THE HOLIDAYS ARE OVER - LONG LIVE THE HOLIDAYS!

What’s been established beyond all doubt in the last few years is that, when it comes to predictions, I’m about as useful as the Serbian intelligence officers tracking down Radovan Karadžić. It might also take ten years for me to get something right but, unlike the Belgrade bizzies, I’m actually trying.

I’ll give ye a genuine, heart-felt prediction: We won’t make the Champions League group stages this time. Sorry. This particular Bluenose feels we’ll have a very short European season in 2008/2009. As with getting to within one goal of the 92/93 Champions League final while winning a domestic treble, playing as many games as ye possibly can one season usually results in ye playing a damn sight fewer the following year. In 93/94 we almost did back-to-back trebles but Europe ended very quickly and spectacularly, in Sofia. This time round I don’t know if it’ll be in Lithuania or wherever we end up if we get to the last round of qualifyers and then our first UEFA Cup destination since Manchester, but I think that great false, misguided hope of so many - that Rangers concentrate on the comparatively worthless SPL rather than European progress - will come to fruition.

Fruition. Fruit. The fruits of our herculean labours of last season were creating great history and glorious memories, and will be a jet-lagged continental showing the following season.

My only real hope for Europe, this season is that - once again - Celtic’s plane doesn’t crash. Fuck me - imagine if they became GENUINE martyrs … Jeeze, none of us would be safe in our hooses. Never mind the search for Mladic, ye’d need tae get the UN peacekeepers over to Glesgae, pronto :-)

How we’ll do in the league, and the cups we hold, is a matter of less pessemistic consideration. But not much. Celtic look like they’ll be more able to capture 4-in-a-row than they were to get 3. They’ll be our only rivals for the title. Strachan must be growing understandably frustrated at the lack of respect he commands among the loud idiots in the Celtic support - and there’s a lot of them - so any pressure they come under could see him unjustly offski by Christmas. But we had a hell of a season ourselves last time out and that means Walter has a hell more way to fall than he does to rise in the demented eyes of our own sizeable collection of knee-jerk blowhards. Winning at Parkhead at the end of August is pretty pointless if we haven’t won everywhere else before-hand - but it’d go a long way to establishing just who is the Old Firm manager the tabloids wil tell his fans they now want rid of.

Personally, I think we’re too bushed, physically and psychologically, to win the league this season or do anything in Europe. The injury to Ferguson is the worst possible scenario because we lose all his world class on-field skills but retain all his negative off-field influences. I’d much rather we’d sold him, bought a couple of less skilful but less distracted midfielders, and turned ourselves into even more of a true unit than when teh thin blue line heroically repelled the hordes in Bremen, Lisbon and Florence. I think we’ll be far from a shambles but it all looks like being another league title to Celtic.

But I started last season by saying we’d win the SPL and do fuck-all in Europe. I wasn’t just wrong - I was 100% wrong. And there’s more hope - from a strange quarter: Celtic won FUCK-ALL in 2002/2003 when they also reached the UEFA Cup final and lost the league on the last day, but they then proceeded to cruise to the league and cup double in 2003/2004. So I know fuck-all. That truly is established. As is the fact that the more pessimistic I am, the better it usually turns out for Rangers.

Anyway, so that there’s no lack of focus come Wednesday night, let’s get the first-day-back-at-school crap out our system now. Here’s what I did on my holidays.

I went to the original place which invented the deep-pan pizza, Chicago-style. “Uno”, on East ohio - just two mins walk from my digs on East Ontario. And, d’ye know something - I didnae like it. Too doughy, the Chicago-style pizza. The taxi driver on way back to airport slagged me rotten for saying this - like I’d insulted his mother. Hilarious banter.

But them pizzas were the only thing I didn’t like about the Windy City and two minutes back on this blog and some paranoid cunt already on here shitting himself about Rangers fans even EXISTING has put me in even more of a sentimental mood about The Second City, the City with Broad Shoulders, the capital of the Mid West … the most SPORTS MAD CITY I’ve ever been to and the LEAST BITTER too! THAT is the way it should be. The US of A gets plenty shit very, very wrong but the sports vibe in Chicago was like an invaluable breath of fresh air after the paranoid hysteria which threatens to devour Scotland in green and white hate anytime Rangers look like doing something spectacular.

