YOU “DESERVE” NOTHING. THE PRODFATHER … 2 DISLOYALISTS … 0 (GERS …2 Jambos …0)

The Rangers Rebels lose. The Prodfather triumphs, again. The Rangers are joint top of the league with no goals conceded in two games played without Carlos Cuellar. Our Chairman’s interviews on Thursday weren’t telling us anything new - they were simply an edict of common sense, a reprising of everything the unhysterical bluenoses have been saying to themselves, to each other and on this blog since the Kaunas defeat and the sale of our Spanish centre-half. Murray sounded brilliant in re-stating the facts of his stewardship but that he had to make any pronouncement at all is a matter of shame for the trouble-making shits who were wiped off the political planet yesterday.

Pedro Mendes stroked that ball about our midfield with all the grace and elan which Cuellar brought to defending. I heard not one shout of “I demand to know the clauses in your contract”. Just as I didn’t hear them this time last year when our other Iberian revelation was making his home SPL debut. I would hate to have been one of those people who gave up their season ticket on the back of one competitive defeat (”Murray’s not putting enough money into the club!! - so I’ll take my money out too!”???) - for those who didn’t had their comparative loyalty instantly rewarded … and then some.

A close-season signing scored the winner last week. A close-season signing scored the opener this week and another created the winner with a mazy run and dribble which elicited a desperate Gorgie foul that saw Kenny Miller thump, fist first, onto his crest. I’m not too impressed by the Velicka-Boyd partnership so far but they’ve scored the winners in both our SPL games of 2008/2009. I am impressed by big Madjid Bougherra and he not only kept the sheets clean again yesterday but after initially seeming to lose the ball he set up Kyle Lafferty’s goal with a sharp piece of determined wing-work. I didn’t think Kyle lafferty could do anything which didn’t involve his left foot but the Ulsterman hammered home with his right peg.

Ye see, it’s only natural to doubt stuff. But, if it’s stuff done for your benefit, by people ye love, ye stick with it at least long enough to see if it works.

And I went straight to my seat in my car to my seat in the Govan Rear, from Shieldhall Road, via Broomloan road. I looked down Edmiston Drive and it was busy - it was mobbed with people in Red, White and Blue just as it has been since November 1988. Most of those Bears were walking to their turnstyle. I knew some of them had entertained more static, desultory ideas. But Radio Scotland had already told me about Sandy Jardine - like Pete Clemenza garrotting Carlo Rizzi - sending out the message to those who dared doubt the regime: car pulls up and a legend steps out and he produces a shotgun called Maurice Edu. Ye’ve got two choices here - ye can get in line or ye can found dead in a skip called “disloyalty”.

Democracy and freedom of speach are for the real world. This is football. This is Rangers. The woudl-be dissenters burst into applause and put their shame on the back-burner. Those with their red-letter flags under their arms must already have known they were in the wrong place.

Pedro Mendes put a more beautiful soft focus spin on our imagined predicament than his namesake Sam might have. Our Portugese Beauty rained bluebell petals on the Ibrox pitch with every turn and touch. Pedro doesn’t like to play for teams without an Archibald Leitch stand - first White Hart Lane and, now Pompey are moving, he has to come to Ibrox, to Engineering Archie’s pride and joy and first love. When he frequently appeared all alone with the ball in a midfield oasis, our new blue strip made it seem Mendes was still at Portsmouth and perhaps he would have been if Harry didn’t owe us one. Maybe. Perhaps. Ye know, the investigation which saw Mr Redknapp’s dealings being investigated at Ibrox? Why did we get Mendes for only £3Million? Our Chairman knows the route to a deal, to a bargain and, like any good Chairman, like any good businessman, he’ll know how to cash in a favour, to twist an arm … or an ‘Arry. Old ‘Arry does love The Rangers, though. Which is more than Peter Lawell does - apparently Celtic’s Joseph Goebbels has just just put in a bid for Ben Thatcher. Perhaps Lawell will tell us that Pedro only came to Ranges because his experience of having a good goal ruled out at old Trafford made him want to play for a club to which referees would award goals and penalties for nothing.

