Kamara Stands: Others Hide

                                

In October 1936 Germany faced Scotland at Ibrox. The Germans had finished third at the second World Cup finals, staged in Italy two years previously. The home nations were yet to even acknowledge Jules Rimet existed. So these friendlies were literally test matches, bona fide arbiters of international football’s true power base.

At the end of that same season, nine of the Germany team Scotland struggled to defeat 2-0 in front of 50,000 would form the Breslau-elf – the Breslau Eleven – who, in another challenge match, provided the most significant victory in the history of the German national team outside only their 1954 World Cup win and their triumph at the 1972 Euros.

It’s a match still celebrated today and which I first learned of in Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenberger’s seminal English language story of German football, Tor! (WSC Books, 2002). Germany defeated Denmark 8-0 in a singular display of attacking guile and panache which marked their arrival as a footballing force in their own right.

The reason I mention the pride felt in this game by right-thinking, modern Germans – even old anti-establishment punks like Hesse-Lichtenberger – is the same reason you’re wondering where Breslau is. It’s now called Wroclaw, and it’s in Poland. At the time this game was played it was called Breslau and was part of Hitler’s “Greater Germany”.  

You know and I know this had almost nothing to do with the players. It would be a stretch to slate them for simply carrying on with their football careers as politics, always above their pay grade, carried on around them.

And, as you’re now probably remembering, England players of that era gave the Nazi salute in a Berlin friendly. It wasn’t just Germans who were forced to go along with a regime whose full evil would only be revealed over the next horrific decade.  

And so there is a picture of that day seven months earlier which clearly shows the swastika flying near the north-east corner of Ibrox, on a flag pole on the old enclosure roof opposite the Main Stand. Part knowing appeasement, part misguided manners, it was gestures like this that bought Britain just enough time to rearm sufficiently to keep Hitler at bay.

Yet I’ve seen modern day memes from rival fans, Rangers-haters, which promote this picture as Rangers “proudly” flying the swastika. It’s offered as conclusive proof of our fascist tendencies.

Forget it was a Scotland game and decorum demands, as it still does, the opposition’s national flag be flown at such games. Ignore the fact Rangers are simultaneously berated by the same internet trolls for fetishising the poppy, which remembers, among others, those who lost their life fighting the Nazis in the ensuing Second World War.

Never mind all the basic facts. Just feel the crassness of such an accusation, such a rank characterisation, in the pit of your stomach.

And now imagine it’s happening to your face rather than over the internet. Try to envisage how desperately alone you would feel if, unlike the Rangers support, you were part of a community vastly outnumbered by that from which your slanderer, your verbal assailant hails.

And then imagine, despite what the 1930s and 40s taught the world about where “othering” ends, no-one from government or law enforcement – not one third party source - is stepping in to stop the perpetrator.

Imagine a fucking referee lets him play on while your heart bleeds from the wound he’s inflicted.

It’s been a week of pathetically trying to imagine what it’s like to be Glen Kamara. It’s been a week of trying to do the impossible; trying to sympathise, as a white man soaked in my own privilege, with a 21^st century black man who has been racially abused, and trying not to make matters worse as a result.

I can’t do it. No-one white can. But we have to keep trying.

Last Saturday morning I recounted my earliest experience of racism – but only as a witness. This week a white cyber friend of mine, a West Brom fan who previously lived in Czechia and now resides in Slovakia, alerted me to a thread he’d begun on the One Touch Football chat room threads powered by When Saturday Comes. I joined him there to half-vent, half navel-gaze and just generally wonder where the fuck it all went wrong while, all around us, black football people – and black society – are trying to remember any time it ever went right.

I woke up last Friday to a Google notification from some Celtic website or news feed – a “Bhoys Blether”, “Celts Chat or “Hoops Haver” kinda thing – which, for some reason, saw fit to do a match report on the Rangers game of the previous evening.  Perhaps it was a reconnaissance mission ahead of the coming Old Firm match at Parkhead. But the dossier on their team’s next opponent consisted mainly of the words “shame” and “humiliation” and “violent”, liberally peppered with “disgraceful”.

Fair dues, I thought - at least they’ve called out the racism of Slavia Prague’s Ondřej Kúdela. But this report didn’t mention him. There was no reference whatsoever to the “incident” near the end of the game. They were simply referring to our two sendings-off and the fact the Slavia keeper, known for coming off his line too early, ended up with stitches to his face after a horrific clash with Kemar Roofe.

What, of course, this “report” was doing was reacting perversely to the fact there had been, the previous night, widespread media sympathy for an obviously distressed Rangers player. By rushing out a spiel on the game which didn’t even allow that one of our players felt he had been racially abused, they were proudly declaring they would never sympathise with a Rangers player, no matter the circumstance.

More disturbing, these Celtic hacks wanted any genuine hurt caused to a Rangers player to be scrubbed from history. Our centre-forward raising a boot too high and our centre-half picking up a second yellow for miscontrolling both the ball and his subsequent tackle, however – this was all proof of Rangers FC’s ongoing evil.

