COLD WALTER POURED OVER LISBON

The floodlights will be on, the Brox will be rocking and our eyes will bore into the players’ backs with all the threat and hope of Goldfinger’s laser beam crawling up tae Sean Connery’s chuckies (”No, Mr Lisbon, I expect you tae get pumped”!) - but it will be light. The sky, as unnoticed as it will go at 19:45Hours on Thursday 3rd April 2008, will contain the dying embers of daylight. Hopefully, it’ll be as beautifully violet-red as it was over Mount Florida in the glowing aftermath of last month’s League Cup Final. Hopefully it will promise of more delight to come in future days. But it will be light. Day light. Not a late summer or freshly autumnal luminescence, but the very particular kind of colour brought by Spring. And below that sky, Rangers will play in European competition. Ah, man - I always knew I’d live long enough …

It’s a quiet triumph. It’s a fleeting consideration. To think about the time of year. It’s still fucking beautiful though. Remember the night we played CSKA Moscow at Ibrox in the 1992/93 Champions League? We’re heading towards that kind of serenity once again. It’s not yet late enough in the season. We won’t realise winter has gone tomorrow. But win this one and we’ll play PSV or Fiorentina in a light of day, a time of year which only Fiorentina have previously enjoyed at Ibrox - because only Fiorentina have played a European final at Ibrox.

We lost to Fiorentina in 1961, we drew 0-0 with CSKA Moscow thirty two years later. But so much of what happened since and in-between means we all deserve to take a deep breath and a look around before Sporting Lisbon pay their second ever visit to Govan. This is our first old-fashioned, home and away quarter-final in twenty years, since Steau Bucharest put us out the old European Cup. In 92/93 we were a goal away from the final of the newly re-packaged European Cup, from what were quarter-final groups. This week sees Rangers, with more than half a century of European football under our belt, reach only our 12th official Qurter-final and our third in twenty eight years.

I was there the night against Steau. I wasn’t the night against CSKA - long story - but I was glued to the telly. And actually being physically glued to our telly, by the scrotum, might have been less painful than what happened at Ibrox and in Brugges that night. I was as transfixed and dissapointed as every other 10-year-old watching the Cologne game at/from Ibrox in 1979 (i was at my gran’s), postponed from the Wednesday coz of snow. Here’s hoping that, now the ides of March are behind us, there’s no Thursday night quarter-final ju-ju left in the soil by Dieter Muller.

However, before the game, we have to stop the narrative, get off the boat, take a look sideways and breathe in the air of what we’ve wanted so bad for so long that some of us have even forgotten it once existed for Rangers. For me it’s only the 4th UEFA quarter-final I can remember featuring my team. The very fact we are playing this game means EUROPEAN RESPECTABILITY this season. This is the realest of real deals. This is the very minimum level Rangers should be achieving every season. This is what, for most of my football-supporting life, I’ve lusted after. This is where my heart swells with more than just chip fat and the basic extra pride which comes from simply supporting The Teds. This is where the rib cage pushes itself a tad more earnestly against the hankie pocket. As soon as they start suffixing the word “final” when describing the stage of the European contest we’re in, Rangers are looking at something better than dissapointment and something a whole lot further away from humiliation. This is where we should start enjoying ourselves. In next year’s football annuals the Qs next to a lst of Rangers European opponents in 2007/08 won’t just stand for “Qualifying round”.

Bring it on. Come here, you quarter-final beaut ye - coz I’ve been waiting a long, long, lonely time to see you again.

And the opponent is perfect. An historic name, a huge proud club - one with whom we have our own inter-personal history and who coudl never be underestimated by anyone - but one which this season is beatable … IF WE MAINTAIN OUR PRESENT WAYS. We, the punters, are allowed a look around. We can suck in the freshness of this glory and then get as traumatically terrified as we like about the prospect of being humped by Sporting, losing at Tannadice again, going down twice at Parkhead and ending the season with just the CIS cup to our name while Celtic win three-in-a-row.

The team, on the other hand, can go neither one way nor the other. They can take only the confidence gleaned from our success so far and the wariness from the ever-present prospect of defeat. From this they must carve a middle way, an equilibrium of concentration sauced with ease. They can’t get too up nor doon about the show so far - and in that way they keep the show going.

But so emotionally wrecked have I become by this amazing season and so tight do we all feel with our heroes, that we can’t help confusing our own emotions with those of Ferguson, McGregor, Weir, Cuellar and co. And I’m drained.