I love the fitbaw with a passion but a trip to the states tells ye that the tribal shit often distracts from the beauty of the game rather than adding to it. There’s beer, banter and the odd bashing at US sports grounds too but - man - it really IS all about the game itself, even if it is the wrong games they’re into. The American sports vibe is heaven, dude. Sheer heaven. And you don’t go through St Peter’s gates to get into this heaven - you just get the El red line north to Addison and you go to WRIGLEY FIELD to see the Chicago Cubs.

Saw the Mets at Shea in September 2002, beating the Seattle Mariners (Who I also saw at the Skydome in Toronto in may 1989!) with a rookie’s home run in the closest thing baseball has to extra time (God knows what it is - “extra innings”??). Also read about the Mets in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy and love how they fuck over Harvey Keitel in The Bad Lieutenant. As much as I know fuck-all about baseball, I’m a Mets man, me. Bluebhoy - regular Celtic/Everton poster on this blog - brought me back a t-shirt from NYC a few months ago and I have to say it’s by far the classiest garment in my collection of XXXXL apparel. It’s an orange plan of Shea on a royal blue background. It’s fucking classic.

Yankees? All this “House that Ruth built” pish (see NASN, just along the dial from Setanta) is doing my nut in - especially as it distracts from the fact they almost totally rebuilt it in the seventies and that Shea is also coming down. Had a day in the Bronx in 2002 and although I couldn’t get in personally, the guy at the ticket office took my camera in so I at least have my own photos of the inside of Yankee stadium.

I went to see La Catedral, San Mames, last summer - it’s an overpoweringly beautiful fitbaw venue which I’ll remember for ever but didn’t change how I feel about The Teds. Same with Wrigley. From Belushi sending the cops to 1060 West Addison in Blues Brothers to Ferris Bueller catching the ball there on his day off, it’s a myth and a mecca -and it was fucking AMAZING to be there. And then it was just such an amazingly quaint, sensual arena in itself - like Lords and Wimbledon combined, except with a mildly footballerish crowd in. What really makes Wrigley, however, are the rooftops on Waveland and Sheffield. In a western world which loves to talk about “sport’s place in the community”, this has to be the best and perhaps only TRUE example of a stadium and a club actually extending out into its community.

To see the Cubs win the World Series would be as amazing as seeing Hibs win the Scottish Cup or Athletic brining La Liga back to Bilbao … but it’s The Gers and the Mets for me. And thin Pizza all the way.

Yet Chicago is one of the greatest - and gayest cities I’ve ever been in. like myself, there’s nothing “between the lines” about it - it’s just right out there! Never seen so many glamorous mincing boys in my life and every shop assistant or waiter was as camp as a row of tents. If you’re feeling a bit “Dorothy” in the mid-west, apparently Chicago is the ony place to head.

Went to see the latest Batman film yesterday - the Dark Knight. Great flick but made all the better coz Chicago is doubling as Gotham this time. Mies van der Rohe’s IBM building on 330 North Wabash hosts a major press conference scene in the movie and, for some reason, the audience in the Odeon at the Quay didn’t appreciate it when I stood up, shouting “I’ve been there - I’ve been there! See that glass - I’ve pressed my face against it’s rectilinear, internationalist, Bauhausian purity - the angles, the materials - God is indeed in the detail …don’t you see, less really is more … it’s the star of this movie …never mind Christian Bale - 330 North Wabash is The STAR of this film!!!”.

Nah. They didn’t like it.

But I LOVED Chi-ca-go.

Helmut Jahn, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, The Wrigley building, The herald tribune building, THE CARBON AND CARBIDE BUILDING (Now the Hard Rock hotel but easily the most beautiful green and gold thing I’ve ever seen … if not the only), Navy Pier, Lake Michigan, Lakeshore Drive, Oak Street beach, Sears tower, the John Hancock (Darth Vader MUST live there), the Chicago River, Second City comedy club, the Gold Coast, Cabrini Green (NOT!!), …

… but, most pertinent to this blog, the sport. Chicago is THE most sports-mad town I’ve ever been in. Couldn’t get into Soldier Field but the refurb which has led to it being renamed “the mistake by the lake” at least allowed me to get into the famous collonades which always marked it out when I watched the Bears on Channel4 in the eighties. MEANT to go back to Mike Ditka’s restaurant for a meal but - hey - so much to do - so a photo outside Iron Mike’s place had to suffice.