You wondered if they typed this up under a Xeroxed, grainy close-up of a roof over Ibrox in 1936, perhaps printed off and pinned to the wall above the Ikea Table of Truth upon which their Laptop of Purity rests. You wonder, basically, if they wrote their report under a billowing swastika.

Last Wednesday and Thursday I was blogging like an excited school boy about the intellectual beginnings and illustrious history of Slavia Prague. I eulogised their kit, I adored their stadium story - I called them a proud, proud club and genuinely lamented the fact I couldn’t see them in the flesh.

The flesh. Indeed.

A few days previously, still celebrating Rangers first title win in ten years, I wondered if anything could ever be done to repair my lost admiration for Rangers traditional top-tier rivals – the country’s other biggest clubs – after their fans and their boardrooms danced on our nascent grave in 2012.

By last Thursday night Slavia Prague had become the closest I will ever experience to hating a football club. I wished them only extinction. By Saturday, looking at a picture sent to the Gersnet WhatsApp group, I almost dissolved into tears to see Dundee United standing, literally pre-kick off v Aberdeen at Tannadice and symbolically with Glen Kamara.

Motherwell and, of course, on Sunday, Celtic too, also clearly took on board Connor Goldson’s distressingly frank interviews on Friday last. Taking the knee was now officially a token gesture.

Perhaps my genuine, post-2012 enmity with Scottish clubs I previously admired was dissolving. My life-long love affair with central European football history – one sealed with games attended and grounds visited in Czechia, Austria, Slovakia and Italy - was certainly turning more toxic than I could ever have expected.  

As Kudela withdrew from the Czechia squad travelling to Wales over the following international week, fearful of arrest for being the racist he is, Scotland welcomed Austria to Hampden a week after Slavia had stained Ibrox.

Any visit by Austria brings to mind their great Wunderteam, surprisingly beaten by Germany in that 1934 World Cup bronze medal match, of manager Hugo Meisl and global icon, the Paper Man himself, Matthias Sindelar. Both were born in towns now part of Czechia.

Once again, a week on from talking of Slavia’s 1938 success – a week on from delightedly posting pictures of Slavia’s 1938 Mitropa Cup-winning team - I was re-immersed in the world of inter-war, Mitteleuropa football - all Danubian derbies, intelligentsia versus workers and sepia-tinted glory. Now it felt soiled. Now it was horrible.

Twitter is perfectly matched to the lockdown mind-set – too agitated to sit still yet too disheartened to engage a long-term project. Yet I’d never previously been involved in a Twitter spat – not one that went beyond a half dozen posts anyway. But this week I went looking for one. I had to do something.

I saw another hardy Rangers soul interacting with a couple of Slavia fans, protesting on Kudela’s behalf in good English. This offered me the chance to somehow, pathetically, “stick up” for Glen Kamara and, who knows, if they were reasonable – one was a "travel blogger" after all! - also enjoy the knowledge not all Slavia fans were racist and I had, in fact, been overreacting to want their club as dead as so many wished mine in 2012.

A day’s back and forth saw these Czech Twitterers never once admit to any of the past proven cases of racism by their fans, slowly resort to calling all Rangers fans murderers because of a tragic death reported in salacious Old Firm terms by the tabloids through the week, and descend eventually into "hoping for more racism" in future games amid a one-way barrage of gifs laughing at the fact Rangers fans, as far as they were concerned, thought we could “solve” racism. 

Slavia fans are the subject of anti-Semitic chants by their domestic rivals. I knew this from Wikipedia. And the reason for these chants is itself horrifically anti-Semitic. I presume the editor of the Wiki page is a Slavia fan and perhaps something is lost in his use of a second language, but it seems more interested in pointing out Slavia fans are not Jewish than berating the anti-Semitic chants. The darkest part of the exchange was when I was basically told these chants justified Kudela racially abusing Glen Kamara.

You can never judge an entire fanbase by their Twitter warriors but, again, an infinitesimal hint of a whiff of a taste of what Glen Kamara must have felt when a man spat something in his ear and ran away because he knew it was evil.

No-one took the knee at Hampden this Thursday. The players all stood against racism and for Glen Kamara. The Wunderteam and First, Rapid and Austria Vienna’s Mitropa Cup successes of the 1920s and 30s were all restored to sentimental glory. Sindelar was the man who destroyed the Nazis on the pitch in his last ever international match.

But that’s no fucking help to Glen Kamara, is it. My temporary xenophobia was gone and my sickening xenophilia was restored? Wow. How does that help Glen, who probably listened last Friday as a BBC Scotland football pundit put all the pressure on him to prove what Kudela had said before re-framing the seminal moment a Scottish football team called out what they felt was a homophobic slur – a sound in Dingwall never proven not to be – as this Rangers team being a bunch of consistent liars.

In early January Michael Stewart sat on the Sportscene sofa and declared a stonewall (no pun intended) penalty and red card against Aberdeen to be unfair. The Aberdeen manager discussed it with the referee and publically concluded the correct decisions had been made. So what was Stewart's argument?

Simply that he, personally, didn’t like the rule. Suddenly.

Aberdeen lost to Rangers that day (we missed the penalty incidentally) and BBC Radio Scotland’s Sportsound did very well in so much of its racism discussions after last Thursday. But one wonders exactly how much proof Stewart will be satisfied with regarding what Kudela said to Rangers midfielder Glen Kamara.