The calendar year has kind of dissapeared. The names of the months have been replaced by runs of difficult games, What the Daily Recoird calls “crucial periods of the season”. If ye win everything, or if you’re Rangers FC, then every GAME is crucial, far less every collection of games. But we can’t cope with that so we break the fixture list down into little bundles in our heads. I was most recently going for the Irish/green-and-white thing, as it took in our games against Werder, Celtic, Hibs (in league and cup) and even the League Cup final because Dundee united used to be Dundee Hibs/Harp/Erin … something like that. But we’ve come through them all - we’ve won them all and, amazingly, we still have another FOUR GAMES against teams wearing green and white hoops - and every one of them will be utterly pivotal and historic. Hopefully. I think.

The defeat of Celtic on Saurday seemed to bring a long daunting, exciting period of super-important games to an end. And we won the fucking LOT OF THEM!!! Yet, just when a wee bit of conrgratulation might seem in order, it would actually be suicidal. I dunno about you but my head can’t cope. If Rangers are as slack and slow against Sporting Lisbon as my heart’s becoming in transferring its affections from one amazing Rangers game to the next, then we’ll be humped sideways by the team of “callow latin youths” every fate-tempting paper in the land thinks we’re gonnae walk all over. It’s not that I’m getting cocky about the next game - it’s just that I’m so reluctant to let go of the last one. Or the one before that. Or the one before that. (Naw - wait - the Partick game ye can keep)

Come on tae fuck! Three years without a domestic trophy allowed us to at least fully appreciate and process the succesive qualifying for Europe past-Xmas which we enjoyed under Eck McLeish and PLG. But when Walter has us humping Lyon away, Stuttgart at home, Werder Bremen at home adn drawing with Barcelona AS WELL AS winning League Cup finals on penalty shoot-outs after twice coming from behind and beating Celtic four times on the trot without conceding a goal as well as progressing past Hibs in the Scottsih Cup and watching Celtic go out … IT’S ALL TOO MUCH AT ONCE!!!

I don’t want THREE DAYS between these games(and please remenber, as well as all this, Scotland were beating France away and giving the Ukraine a riding at Hampden!) - I want three WEEKS … sometimes three months. I want to slowly sip down, luxuriate in the tatse of every millilitre of enjoyment from some of those matches. The two Bremen games were worth three years of contemplation EACH!

I’m loving it and I and I’m loving it so much that I want more TIME to love it. Oh Saturday was so sweet, so intense, so nice, so raw and emotional - and now, with all the GARBAGE pouring forth from the media about Sporting’s “poor away form” (they beat Dynamo in Kiev this season for fuck’s sake!!) there’s a real chance that our great results in Europe and our recent domination of Scotland’s two-times Champions League last-16ers will make us think this quarter-final is just a formality.

I’m worried. I was worried the players might feel the same as me - coz they were at all these games with me, ye know.

I was worried. And then I saw the news on Wednesday evening. And then I saw Walter. And then I wasn’t worried - because he is. And then I knew the players weren’t thinking further ahead or further back than Sporting Lisbon at Ibrox, because I saw the coldest of focus in Walter’s eyes and in Walter’s voice I heard the kind of timbre usually reserved for the phrase “cut the green wire”. We thought MARCH was important??!! Walter knows April is absolutely COLOSSAL. And he knows that the only way May will ever be as PHENOMENALLY MEGA as we all want it to be is if he doesnae look any further forward than SPORTING LISBON AT IBROX.

Sporting played in the first ever European Cup match - they drew 3-3 with Partizan Belgrade. They had a legendary team with a forward line known as “the five violins” which peaked just before European competition came along. They, like us, have only ever won the European Cup Winners Cup - once. Like us, there was a craziness about their win; In 1964 they played in front of the lowest crowd ever to attend a European final and they drew 3-3 with MTK Budapest (hilarious semi-final conquerors of Celtic that season) in the Heysel in Brussels. The replay was moved to Antwerp where news of the first game quadroupled the crowd. Sporting won 1-0. And, NO - CELTIC DID NOT INSPIRE THEM TO SWITCH TO GREEN AND WHITE HOOPS WHEN THE GLESGIE HOOPS WON THE EUROPEAN CUP IN LISOBON IN 1967!!!. If I hear that PISH once more I’ll have to refer everyne to Sporting’s website for pictures of their 1964 team, wearing the same strip their 2008 team will be wearing tomorrow night (well, it’ll have been washed since I’d imagine.)