Likewise, I “struck out” (see - I’ve obviously been to AMERICA!!) when I went out to the United Center, home of the Blackhawks ice hockey team and the world famous Bulls basketball side, but I did go down to 35th/Sox on the Red line and wangle my way into US Cellular Field for a tour of the new Comiskey Park, of the home of the legendary Chicago White Sox.

The “SOCCER”, is a controversial subject. Having become, in a few short Sapphic days, such a fantastic lesbian that I could actually pull a straight woman, I finally experienced that mythical “marital emasculation” which all straight men talk of. We’d been to the baseball at Wrigley and, as great as that was for the sports-ADMIRING female partner, there was, and I quote, “No fucking way” she was then heading all the way out to Bridgeview and Toyota Park on our last Saturday Night in Chicago to be crammed on a long, sweaty El journey then a bus ride to see sub-standard soccer between the Fire and Maurice Johnston’s Toronto FC.

I was given that threat-masquerading-as-an-offer which so many of my hetro friends say is very comon in married life . ie, “YOU can go if you want to”.

I suddenly decided that, altho I’d been to serie A, Bundesliga, Czech league, Premieship games etc and that MLS would be a great addition to the collection .. I suddenly decided that I was MORALLY OPPOSED to encouraging any potential US takeover of FIFA and so would not be supporting Major League Soccer.

Anyway, it’s not a REAL Chicago sport, is it … it’s not what the vast majority of Chicagoans are bothered about … I wanted the REAL local sports vibe, didn’t I?? I mean, wouldn’t want to watch cricket if I was a tourist in Glasgow, would I??? Or Baseball in Munich … or grid-iron in Beijing…

When we got back to our Near North hotel room from the restaurants and bars which I REALLY MUCH PREFERRED GOING TO that Saturday night - HONESTLY, DOLL! - I did watch the LA derby live on ESPN … coz, with it being on the West Coast, she was asleep by then!! Phew!

Chicago won 2-1 against Toronto BTW - scoring the winner in the last minute. I’m sure I’d have hated it if I’d been there. I’m SURE I would have …

Everywhere in Chicago you see Cubs fans. It’s as though EVERYONE is wearing Cubs colours and those colours are Red, White and Blue and quite reassuring to my Rangers soul … until you realise that the Cubs are most likely the Celtic of Chicago, BECAUSE of that need to be moral victors and also because their more noticeable colours, like a green-and-white hooped jersey, give a false impression of how much the North side of Chicago rules the baseball loyalty of this city. White Sox fans wear simple white and black favours - much less noticeable to a visitor than their National League rivals’ Red, White and Blue gear. But it takes more than a strip to make a club and it’s the Sox, with their 2005 World Series success, their state-of-the-art stadium and the beautiful infamy of chucking the 1919 world Series to the Cincinatti Reds (who, ironically, I saw losing to the Cubs at Wrigley) who probably hold more genuine, long-term affection and more financial aces up their sleeves in the Windy City.

I’ve always disliked myself for the dissapointment I feel whenver I see a Celtic strip in the street. It’s about supporting your own team rather than hating yer rival. But yesterday, as I walked out from a movie about a caped crusader who was the kind of hero a city needed rather than the kind of hero a city wanted, I spotted a wee boy in a Rangers jersey. There’d been a dad wearing his in the theatre when the lights came up. I walked out the building into the harsh sunlight and two girls came up the steps wearing the Rangers blue. I didn’t just feel happy - I felt reassured.

See - that’s why I can say honestly if I think my team will win or lose - coz the joy and love I feel whenever I see their strip tells me the results will alter my affection for Rangers NOT ONE JOT. The holidays are over - but the soul is refilled and ready to do battle once more. Did I just say “battle”? What a lot of pish, Eck. The soul is heading back to its work and needs the beautiful distraction of the football to keep it going once more. But it only needs the football. It only needs the SPORT.

About this entry

You’re currently reading “THE HOLIDAYS ARE OVER - LONG LIVE THE HOLIDAYS!,” an entry on FatEck.co.uk

Published:
07.27.08 / 5pm
Category:
News