In my Premiership title celebratory rantings I also laughed at the fact Rangers going from the top of Scottish football to the bottom and back again in the space of a decade would never be allowed to be the most romantic story in Scottish football. It took less than two weeks for me to be reminded we will, in fact, for so many over-invested, one-note observers, always need to be the most evil team in world football.

This extends to the need to wipe from history not only any good we do, but any undeniably evil behaviour towards us. Right now, somewhere, someone is twisting this last week into Rangers, the club who flew the swastika, also being the club who ended the taking of the knee. No context or explanation will be given. So we have to remember why and how.

But these are the loonballs. The nutbars. These are the permanently enraged and rarely engorged inadequates whose excesses contain their own defeat. Most Celtic fans have laughed off the swastika over Ibrox meme before it even hit a Rangers Twitter account. And we know what it’s like from the other side: We’ve all read or heard fellow Rangers fans linking the darker history of the Vatican with a guy at your work who hasn’t been to mass in decades but, well, supports a fitba team much the same size as ours.

Nah – they’re not the enemy. They’re not the kind of people who celebrate on your pitch then wait outside the tunnel for 45 minutes because they know they’ll be attacked if they go anywhere near the dressing rooms and they know they deserve it.
 
It’s the guys who scoff at the point of even fighting bigotry. Those using “woke” as a jibe, those insisting “it’s just the way things are” – those demanding hard proof of injustice far louder than they ever asked for its end, and whose sympathy depends on the colour of your shirt rather than, yup, the colour of your skin. They’re the ones you have to watch.

Sectarianism kills like racism. Nothing empowers both like pretending they’re just the norm. And nothing destroys the confidence of black players like knowing white men with a forum – be that a gif on Twitter, the microphone of a national broadcaster or the reigns of a famous Czech football club - feel no need to even try to stick up for them.

Glen Kamara

He was crying. A grown man crying tears of devastation. But he confronted it – confronted everyone – and, everywhere he looked, no-one would meet his stare. The crying man was the brave man, swimming against a sea of cowards.

I was 14 so you’ll not be surprised I can’t recall the exact circumstances, where the terracing tickets came from. But I know we were all originally meant to be in the comparative calm and safety of the main stand for Scotland v England on 26 May 1984.

It wasn’t the first time I’d been on the old Hampden West Terrace - the “Rangers End” – and I can’t remember if it was section J or H behind that goal, but it was definitely the first time I’d been without an adult.

Somewhere between catching the train from Ardrossan South Beach to Glasgow Central, tartan scarf chaffing the neck, and being smuggled into what later became the Solid Rock Café on Hope Street, Coca Cola at the window table, three terracing tickets suddenly became an option for my dad and his mate Michael.

Michael’s son, Jim, and Jim’s best friend, Craig, both 15, instantly joined me in pleading our cases. I can’t remember all the conditions but the main ones were “don’t die and don’t tell your mothers”.

Maybe the dads just wanted peace but, as we hadn’t in any way curtailed their drinking, it’s more likely they thought it was a right of passage they couldn’t deny us. Or an education in the ways of the world we badly needed.

Well, it was certainly educational.

Oh, we loved it. I’d be lying if I said otherwise. Falling about the place in a crowd of well over 70,000; Cascading down a dozen steps and back when Mark McGhee headed past Peter Shilton right in front of us:

In the world of desire that was my early teenage years, seeing that ball go inside the square posts and yurt-sized nets of Mount Florida was rare fulfillment.

Being on that terrace was what I regarded, as only a kid can, as the full adult experience. And looking back I’m so happy I did old Hampden, old style, in the oldest international fixture on the planet. Played at 3pm on a Saturday too.

But I can’t be truly proud. And not just because watching a football match isn’t really, in the scheme of things, an achievement.

It was a beautiful sunny day. Although, famously, sections J and H comprised the only roofed terracing at Hampden, I remember it being warm even up the back, probably from the compacted bodies singing and jumping in the very way that made Jim, Craig and I so desperate to be in this fabled part of this fabled ground.

And there was a young black man a few rows (i.e., people) in front of us. He was older than us but probably early 20s at most. And at first I thought he was sweating. And he might have been. But he was also crying – and crying with a horrified disappointment the like of which I had never seen before, had never known, but instantly understood.

He was wearing the 1978 white Scotland away top. The one I got while in primary school (Umbro – an absolute classic). And he wore a tartan tammy and, I’m sure, sported a huge Scotland rosette on his chest. And he’d been enjoying himself up here.

It’s a sad fact that anything other than a white face on the Hampden terraces in 1984 was even rarer then than it is today. I know this man had been enjoying himself because he was briefly the exotic centre of attention from all these banterish adults my pals and I found so intoxicatingly “laddish”.

I have a recollection of him being greeted overly fondly, in a well-intended but ultimately patronising manner by immediate members of a Tartan Army that was then just a collective noun for the crowd at a Scotland home game, rather than the self-congratulatory faux lifestyle it became.

But at least that lifestyle eschewed what happened next.

