REAL MEN LIKE IT HARD! (GERS … 0 Sporting Lesbian… 0)

Gut instinct? We’ll lose by a couple of goals over there. Before I’ve even got my jacket off, my slippers on, my crack pipe charged up or I’ve spent a few hours talking to the video tape of the game, all to gently extinguish the surfeit of Big Match nerves, my of-the-moment estimate of the overall price of this quarter-final tie is expensive: I think The Gers are out, troops. I don’t know if we have another Panathinaikos in us. And, in many ways, Lisbon could be worse than Bremen. At least Bremen lumped endless high balls into us - playing to our strengths - these sleekit little fuckers will be doing the tippy-tappy, intricate pish which might just be our undoing. As predicted, the papers were writing off our latest European opponents with indecent haste. So much for their reputation as “poor travellers”! As stated on Wed night, on these here pages, Sporting did Dynamo in Kiev this season - they also took a scoring draw home from Bolton. Although my pre-match rants won’t quite have Mystic Meg shitting herself about her job security, The Teds on the pitch did indeed seem as mentally and physically drained tonight as The Bears in the stands. I can never blame either for that after this season’s heroics.

And yet, the moment I say this, the moment I read back my gut instincts, I’m comforted. With a gut so full of junk food there’s every reason to expect your instincts will become confused and befuddled in a swirling quagmire of Coca Cola, Becks, Donner meat, Pedigree Chum and Yorkies. If The Gers were tired tonight yet still managed to keeo a clean sheet at home - for the THIRD STRAIGHT UEFA Cup Tie in fact - and if Sporting have managed goals on travels to Kiev and Permiership grounds but couldn’t get one at Ibrox then, once again, The Gers really are pulling out all the stops. If we’re obliterating the very memory of conceding “away goals”, and doing so while being a bit knacked, then there’s every reason to believe we can conjure up another result next Thursday. After all, have we not fucking REVELLED in backs-against-the breezeblock scenarios all season long. Since when have we done anything the easy way this season? Since when have we pair Bears watched a Gers triumph with every part of our personal areas remaining bone dry??!! Eh??!

If it’s a small ask, we’ll make it just difficult enough to demand our concentration. If it’s a big ask then, these days, that’s when The Rangers usually have the answers.

When I first took my place at this well-tapped keyboard tonight, Davie Weir’s suspension was another debit against the objective optimisim account. Yet did Davie not make one or two uncharacteristic errors of judgement tonight, one of which led to that costly cautio? He’s been legendary since he arrived at Ibrox but there’s reason to belive, after he thrice run himself into uneccessary trouble this evening, that Davie Weir might be timing his enforced break to perfection. Get Christian Dailly in beside Carlos and we may well be okay. Fuck it - my guts are permanently churning - there’ll be another new instinct along in a second.

They wear a strip with horrible connotations for us, they come from a city with horrible connotations for us, they’re a disgusting little cum-stain on the concept of sportsmanship, their fans are wankers and when they sniff an angle they’re like flies round shite. Man - this was the first time I’d ever seen them in the flesh and I already fucking loathe Sporting Lisbon. At first yer thinking, sarcastically, “hey they’re strips actually quite nice - must be the black shorts which make all the difference!” and then you remember the taxi full of them on Shieldhall Road with the window rolled down and some sun-tanned streak of Iberian pish shouting “The special one” as he points to his hoops.

“Aye - special NEEDS, ya fucking balloon” wasn’t perhaps the most decorous riposte I’ve ever come up with but, after having a wee swatch at them after the final whistle, from my Govan Rear vantage point, the second bunhc of hooped away fans to attend Ibrox in five days really are a pile of wank. Calling themselves “Torcida”, glorifying the ethnic horrors of post-Yugoslavian football, really did put the used condom on the cake for me. Their gesticulations to the polis and to our innocent Blue Order brothers confirmed my initial findings. The Porto fans were brilliant - this mob, the TRAVELLING mob anyway, are scum.

And little wonder when following such an underhand mutilation of football. As I watched the first spate of pathetic time-wasting and play-acting I was suddenly reminded of Vitor Baia’s antics in the 2003 UEFA Cup final, somewhere in Spain, which almost had me sympathising with Scotland’s very own emerald hooped herberts. I used to sympathise with Portugal, for never having won a major international tournament. As I get older, however, I love to see them lose. It’s ridiculous in many ways - to prefer an honest leg-breaking tackle to the “heresey” of being spat upon. But as much as I revere their football skills, I’m just genetically programmed to loathe the inate hypocrisy of the latin game.

