GRAVE CHARACTER! (GERS … 1 Saintees …1[AET], GERS win 4-3 on Pens)

Erm … hullo? Is that you, troops? Yeah? Yes, hello. Erm - yes - I’m afraid I’m not gonnae be able to make it in today. No. Sorry. Gonnae have to have a wee sick day. Yeah - erm (cough! Cough!) - see I’m really ill. Really genuinely - erm - sick. Why did I say “genuinely”? I don’t know. Strange that - eh! - Hah-ha … haaa-choo! Erm, yes. Just woke up with this - erm - (splutter!) - really bad, bad, really bad cough and stuff … And I cannae see me being able to be of much use to youse today … or tonight. Sorry? What’s that? No, I DON’T have any “bits of toilet paper stuck up my nose” - why would you think that? - huh! That’s crrrraaaayzeee talk! - this is just how I sound just now - bunged-up and really genuinely, honestly, authentically ill. Unwell. (cough!) I can’t come in. I’m sure you don’t need me to explain anything about today’s game anyway - it’s on all the other websites (I hear Follow Follow’s really good - check it out!) and it’ll be in all the Monday newspapers (I hear Graham Spiers is always a cracking good read - check him out!) … and it was on the telly anyway. You don’t need ME to tell you about Rangers-St Johnstone. SO - yeah - I’m just going to get into bed and hopefully I’ll feel much better tomorrow. Okay, talk to you lat… what?

Doctor? No - no, no - noooo, I’m sure I don’t need a doctor. I’ll probably be better tomorrow. I just need to take a …. OH, FUCK!! - ALRIGHT THEN!!! ALRIGHT THEN YOU SICK, MERCILESS BASTARDS - I’M NOT ILL!! OKAY??!! HAPPY NOW??!! I’M JUST FUCKING EXHAUSTED, OKAY!! I’M JUST MENTALLY FUCKING DRAINED!!! YOU GOT ME BANG TO RIGHTS - SATISFIED??!! I’M AT IT - I ADMIT IT!! YOU BUSTED ME. WELL DONE - NOW … PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE JUST LET ME PULL A SICKEY - PLEEEEASE! I CANNAE TAKE IT! I CANNAE HANDLE IT, TROOPS! I NEED A BREAK - PLEEEASE! I cannae go back there - ye cannae make me re-live that game today - I’m noh up tae it. Please, boays - PLEASE. Don’t. Do. It. To. Me … eee - eeee ee-he-heh…

I’m … (sob!) … just … (boo-hoo!) …totally … (greet!) … fucking …(nyah-ha-hah- MAAAAMMYY!!!) … too …(blub!) … tired … to …(sob!) … type what I saw today … I can’t re-live that. I can’t. Not yet. Just give me a wee while to collect myself. Give me a wee bit of recovery time. Please, troops. Please. I’ll have a fully-detailed rant about the 2008 Scottish Cup semi-final between us and the Perth Saints - I will - I’ll have it for you soon - honest - just not today. Please. Give me til about - I dunno - JULY??!!

Fucking hell.

Oh, fucking hell.

How can you be so glad yet so utterly done-in at the same time? How can we be so critical of our own team yet have not one ounce of energy left in our own bodies when all we’re doing is WATCHING the fucking games??!! The players are going through it. They’re the guys going through the proper physical and emotional wringer. They’re the ones putting in the reall effort. So they’re the ones I shoudl be feeling sorry for - not myself. OR are they getting it easier because AT LEAST THEY CAN DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT when it’s 1-1 with St Johnstone and our entire season of history is in the balance??!! Oh Goram, I love You Rangers - I love youse so much and I’m so proud of what youse eeked out today, given all that’s happened before and during this Scottish Cup semi, given that this was arguably the most important one-off domestic game left in our season, given the injuries, the suspensions, the changes, the illness (mien AND Kris Boyd’s), the tiny crowd, the set-back on Wednesday and the knowledge that all you could do to get some attention in this game was fail - take all that into consideration and then I’m JUST SO FUCKING PROUD OF YESE. Even more than I am normally.

But you almost killed me. I don’t blame you. I’d be happy to die watching Rangers win. I don’t blame you. I don’t care if the penalty shoot-out had gone to 10 - 9 or 20 - 19 before we eventually won it. As long as we win it. if we’d lost it I would have loved ye more rather than less. But you won it - thanks, Gers coz I’m in heaven.

But almost literally.