That man, a fellow Scotland fan, was enjoying himself. He was at the centre of the camaraderie. And then Mark Chamberlain got the ball.

Then John Barnes got the ball.

Then Luther Blissett.  

And the "famous Hampden Roar" began dipping itself in the sewer.

The ooh-oohing started. Slowly. Imperceptibly at first. But then rising to a horrific volume, particularly up the back of that huge stereo speaker – that gargantuan loudhailer - that was a colossal, packed terrace under a comprehensive metal roof.

Chamberlain, Barnes and Blissett will have heard it next loudest – these men knew only too well the sound of animals impersonating animals - but most overpowered by this most disgusting of mass insults was the poor man in front of me and my young pals.

I know I realised straight away. I realised the horror, not of the chant – oh no – but realising that as that chant went on, rather than miles away on a distant pitch, there was a black man right in front of me. I know I was scared to see the real consequences of such behaviour. But I don’t know if I was scared or upset for him or even in any way empathetic.

I genuinely can’t remember. While I hope I sympathised, I'm pretty sure I didn't help the man and, if this behaviour from thousands of fellow working class Scots was the world I lived in, who knows how it affected me because, make no mistake, racist behaviour comes from social conditioning.

Christ, maybe I thought he’d find it funny. This was 1984 and I honestly can’t remember what I felt and thought about racism because, frankly, I didn’t have to deal with it. There was precisely one black family in all of Ardrossan. And it wasn’t mine.

I hope I was sympathetic and I certainly hope to hell I hadn’t joined in the chanting. I feel I didn’t but who knows what hormone-addled 14-year-old me would have done in an attempt to fit into the carnival of the illicit that was standing in the rowdy section without our parents.

I know I loved the singing and the swearing – I almost certainly booed God Save the Queen in the same way I’d have lustily sung it on the East Enclosure a few weeks earlier. These were the days when we weren’t so literal in our fandom – we were allowed joyful hypocrisies like that.

But I hope to hell I knew back then that making that noise whenever a black man touched a football was beyond hypocrisy and way, way beyond sport.

The one thing I haven’t said is I’m sure he couldn’t speak. At all. Every time I look back on it, and we’re talking 37 years now, I have this idea that this man literally had no voice, which is why he’d been so emotive of expression when everyone was being patronisingly nice to him.

I’m worried this detail isn't a memory so much as me retrospectively imposing a metaphor of helplessness. But I’ll never forget how his face dropped as he realised what he was hearing around him from these previously friendly, welcoming people. In front of my eyes too young to process or deal with what they were seeing, this man's spirit was slowly, visibly crushed.

He immediately began jostling and grabbing those around him. People, stood right beside him, who’d been exchanging pleasantries with him just moments earlier, were making that horrible noise at those three England players. His eyes screamed a devastated “why?” in their faces.

And those he approached refused to meet his gaze. Some briefly patted him on the back as if to dismiss it as harmless banter. Yes, banter. Even though it would be decades before I knew what to call it, that moment – seeing those Scotland fans genuinely trying to brush off horrific racist abuse as bantz - was my first awareness of white privilege.

The most he got by way of response was “it’s not you, mate – it’s them we’re doing it to, those England players”. 

And he pointed at himself. No, you’re doing it to me. When you make that noise, even if you think you’re only aiming it at those three England players, you’re doing it to me. And my family. And millions of others.

The Tartan Army should have lost its mystique for me that day, even as a kid. But that only happened in later years when the kilt-wearing, doe; a deer attention-seekers takeover caused me to look back on the incident.

Yes, at age 14 I just saw it as an “incident”, almost a fucking curio. The real import only dawned as I grew up. For that man in front of me on the Rangers End it was hell on earth, a betrayal of trust that I could understand intellectually but, in all honesty, will never be able to fully understand emotionally.

Tony Woodcock equalised for England. A 1-1 draw and, no doubt, a great day out for me and my two pals. I remember us yakking all the way back on the train to Ardrossan, sans dads (our mums knew they’d be staying in the pub anyway), and then the bus from station to end of street, and I remember feeling I’d had a big, grown-up day out.

Glen Kamara wouldn’t be born for another eleven years. The Czech Republic was still part of Czechoslovakia at that time, still a satellite of the USSR. Hampden is now an all-seater, all-covered venue and whenever I’ve been there this century I love the excuse to sit down, rest my voice and concentrate on the football.

So much has changed. So much has modernised. And yet this week a black man was racially abused in a Glasgow football stadium during a match screened live on TV.

There was no crowd at this one. Glen Kamara’s racial abuser asked him to wait while he stepped over an injured colleague to shout his disgusting abuse directly into Glen’s ear. This man was sober and sharp and he was a fellow player on that pitch meant to unite everyone who steps on it as sportsmen.

It wasn’t just a betrayal of trust and sportsmanship. It was a betrayal of human advancement. It was the basest of insults to the very emotional and intellectual principles on which Slavia Prague were formed in 1892 - formed as a literary and debating society for the advancement of the Czech language under the rule of German-speaking Austro-Hungary.  

Slavia’s opponents for the 2008 match to commemorate the redevelopment of their stadium were Oxford University, one of their first opponents back in the 19^th century when they were founded by medical students. This is a club founded by thinkers. What an inversion of their legacy.