Kevin Thomson is being treated like a war criminal because he took a dive against Celtic. We all know it’s actually because he SCORED THE WINNER AGAINST CELTIC and while no-one at Rangers is “proud” to see Kevin dive, the hysteria around one incident in a game packed with dodgy decisions (ie, a normal game of football) is the real evil Rangers must fight against lest we end up like Italy or Portugal wher the sporting ethos is totally drowned out by whoever greets loudest. A week earlier Nakamura took a dive in Aberdeen’s box to try and win a penalty in the Scottish Cup, Jan Vengoor of Hesselink almost borke Zander Diamond’s skull with vicious elbowing in the same game: Nothing. No reaction. No-one cares. Especially Rangers fans. Everyone else accepts this is part of the game, part of its theatre. When it happens aginst Celtic, however, we’re expected to be summoned to the Hague. The media blow it up, we usually let it wash over us, Celtic get distracted from their own failings, we get the trophies - everyone’s happy. In Portugal, however, they manage to multiply this mania by ten times the cowardice, and use it in the course of each 90 minutes they play.

If Kev T is an arch cheat - something which, strangley, only seems to have become a possible trait of his THIS WEEK - then he had a masterclass this evening in how it’s REALLY done. What stuns me is how Portugese teams can actually maintain enough concentration to remember how to play football when they eventually get hold of the ball. They spend so much time appealing, time-wasting, play-acting and perfecting the demeanour of someone liberating Belsen that it’s a wonder they have the psychological energy - nay the fucking SELF-RESPECT - left in their body to enable coherent ball control skills.

Not a surprise when they behave like this. But always disgusting. I decided tonight I wisnae gonnae bother rising above it. Rarely have I given an opposing team such abuse. Rarely have I been out my seat more to shout invective rather than encouragement. When a player hits the deck like a circus act falling from his stilts, rolls around like Ewan McGregor going Cold Turkey in train-spotting, greets for his sainted mammy until the stretcher arrives for him and is back on the pitch thirty seconds later, trying to break Barry Ferguson’s ankles, ye just have to get into the pantomime spirit of it all or yer gonnae explode. Oh, yes you are.

When they do the writhing about I always feel total, if slightly handy indignation on behalf of guys like Eduardo, Ian Durrant or David Boost - people who’ve suffered injuries which actually merit the kind of epileptic overacting we saw from Sporting’s players tonight. But when one of them fouls Kirk Broadfoot and then motions towards him to “get up and stop acting it” … well, it’s at moments like that I’m glad I’m not sat in the front of any Ibrox stand, near the pitch.

Vermin. Is perhaps a bit too strong. It’s only football after all. So there was absolutely no need for me to call them “rides”, “cunts”, “scum” or that other name. What was it? Vermin.

And when they did play football, Sporting’s epic cheating actually became something of a relief. As the clock hit the late seventies, those litte potential breakaways those of us with an elevated view had been reconnoiterring for most of the game actually matured into a period of dangerously sustained possession. As the clock headed through the eighties for the nineties (Do you know - the scoreboard clock at Bratislava’s Tehelne Pole stadium is the only one I’ve ever seen which goes PAST the 90 mark!) Sporting’s greater instinctual interest in cheating that clock prevented them from cashing in on our sudden unease in defence. Davie Weir was chief offender in being unable to resist losing the baw the moment we retrieved it. But Davie, as with the rest of our team, recovered and re-won the day - every time.

We never had any sustained momentum going forward. We won many a corner and those provided our only continued route to the Sporting goal. Our open play needed Barry Ferguson to, basically, send himself long balls from the middle of the park to the penalty spot. Our captain couldn’t get on the end of his own through-passes though. In this respect, in respect of our continued and honourable and damn fucking awe-inspiring use of one man up front, the main aim of the evening was to keep a clean sheet. We did that and I’m loving it.

For years, on this blog, I’ve railed against our moments of European incompetence. I just want to see Rangers LOOK LIKE THE REAL DEAL in Europe, look like we know what we’re doing. And the greatest on-going bugbear, the most persistent indicator that Rangers are NOT ready for European glory has always been, for me, the number of times we concede a European goal at home. “away” goals are the killers in Europe and the teams who can avoid conceding them tend to be the teams who do the biz or, at least, know how the biz works. Rangers can now only have a maximum of one more game at Ibrox in Europe this season. Even if that happens and Fiorentina or PSV Eindhoven put six past us in Govan, I’ll have been witness to SIX European clean sheets at Ibrox this season. HALF A DOZEN TMEs in 2007/2008 Rangers have ensured the opposition, in Ibrox for UEFA competition, have gone home with NO GOALS to their name.

