with Blue tops and white shorts. However, what about the USA??!! Winning 3-0 in Poland in an all-grey horror show which stunned holy goalie Boruc and his ever-elegant team-mates in the classic white-red-white attire of old mother Polska.

I’m having £2.00 Each Way on Romania this summer but my last quid is going on the nose of THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA to lift the Henri Delauney in Vienna this July. Oh yes. Ye heard it here first, folks. A couple of the “serious gamblers” at work were mocking me when I declared my hot tip for EURO 2008 but I know they were just trying to throw me off the scent, trying to keep the odds long on the best Yankee bet of the summer. I’m too long in the tooth to be fooled by that old punter’s trick though. Da Marcus Beasley will be fit again by May, they’ve been World Cup regulars for almost two decades - yup, EURO 2008 could very well be the tournament in which the US of A finally lift major silverware. Ye heard it here first.

And, now that I’ve buttered ye up by giving you all top fashion and gambling pointers, let’s get back to me being an angry Old Firm fan. let’s have a look at what I said on Monday, on a thread, in a rage, after watching too much TV and reading too many newspapers. I began rationally enough, using the football on Saturday 29th March 2008 as my starting point but then, just like the morons I slated above, it all goes a bit … well - …

I remember Strachan’s tactics against Man U at Parkhead in the Champions League - revelation The guy has many a trick up his sleeve and I just hope Waldo is ready to counter them. He’ll know us every bit as well as The Divine Cardigan knows his team and their formations so there’s as much reason for trepidation as optmism. It’s a major moment - and one which is unusually overdue.

I want to win it so badly but - frankly - the sickening hypocritical pish we’ve had to endure over the last few years every time we’ve beaten this mob is creating a dark cloud over this coming weekend for Yours Bluely. What was always in the background at Celtic was foregrounded by O’Neill and is now firmly in situ - Celtic make it almost unpallatable to beat them.

When we beat them there’s always trouble - they are the collective equivelant of Javier Mascherano’s behaviour at Old Trafford yesterday (Easter Sunday). A self-fulfilling prophecy of paranoid indiscipline bringing about punishment which further feeds the claims of mistreatment. The OF derby is the only game on the planet where the team which abuses and threatens the ref, implodes in terms of discipline, has most men booked and generally does all it can to start a fucking riot among the crowd, pelts our players with lighters for taking a corner, uses the catholic religion as a tool to wind-up opposing fans at a football game, refuses to shake hands with opponents, brings players and flags onto our pitch after every defeat at ibrox, and is continually allowed to walk away from our stadium unharmed because - hey - we’re naively just happy to have won, is STILL SEEN AS THE VICTIMS!!!

We’ve done a fair bit of on-field cheating and diving in these games this century - Peter Lovenkrands springs to mind - but the hypocritical hysteria the hooped herberts bring to the whole occassion and to our very existence has really begun to wear me down. I despise this fixture.

The only thing that’s certain about next Saturday is only Rangers can lose: Should Celtic concede more goals and win no points it will still be a moral victory for them. It’ll be the Masonic referee or the sectarian media’s fault. The phrase “show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser” is such a pile of horse shit it’s unreal - show me a good loser and I’ll show you a guy with manners, discipline, respect and the knowledge he’s put everything into the game - but it so perfectly excuses the Celtic mindset that it’s never been allowed to be exposed for the crock it is.

When Celtic played Boavista in 2003 that cunt O’Neill railed against the fact they were EXPECTED to play us on the Sunday after their Thursday away leg (Celtic won both games BTW). Now Peter Lawell, before anyone at Ibrox has even suggested an extension to the season, is demanding Rangers be MADE to play all their games within the prescribed time-table of the season. Fair enough point and I totally agree but what really grates is that when those bastards were in the same situation as us they were claiming conspiracies because the SPL/SFA WOULDN’T change the time-table for them. Now they’re going out their way to bleat and moan like little victim school weans coz they THINK we might make the SAME argument they made five years ago??!! They’re shit fucking scared Rangers might actually win something and, as always, will clutch and scrape at ANYTHING which might prevent that happenig while all the time claiming they’re being PERSECUTED if anyone actually stands up to them. It’s fucking criminal.

So we don’t have to IMAGINE what it would be like if Celtic were forced to play three games a week while we were allowed to concentrate on the one competition we could still win. We KNOW what it’d be like coz it happened with those bastards in 2002/2003 - and we were both in TWO competitions each at that point!!! yet - somehow - they were still being hard done to? Where’s their fucking self-respect??”!! They gret like pussies all the way in 2002/2003. Their players gret like cocks because they won by one less goal away from home than we won by at HOME on the last day of the season. their players slated Dunfermline for lying down to us while IN THE SAME BREATH slating Kilmarnock’s players for trying so hard against them!! Hypocrisy FC - I fucking hope we destroy them - on and off the pitch.

Will never happen though - myths are always more attractive than reality. Being a “rebel” is always more romantic than simply being fair. One of them said, when JOHN REID became their chariman (fucking hilarious - every pretence at an “ethos” went right out the window in one day) that Celtic fans left their politics at the door when they entered Parkhead. I think you’ll find they COLLECT their politics at the front door - and ithey’re the sporting equivelant of the scene in The Office where the guys who lose the pub quiz claim to have actually won it because they chucked someone’s shoe over a roof. Celtic don’t lose - they just change the subject.