Watching a football match without indulging in racial abuse isn’t an achievement – it’s the minimum expected of us as human beings. Watching a game of football where a player with black team-mates racially abuses an opponent isn’t more sickening than any other racist attack but it’s the true depth of this societal sickness shown in starkest relief.

What we saw on Thursday night was genuinely disturbing. And I can be as proud as I like of the Rangers team for waiting down the tunnel for Slavia, of our club for their solid defence of Glen Kamara – but I can only be sorry for Glen that he had to endure that, and truly sorry to him for every part of my miserable life where I’ve unwittingly enabled that kind of action.

I’ll never patronise him by saying I understand. By that biggest of flukes, birth, I’m white - I can’t truly understand. But I’ll join in with the rest of the Rangers support in supporting him in every way we can. By trying to make sure this never happens again.

A Legend Calls: The Slavia Prague Dossier.

Two possible scenarios here: We either go out to Slavia and everyone bemoans the opportunity missed against “someone we definitely should have been beating”, or we utterly pummel them and there’s a sense of “aye, I always knew we were way better than them anyway”.

No. Wrong. Don’t. Just don’t… ever. You need to know who we’re playing here. You need to know it’s not just a random eastern European side with a decent home record for the last couple of seasons. For the sake of properly contextualising any result Rangers get tonight, you need to know about Slavia Prague.

When I continually go on about "European club competition" I am, of course, referring to the three competitions, all begun between 1955 and 1960 open to clubs from every European association (and maybe the odd Israeli league here and there). Among the many factors paving the way for the European Cup (now Champions League) the Cup-Winners’ Cup and the Fairs cup (later the UEFA Cup, now Europa League) were technological developments in floodlighting and air travel.

But, more than that, the template had been set by other, regional, cross-border competitions. The most famous of these was the Mitropa Cup, contested by sides from central Europe. Begun in 1927, Slavia Prague reached the 1929 final and won it in 1938. 

Considering that, in between times, Slavia provided eight of the Czechoslovakia side who lost the 1934 World Cup final to Italy, in Rome, after extra time, we can be sure the Mitropa Cup was tasty. As far as I know it was never sponsored by Petrofac Training or Irn Bru. It was, in fact, sensational.

Clubs from Italy, Yugoslavia, Hugary, Austria and Czechoslovakia: Players who’d scored in the final and the semis of the three World Cups played in the 1930s – the first three World Cups; players who were bringing continental Europe up to speed with the British game a lot faster than we wanted to know, were contesting this competition in front of huge crowds in iconic stadiums.

Slavia’s best run in European football as we currently know it was reaching the 1995-96 UEFA Cup semis. There they lost out to young Zinedine Zidane’s Girondins Bordeaux, but helping invent such competitions ensures Slavia’s legend is embedded in them as deeply as Rangers is. Contesting a Uefa group stage in eight of the last fifteen seasons means their 21^st century form should also give us pause.

You see, the Czechs are like the Danes. Their league can’t hold onto its home-grown stars because football isn’t the biggest thing in their lives like it is for us. The Danes have hygge, the Czechs have ice hockey. And none of their clubs have ever reached a European club final while Scotland, with a third of Czechia’s population, has had four cubs in nine finals. Yet their national teams are sensational.

I was at Wembley for the Euro 96 final, lost on a Golden Goal by the Czechs to Germany. There were five past or current Slavia players in the side, including Patrik Berger (of Borussia Dortmund and later Liverpool) and Karel Poborksy (Manchester United, Benfica, Lazio). Vladimir Smicer – him of the long-range goal in Istanbul compounding the comeback our manager started against Milan in 2005 – began and ended his career at Slavia.

So, from one knock-out round to the next, Rangers have gone from an opponent you perhaps had to be told once reached a European final to one you might be surprised to know never has. We may sometimes accidentally call them Sparta but, in the way we maybe weren’t so familiar with 1993 European Cup-Winners’ Cup runners-up Royal Antwerp, we had all heard of Slavia Prague; as a name, an institution – a club with probable pedigree but undeniable mystique.

If, last Thursday, those 300 Czech health workers creating that strangest of things in a 2021 football stadium, an atmosphere, sang their own lyrics to the tune of Sloop John B I didn’t hear them. But it wouldn’t have been the catchiest song anyway:

Some young men - probably medical students - had a dream,
To start a sports club and a literary and debating society to encourage the Czech language,
They had much brains, bikes and books but not one single ball:
It was another six years before they started a fitba team,
But the Austro-Hungarian empire were suspicious because they favoured the German language; 
Twenty or thirty titles… depending on your opinion on the legitimacy of the leagues they won around the First World War and after the Communists took over in 1948.

Yeah, Czech history doesn’t really scan with ours. I feel old because I remember Czechoslovakia, when the Czech Republic was joined with Slovakia as one country. They split up peacefully on the last day of 1992, having previously done so, much more darkly, during the Second World War. Our opponent in this Thursday’s Last 16 Europa League second leg has lived in only one city but seen their country given a few different names. 

