SPLIT INFINITIVE

I arrived in Dundee two hours before kick-off on Sunday. Just a WEEEE bit up-tight and excited I was that morning! So, I decided to top up the petrol before the game which, after full-time at Tannadice, would let me shoot straight back into the nearest traffic jam with never a care about having enough gas in the tank. That road of endless roundabouts ye take in the City of Discovery as ye head past the toon centre and towards the Broonsesque and Soapy Souteresque environs of Tannadice and Dens - I drove into one of the BP garages on that wee Cumernauldesque and East Kilbridesque thoroughfare. Got oot the car - nae unleaded in pump number 1. Gets back in the car, reverses and parks up the arse of the ubiquitous white van - he’s taking on diesel but the “out of use” sign is on the unleaded pump. I reverse again and re-align myself with the last filling station on the forecourt - eventually the back-packing, snowboarding,mountain-biking family of 2.4 kids gets their 4×4 oot my way and - BINGO! - the third pump has its pencil unleaded. I get inside the wee shop to pay up and treats myself to a TRIO Bounty Bar as a reward for my persistence. It was a day of threes. It was a day of being put down three times but hanging on in there and eventually getting a result.

1 hour and fifty minutes before kick-off I left that roundabout-riddled route once again, veering high off to my left, taking another three or four roundabouts and parking up outside a very special restaurant. Had my KFC in Dundee before the RFC scored Three.

As I sat there munching down my 2-piece Colonel’s Meal (if it hadn’t been so soon after my McBreakfast I might have gone for the 3-piece, which would have made more sense in terms of the pathetic attempt at symbolism going on here. But then I suppose Rangers taking all three points would make more sense too! We had three different goal-scorers though! Oops - no - wait a minute - Caros Cuellar makes four) and I opened up the Sunday Herald Sports section. Page 2 contained a wee piece on Gavin Rae and how Le Guen hung him out to dry by giving him the captaincy that fateful, horrible day at Fir Park last season. It isn’t lift music they play in KFCs - it’s just a very mainstream musical accompaniement to your heart attack. However, I didn’t know the song or the artist - sounded kinda like the Cranberries actually - but the line being continually repeated as I read Rae’s dig at PLG was “I don’t know why you did it, I don’t know why you did it”. And Gavin said he didn’t ever get an explanation from Paul.

But Gav did get a place in the FA Cup final with Cardiff later that day so well done to him and Stevie Thompson. And well done to me for predicting Walter Smith would have us beating Celtic regularly and probably winning the league again at his first attempt. NOT so well done to me for thinking PLG was the only way to go for progress on the European front. Even if the two pairs of hoops stop us realising our two-fronted dream this season - If Sporting do us on Thursday and Celtic pump us full of unleaded twice at Parkhead to launch a spectacular comeback for three-in-a-row - Walter has still worked miracles on both fronts. If we win nothing more than the CIS Cup this season, Walter has still brought back the fight on all fronts. No-one in the media and not many on the Ibrox terraces would forgive him if he didnae win the SPL now but, on the European front, my worry is that just as many would say “well done” and we’d all just take it on the chin, expecting more progress next year.

If life’s taught us anything it’s that a great European season can be yer last for fucking eons. Ye have to squeeze every drop out it while ye can. Sometimes those garages yer banking on driving into just a little further down the road are all dry. We MUST give every last drop on Thursday night, lest it’s another 36 years before we stare a European final in the face. But, whatever happens on Thursday, Walter has totally shamed my assesment of his continental competence. My pre-season prediction was “Domestoc- great. Europe - crap”. I’m so chuffed to have got the second half of that reverse forecast SO wrong. But I’ve still been SO wrong. Everything I thought we would get after three years of rebuilding under Le Guen, Walter has us on the cusp of achieving after just 16 months. He’s a better manager than he was when he left - and that’s fucking saying something.

Me? Well, I’ve always been shite with predictions!

I think we’re going out on Thursday, and by a couple of clear goals. So here’s hoping I’m as bas as ever with that forecats - but we’ll deal with the Lisbon build-up more comprehensively on Wednesday evening. For now, I can tell you one of the most spectacularly shite predictions I made this year was that the last weekend of the SPL season would fall on 10th/11th May. I only discovered last night, with the announcement of the post-split fixtures, that the SPL is in fact rounded up the foillowing weekend. The Wee Red Book said the Scottish Cup Final would be either the 17th or 24th May so I crazily assumed my sister-in-law’s wedding, on Saturday the 10th of May 2008, would be on the EVE of Rangers final SPL game of 2007/2008. Coz, ye know, the final round of top six fixtures always take place on a Sunday.

