Unemotional Stunt (Part 2: To Have and to Hold Back)

 I’ve never wept at a game because of a setback in a football competition. I store them up, the bad times. I know I’ll have the rest of my life to regret them – that I’ll live those defeats way beyond the confines of the stadium and that they’ll come pouring out the eyeballs when we next win a big one. 

I’ve always seen the “devastation” as part of the game. Even as a kid I knew that to take the pain so hard would eventually cost me my interest in the sport itself. There was an instinctive understanding of football’s long narrative, that most of us get two or three moments in life to see our team truly over-achieve, reach a peak we’d established as doable for them around age 10.

Such truly joyous moments are so few and far between you need to build up a resistance to being constantly denied them. Seeing Corporate wallies giggling in the concourse as they depart seats lifelong season ticket holders were kicked out for champions League games - that’s too much. This is where the most stunted of non-criers will vent their pain by inflicting it on those showing way too little.

Generally speaking, however, I hate the idea of a camera close-up of me, as Rangers fail to win a game they were never really expected to, being relayed to the world. Forget the obvious entertainment it would grant Celtic fans – I'd be ashamed of such outrageous self-indulgence when so many other clubs never win so much as a Scottish League Cup. There's real vanity to it.

And yet I have welled up when Rangers lost out. Mr Stoic here has indeed blubbed at defeat - twice in fact - and blubbed but good. Neither was as straightforward an incident as you might think, so perhaps it’s apt that the connection this time is Manchester City.

 In 1998 when Rangers lost the chance to win ten titles on the trot, winning our final game of the season away to Dundee United as Celtic’s home victory over St Johnstone denied us the league by two points, I was my usual self – more hollowed out with resignation than animatedly bereft.

 My sister and I listened to the game on the radio in my Glasgow (mature) student flat. The main thing in those days was that Rangers had equalled Celtic’s nine-in-a-row but, as has proven true, I knew the failure to do ten would nevertheless haunt me forever. And if I cried once what’s to stop me crying forever?

 I quietly saw my sister into the city centre and onto her train back to sunny Ayrshire. Glasgow Central station resembled a war zone as thousands of Rangers fans had been watching our game on a big screen at Ibrox (this was the last time a final day title decider would not be shown live on a TV channel) and were now bumping into celebrating Celtic fans returning from Parkhead as everyone set off home.

 All this was expected, emotionally planned for and no surprise to me. Them’s the fitba breaks. I was skint and in the middle of my finals. Hey - it was an excuse to have a frugal, healthy evening.

 I kept my head down and got back to my flat, which I shared with a Celtic-supporting bloke and a girl with a boyfriend from Galway I’d become mates with. They didn’t want to get in my way and I stayed out of theirs that night. I’d gone nuts the previous year, in the same flat, when Rangers sealed nine-in-a-row and they’d respected that: Time for me to reciprocate.

 But all this diplomacy – and my gutted, emptied mood - meant I was sat alone in my room on a Saturday night; no intention of studying and incapable of any real indulgence. BBC 2 was screening a night of football-related programmes, all in a “You don’t have to be mad to love footy but …” vein.  I think it was hosted by Mark and Lard:

 This felt perfect: I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t consumed by football feeling so to watch a movie or a game show would’ve been pointless. Yet this channel was relaying English football stories so there’d be no direct, painful references to my mob. I watched, tepidly sipping a few cans of something, hiding myself in the safety of English fan culture.

 Then a Manchester City supporter, in his 30s, began talking about his son, who he’d lost to a horrible illness. He spoke of how they went to City games together, at Maine Road. He spoke about how when City, one day, got back in the top flight, it would be for his son, who he knew would be watching.

 That was me. Gone. Gone for ages. Properly blubbing. Distraught for minutes – maybe quarter or half an hour; just gone. Quietly sobbing in my room, on a big, green fucking chair borrowed from a fellah who’s dad had won the All-Ireland with Galway.