Slavia, twenty years younger than Rangers as an organisation (their only sport initially was cycling), go back to the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s rule under the Habsburg dynasty. Add to that the fact Slavia themselves have been one of the leading lights in Middle European football in the 1920s and 30s then ended up going through some seriously lean years, and ten name changes - and a few temporary stadiums - then we can’t even beat them on the “from the top to the bottom and back” angle.

That strip, eh. It’s a cracker. The white and red halves and the big red star denoting Slavic nationalist roots. And the stadium, Eden: Yes, it has too many connotations of “Paradise”, and indeed Slavia’s on-field legend was formed by Scottish coach John Madden, who played for Celtic in the Victorian era (long before winning the Superbowl with the Oakland Raiders).

But, depending on what source you read – and I’ve hit everything from Simon Inglis’s The Football Grounds of Europe to The Rough Gide to European Football 1999-2000 to Wikipedia - the prelapsarian ground name derived from a nickname derived from a neighbouring restaurant, or just plain sarcasm engendered by the then condition of the area of Prague Slavia were forced to move to in 1953 by the Soviet-controlled government.

For over half a century Eden, the stadium, was a bowl of basic terracing with one even more basic wooden stand. Joe Lewis’s ENIC group, them perpetually rumoured to be getting involved at Ibrox during David Murray’s reign, were perhaps the worst of the owners in the post-Communist period who continually failed to redevelop the stadium, forcing Slavia into a few tenancies in a city which is, luckily, one of the ground-hopping capitals of the world.

Well, now it’s the best football stadium in the country. It hosted Craig Levein’s innovative 6-4-0 formation when Scotland lost 1-0 to the Czechs in a Euro 2012 qualifier and, more entertainingly, Bayern beating Chelsea on penalties in the 2013 Super Cup. It’s maybe not Eden but if it’s what UEFA now see as a Super Cup kinda venue - modern, attractive, and seating 20,000 spectators – it’s conclusive proof Slavia have finally made home less hellish.

Since 2015 Slavia are owned by Communist China, initially through their energy conglomerate and now the CITIC investment group. But if Rangers eliminate this proud, proud club, the glory will be about more than simply reaching a European quarter-final. As we now know, you don’t own a legend – you just enjoy being associated with it.

Number 55: The Hated House of Love

 I like the beach ball. Just as a policeman never more in need of his Hi-Viz vest clears the flags and scarfs hurled onto Gerrard’s bonnet, just as the clouds of smoke, billowing 55 flags, inflatable league trophies and howling worship straining over ever more fragile-looking crush barriers, make it necessary to have a windscreen cleared at 10am on a dry Saturday morning in early March – an officer of the law whips the detritus of adulation off our manager’s wipers and, the second he does, a big red, white and blue-panelled beach ball splattered with Union Jacks comes bouncing across that bonnet, your screen and our manager’s vision.  

“So Much Love” was switched off in the car. As he edges left towards the incline to the parting bluebells, Steven Gerrard mustn’t be allowed a second when our love isn’t enveloping him. So much love that it will never be switched off.

You probably missed the moment Rangers were the most romantic story in Scottish football. A club demoted to the bottom tier of league football upon the liquidation of its holding company are, nine years later, national champions. The title was sealed earlier (7 March) than any in the last 119 years by a side, unbeaten in both the league and Europe, also denying their derby rivals a record tenth consecutive championship. Throw in, in his first senior managerial job, a global playing icon responsible for the most famous on-field comeback in European club football yet haunted by his lack of a domestic league title: surely we have a conjunction of emotive plot-lines worthy of any Hollywood weepie.  

The scenes filmed from Steven Gerrard’s car as he arrived at Ibrox on 6 March, hours ahead of Rangers 3pm Kick-off against St Mirren – the 3-0 win which put them within a point of the title – began to a house soundtrack, quickly resembled a variation on the images shot for Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy” or The Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony”, but were soon more worthy of a truly decadent music video, one accompanying some overwrought hymn to redemption. One by, perhaps, dare I say, Coldplay…

Children all but throw themselves in front of his Range Rover for a photo, a huge banner bearing his image adorns roadside billboards. Lloyd Wade’s voice and Owen Westlake’s track are switched off because there’s a throb and a beat behind a dozen different songs drowning it from the other side of the glass. Gerrard or his passenger – I can’t quite make out which but one knows what immortality looks like and the other how it feels – can’t believe what they’re driving towards, are stunned into silence until one quietly exclaims “fu-cking hell” as stewards and police desperately fight to clear him a path, a sliver of road through a sea of grown men exploding into a miasma of red, white and blue smoke, firecrackers and bellowing adoration.

This was precisely how we’d imagined it. This footage, hitting social media before kick-off, reflected exactly how we had always pictured the team arriving for the weekend Rangers reclaimed their place at the top of Scottish football. Playing in every lower tier available and suffering every on-and off-field humiliation possible, our fifty fifth league title was often as much myth as ambition as a burden on our breaking backs. We had plenty time to envisage the day it arrived and Edmiston Drive was always going to look like this. But, of course, on 6 March 2021, Ibrox stadium was closed to the public and these fans were all breaking Covid restrictions.