Whatever the reason. I’m so glad he’s here. Whatever the spin, I’m so glad it will just be the usual enemies at Celtic who’ll be putting it on our victories from now on, rather than the hysetrical revisionists who seem to have cropped up within our own ranks in the last few years and who were working themselve sinto a frenzy of dishonour this week. Hearts yesterday were nowhere near as dangerous to our team as the so-called Rangers fans who’ve been tearing into all things Ibrox with something nearing fanatical glee over the last ten days. Like the bile we’ve taken from sections of Celtic fandom over the decades, we suddenly have an anti-Rangers element within Rangers which takes the smallest fact or the most half-heard, whsipered quote, and turns it into a crime against humanity, committed by the “Evil Ibrox Board”. You wonder just how they will begin to attack the signing of Mendes - we’ll see if my ridiculous ruminations in the previous paragraph re-appear, irony-free, on the airwaves and letter pages some day soon.

Add Steve Davis to Pedro Mendes and we’ll be formidable in midfield. Then Barry Ferguson on top of that, with Kevin Thomson cleaning up for them all … oooooooh, MAMMA!! Hubbah, Hubbah, Hubbah-fucking-BUBBAH-GUUUUUM!

Broadfoot continues to improve, despite being moved all over the place and Allan McGregor is back to his brilliant best - his double save yesterday was reminiscent of his Bremen heroics - and Maurice Johnston’s recommendation Maurice Edu will sit within or in front of that defence if he gets his work permit. We’re applying a drop bolt to the back door and eeking out heavy artillery for the front door. We have no Europe to finance us but neither will it distract or drain us. Players will leave but a squad of depth is plainly ours for the season.

We are far from the finished article. We never will be. But the throbbing optimism and easy enjoyment of a day at the Govan Palace completely overwhelmed the four stands at kick-off yesterday. There were more people enjoying a smoke and a pint on the rear “veranda” of The Wee Rangers Club than audibly protesting outside The Main Doors. “Crisis” my ARSE! All my fears and doubts about the lunatics taking over the asylum simply disintegrated at 3pm yesterday. The posts on the past few threads of this blog, the utterances of “what are those arseholes all about” by those all around me at the game looking at the “protest” banners in the Enclosure, Club Deck and Broomloan and the signings of Mendes, Edu and Davis in a 48-hour period restored my faith in the wider, deep-delved sanity and loyalty of the Rangers support and simply reinforced my knowlege of Murray’s suitability. The doubters had just had their arses kicked. And, as that’s the area of their anatomy from whence most of their utterances emit, I’m sure we’ll be hearing much less from them for a while.

The doom-sayers might take up the airwaves, websites and letters pages but they are officially NOTHING when the game comes around. They have been tacitly ousted from Beardom. Rangers took to the pitch and Ibrox glowed with love and belief. That the scoreboards and their LCD clocks had been removed from the Copland and Broomloan was most apposite: We didn’t need to know what time it was - Rangers were winning and improving and Ibrox was full: It could have been ANY TIME since November 1988.

Perhaps my traditional opening defence of David Murray is becoming stale: “Thirteen league titles in twenty years” certainly sounded better when it was “Thirteen League titles in seventeen years”, and I admit neither version reads as pleasingly as “twenty out of twenty”.

So, perhaps a new tact of solid fact might begin the seepage of reason into the formica skulls of the Anti-Murray Mint brigade. Try this on for size: In the Twenty TWO years BEFORE Sir Dave The Rave took over at Ibrox, The Rangers won just FOUR league titles. That’s taking us back to 1964/65.

Just where and when, exactly, was this prelapsarian idyll to which the we deserve better fuckwits hark?

