PUT AN “AMEN” TO IT!

Here we stand, folks. Here we stand in the most middling Saturday a Rangers fan has ever known. One week previously we were caught up in a Scottish Cup final, demanding, hoping, praying for a dignified end to a monumental season of personal momentousness for every Bluenose alive. Rangers v Queen of the South. Seven days hence we’ll undergo the first serious tatse of moving on, of leaving it all behind. I’m not a media whore but more of a press kerb-crawler, a telly punter, an internet “John” and as much as I know 2008 will always be about Manchester’s first UEFA Cup final, tomorrow’s Sunday supplements will include the first of the EURO 2008 guides. The television channels will be unable to avoid finally acknoweldging a tournament for which none of the home nations have qualified. Next Saturday: Switzerland v the Czech Republic, Portugal v Turkey. Last Saturday’s heart-pounder, next Saturday’s heart-massager. The depths of the traumatically personal - the sanctuary of the glamorously neutral. Seven days from each. We’re too far removed from our quadrouple quest to go back, but the first rung on our climb to next season is still too far away to touch. The most intense Rangers season ever has been over for a week. The moving on from that season is one week away.

Yes, I do feel a bit like Ethan, played by John Wayne, stood at his brother and sister-in-law’s funeral, wanting to get it over with, wanting to be off into the wilds to find chief Scar and revenge. All these over-trite attempts to sweep the horror of loss under the carpet of civility are getting to me. Fuck that. End the ceremony, end the ritual - just give us the sweet-tasting carnage of vengeance. If you think the 3-0 win at Ibrox at the beginning of last season was a going-over, wait til you see what we do at Parkhead this coming August or September!

Like the anti-hero of John Houston’s The Searchers, I want the grave-side do-gooders to PUT AN “AMEN” TO IT so I can rustle up my posse and get after that bastard who must be scalped before I can have satisfaction. But, as Mrs Jorgesen says to Ethan when she’s trying to stop him dragging her son into a death mission, “Dont let them live their life in anger, Ethan!”

Or some such words. Don’t let them spend their lives in vengeance. Whatever. Anyway - she’s right. The old Texican school mistress (retired) is right. Celtic can wait. Lawell can wait. We’ll deal with those bams in good time. Right now we need to get off our horses, drink our milk and, sour as some of it tastes, honour our past season. Ye can’t move on til ye’ve drunk in where ye’ve come from.

There’s an archive on this blog. All 68 games have been dealt with in hundreds of thousands of words, some of them coherent, on these very cyber pages. Feel free to scroll down, under the threads and get lost in my web, my net of Rangers ranting. How many other Bears and I felt about every game in all five competitions in which we set various heathers on fire last season, is here for as much re-reading as anyone is want to indulge in. I don’t want to repeat myself now. But I do want to quickly highlight the highights of the highlights.

Even as I roll down the driver’s window, my clapped-out Jag doing 1 mile per-hour along this dingey, dankly-lit dockside street of solicited sleaze, I know I must respect my roots and be pure for the future. BBC Scotland can whore its highlights of last season all it wants. Just because the Quayside pimp has dolled up her best girl in a “the season in 90 minutes” mini skirt, even a Jeffrey Archer-esque purveyopr of pish prose like myself has too much tatse for something so shabby. It’ll take more than the corseted gimmick of compressing a whole league season into the duration of just one football match to make this ole fitbaw perv tune in at 10:05 tonight. Auntie Beeb can prostiute ger shiny wears all she wants - it’s still an SPL season which came to an awful end. Much as we enjoyed burning off our animal lusts on 2007/2008s’s main domestic piece, we went limp just at the moment we should have been exploding into climax. We couldn’t maintain the lust without the respect. The SPL had been cheapened for us after Florence, after Manchester. By the time we realised it was wilfully draining the energy we should have been giving to our true love, European glory, it was very hard to “raise our game” for an empty, souless fuck of a League.

It was a good ride though. Celtic haven’t scored at Ibrox in three games now. We’ve scored four times in our last three trips to the piggery. We began with a 3-0 destruction of Inverness at a stadium in which we usualy struggle. We did likewise to Celtic in our first derby of the season. When the late-summer sun shone, Rangers didn’t concede and Rangers did the biz. As the damp beginnings of autumn emerged we started to leak golas - two at home to Falkirk - so we put seven past them in return. This Rangers team meant business … against anyone, anywhere, in any contest.