St Mirren swatted 3-0, the Rangers players ran up the emergency services access entrance to celebrate through our famous blue steel gates with those fans. On their way, as we slowly realised what they were doing instead of heading down the tunnel, they passed beneath my Main Stand Front season ticket seat. As I sat watching it on my laptop, in my little box room, in my house barely four miles away as the crow flies over the Clyde, I almost stood up to applaud them jogging along a track-side I could suddenly feel below me again. My old ticker nearly melted. It’s one of the most iconic images in the history of our club, and one of the most compassionate.

Ally McCoist joked that Mo Johnston was caught somewhere near Cessnock underground station after his Old Firm winner of November 89, but surely no Rangers player, far less the entire team, has ever gone so far off the Ibrox pitch to be with the support. In a time when stadiums must be empty, a corner of the ground we fans never paid any mind, just like that, lit up and became part of Rangers folklore.

Praise for the footballing achievement from Sky Sports News and the BBC in London and Salford was, on Monday and Tuesday, drowned out by censure of the protocol breaches from the Scottish media and devolved government. Credit where it’s due, despite our six-year impasse with BBC Scotland, Sportscene lauded us on the Saturday and Sunday. Some of it was through gritted teeth, yes, but as well as a complimentary musical montage there were old-fashioned, "How nice does it feel"vox pops on Edmiston Drive and only passing, obligatory mention of Covid safety breaches. Now that we’re champions again, the Scottish Auntie might actually want to talk to us again.

The SNP lambasted us for the same reason they lambasted Celtic’s January trip to Dubai – it distracts from the ongoing negative publicity around the Alex Salmond inquiry and their failings in more serious, legacy problems with Scotland’s public health. So it doesn’t matter that Rangers took quarter of a million fans to Manchester for the 2008 UEFA Cup final, with 40,000 watching on screens at Ibrox. There was no praise for the vast majority of that support staying home in the first weekend of March 2021.

By the following Saturday, when Rangers weren’t playing, there was legitimate comparison of Police Scotland’s peaceful, containment approach to the Rangers celebrations with the Met police’s heavy handed breaking-up of the Clapham Common vigil for Sarah Everard. But many social media comparisons – one from a freelance journalist formerly used by the Guardian and Channel Four News who refers to the Rangers support by the Nazi term Herrenvolk - were clearly, stunningly, sickeningly exploiting the horrific murder of a young woman to demonise Rangers fans. It took precisely six days from Rangers winning a football competition for things to sink this low.

Barely 24 hours of celebrating and, for the next five days I was quickly reminded the romance around Rangers will only ever be felt by Rangers fans or some people outside Scotland. Inside Scotland and for so many outside, mine is the club which, by exploiting sectarian tension, co-dominated the entire history of Scottish football (Celtic share that Scottish record of nine straight title wins with ourselves). That domination, already tainted by an anti-Catholic signing policy until the late 1980s, is itself debated. Despite the Scottish Football Association and UEFA confirming Rangers on-field heritage was transferred to new owners in 2012, rival fans claim liquidation should apply to every aspect of the club formed in 1872; they see the 2020-21 SPFL Premiership as our first major trophy rather than our 116th. 

It doesn't matter that we have one of the most polyglot and ethnically diverse first team squads in Scotland. It matters less that star striker Alfredo Morelos has his own charitable foundation, distributing food parcels when returning to his native Columbia. No-one remembers the club announcing last July that any fan objecting to our players taking a knee in support of Black Lives Matter was not welcome at Ibrox. In December’s trip to Ross County these players and their manager reported an opponent’s allegedly (and never proven) homophobic remark to the referee. In Scottish football, unfortunately, flagging such an incident is massively progressive.

So too is the style of play. Wingback James Tavernier, leading the season in goals and assists, was seen as defensively weak when Gerrard arrived and made him both captain and driving force of the Liverpool Lite/Diet Klopp tactics of relentless pressing and stylish possession. We have easily the most ruthless attack, relentless midfield and parsimonious defence in Scotland - we've scored the most spectacular goals and made the most sensational saves in Europe. Equally refreshing is the patience afforded Gerrard by a boardroom now full of Rangers-loving businessmen rather than the cowboys of the immediate pre- and post-liquidation years.

Gerrard, an articulate, humble, steely-eyed diplomat and father figure who in three years has celebrated on the pitch once and confronted a referee once, single-handedly rebuilt much of the infrastructure which atrophied under those opportunists, including Newcastle owner Mike Ashley. He couldn’t capitalise on pole positions achieved going into the January breaks of 2019 and 2020 but Gerrard vastly improved on the third place we achieved in the two top flight seasons before his arrival. Last season’s Europa League campaign made us the first Scottish club to exceed Celtic in any competition since we beat them in the 2016 Scottish Cup. Nevertheless, boardroom bravery made him the first Rangers manager to survive two full seasons without a trophy.

