The Unbearable Lightness of Being Champions.

Don't worry - this season still only ends when Rangers say it does.

It was only the second weekend of being allowed to travel outside Glasgow: We could finally go anywhere in the country and, what was more, the sun was shining all over that same country on this suddenly liberated Saturday afternoon. Added bonus – Rangers weren’t playing til Sunday; there was nothing confining me to TV or laptop. I couldn’t get myself kissed by a sailor in Times Square but I could be on the Gourock promenade overlooking the Firth of Clyde in 40 minutes, the Loch of Lomond overlooking the heather-strewn bens and stags and stuff in similarly short order.

Having been cooped up in the same city for months on end, where would this tank of diesel take us?

Ibrox, please. I want to see the new flags on the lampposts of Edmiston Drive.

Ten minutes later, although I’m arriving via the Clyde Tunnel and Shieldhall Road, I’m still wishing I’d downloaded Owen Westlake’s “So Much love”, the tune playing in Steven Gerrard’s car when he arrived at work from the Dumbreck Road side on the morning of Saturday 6^th March, as I traverse the same roundabout and take the same slow left off the dual carriageway, crawling up the white-lined incline towards the big blue gates bearing the lighter blue bluebells.

Instead of being guided in through those gates by beckoning stewards, police and football history, however, I’m pulling to a halt in the three-quarters empty Broomloan Road Stand car park, in front of the off-duty, squat, white cranes of heat lamps for the pitch on which no Scottish visitor has won for over a year. Despite the fact there’s no frenzy of smoke bombs, no crush-barriered throng roaring pre-title hysteria at our wee car, I’m happy to notice a sprinkling of others have had the same idea as me and mine today: We can’t get in but, almost more than ever, Ibrox will make a gorgeous day out.

 

Bluenoses mill about in the lunchtime sun, not so much contentedly as serenely. Very little is different, yet everything has changed. We might not have received the trophy yet but our stadium – the place we worship and its approaches - wears new ribbons, fresh bunting. Everyone’s taking photos of the row of “55” banners down the red blaes-ish central reservation in front of that gorgeous pile of Welsh red brick. Selfies are had with the “champions” poster on the billboard Stevie G saw draped with a flag of thanks before kick-off against St Mirren that amazing day.

Edmiston House is gone – a huge space behind the Copland Road stand - but the palace on Edmiston Drive is more regal than ever, a huge testament to everyone working inside it, boardroom and pitch, for the last few years.

As we nip down to the billboards on the roundabout, a woman pushes a pram past us, talking on her phone. She’s wearing the home top, the top of the champions of Scotland. Her kid is being pushed along the Street of Winners by a mum in the jersey of winners. I even take photos the roundabout – the mound of grass in the middle of that circular concrete casing intersecting Broomloan Road with Edmiston Drive; The mound across which that boy in the tracky runs to get a picture of Steven Gerrard in the first sign of the avalanche of adulation about to engulf our gaffer that day in March.

Twenty years I’ve been approaching Ibrox on foot from that direction, crossing Broomloan Road at that roundabout. I’m always thinking about what’s about to transpire inside the stadium. Now I see that roundabout as an event in itself. It’s part of why I’m here today, foregoing the open Clyde Coast for the enclosed blue (blue, blue) sea of Ibrox.

What hair I have left is rapidly greying but once a ginge, always a ginge so I don the baseball cap, like a superannuated, hyper-inflated Beastie Boy. I bought it in Chicago. I bought it in the club shop annexed to what Chicagoans call “the Mistake by the Lake” in possibly the warmest day I have ever experienced, at possibly the fattest I have ever been, after the longest Rangers season I have ever known. In July 2008 I bought a Chicago Bears baseball Cap at an empty, closed Soldier Field Stadium. It remains the only shop I’ve ever been in which sold hats big enough for my colossal head. For thirteen years, whenever it stops raining, I’ve worn a white baseball cap bearing a massive Orange C. Poetry.

A young lad sits at the base of the bluebell gates, using his stadium like the world’s staunchest deckchair. Resplendent in Castore - shades on, phone in hand – he’s waiting for someone. And that someone is probably among the handful of people I see walking towards the Portakabins of the ticket office. Are we selling briefs for a game I don’t know about?

Nah. Under the overhang of the Broomloan – where the offices and stairwells above create a colonnade at ground level, is the Barcelona 72 panel. Even before I’m in the shade offered in this space I have the hat off. People aren’t just here to admire a new decoration to the stadium exterior. Heads aren’t bowed simply because the tiles engraved with white-lettered names of Rangers fans lie flat on the ground. And that beautiful central title panel, showing the clubs, score and scorers from the 1972 European Cup-Winners’ Cup final at Barcelona’s Nou Camp, does indeed look more like a flat marker headstone than a flagstone.

Yes, some of the people here are looking down on their own names. My own brick is just a few steps north, on the Willie Waddell panel – a 40^th birthday present from my Killie-supporting auntie. But the atmosphere is reverential. Floral tributes rest at various spots. We instinctively keep our voices down.

Football clubs mean the world to people, irrespective of how many trophies they win. This is our football club, and it was built on winning trophies. So many of the people who follow followed down the decades have had short, hard lives – their allegiance to Rangers was often the only success they knew and the only regular pride they felt. At times this has certainly been true for myself. 