Carrying on, like Doctor Who with the Tardis stuck in reverse, from 64/65, back to the first Championship after the Second World War, we won ten titles in 18 years. Better, but still not Murray Mintish. Continuing back in time in proportionate measurements of Murray’s Ibrox career, the only period in our history more succesful than our current owner’s two-decade reign, is the inter-war years. Fifteen league titles in the first twenty years under Bill Struth - quite clearly the ONLY person in Rangers’ history at the heart of more success than Sir David Murray.

I would never deny that we “want” more success. I have, like all good Rangers fans, an unquenchable lust for silverware and championship flags. But the day you begin thinking you “deserve” it, you are dead.

The use of the word “deserve” in football parlance has always been the first indicator of the idiot. A team has twenty five shots on goal and one of them goes in - the other team has no shots on goal but, should that unscoring team come from three leagues below their opponents, every hack, journo and bitter-as-marmite-on-salt supporter wheels out the old “deserve” chestnut and begins yet another prolonged, agonising, tortuous, Amnesty International-letter-writing-to-your-local-MP-campaign-attracting abuse of both logic and the English language.

“Deserve” is a plea. “Deserve” is a begging bowl. “Deserve” is a whinge and, yesterday, inside Ibrox Stadium - one of World football’s most palatial theatres of unending privelege - the word “deserve” was a red-lettered, six foot-wide embrarrassment.

We thought we deserved to beat Kaunas - that’s why we didn’t.

Winning is about focus, about grounding yourself. You eschew ego - both your own and your opponent’s - and simply drive on. Winning stems from knowledge and belief as much as inate talent. And winning titles, winning fame, means maintaining an equilibrum of achievement over an extended peiod of time, be it one season or two decades or one hundred and thirty five years. Perfectly continual success has been achieved very few times in football history - our 1898/99 team being one of the few on this planet ever to have gone an entire league campaign without dropping a single point. More often than not, the real long-term winners are derived from those who react best to the occassional defeats everyone must invariably suffer. It’s not the defeat - it’s the REACTION to the defeat.

Real Rangers people - real winners - do not shirk from apportioning blame for any of our losses but, more importantly, we know that LOYALTY in a time of defeat, in a period of set-backs is the only loyalty which counts. When we’re down and when we’ve lost a game or two, THAT is when you earn the right to be winners. Moan, whine and look for scapegoats and you will continue to lose: Have a quick rant, regain focus and get back on the bike - united - and you will continue to win. And you will enjoy it all the more for having played your part when your club needed you most.

When Rangers lose a single league match it will not be Bary Ferguson who is dropped for the next game - everyone knows he is the best player on our books. He’ll contribute far more good play than bad over a season’s course. So when Rangers have one disastrous European season it should not be David Murray who is dropped as the evidence clearly shows he is the best man available to run this club. Perhaps the best who ever has. Sir Dave has bad seasons - just the way Laudrup and Gascoigne had bad games - but true class always outs over the long haul. All you can do is get behind a man who has earned your loyalty, repay him with some of your own.

I can’t fault anyone for being pissed-off with our start to the season. But I will disown those who mount concerted campaigns to attack their own club. I will suspect anyone who focuses on Celtic having won the last three titles rather than Rangers having not. I will denounce anyone who claims to be speaking for me and then says the exact opposite of what I think.

And I can do so guilt-free, as those people who are heard on radio and TV and read in newspapers this week are the very same people who e-mailed me on various occassions, sometimes to my personal e-mail address, telling me I “wasn’t doing the club any favours” and “helping the enemies of Rangers” by admitting we had a bigotry problem. This is the way of the hystericals, no matter which team they claim to support.