That has to be one of the longest days of my football-watching life. I can’t type out any words about it. I can’t go back there to that game. Please don’t make me. Shawshank Redemption was on the telly again last night. Couldnae help watching a bit of it again - no matter how cliché-riddled it might be, no matter that it makes gang-rape seem like a minor inconvenience in a life of otherwise permanent chuminess and esprit de corps, it’s still a fucking great yarn. The greatest moment is Andy Dufresne making his escape. Andy Dufresne’s greatest triumph is when he crawls through that wall and along that 500-yard long sewage pipe on his elbows and knees. That’s his greatest moment - BUT HE DOESNAE EVER WANT TO RE-LIVE IT, DOES HE??!!!

Fuck me! “Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free.” Noh if yer a fucking fitbaw fan, Mr Morgan bloody Freeman! Hope is what slaps the shackles on ye when yer watching yer team toying with history! When we’re parading the SPL trophy or the UEFA cup, THEN we can get the cameras oot and start writing book-length postcards recording the moment for posterity. But, even if that does happen, today - the day we were at our lowest ebb and yet managed to keep the wider dream alive - this is the day we REALLY made it all happen and this is the one day of victory in 2007/2008 we will probably least like to recall.

In Europe, in 2007/2008, for us Bears, it’s been death by orgasm. In the SPL it’s been death by a thousand splashes (of fun!). But in both domestic cups it’s been death by relief. Death by Relief of Mafeking proportions. Wouldn’t have it any other way - ESPECIALLY after three years without a trophy. But my body doesn’t lie (Except when it sees the Scottish Rockette cheerleaders - then it REALLY fools itself and all my morals and sense of taste go oot the windae along with that knowledge I’m a 22-stone man in his late-thirties who needs liposuction even more than viagra. I now KNOW why I find the Rangers “girls get active” cheerleaders so objectionable - and I always thought it was political too …).I feel ill. Absolutely shattered. I feel drawn, pale, shaky, dizzy, weak-kneed and utterly, utterly knackered. I was shaking at the end of that today, I was quivering like a lifer whose just had his conviction overturned.

And THIS is as we successfully pursue the icing which will make this cake the greatest we’ve eaten since 1992/93 … or perhaps since 120 years before that. God help me if Rangers are ever involved in a relegation battle!

No wonder they say it’s the hope which kills you. Today the hope of a quadrouple, or of a treble plus a European final - even of “just” a treble - the hope that this season of glory would end only at the hands of opponents who no-one in the world would be surprised to see us lose to, that hope almost finished me off.

I’ve never come so close to audibly criticising Rangers at a game. I’ve never come so close to blaming any old, routine poor-decision shit on a referee or a linesman as potentially costing us a game. It’s never luck, it’s never the officials - it’s always just YOU and YOUR TEAM who are to blame or applaud. But I was scraping the arse of the moral barrel today. Every time that wee chubby linesman on the North Stand side, my side, gave one of his 300 off-sides against Nacho, I was on him like a Celtic director getting a Glasgow Herald journalist sacked for mentioning “beads”.

As the interminable mediocrity of our performance was established, in a game which meant more to me than most Scottish Cup semis I’ve ever attended, my faculties had all but gone by half-time. I lost my sense of myself and surrenderd to cliché rather than insanity. I’ve never come so close to actually looking away from the action, turning my back on a penalty shoot-out because, like those silly tourists who have absolutely no idea about football but insist on getting more outwardly emotional than anyone else in their vicinity, “I just couldn’t look”; I’ve never come so close to actually going through an entire day of Rangers victory without smiling. Only the kebab and Coke I picked up on the way home has saved me from a total physical break-down.

Yet, it wasn’t you I was almost having a pop at, Gers, Neither were you to blame, Mr first, second, third or fourth Official. No - it was the tension. I was angry with the unrelenting tension of the whole affair. Had St Johnstone scored three goals at the start of each half and Rangers never crossed the half-way line, I would have been more long-term devestated but I would have been more short-term calm than watching us win as we did today. No-one can have a verbal pop at a metaphysical phenomenon without seeming completely insane. Ye can’t get on yer feet in front of 20,00 Bluenoses and berate “Tension, ya cunt!”. Mind you, many times today I would happily have used the excuse of a sectioning to get me out of that ground.

