Did I ever tell you about the time I saved my wife from a
tiger? No? Well, that’s probably because my feat of heroism didn’t take place
in the Indian rain forest but in the passenger lift to the top of a famous
European tourist attraction. And it wasn’t so much a tiger as someone dressed
as a tiger. And they were so skinny I couldn’t tell if it was a young man or a young
woman (it may actually have been a leopard suit, perhaps a cheetah. I don’t
know - I’m a man of action, not David bloody Attenborough) so, knowing a
passport-revoking assault could also become a hate crime, my coiled-spring SAS
reaction was swiftly dialled down to a decidedly huffy mince towards the
pronounless jungle cat, my not-in-any-way-bothered missus, and the female
photographer demanding to take a picture of my wife and I with the “tiger”, which we would then buy for far too many
Euros at the end of our visit.
That’s Belgium for you. Or, rather, that’s Belgium for me.
It’s a country that doesn’t hate me. In fact, I get the distinct impression it hardly
thinks about me at all. Yet, despite the fact I’m as big a fan as anyone of
chips with mayo, waffles with ice cream and Poirot with Suchet, it consistently
throws my excitement back in my face.
Maybe it’s the fact I don’t like mussels. Maybe it’s that I’m trying just too
hard to like a country so beloved of two of my personal TV heroes,
Ian Nairn and Jonathan Meades. Perhaps it’s that it has enough identity
problems of its own to be bothered with a Scotland supporter who dislikes the
SNP more than the England national team and was raised neither catholic nor
protestant despite having a mother from one religion and a father from the
other. Whatever the cause, my relationship with Belgium is… well, I believe the
Flemish expression is “pffft”.
This is neither the “name me a famous Belgian” cliché nor an aversion gleaned
from the Cockpit of Europe appellation. Bar Brel, in Glasgow’s Ashton Lane, is one
of my favourite bars in the world and while Jaques Brel, the man it’s named
for, isn’t my favourite singer in the
world, he was bloody good and seriously cool. Bowie covered his “Amsterdam” and
didn’t get anywhere close.
No, the cause is mysterious but the fact undeniable; if I’m looking forward to
something Belgian, it all goes weird. If I’m concerned about something Belgian,
it laughs in my face. If I’m about to get angry at something Belgian, it runs
away, calling me whatever the French is for “tight git” and shutting the lift
door behind it.
The point of all this? Well, I’m not just trying to explain why last Thursday, in Belgium’s second city, against Belgium’s oldest club, I wasn’t in any way surprised to go through all of the above emotions in the space of one of the most barnstorming 90 minutes Rangers have ever played (that it was actually 105 minutes is just the start of the story). I’m giving you a solid reason why, despite our team winning that game by the odd goal in seven, we, as a support, should remain cautious about tonight’s return leg.
There’s a case for saying this is just what Rangers do now in the first leg of the Europa League Last 32. We concede more than expected against a team in much red but eventually come out on top in an epic. In that case, per the second leg against Braga last season, we’ll see out this tie in a well-drilled fashion, entertaining only for further evidencing the ongoing miracle of Steven Gerrard’s Rangers in Europe. And Alfredo’s first goal - or three - in the knockout stages.
However, if last week’s heart-stopper was about this beef - or boeuf, or stoofvlees - between me and Belgium, I’m worried. I’m worried for
Rangers. Because if you think it’s all in my head and it’s only about my
holidays, think again. It’s all about the football.
I’ve seen the Belgium national team three times in the flesh. I know many
Bluenoses have little time for Scotland and I respect why. However, while I’ve
never worn a kilt, I’ve always supported my local national side and at Hampden in
the last few years I’ve seen Belgium win 4-0, twice, 365 days apart.
Furthermore, in a World Cup qualifier 20 years ago, they equalised in injury
time despite being 2-0 down within half an hour. Belgium have never won a major
tournament yet I’ve seen them beat Scotland 10-2 on aggregate.
