NOW FOR THE BIG STUFF (Thelitk … 3 GERS … 2)

Ahhh, Parkhead in the sun. It’s like an 80-year old woman in a bikini - what would look great on others only serves to expose the decaying horror when on this.

The suffering of cotton field slaves gave rise to the blues. People who live in oppression and suffering don’t want to hear light-hearted, flippant songs which reflect nothing of their own lives. Similairly, sunshine has no place near the home of Celtic FC, a club championing oppression and suffering rather than fighting it. Bright rays only expose the mouldering hypocrisy hiding in the corners. A thoroughly putrid experience on any day, travelling to the East End’s warehouse stadium, a sickening crime against aesthetics, is only made bearable by a Rangers win. So thank fuck I’m home. Thank fuck we don’t have to go back there this season. It’s a weight off, it’s a drudge finished. Now, we can concentrate on nice stuff.

Row FF of the upper Lisbon Lions stand was very much in the shade. But, having to climb all the way to the very, VERY top of this frankenstein concoction of breeze-block and aluminium moulding, after being kept outside for 15 minutes, until the game had kicked-off, before even reaching one of the whole THREE Tesco Self-service turnsitles open to us, meant I was still sweating buckets as the dank consumed me.

As I ascended the gloom descended. Three steps from my row I heard the swelling hysterical lust of a Parkhead crowd. They must be attacking. I turned to face the pitch and saw some hoopy cunt slap the ball into our net. They’re always either midgets or anorexics. It could have been Frank McGarvey, Tommy Burns, Brian McClair, Henrik Larsson or Jimmy bloody McGrory. Their goals at the piggery always look the same - lots of pissy-passy St Thomas Aquinas Secondary School Prefect stuff, all white socks and ferret-like movement, followed by little girly leaps in the air, yelping with pre-pubescent mania and a tidal wave of high-pitched screaming washes over you like a vomit-green oil slick. Apart from one corner oasis of Blue, there isn’t a dry seat in the house.

Two corners, two goals from big guys doing the business in the box, getting their heids in there first. Red and Black socks run away for a little congratulatry confab and then we re-group, knowing there’s still work to be done. Yes, would you believe it, but I think all Rangers goals at darkhead are proper, decent, sportsmanlike and worth watching again.

Sectarian? Me? No. I hate ALL religion. Small minded? Me? About the fitbaw? Fuck, yeah. We’d have to be or else there’d be no football. And I hate all reality TV programmes too … and tuna chunks in brine as opposed to sunflower oil. Oh yeah, there’s some stuff in life I just don’t give a chance.

I parked the car just along from the Louden and walked down, into the overhanging belly of the Celtic support and through the Forge car park (methinks that architectural abortion of a shopping centre was the inspiration for the sub-modern design crime of an arena to which we were all headed. More carbuncle than Corbusier). I wore no colours. Going to Parkhead always brings out the brown, black and grey in my wardrobe. But, as it was cheap replica shirt weather, this lack of a Leprechaun outfit exposed me almost as glaringly as it would if I’d jogged along the Gallowgate wearing a bowler hat and an orange sash.

The similarities can’t be denied though. We have blue shell suits - they have green; we sing about the UDA, they sing about the IRA; we sing about Big Jock knowing, they sing about Nacho Novo being shot dead in his sleep. We ALL love Buckfast, we all love any country bar Scotland, we all love three-letter acronyms of murder and we all love an excuse to hate with colour-coded tunnel vision. I had no trouble blending in - I’m as tediously unimaginative as anyone else at an Old Firm game.

At Springfield Street you break free, you do a swift wee jog into the arms of the police cordon, flashing you ticket before any wannabe bottle-chucker realises what you are. I’d hoped my team was gonnae score a third before we realised where we were playing. Instead the jinkyists scooped home another equaliser before the break and my pre-match prediction that, no matter how many or few Celtic got Rangers would score three, began to haunt the fuck out of me rather than give hope. I’m traditionally a fate-tempter extrordinaire when predicting anything positive for The Gers:

I never did stump up for a colour license for my crystal ball. One of the Old Firm did score three today. Wisnae us.

We had our chances. The second-half move which ended with Novo flashing his shot all the way across goal instead of just across Boruc was the moment where we lost the game. They went up the park and got their winning penalty (these Masonic refereeing conspiracies really are good at putting up the smokescreens eh??!!:-)) and someone failed to tell Alexander where Robson put his penalty for Dundee United when we played at Tannadice in October.

We were one goal away from securing the league title today - but one goal is as good as 100 goals when ye don’t get it. The language of ifs and buts is more hateful to me than any twat wearing a God Bless The Pope t-shirt ever could be. I took less heart from our up-beat, up-tempo performance with so many players injured suspended or about to be - we still lost - than I did from the fact McGeadie, Boruc and a few others from our main contenders are so consumed with hatred for Rangers that their game often goes to pieces as a result. Their concentration is sometimes all over the place and, like Boruc making a hilarious fool of his religion by cheapening it into a football terrace jibe (WHY do some Rangers fans let this clown wind them up? If you don’t believe in Catholicism then ye shoud surely find it as funny as I do),Mcgeadie doesn’t seem to realise we’ll ALWAYS have him in our back pocket if he persists in letting his jealousy about Rangers turn him into such a bad-mannered wee wean. Our personnell being thin today is not an excuse, but taking an utterly desperate Celtic so close on their own patch while missing key players shows more than enough character: I really don’t think Celtic have that kind of maturity - they’re such a hateful little array of personalities right now that they need a bigger enemy to rouse them. What we couldn’t do today I suspect any of Celtic’s three remaining opponents this season could well manage.