More to come after Gavin and Stacey on BBC 3 …

(goes away for an hour)

Okay, I’m back. Had a couple of bottles of Becks while watching a couple of BBC3 comedies. Feel a bit more relaxed - if no more energetic. Bed beckons more becomingly than it usually does on a Sunday night but at least I now feel ready to let my brain briefly sharpen up on the detail as it points the memory in the direction of Hampden this afternoon.

The whole experience is best summed up by the leitmotif of the empty seat beside me which the wee boy behind it persisted in dunting up and down disinterestedly with his feet as Rangers toiled on the pitch and I trie dto keep up with our latest change of formation or personnel. I wanted to slap him but - hey - it’s noh his fault. I should have slapped his dad.

I knew it’d be half fucking empty. Fair enough, it’s a Sunday and it’s on telly - every non Old Firm derby cup semi for the last t300 years has been an insult to the myth of cup romance. The St Johnstone fans were more up for it today, yes, but that’s coz they had fuck-all to lose. Just like us in the UEFA CUP semi they’re in uncharted territory and playing opponents expected to hump them. When yer free of hope ye can go ballistic. But there was still only about 5,000 of them there. Our punters, in fairness have had a hell of a lot more to fork out this season but, well, I said my bit on Thursday about the need for our support to get there in big numbers today. Having not REALLY done that - come on! It’s in GLASGOW for fuck’s sake! - we then failed to make ANY NOISE WHATSOEVER, save a few dedicated Bears over to my right, down the very front of the North Stand, waving a Spanish flag at Nacho and trying folornly to raise a song from a somnambulent Beardom.

This silence was the only testimony to the scale of the occassion Rangers faced. If that silence came from crippling nerves. To win today took the Scottish Cup out of the equation. There are now just TWO competitions to deal with. The Hampden final against Queen of the South (how ROYAL a fixture does that sound??!!) is scheduled to be the last game we play this season, in ANY competition. It will also be the least important of the indefinite number of meaningful games which remain for Rangers in 2007/2008. Only if we win the SPL AND Uefa Cup will the QoS final take on truly magnificent proportions.To win today removed another chance of humiliation from this season. To win today, more importantly, kept our treble and Quadrouple hopes alive.

To win today, more than that, was to show that the Celtic defeat last week had not put a total cowbosh on our momentum.

Martin Haride and the Hampden pitch did that more effectively than Celtic ever could. Hardie stamped on a prone Steven Naismith, Burke was also followed-through upon by an opponent but seemed to take more of an accidental doing as he went over his ankle. I think our games against First Division sides have exposed our lack of a midfield thug, a nut-crunching psycho, more brutally than our ties with Lyon, Barca, Werder et al. We need a Martin Hardie. Saintees did to us what we need to do to Fiorentina in another similairly-proportioned miss-match of a semi. But I seriously wonder if we have just enough of the illness which must attend such ambition.

Ally McCoist is nominally in charge for Scottish Cup matches but Walter had to intervene today, just as he probably did against Hibs and Partick Thistle, in the previous ties we failed to win over 90 minutes. But when yer team is already struggling with injuries and suspensions and then ye lose two of yer starters in the first quarter of an hour, yer really can’t blame THE Gaffer for stepping in.

All-in-all we had a shot off the post and a couple of efforts cleared off the Saints goal-line and had a shout for another penalty after the one Nach scored during extra time. We missed several chances and were culpable at the goal we allowed Saints to walk into our net. But there’s no such thing as luck in football. We were poor and our detractors are bitter - but ye don’t win Scottish Cup semis by luck. In the penalty shoot-out, as per our last at Hampden, against another troublesome Tayside team, on another brutally draining but ultimately successful day, we overtook our oppnents for the first time in the game as the regulation 5 kicks came to a close.

This Rangers team has timing above all else. When we’re going to play poorly or allow tiredness to creep up on us, we do so at moments where the opposition is of insufficient quality to capitalise. We’ve looked sluggish a few times this season - but never has it cost us a game or a trophy. As I always say, when Barry doesn’t play, we look disjointed. I hope he makes the best of his extended rest and has the games of his life in our next two away games. If we had to struggle then today was our last chance to do so and win, against a thoroughly tough and brave Saintees team who themselves had a few injuries. Big Cousin, I HOPE, summed up the general Rangers character today - do just enough and no more because we’ll need all thr energy we have for our next three games.

Thsi Rangers team, yes, has timing above all esle - all else except GUTS.

All I wanted was for us to go through to the final. We’re there and I fucking love it.

Good-night, troops.