While you were all sitting last night (Monday) trying to work out what needs to happen for us to win the league at Parkhead, I was sitting by my mobile phone, feeling as if someone in the family had just died. It was my mate texting me, breaking it to me that not only were the Teds playing on the day I’d be at a wedding, but we were playing Dundee United at HOME.

Where my heart is.

I haven’t missed a single home game all season. Friendlies, cup, league, Europe. I’ve been at them all. Every year for the last seven I’ve always managed to miss ONE home game, total, for whatever reason. But never the last one, and never a sensationally important one. This year, this season, irrespective of how well or poorly Rangers performed, I had it down that I would be at every single home game this season. When ye get past the age or capability of going to EVERY game in a season, ye at least like to make all the ones ye get a ticket for.

I’m fucking devestated troops. Absolutely devestated.

It’s not only that I’ll miss a potentially memorable game in an already historic season - it’s just that I wanted to be totally involved, at least on teh hme front, from the Ajax and Chelsea friendlies right through. Ye need to be on the inside. Ye then feel like ye’ve earned every bit of glory you’ve hunted. Doing ALL THE HOME GAMES would more than compensate for the fact I’ve only done some of the away ones.

So, one thing I can be sure of predicting correctly is that, while I will witness omething amazing at the wedding - two people in love cementing their blah, blah, blah - I will miss something amazing at Ibrox, something which I haven’t seen in my own 31-year love affair with The Teds. I don’t knwo what it’ll be yet, but if I’m not there ye can be sure it’s gonnae be fucking amazing. I’ve written a chapter in a book about this - I have previous in this department. Rangers sending my Cup Final ticket to the wrong address, me getting the night wrong for the Supporter’s Club meeting when they dished oot the briefs for Aberdeen at Pittoidrie in 1987 and my name being pulled out the hat but me not being there to collect my brief and so - bang - twice in my life I’ve missed moments few folk deserved more than myself. Dundee United at Ibrox will be the day we win or lose the SPL - coz I won’t be there.

I hope we still have days at Manchester and Hampden after that United match on the 10th. But I won’t be at our own place, our Govan Palace on Saurday 10th May. Its’ on fucking Setanta as well! Just to put the boot in I’ll probably pick up a brief sight of us on a tv in a bar or something, reducing the second biggest love of my life to a fucking tourist attraction - something ye see IN PASSING - instead of allowing me to be at the very heart of it, breathing it.

I love my sister -in -law. She’s one of life’s great people. I would never miss that day and she will be more gutted than me that the fixtures have worked out this way. She’ll probably try to cancel the wedding now, just so “Alex can get to the game”. That’s why I cannae vene be bitter ather - Coz I genuinely intend to be at her wadding out of more than duty - coz she’s lovely like that! But, unfortunatley, all the other selfish “traditionalist” bastards in our respective families will poo-poo that perfectly valid option - of cancelling the nuptials til the close season. Ye know it’s just a matter of time til one of my relations says “but ye go to the football EVERY week - what difference is missing one game going to make??!! And, that auntie WILL be decked, Zimmer frame or no zimmer frame.

The biggest tragedy of all is that this is absolutely nothing like a tragedy. So I can’t even be allowed to mourn it properly. It’s “only football” is the truth we’re all trying to avoid all our lives, us fitbaw punters. Calendar nightmares like this force ye into that form of “adulthood” which the sad, twisted, bitter people of the planet whish upon all those who actually have some imagination and some desire to live life rather than bitterly avoid death.

I wouldnae miss Ruths’ wedding for the world but I can’t believe that the day we might win the league or even pick up the trophy - basically, a day I’m being offered the world - is what I will actually have to give up. Even if we lose the league, I want to be there, I want to see it through from beginning to very end. I want to end with my team what I started with my team.

Now I just feel like someone involved in a threesome with Sting and Trudy Tyler: I’ve had all the relentless, grinding build-up - but I won’t be allowed an orgasm.

Fucking “SPL” - what a piece of amateurish tantric shite.