The famous night against Club Brugge (runners-up in the 1976 UEFA Cup and 78 European Cup)? The night Scott Nisbet scored that goal for ten men which, even now, has me crying every time I see it on YouTube? Oh, I was there alright. I was there about three hours before kick-off, trying desperately to get a spare ticket. All I got was a pennant, wet, and the train home to watch it on telly.
That was a year before I started back in full-time education aged 24. I was still paying off the credit card I’d battered while working in order to follow follow every week since leaving school at 16. I made it to the famous Leeds and Marseille home ties that season but couldn’t afford a season ticket or even to buy all three group games up front.
As soon as I was solvent again, at the end of that decade, I vowed I’d never miss another meaningful home game. And for the last 21 years I largely haven’t. So, of course, the Belgian sides I need to score off my list pick this season to start arriving at Ibrox, the season Covid kept everyone out the grounds.
It was horrible for all of us not being there for the visits of Benfica (ten times European finalists) and Galatsaray (2000 UEFA Cup winners). But I’ve seen Benfica in the flesh, at Anfield. And I was at our first Ibrox meeting with Galatasaray, when Hagi Senior faced us in the Champions League. Those two great clubs are on my European finalists Got list. Club Brugge, KV Mechelen (1988 European Cup-Winners’ Cup champions), Standard Liege (1982 European Cup-Winners’ Cup runners-up) and Royal Antwerp (1993 European Cup-Winners’ Cup runners-up), however, are on my Not Got list – the one that’s taken me 36 years to get down to just 31 clubs.
KV Mechelen don’t do much European football these days. But Standard Liege and Royal Antwerp couldn’t wait to turn up at my front door as soon as they heard I wasn’t allowed to open it. I’m convinced the only reason Rangers have beaten one of them and should eliminate the other, is the fact they can still annoy the shit out me by playing in front of my season ticket seat, knowing I can’t tick them off my list.
Standard Liege lost the Cup-Winners’ Cup final at the Nou camp ten years after we won it there. I’ve wanted to see them ever since my gran brought me a Standard pennant back from Belgium around the same time, from one of those ferry trips to Ostend all the rage in the early 80s. It still hangs in the same room as my Rangers v Brugge pennant from 1992-93, reminders of love and failure.
Never mind Roofe’s sensational winner in the Stade Maurice Dufrasne – I would only have been at the home tie in this season’s group stage and what a game that was. Standard wore a sensationally continental away kit - red and white half hoops with black shorts, like nothing you’d see in Scotland, defying the idea strips are now globally generic. That strip, like them twice taking the lead and us winning, epitomised the glamour of European nights. All that was missing was the most important element: me (and my wee list, and my marker pen).
I had to attend night school to get back into full time education. As skint as I was when Royal Antwerp reached the 1993 Cup-Winners’ Cup final, I wasn’t so skint I couldn’t rough it to London and back.
I was only 23 years old and had never been to one of these European finals that so obsessed me. But I had an exam, that very day - the day of Royal Antwerp v Parma at massive old Wembley. A crowd of 37,000 turned up. A match ticket wouldn’t have been a problem – there were 55,000 going spare. And, of course, later, I found out I’d got into Uni through my other exams. I sat my Higher Modern Studies – I missed that final - for nothing.
Bloody Belgians.
The tiger incident? That came during a July 2004 holiday in Brussels, with the girl I met at Uni. We like a city break. I usually go crazy with the sightseeing. I’ll never know why but in Brussels that just didn’t happen. It was great but in a very weird, slightly draining way. The window of our entirely air conditioned room looked out onto the centre of the hotel – the dining area under the atrium and the doors of all the other rooms. Weird.