The doppelganger victory against VfB got our Champions League group stage off to a flyer but we’d already set the tone by conceding nil in our four qualifying matches. We conceded none away to Lyon and scored three in possibly the single greatest away performance in Rangers history - and we kept the shutters down for the visit of none other than Barcelona. We were far from discraced in the Nou Camp and the first pilgriamge to the scene of our only European trophy win and our last European final, set the off-field tone: Fateful, magical, and not wanted by the locals. A rollercoaster in Stuttgart and a counter-attacking humping at home by Lyon in our last game (how good was Karim Benzema?!! Class!) had punters booing Rangers off the pitch. That was another theme of our European adventure - idiots with fuck-all clue about football or loyalty pretending to be Rangers fans.

The sale of Alan Hutton was a no-brainer. A brilliant player for all of eight months, we netted one million punds for each of those months. “If he’d stayed …. if he’d broken his ankle … if we’d knocked back the money …”

Sir Dave of the Murray has, for all of this century, endured an organised slagging and watched a witch-hunt become formalised among certan fuckwit sections of the Ingrate Loyal. All because of his financial acumen - or perceived lack thereof. We, the folk who watched Rangers in the early-mid eighties, all know this is pish. We all know it’s a scandalous abuse of a businessman who is as dodgy as any other of his wealth but 100 times more dedictaed to Rangers than any other Scottish Millionaire yer likely to meet. When Rangers are winning everyone is happy. When Rangers lose, suddenly everyone’s an accounant. So even those disloyal dweebs couldn’t complain when we netted £8LARGE for a prodcut of our youth system who’d already suffered a broken leg. Those complaining that his sale cost us the league need to ask themselvesif they’d be willing to pay £8Million to get him back.

Hutts would have played against Celtic at Parkhead had it not been for the tragic death of Phil O’Donnell. We would have won that game and, it would seem, the league. At least, it’s very easy to believe we would have from thid distance, had the game been played at that time. Everyone in Scottish football wishes there was no reason for the January old Firm fixture to be cancelled. No-one in Scottish football gives a monkeys about league titles when compared to what happened to Motherwell and the O’Donnell family in December 2007.

We’d played earlier that day. We were the Setanta game, at Easter Road and that day we played a possession football the like of which I’ve rarely seen from Rangers. We were immense and entertaining, we won by just one goal. The Christmas period and the new year felt strange in that the second Old Firm showdown never happened. There was no true gauge of our league form other than the fact we simply kept winning. If Lyon gave us our biggest home roasting of the season, Hearts at Tynecastle in the early part of the campaign was our bigest away doing. We actually did well to claw back a few goals that day and “only” lose 4-2.

When we returned to Gorgie in February, new signings Steve Davis and Christian Dailly in the starting XI, everyone thought it would be time for the cracks to appear. Instead, we produced our second most sumptuous domestic away performance of the campaign. We utterly destroyed Hearts and did so with spectacular style and grace. No-one other than Rangers noticed. Lionel Messi had whinged after he met his match at Ibrox and instead of the Barcelona star being derided as a sore loser, the anti-Rangers lobby took up his unedcuated sniping with relish.

So we shut up shop at Ibrox and gave not one fuck about the lack of knowledge and all-consuming idiocy which passed as “opinion” through Scotland’s football land. Before we knew it we were putting Wedrer Bremen out of the UEFA cup - “lucky” -, spectacularly defeating Dundee United in the CIS Cup final by coming from behind three times, including in the penalty shoot-out - “United deserved to win it” - ,and giving Celtic another lesson in control at Ibrox - “not pretty to watch”. When the jibes got bigger and bigger we knew that Rangers must be scaring the shit out of Celtic and the rest of Scotland. Out went Sporting Lisbon and suddenly we had a European semi-final at Ibrox and AGAIN we kept a clean sheet at home - the ONLY requsite of any team trying to maintain its self-respect in Europe. Penalties took us through in Florence in what was one of the greatest nights of most of our lives.

Manchester was a matter of rib-cage-bursting pride. Some knob-heads ruined it and gave our detractors the excuse they were looking for. Celtic’s run to Seville and the deification of anyone involved in O’Neill’s greatest achievement as Celtic manager, meant there could be NO denegrating of our achievement in getting to the UEFA Cup final, even from the masters in hypocrisy who follow Celtic. And just as the tidal wave of hatred was about to come crashing down on us re the behaviour of those muppets in Piccaddily Gardens, the stunning news about Tommy Burns had everyone chiding themselves for being so small-minded. Me especially.How many more people did the Scottish Football Family have to lose before their time, before we’d all realsie we’re all the same.