So, in another attempt to leak reason into their noggins, let’s speak in the language of the disloyalists. Let’s speak in the language the children within The Rangers Trust will understand, as they fantasise about their place in life and use Rangers as a vehicle for their own little ego-trips. As the try to create a buffer rather than link between the club and the fans. As the try to make themselves a band of hierarchy to which we should cow-tow. As they sit in pubs in Paisley Road West, facing the door, wondering about who might come in and try to have a go, as they ask UVF-wannabes to issue telephone-line threats to ordinary lone Rangers fans who “dare” to slate them. Let’s speak to them in the parlance of the movie fantasy hard man world they inhabit:

Godfather II. The scene where Michael disowns Fredo: “You’re nothing to me now … you’re not a brother, you’re not a friend. I don’t want to hear from you.”

Brilliant acting in the best movie of all time (joint). So brilliant a movie that, just like Godfather I and just like Goodfellas and just like the Sopranos, thousands of grown men all over Scotland were confused into finding the characters admirable. I’m geekish about these films too - I love them - but I’m as much a “Button Man” as any Star Wars anal retentive is Luke Skywalker. I’m as much Michael Corleone as I am Darth Vader. Yet so many adults are seduced by Coppolla, Scorcese and Chase into thinking they themselves want to be ruthless hard-ball playahs, and never have the emotional intelligence to remember that these portrayals of Mafia life are, ultimately, analyses of scum, exposes of the morally bankrupt and socially retarded. So many Follow Follow and RST types see their ability to have a voice about Rangers as their passport to living a fantasy of Mob-like menace and influence. They have no idea what they are doing or just how far removed they are from the real heart of the Rangers support. Like me, they’re just loudmouths. Like me, if this Rangers life was The Godfather, they’d be Fredo.

Because Fredo is stupid, he IS “dumb, like everyone says”. Yet he is no less loved and no less a part of the family - he is the guy who makes people welcome, he is the social convenor, he is the man who gets the party going. Hey, ye know what - he’s a bit like the guys who start the singing at Ibrox! Ye need him to create an atmosphere condusive to success. Fredo is a key part of the family - until he tires to enter into the world he does not understand, until he tries to run the business side. And then he’s an enemy of the family.

Just before Michael has his fateful chat with Fredo, he speaks in the den with Tom Hagen, Rocco and Al Neri. Hyman Roth isn’t dead, Frankie Pentangeli is securely hidden and protected by the FBI in an army base and is due to testify against Michael because Roth convinced Frankie that the Corleones wanted to kill him. Michael has already testified and has, in Tom’s words, opened himself up to five counts of perjury. Michael’s bodyguard was killed in Cuba, before he himself could kill Roth.

Tom says to Michael “Roth - he played this one beautifully”. Michael gives his adopted brother a look. No words. Just a look. It says “How dare you doubt me”.

By the end of the film, Roth has been assasinated, Michael’s decision not to invest in Cuba proved correct, the Congressman who initially tried to blackmail Michael is now working for the Corleones and Frankie Pentangele not only convinced not to testify against Michael but also then persuaded to kill himself for even THINKING the Corleones had turned on him. True, Rocco gets killed in the final move on Roth but - hey - Carlos Cuellar had to go too. Collateral.

Worst of all though. Most ruthless of all, Fredo is capped. Michael waits until their mother has passed away and then has Fredo quietly offed. He may have been part of the family, He may have been misguided and stupid but he got greedy for power and he got involved in shit he just couldn’t deal with. He fled it, he admitted he was stupid, he explained why he did it and he begged a forgiveness he thought he’d earned.

But there is a price to pay for turning your back on the family, for actively trying to compromise the hierarchy.

When Carlos Cuellar left I was dissapointed but in no way suprised. When Sir David Murray leaves I will be less surprised but completely gutted. Bereft. Scared. But that ain’t gonnae be this week. Yesterday Sir David pulled it off again. And the Fredos within the Rangers support showed themselves with their pathetic whinging banners. Al Neri will forever be behind you, on that boat, as ye dip yer rod in the water and say yer Hail Marys. You people should, perhaps, like Frankie Five Angels, take the honourable way out … of Ibrox.

The Prodfather knows what’s got to be done. How dare you doubt him.

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Published:
08.17.08 / 6pm
Category:
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