Whatever the score, I just can’t wait to get them the fuck out our stadium on Saturday. They’re an embarrassment.

We didn’t sign a Catholic for a century. That’s dispicable. That’s sectarian. Frankly, that’s GOING ABOUT IT ALL THE WRONG WAY. But when ye see the vindictive, medieval, plain-fucking evil shite coming out from the cunt cardinal of cardiff over the last few days - actively ENCOURAGING the continued suffering of people with debilitating illnesses - I’ll take the lesser form of god-bothering which is Protestantism over Catholicism any day. But ye can stick Protestantism too - I love PEOPLE and I want to help PEOPLE - there is no god, there are no ghosts and what we see at Celtic is what happens if you believe in that kind of mumbo jumbo shite.

Bring back “Hullo Hullo” - just change the dubious fucking words - everyone rushed through the bit about “being up to our knees” anyway. It was the hard sound of the “hullo Hullo” which we all loved. It encouraged our team like no other ditty and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this was the song most oft targeted by the paranoid pricks sitting on their green sofas, phoning UEFA’s grasser-line while they watched us play in the Champions League on STV. While, all around us, the Spanish fans supposedly so offended, were swapping scarves and generally having a laugh with us. Funny how the outrage with our sectarian song sheet always peaked when Rangers were doing best on the pitch.

Just change it to “we’re up to our knees in toast and cheese - surrender or I’ll cry”

Hullo Hullo was a song of LOVE - and it’s been allowed to dissapear. Big Jock Knew is a song of hate - and it goes on unchallenged. Drop BJK and bring back Hullo Hullo. The minute we start giving into hyprocrisy we’re fucked. We need to defeat Celtic on AND off the pitch. The former requires a great effort, the latter requires you to simply have the balls to be yourself.

Appropriate line to end on, dontcha think. I’ll let you decide if I was being myself there? I certainly still agree with all my points - but perhaps not the ranting, vindictive way in which I framed them.

Today I was talking to my Celtic-loving amigo Bluebhoy. He was telling me, by ways of a normal conversation with what he thought was a mature adult, of the Parkhead perception of rampant cheating by anti-Celtic officials down the decades. He was actually telling me about an official he thought had gave CELTIC a few dodgy decisions so he thought he was on safe ground. But he didn’t know how tense I was about Saturday. Like he isnae. He didn’t know how wound up I am by the fact due Parliamentary process and life-changing scientific progress has been fucked up by and cow-towing to medieval-thinking, mafia-like religious conscience this week (not that a religious conscience is any kind of real conscience). And Bluebhoy had no idea I was so currently wound up by the total hypocrisy of certain Rangers fans who think it’s okay to sing the openly disgusting “Big Jock Knew” while letting the great songs we sang be banned without so much as raising an eyebrow or, more to the point, changing a lyric. Most of all, he had no idea just how tired I have become of the Celtic mindset as I see it and how I managed in one fell swoop to connect a few things at Ibrox in the last decade with everything else that’s going in the world which upsets me Basically, I’m pissed off with everything about this Saturday. Basically, I’m just REALLY NERVOUS about a really big game and it comes out as it did above.

Bluebhoy’s talked to Celtic greats and they confirmed to him that pro-Rangers bias went on in their day. And I said to him - a good mate wanting a chat with a guy he thinks he can chat to - I said:

And I believe Bertie Auld, Bobby Lennox and co genuinely believed it too. Jock Stein believed it - and he was an ex-Bluenose! Every football team needs extraneous pyschological inspiration to reach the heights - look at Ferguson and Wenger whinging every week about refs etc despite fact they’re constantly doing huge stuff in the game. At Parkhead that off-field inspiration is institutionalised. I wouldn’t have Celtic’s overall mind-set for the world - just as you wouldn’t have Rangers dour sectarianism for the world, mate - but I am still seriously jealous that it’s there - it definitely helps yese reach new heights in some games and excuse yerselves for pulmbing the depths in a few others.

What Celtic have, in my mind, is the tool of groundless emoting to avoid or distract from on-field defeat. And yet, what am I doing?!

I’m out for my post-bolognese constitutional this evening and my phone rings in my pocket. I answer. It’s Bluebhoy. “I’ve got ye a ticket for the UEFA Cup final, mate. In case ye don’t get wan through yer Travel Club. I got two through UEFA. If youse get there you and another good Bluenose I know can huv them - if, as hoped, your mob gets knocked out before the final we’ll baith go, like we did last year, tae see Espanyol and Seville at Hampden.”

Nuff said.

Watching the news tonight, a wee Goth lassie was beaten to death simply coz her and her boyfriend dressed different enough to give the brainless vermin who attacked them the excuse. Colours and clothes as an excuse for violence - pathetic. In Tibet, terrified Bhuddist monks risked death by telling Western journalists the truth about stage-managed Chinese images of peace in their occupied homeland - the Chinese police took the monks away to god knows where to do god knows what to them. Monks - giving their life for democracy. Maybe religion can do some good.

Artur Boruc blesses himself at us? - bless yerself back at him! If it means nothing to you it cannae be an insult.

Saturday? I really hope my team wins that football match.

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Published:
03.27.08 / 10pm
Category:
News