And so we didn’t win the league. No excuses. We bit off more than we could chew but only coughed up the very last morsel. Scottish Cup lifted against Queen of the South, League Cup lifted, SPL title lost with just twenty minutes of the league race left and the UEFA Cup final lost three minutes into injury time. We even took our Champions League Group Stage campaign to the very last game. The SPL was lost when we didn’t take a draw at parkhead, from either of our visits there. We certainly gave it our all but we were simply running out of energy to give. That’s how it works. No complaints. Just pride. Even the goal which won Celtic the title - Hesselink’s in injury time against us - came after we’d had a man sent off and our injured goalie had saved a penalty before he was subbed. Losing is losing. End of. That we took it to the wire just means Celtic took it even further so congratulations to them. But when losing there’s giving up and there’s NEVER SURRENDERING. I’m convinced a few members of this Rangfers team are currently strapped to tables omewhere, their limbs still bursting to fight off imaginary footballing foes. When it goes to 68 games, the body and the brain must fall out. But the will of this squad is limitless.

This isn’t the greatest season of my life. Had we won the SPL title or the UEFA cup then it would be but the 92/93 Treble team which got us to a goal from the Champions League final must remain the greatest I’ve known. But I was gearing up for a return to full-time eductaion that season, I was skint beyond all belief and only went to a dozen or so games. But this season I went to 48 - and I charted all 68 of them in a way I never even thought about in 1992/93. This was the most intense season of my life and the most personally enjoyable, as well as the most draining. Coz, ye see, when yer losing the league title by twelve, fifteen and twenty points, there is nothing to get excited about. Losing is easy. This was the difficult stuff and we all of us loved every second of just BEING THERE FROM THE BEGINNING TO THE FINISH OF EVERYTHING.

But the process of shoving it into our memory banks and a corner of our hearts has already begun. Even if we don’t know it.

And it has to.

If we’re to go forward with increased purpose and skill we need a clear mind. Trying to approach next season is pointles until we’re all thinking straight about last season. We can’t afford to muddy our own waters. It’s already happening with the Kenny Millar saga. Rangers and Celtic players are becoming Celtic and Rangers players with increased regularity. We should be thankful the biliousness of the Old Firm divide has relented to such an extent. But I’m more guilty than anyone of confusing the need to preserve boundaries with a knee-jerk slump into colour-coded bitterness. We want our team history to have some sort of off-field integrity, yes. We all want our club’s name to mean something, to be something which earns the respect we demand for it. Seeing hatred of Celtic as the barometer by which we measure love of Rangers is the starlingly wrong way to do that. Ye get respect by what you do right - not by to whom you do wrong.

I no longer know if Kenny Millar did, indeed, kiss the Celtic badge when he scored for them against us at Parkhead in 2006/2007. I haven’t been in any great rush to watch any re-runs of that particular moment so I can’t be sure. A lot of people have told me recently that he didn’t, that he just pounded his chest, on the area of the Celtic crest. As far as I was concerned he kissed that badge, snogged that shamrock, took it out for dinner, booked it into a city centre hotel that evening and the reason he fucked off to Derby was because he later discovered that the Celtic badge was pregnant and he was in no mood to get married. Basically, he scored for Celtic against Rangers after having been a Rangers player and he seemed to enjoy it. That’s a cunt in my eyes (Mmmm - ye pay top dollar for THAT down the docks … and ye need to clean yer contact lenses after wards) but sometimes my eyes get JUST A TAD blinkered.

We need to move on. We need to take only the stuff from last season which will help us with next season. I want a twenty-point League title win by The Gers. I want us to win all four old firm games by a mile and to win two more pots than we did last season. But the team must be knackered and our support is knackered too. We all need a fucking good rest first - or else we’ll go backwards next season instead of further forward.

Let me enjoy the European championships. Let me regain my objectivity and equilibrium. Let’s put an AMEN to the traumas and intruigues of 2007/2008, to the pain and the exhaustion. But let’s NEVER, EVER forget the highs, the history, the joy, the enedeavour, the bravery, the brilliance and the sheer, heart-stopping excitement of it all. Let’s take that, bank it, use it, learn from it and WIN FOUR TROPHIES in 2008/2009.

But first, a car trip to Annbank Juniors. And then a TV trip to Austria and Switzerland.

Injun will chase a thing till he thinks he’s chased it enough. Then he quits. Same way when he runs. Seems like he never learns there’s such a thing as a critter that’ll just keep comin’ on. So we’ll find ‘em in the end, I promise you. We’ll find ‘em. Just as sure as the turnin’ of the earth.

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Published:
05.31.08 / 5pm
Category:
News