Against Zeta this was expected. Against Red Star it was bloody handy. Against Barcelona it was the cause for epoch-making celebration. Against Panathinaikos I had to convince a few folk it was well worth it, against Werder Bremen it was part of an all-round orgasmic evening. Now, against Sporting, the fatalist inside me says we needed more than just a clean sheet at the back - if Sporting’s weakness was indeed in their away form then we had to take a lead and a clean sheet over there. But the way Rangers play, the way we’re set up and the fact Daniel Cousin could be back next week, means we’re very much in this tie. And, irrespective of the final outcome in the Jose Alvalade, Rangers have given me the one thing which comes close to being as precious as a European trohy itself: They’ve shown me NOUS in Europe. The’ve given us six home clean sheets.

Fucking love you, Teds - so ah dae.

The people I feel really sorry for are the street hawkers outside Ibrox. The ones selling the scarves. he bandit salesmen, with their wee display of wares up on a fence or down on a tarpaulined section of pavement or pinned to a dart board case resting against a bollard. Most of all, the ones who sell the half-and-half scarves, for European souveniers. My heart goes out to them in the first four months of 2008. They must have spent the last decade hoping for a long, sustained European run by Rangers. That way they can churn out even more special souvenier scarves and the high percentage of plastic Rangers fans who turn up for these games will buy up the traditional Red, White and Blue bar scarves in greater numbers than usual. Folk like me, who want to mark the occasson might go for a half-and-half scarf for the football trivia collection in the hoose. Fifty percent of the scarf says Rangers, in our colours, the other half has the name of that night’s opponent, highlighted in their respective shades and hues.

And then we draw Panathinaikos. And then Werder Bremen. And now Sporting Lisbon. All green and white - one with a shamrock for a badge, one with a hooped strip. Ye’ve never, in yer life, seen more “speshelle sooveneeyur scarves” in so little danger of being bought. And now, suddenly, there’s only the prospect of one more European game at Ibrox - and that prospect is far from secure.

The Teds did look a bit head and leg weary tonight. The crowd too wasn’t just AS rabid as I expected us to be. Think that’s why I was going full-tilt on the clichéd baiting of latino skuldugerry. Just wanted to get the atmosphere up a bit. Saturday’s game was still occupying so many of our thoughts - it was such an attritional classic that tonight became a bit to soon to be getting THAT wound-up again. Tonight was, for me anyway, so much more important than Saturday’s internecine concerns. Even if ye think beating Celtic - yawn! - is the be-all and end-all, ye still know a European quarter-final is MASSIVE. But what we know can’t change what we’ve been through and the energy, the urgency just wasn’t there. We were all drained. It was strange.

Perhaps the time of year confused us. It was daylight and Rangers were still in Europe. Perhaps - and this is the most likely cause for the less-than-mental atmos - the fact Sporting aren’t anywhere near as good as Werder Bremen made it a bit more difficult for us to get fired right up for it: Two and two rarely make four in football and just because weve beaten a greater team in the previous round doesn’t mean we’ll walk all over our next European opponent - but it fairly messes with yer focus. Perhaps the price of the tickets ensured a few of the punters were more touristic and shy.

I had a classic ongoing behind me. Two tourists - one yer typical growling pit-bull 1960s hard man, whisky faced, half-pished, straight off an oil-rigg and wanting to be sentimentally aggressive. The other, skinny, early twenties, studenty, trying to slum it with the proles and do a bit of shouting to get in touch with his inner male. I usually find these kinda punters a bit annoying but tonight I wanted another 20,000 of them - coz at least they were making some sustained noise. But it was hilarious. Yer old hard man would be out his seat every two seconds “Fucking kill that cunt, Braodfoot - get the finger oot man - boot his tarrier baws!” and then his new friend would shout what almost amounted to subtitles for the hard of profanity: “Yeah, Kirk - don’t just let him walk all over you. Stamp your authority on proceedings!” .. or such like.

My second European quarter-final in 20 years was perhaps always gonnae be an anti-climax, with so much emotion invested in it. But if we can get through Sunday without any more injuries or set-backs - and Goram only knows that’ll be fucking difficult seeing as we’re at bloody TANNADICE and they like a piece of us up there these days - we’ll get four more days rest, without the hype of last weekend attending it. We’ll go over to Lisbon as underdogs, at least we are to the people we want to think of us as underdogs - Sporting Lisbon - and we’ll face a young, fit team of tricksters in a hostile atmosphere and draining heat.

It’ll be fucking tough. And that’s the way this Rangers team prefers it because so are they - fucking tough.