I went to Anderlecht’s Stadium and it was shut. We spent half an hour in a near-empty bar unable to get served. We kept intending to do a day trip to Brugges but never did. We found the plaque commemorating Verlaine shooting Rimbaud but didn’t go into the Musée des Beaux Arts. We did go to our first ever Ethiopian restaurant but, far from treating Brussels like Auden and Isherwood, one day we ended up in front of a TV watching the Open, from Troon – in Ayrshire - Ayrshire, where my mum and dad lived. I was in the capital of Belgium, looking at background shots of Ailsa Craig and the Isle of Arran, landmarks I could see from my bedroom window every bloody day growing up.
And in that Ardrossan bedroom, of a schoolnight, scouring my Marshall & Cavendish Encyclopedia of World Football, I was transfixed by a black and white picture of the 1958 European Cup final between Real Madrid and Milan - in Brussels. Almost more than the action shot of Alonso saving from Juan Schiaffino, what grabbed my attention was the sight, behind the Heysel stadium, looming above the packed terraces, of what looked like a gargantuan, skeletal space ship from a 1950s B-movie; The Atomium.
The same year Real won that final (3-2 after extra time), Brussels also staged the famous Expo World’s Fair and built the Atomium, a 335 foot high stainless steel model of the atoms making up a cell of iron as it would appear under a microscope. Exciting, mind-bending stuff, eh? Yeah, well, maybe in 1958. And also now, apparently.
When I got there in July 2004, having already failed to get into the Heysel Stadium (surprise, surprise - it was shut), the Atomium was falling to pieces. It was due to shut in October of 2004 for refurbishment. But the refurb was already under way. And the desperate attempt to hawk money from visitors with the indeterminate cat costume was, in its own way, perfectly apt. But if you got in the lift you could visit the various “atoms” and I knew at least one of them offered a view of Belgium’s national stadium.
The Heysel stadium, of course, by then had completed its own refurbishment, physical and otherwise - it was now the Baudouin Stadium – in an attempt to escape its own, much darker history. It now had more and bigger stands than in 1958, and huge cantilevered roofs which I imagine blocked much of my view of the pitch. I can’t remember because (a) I was too worried about another attack from the big cat that may well, now I think about it, have been native to the Belgian Congo and (b) I seem to have lost the photos I know I must have taken that day.
The only stadium pictures I can find from my trip to Brussels are of the famous Edmond Machtens Stadium. It’s a ground so open on one side you can photograph it from the street. The year before I stood in the Molenbeek district sunshine holding my camera through the gates, RWD Molenbeek were forced into another merger. The following year, one of the stands I pictured was named after Raymond Goethals, the manager in charge of Standard Liege when they bribed a domestic opponent to chuck a game the week of their 1982 Cup-Winners’ Cup final, the manager of Olympique de Marseille when they did likewise the week of their 1993 Champions League final and the manager of Anderlecht for two of their three successive 1970s European cup-Winners’ Cup finals.
That’s Anderlecht, who bribed the referee ahead of the home leg of their 1984 UEFA Cup semi-final versus Nottingham Forest. Franky Vercauteren played for Goethals at Anderlecht. Vercauteren is Royal Antwerp’s manager right now and when, last Thursday, that Bulgarian referee allowed Avenatti, Seck and Lukaku to get away with assaults on, respectively, Tav, Kent and Balogun, but booked Ryan Kent for nudging someone, I did begin to wonder.
But mostly I wonder if the way Belgium hates me will see Royal Antwerp win by two clear goals tonight, or will it ensure we go through purely so we can draw Club Brugge in the next round? Just to piss me off. That’s Club Brugge who may well have taken money off Marseille in their final game in our 1992-93 Champions League group. Photos with a tiger or access to European finals – it’s all about money with the Belgians, while I’m just here for the sights. That’s it – that will be why we just don’t get on.
My Not Got list remains at 31, despite the fact it should have been in the twenties. That Rangers have offered me the chance to go to the match virtually – to join in a virtual fan experience - seems like the final insult. I’m as close as I can ever be to seeing Royal Antwerp in the flesh, without really being there. And, like me getting through this entire rant without mentioning Tintin, Rangers are as close as it’s possible to be to the next round without being there yet.
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