 I’ve never quite sorted out why I went like that. Mostly it was for that man and his son – but I usually respect that kind of grief rather than indulge in something I’d been lucky enough never to feel.  But that City fan and his son were telling me why it was okay to love football so deeply. Add to that the stress of final exams which I hadn’t studied for in any way shape or form, that I was truly head-over-heels in love for the first time in my life but so much so that I wanted the girl to live her life away from me, and the other random, personal shit always thrown up by student life.

 But mostly it was because ten years of sheer football tension needed to get out. I gret like a baby after Rangers won a battle that day, after winning the war the previous year, but lost the minor campaign that followed. I did the sobbing all alone in my room and most of it came from sheer pride at what Rangers had achieved – taking that tenth season right down to the wire, running on fumes - rather than what had been lost. 

 So there was some sort of tortuously strained link when, ten years and five days later, with us again en route to losing the title to Celtic on the last day of the season, my true Rangers obsession came to fruition at Maine Road’s replacement:

 All I ever really needed was to see us in a European final. Since I was a kid, reading about "Barcelona in 1972" and later watching the video of that victory over Moscow Dynamo, I knew real success for my club would be reaching a continental showpiece. Nine-in-a-row was a domestic, local, private affair and it had to be done but, Jeezus H Christ, it was so tense and horrible so much of the time, with virtually all the pressure on Rangers. European football is freeing – like a holiday. And it’s all the more glorious for being watched and shared by an entire continent.

For as far back as I could remember, I dreamed of being there when a Rangers captain again swapped pennants on the half-way line of a neutral venue that wasn’t Hampden, with a UEFA trophy glittering in the background. Again, winning it was, like ten-in-a-row, so much nicer but not the main requirement.

So when, one year after I attended Sevilla v Espanyol at Hampden in the UEFA Cup final, the Rangers players walked past the very same trophy on the podium in the City of Manchester Stadium main stand, I could definitely feel the lips wobble, the throat dry and the eyes dampen. 

A 67-game campaign – where I’d attend 49 of them and blogged extensively about every one into the wee small hours before working a full-time job the next day, had reached its denouement. Again, the physical and mental exhaustion was kicking in. A tear or two went over the ridge and onto the No-Man’s Land of the cheeks. But I sucked the rest up and got some stiff into my upper lip, at least.   

 There was no fucking way I was taking the chance I’d be spotted on camera. For me, again, this entire run to a European final, from last-minute winners in Champions League qualifiers and finishing third in the same group as Barcelona, to endless 0-0s and tight games through the subsequent UEFA Cup knock-out rounds, was one long victory – and one you could only stop worrying about and start celebrating when you knew it was over.

The loss to Zenit finished the run and I was remaining inside that ground to applaud Zenit – managed by an Ex-Rangers manager – and to laud my team for ensuring I could die happy. With football, I cry when I’m happy, when my team make me undeniably proud.

With Manchester 2008, the only real defeat took place shortly afterwards, when I got back into the city centre. That time, my heart really did sink - for what had happened and how it would be used. But tears weren't appropriate.

 
 We only truly lost that tenth straight Scottish league title on the last day of the season. We only truly lost that UEFA Cup final in the last minute. The Saturday after Ten-in-a-row passed us by we lost the Scottish Cup final to Hearts and my mate and I joined my flat-mate from Edinburgh and toasted her Jambo dad.

 The day before, the day Frank Sinatra died, the day of our final finals, that other girl told me she wasn’t going anywhere without me and a year later, dear reader, we were married and that's one result that's had her crying ever since. So tears must symbolise real joy, right?

 Just like at weddings, you may cry for the joy of seeing two people in love - you may even cry at the thought your daughter is now wed to a fat football geek from Ayrshire. But if it’s a truly bad result – like you know your new father-in-law can blow the head off a rabbit from half a mile away – you need your wits about you and your eyes dry as a bone.