DECISIONS, DECISIONS … (Sheep … 1 GERS … 1, PART 1)

The linesman in question at Shittodrie yesterday went by the name of BILLY BAXTER. Thank Goram. Only if he’d been christened Archibald John Knox Eglinton Montfode Cromwell Huguenot Boyne Luther Ferguson Shankhill Calvin - who, as it transpires, was running the line at Tynecastle - would there be any less need for hysteria about conshpuruceees.

It’s tempting, I know, to read something more than sheer incompetence into decisions such as those at Ayburdeeeen but (a) ye’d have to be stupider than Hugh Grant crawling along an American kerb to succumb to what is only a “temptation” to look like a prat just because ye can and (b) that really is all it was - sheer fucking incompetence. To see it as anything else, for a club of our size, would be embarrassing. So we haven’t.

Walter was, as always, phenomenally diplomatic and classy in his reaction. He bemoaned the decision but stated his worries in terms of “the old firm” rather than Rangers and admitted the “new” offside interpretation was partly the cause of the linesman’s confusion and that - and here is the key - there’s every reason to think Beasley only put the ball in the net coz the Aberdeen players had seen the flag anyway.

Mind you, I read Walter’s quotes in the Sunday Herald. So the term “Old Firm” could easily have been a misprint of “sheep-shagging bastards” and the entire quote could in fact have been the words of Walter Winterbottom, taken down by Michael Grant during the 1962 World Cup in Chile.

Coming out the rabbit-run, steel-fenced, Joliet exercise yard-style exit from our allotted area of Pittodrie, everyone was mentioning the fact that “even Scott Booth”, the fat Harry Potter himself, had confirmed on pay-to-view TV that the goal should have stood. Either these were punters who’d been right under the South Stand commentary gantry while preppy Scott SHOUTED his Setanta punditry, or everyone at the game is getting texts from folk watching it on Virgin 538. Yes they are. But no-one around me was claiming a conspiracy or even getting in any way riled. There was, among the travelling Bears, a phlegmatic acknowledgement of what goes around comes around with officials. We blamed our own team for not putting Aberdeen away earlier.

I love Rangers fans for that. Fuck conspiracies. Blame yerself for yer own failings. Only children blame others.

When we start seeing it as “all a bit sinister” or when we start seeing any patterns at all in Scottish officiating, we become like the nutters amongst our Green and White friends. We’re forced to remember incidents such as the key decisions which have gone Celtic’s way in their opening three games, not because we think officials are pro-Celtic, but because ye need to have a handfull of counter-balancing facts whenever trying to extricate yerself from a hyserical tirade by a bleating-faced hoop-lover anytime we beat the bastards.

Unfortunately, for me and every other Teddy Bear, there’s no way we’ll ever keep up in the outrage-remembering stakes with the more rabid fans of a club who NEED to feel the world’s against them. Rangers supporters, like most normal fitbaw fans, remember great players and great goals - the only bad decisions against Rangers I can recall beyond this season or last are the build-up to the 1989 Scottish Cup final winner and Michael Mols being punched about the head and face by Bobo Balde all through the 2003 League Cup final with no punishment. Even then, these were, to me, just things that happen in games. We won that 2003 League Cup final so who gives a fuck. And we’d humped Celtic all through the 1988/89 season so we should never have had to rely on one properly-awarded shy to beat them in the Cup Final. Shit happnes. We get breaks like that too.

When. however, ye have no capacity for intaking prosaic fact we become like the people who think Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t shoot JFK. We transform into the kind of perma-revelatory pub loudmouth who prefaces every sentence of incredulity at yer naivety with “Ye cannae tell me …”, as in “ye canae tell me Jack Ruby was just some loudmouthed wannabe mobster who just happened to be in the area when Oswald was being paraded to the press and shot him on the spur of the moment just out of some life-long need to be the centre of attention, preferably by being at the forefrunt of some act of national retribution. Ye cannae tell me it wisnae part of a Mafia-FBI-CIA agreement. Ye cannae tell me he didnae leave his poodle in his temporarily-parked car to die of heat suffocation as anything other than an alibi for his superiors, to give the apperance of acting on his own on the spur of the moment. Ye cannae tell me that. Ye cannae tell me there’s nae logic to life. Ye cannae tell me there’s not a reason for everything bad that happens. Ye cannae tell me there’s such a word as ‘random’. ye just CANNAE!!! …”

It’s a bank holiday tomorrow, and I’m one of the few people left employed by a bank (Only because my job’s of such menial importance and pay that it would make absolutely no dent on the credit crunch depression if I was paid off). So, in order to “get in the holiday spirit” I lay in bed til lunch-time today (usually, by noon on a Sunday, I’d be completing a four-hour fell-sprint challenge) and then, instead of relating my full and fulminating cyber opines on the events in the Granite Shitty I watched the Wigan-Chelsea game. Other than fulfilling some strange need to “be bank holidayish”, I mainly watched it to see Deco. Because, like, I love him and want to marry him. I should have switched off the minute the wee guy banged in that free kick. I knew that’d be it.

Wigan-Chelsea made me fell a whole lot better about Rangers, after our two dropped points yesterday - but it also made me so numb that I aint gonnae type out the full details of my day trip to Aberdeen until Monday morning.

I know this will upset many of you. I know a lot of you also don’t read my shite anywhere else than at yer work and yese’ll all be on the same wank - erm - bank holiday as me so that’s fine by you … and I know most of you couldn’t give a flying fuck if I never typed another word in my sad, fat life.

:-)

But it’ll be up there tomorrow, Monday, my Ayburdeen Match retort - and, I’ll be honest, one of the reasons I’m delaying the posting of the full facts is to escape, to deny, to avoid for just one more day, the full guilt and shame of what I did yesterday.

I’ve done many a thing I’m not proud of in Aberdeen. But Aberdeen deserved all those things. And so did that lollipop lady. What I did on Saturday, however, went beyond the pale. Artur Boruc has nothing on me when it comes to being a stupid fat prick with no social conscience. I’m ashamed. I’m disgusted with myself. I’m not looking forward to fessing up.

But the punishment must start somehwere - it starts on these pages, of this blog, on Monday 24th August. (Well, be honest, it’s a fucking punsihment very time ye have tae read this shite in’t it and … erm - no - sorry - … anyway …)

If you thought little of me before - just wait till this time on Monday night …

I’m scum. Total scum … just ask Liz Hurley …