Sporting, like us, kinda dislike their city rivals - Benfica - who’ve won the European cup. Sporting, unlike us, also have Porto to dislike for the same extra reason. Sporting, unlike us, play in green and white hoops. With black shorts. Sporting will be the 61st European finalist, out of the total of 96, who I’ve seen in the flesh. I need two more to get to two-thirds of the total. The only other previous European finalist in this season’s UEFA Cup who I’ve never seen before are Fiorentina.

We met Sporting in 1972, enroute to our only ever European trophy win. It seems ironic and temptingly lucky to think we’ll meet them again when, after our performance againt Werder we realised this season’s Rangers team can actually reach this season’s UEFA cup final. However, we played Moscow Dynamo exactly thirty seasons on from our last competitive meeting, in Barcelona, and that ultimately meant fuck all. It gives it a touch of extra romance to know that we had such an amazing, traumatic time when last we met Sporting - we beat them on away goals - (6-6 on aggregate!!!) but the ref didnae know about what was then the new away goals rule and he made us take part in a penalty shoot-out. We didnae score a single pen and only found out we were through whle Sporting were parading their keeper around their stadium to a jubilant home crowd! OOPS!

Tomorrow, we can use that if we wish. We can use their strips if we wish (please wear yer home strip, Sporting - don’t try to “quell the hell” by not wearing yer Celtic-ish strip … like yese did against Celtic and their Sporting-ish strip!). We should use the fact it’s a quarter-final above all esle. We should use our love of The Gers and the fact we, as Teddy Bears, have more than fucking earned this night, to ROAR SPORTING BACK TO LISBON WITH NO GOALS TO THEIR NAME, NO CLEAN SHEET TO THEIR NAME AND FEAR IN THEIR BELLY ABOUT WHAT WE MIGHT ALSO DO TO THEM ON THEIR HOME PATCH!!!

It’s been a long, hard season of endless joy and celebration, I know troops. I understand. but please, lets’ just try and raise ourselves once more. Don’t fall asleep. Don’t lose yer focus. Don’t think about Celtic last week. Don’t think about Dundee United next week. Just focus.

On European nights, since I hit my mid-thirties, I usually have an underlying feeling of putting my shoulder to the back of some monolithic weight once again. The European burden is one I carry like a concrete albatross. I love European nights at Ibrox but I want it so much I sometimes go past the point of cheery, “ha-ha-ha” enjoyment. Every European game feels like another teasing prelude to yet more ultimate dissapointment. Coz, although reaching a quarter-final is fantastic by the standards of the last thirty years - basically it’s fantastic by the standards we’ve known since winning our one and only European trophy - it’s still far short of what Rangers need. We need a piece of European silverware in the cabinet again to save a generation, to reward a generation and to add another one to the season ticket waiting list.

So often I’ve approached a European night at Ibrox thinking that the final of the tournament in which we’re competing is more distant than my chances of a medal finish in the men’s 100metres at Beijing. So often I’ve walked up to or away from those floodlit roof fascias almost weary with the knowledge of how many teams and how many rounds we’d have to get past before I finally realised my most commonly-occuring footballing fantasy, in a life dedicated to football. This Thursday night, as I approach Ibrox for yet another European match, I will know it can only be, at best, for the second-last time this season. After Sporting Lisbon’s visit, there can only be one more European game at Ibrox this season. It may never happen or it may end in a humping but - hey - the good ending is almost as clearly in sight as the bad one. For me that’s a major buzz. For that I’m so grateful to this team and Ally, Kenny and Walter.

For Walter, however, it means as much change to the routine as if we were playing the first leg of a 2nd round qualifyer. He’s neither looking back nor forward. Walter’s just looking at Sporting Lisbon, now. And he’s staring them right in the fucking eye-balls.

My dream for my retirement? Watching DVD or video footage of Rangers in a European final … and it’s in COLOUR!

PS - DID YOU KNOW, the night Rangers won the European Cup Winners Cup in Barcelona, Scotland played an international at Hampden. There were no Rangers players in the Scotland squad that night either - SFA conspiracy! So our game, our only ever victorious European final was not shown live on TV as it might have affected the Hampden crowd. And Lou Macari came on as a sub for his first Scotland cap.

This fact, with which you can stun the ever-increasing number of Celtic supporters at your place of work, was gleaned from Barcelona Here We Come, the official story of Rangers 1972 European Cup Winners Cup triumph by Ronnie Esplin and Alex Anderson, photos by Eric McCowat. In my entirely neutral view it’s arguably the greatest football book ever written. In fact it’s so arguably great ye cannae buy a copy aff embdy except me and Ronnie. I’ve got a hoose full off them. In fact I’ve fashioned an igloo-like construction from the un-pulped copies, into which I withdraw from the world whenever we lose a big European game.