Taking us into the Europa League group stage, via four qualifying rounds, in his first season excorcised the humiliating 2017 (non-) return to continental competition under Portuguese experiment Pedro Caixinha. Reaching the last 16 in his next two seasons, providing great Ibrox victories over Porto and Feyenoord - winning in Belgium - exorcised memories of Third Division losses at Stirling Albion, and at home to Annan and Peterhead. (Although adding those proud Scottish clubs to our friends, on the way back up, is something I’d never want to forget)

Crowd-surfing in a 50,000-strong blue bedlam as we turn 2-0 down at home to Braga, after a first leg hour of a Europa League knock-out tie, into a 3-2 win on the night and a home and away victory in the Last 32 of continental competition; it eradicated my sofa swallowing me as we turned 2-0 up at Alloa with 20 minutes remaining of a Petrofac Training Challenge Cup semi-final, live on the BBC’s Gaelic language channel, into a loss in a tournament we didn't even want to be in.

What we can do in next season’s Champions League, under a man who was winning European silverware before his 21^st birthday, is further proof, on top of the eight trophies and a European final in the four full, cash-strapped, bank-owned seasons of Walter Smith’s second coming – on top of the journey from a ball on the Brechin hedge in July 2012 to an aeroplane with a banner over Tannadice in March 2021 – that Rangers are more hated than ever because we're now more unstoppably, irredeemably romantic than ever and because we served our time for our crimes and not one bluenose deserted.

We've removed the negative connotation from the phrase "glory hunters". We are now its very denotation and what we endured on that hunt - what we survived - makes our glory truly deserved. We know the scent from what we feasted on before 2012 and, having tracked down our prey once again, our haters are terrified our increasingly sated support will garner the strength to pull our past and recent glories together, covering over the chasm of demotion and banter in-between, like the 5-5 of that score with Hibernan at Easter Road, in the last game before Gerrard's arrival, those two fives slowly slamming together to sandwich and squash Neil Lennon's on-field taunting at full-time in a huge 55. They're scared we'll be allowed to forget. But we don't want to forget. We'll wear 2012-2021 like a general wears a scar. Our loyalty to our club is now irrefutably stronger than anyone else’s faith in theirs and… and… and - man - this patter. Social media really doesn’t help, does it.

Everyone’s so fucking polarised. Damn near radicalised. Jeezus. I spend my whole life, into my early 40s, loving Scottish football in its entirety, never getting in anyone’s face about their team, only seriously slagging my own club and never anyone else’s because – hey – perspective, hey - respect, hey - sportsmanship and – hey – we’re all united by our hopeless love of the game, right? And then – bang – people I didn’t even know had an interest in football, people who’ve never paid through a turnstile in their fucking life, or people who used to actively boast to me about how their club under-reported their attendances, who wore their board’s “skimming off the top” like a badge of honour, are in my face laughing at my club potentially never playing again, telling me I’m responsible for ambulance services being cut, mocking the fact that my longest ever passion might die.

What the fuck happened here, folks? I never saw a chief executive appointed to a football club with the express remit of paying as much tax as humanly possible and I never saw a lap of honour from accountants carrying a set of balanced books – not one that got a packed stadium on its feet anyway. And I never knew anyone who tried to live their politics through their football club who wasn’t an absolute sell-out in real life. Grow up and have a fucking word with yourselves.  

Archie Macpherson, the doyen of Scottish football commentators, was roundly mocked for warning Rangers demotion could mean “Armageddon” for the Scottish club game. Yes, it survived, and St Johnstone, St Mirren, Ross County, Inverness and others enjoyed first or long-needed major cup triumphs. But I didn't enjoy those in the way I might have before 2012. Some of them - and not just Hibs in 2016 - I downright resented.

That it’s still 1985 since anyone other than the Old Firm won the league I no longer find embarrassing. And, a year after Rangers hit the financial skids, the third oldest league body in the world went to the wall and the pyramid system the SFA would never approve was suddenly brought in to appease and distract. By that point, once proud of our national game's heritage, I could have cared less. I'm hanging on to my support of the national team but that's because it's still my country and I've put more time and money into it than all but perhaps 5,000 other Tartan Army types.

To forget the hate thrown my way when I needed a hand, it’ll take a few more trophies from Rangers and far more signs of respect from our group of traditional rivals. Aberdeen, at board and managerial level at least, have matured a bit in that respect recently. I hold out little hope for more but, while it's a matter of regret, it's no longer my concern. It can't be after the top flights forced me to circle the emotion wagons in 2012. I was forced to worry only about Rangers and now it's more evident than ever we still carried on and always will. And Rangers are now all about the romance and the comeback and the glory, and the love of football I no longer need to seek anywhere else. I have it all at Ibrox. So much love.

The house track has stopped. It’s stopped as the car in which it plays circles that roundabout I cross every other Saturday after parking my own car in the depths of Moorepark. Nine years and a month ago, a smaller crowd gathered on Edmiston Drive, behind fewer, and even more temporary, crush barriers. A man in a black jacket by The North Face gret for all Rangers familes. A man on crutches, wearing the Uefa Cup final Rangers top, bellowed into a camera that the league was gone but the priority now was that the house - the big house – must stay open. Well, the big house, barely visible behind the scarlet and azure plumes, is closed. Everyone's footballing house is closed. That sounds a lot like Armageddon. Perhaps for them it is. But not for Rangers. For us the league is no longer gone. From what our players are shouting out the windows and running to the front gate to tell us, it seems like the league has very much come home.