Right now, I’m just worried about Davie Weir for Florence. Another great headed SPL goal from the old man and another digging-in performance as we sought to at least eek out the draw which would end the title race. Then he gets injured and then everyone starts wondering why Amdy Faye is on the bench instead of Webster. I suspect it was because, depleted as we were, Walter hedged his bets with Faye who can play both centre half AND midfield. We can all be smart after the fact and theorise about Hemdani perhaps dropping into the stopper roll Paul Le Guen gave him on occassion. We can all wonder if Papac could have gone to centre half and Whittaker to left back. At the end of the day, In Walt We Trust. This one we lose, fair and square as always.

I said at the time that our second Old Firm win at Ibrox was nothing more than an insurance policy against two losses at Parkhead. Now it’s time to cash in that policy. And we certainly weren’t disgraced in either game. What I also said, yesterday, was that a narrow defeat at Parkhead might just keep us mean, moody and focussed enough to pull something out the fire which will be Fiorentina at the Artemio Franchi. A win or draw today might have put the European adventure into “bonus” territory. A Loss today leaves us with something to prove. Thursday will be infinitely more intense, on and off the field, than today - we need to hope the raction to this derby matches that intensity. The league is still ours to lose but reaching the UEFA Cup final requires a gargantuan performance from us - better even than the weathering of the Werder shit storm. It’s not the defeat - It’s the REACTION to the defeat. I dunno, troops. but maybe tying up the league today woudl have made us too carefree in Florence.

Mmmm - just call me Alastair Campbell … or Charlie Wheelan …

My only concern is that we’ve only had two 90-minute VICTORIES in April - and one of them was against a First Division side. Yeah, we could draw every 90 minutes from now til the end of the season and still win the quadruple but the league in particular will NOT be won that way. And the UEFA cup campaign, which is one thoroughly brutal fixture away from historic, would maybe have benefitted from a wee sense of domestic triumph somewhere along the line. Like we say, teams only feel tired when they’re losing. Right now we ain’t winning.

Whittaker was immensely stupid today. Even though he was about the size of a subbutteo player from where I was stood, it still seemed like an obvious display of immature frustration. Walter won’t want to lambast anyone these days - we need all our players having their egoes massaged as thoroughly as their aching limbs - but this display of petulance may haunt us later almost as much as our lack of a psychotically physical henchman again cost us today. Hartley and Hesselink and Robson are all vindictive thugs - we know that - but ye don’t complain about it and ye don’t “Hope” the ref does something about them. Ye sort that shit out yerself. I have no problem with what that Celtic trio get up to - I want it in my own team. We need a Martin Hardie-esque hatchet man - someone who WILL put opposing assailants in the hospital. Losing games is inevitable but being bullied is a total no-no.

Anyway, even if we had such a psycho, today he’d probably have been injured or suspended! ;-)

Getting back to the car was even more traumatic than getting to the ground. Fucking hell! I mean, I don’t usually wear colours - even to home games - but walking against the grain of the diaspora felt like one long journey up the nose of a giant suffering from a heavy cold. I haven’t seen so much green up-close since … erm … well, I just haven’t seen that much green! There’s no quick way of merging into the Celtic crowd without suffering a three or four minute period where it’s painfully obvious which section of the ground you came from. The polis cordons DON’T help on these occassions, creating a massive No Man’s land which you’d have to cross before being “welcomed” into the gloat-hungry timalloys, your fat emerald-free frame standing out like an SAS snatch squad at an IRA funeral. And there was just no-one in hoops heading back my way. Probably because I was headed for the Louden enclave. No-one was wearing clothes like me - no-one was walking in the same direction as me. I could only force a smile and a jovial gait for so long. By the time I was walking past the Forge again I was more upset by the fact I was dressed like a nun and the sun was beating down on my black-clad body and balding ginger napper.

Got to the car, turned it round and sat in a traffic jam outside the Louden for twenty minutes. The polis were letting all the Celtic buses through first and every single one of them was full of punters waving and cheering in the direction of a pub which had no windows or open doors. I actually found it quite funny.

“Laughing” Eck? Laughing after a Rangers defeat at Parkhead? Not taking the game seriously? Nah - more like we True Blues take it so seriously we really aren’t phased by suffering at parkhead what we made them suffer at Ibrox. And, if you take yer team that seriously, you take defeat not with a pinch of salt, but with a huge portion of grace.

Parkhead is horrible but then that’s because Parkhead only gets to see Rangers a couple of times a year. Anywhere would look depressed being so denied.

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Published:
04.27.08 / 5pm
Category:
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