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.