So, for the likes of us, what happened some 32 hours later, up the other end of our beautiful stadium – inside the ground, in front of the Copland Road stand – was intensely painful. Not just because of how it happened but when it happened - that we spent every last minute of a sun-drenched weekend waiting for it to happen and then it waited until darkness had descended before it did happen. It took extra time and penalties to do something we hadn’t seen since the dark night Hamilton won at Ibrox last season. It was so dark, as our manager said, a record-breaking defence couldn’t see the most visible goalkeeper in Scottish football waltzing up to the edge of our six yard box for a corner, a la Peter Schmeichel in a different Nou Camp European final.

It was so sickening because it further emboldened the slander coming our way from the east of the city with greater frequency as we’ve steadily taken this season away from them. Consistency, apparently, now equals dour. Scoring goals, we’re informed, isn’t as meaningful as possession. Penalties you think you should have had are all theoretically converted despite the ones you actually are awarded all being saved by Allan McGregor. And winning the Scottish Premiership title on the pitch, by beating everyone else in the division, is somehow invalidated by the fact no fans were allowed into the stadiums: Real Premiership titles are the ones where you’re handed the trophy in an empty training complex, with not even an opposition team around, having failed to fulfil over 20 percent of your fixtures.

St Johnstone’s 122^nd minute equaliser was so painful because, while we’ve never previously conceded a goal exactly like it, we seem to have been heading towards it – in style, timing and gut-punching effect - for almost a decade. From Queen of the South equalising in a Challenge Cup quarter-final with the last kick of the ball then winning on penalties, through Stranraer taking our 100 percent League One record in the 94^th minute on Boxing Day, to Alloa Athletic beating us in normal time in a Challenge Cup semi-final we led 2-0 with 20 minutes remaining.

All those moments happened in the dark.

In the sunshine (on Leith), we’ve seen Raith Rovers waiting til extra time in a 4pm kick-off - on Easter fu**ing Sunday at Easter fu**ing Road - before beating us in the Challenge Cup final and, ultimately, Hibs beat us in the 92^nd minute of a Scottish Cup final we led with ten to go… after we’d failed to seal the Championship at Stark’s Park because of a 94^th minute equaliser… and ended the league season with St Mirren pegging us back in the 92^nd minute: All in the sun.

Steven Gerrard’s first league game in charge of Rangers saw Aberdeen equalise against our ten men in the 93^rd minute at a sunny Pittodrie. His third league game saw Motherwell equalise in the 94^th minute at a dank Fir Park. The late, late goal seems to have happened at Rugby Park, whatever the weather or time of day,  every time we’ve played there since returning to the top flight - but they’re all winners rather than equalisers, and only one was a Rangers winner.

And we’ve seen it this season too: At Paisley in the League Cup we equalised in injury time yet managed to lose the game before extra time. Hamilton away in the League, Benfica in Lisbon in the Europa League and St Johnstone in our last two games – all games where we conceded the equaliser with the very last kick of the ball.

It’s something that happens all the time. Except for the 15 times this season we’ve won games by a single goal.  When we seem to be returning to old ways, the pain of the past almost threatens to cloud the brilliant light this team has brought to this campaign.

All in all, it amounts to a season where Rangers have been phenomenal but tension has been virtually ever-present. The play has been coruscating, the goals have been dazzling and the consistency has been blindingly spectacular. But the score-lines, in the league, have mostly been routine. With three left to play, we’ve won six Premiership games by more than three goals. Now, that is, in itself, very impressive but perhaps doesn’t amply connote a team who sealed the title in the first week of March without losing a match. We’ve also drawn six games and none of our four goals-or-more victories came against our nearest “challengers”, Celtic and Hibs.

This is not a gripe. This is not a complaint. I would take these stats every single season for the rest of my life. But when, last Sunday, we conceded the most deflating Scottish Cup goal since the 2016 final and arguably the worst defended meaningful goal ever conceded by a Rangers team - during what could yet be officially the best defensive season in the history of British top flight football – it brought home what this Rangers season truly lacks: A gala day; A festival – a fitting on-field celebration of Rangers 55^th league title.

Yes, we want more trophies. No, Steven Gerrard has not won any cups. Yes, it’s been far too long since Rangers won any major cups.  But Ibrox is already bathed in an aura of celebration and relief. The old place oozes joy and catharsis right now. Fans might not be allowed inside but we’re built into the bloody bricks and we know we’re champions.

That league title is the most important in our history and almost deserves to have the whole trophy cabinet to itself for a season, so completely does it outshine everything else in Scotland. We want the Scottish Cup – perhaps we needed it. But what we really needed it for at this juncture was as both the final say on this season we’ve dominated and a way of underscoring that dominance ahead of next season.

Yet a double of sorts, perhaps a treble, is still on.

Believe me, finishing the 2020-21 Premiership unbeaten might not be physical silverware, but it’s another trophy – of far greater and longer-lasting repute – to sit alongside the very angular former SPL trophy. And if we want to cut loose with a win to rubber stamp our superiority and properly celebrate Title 55, Celtic at Ibrox on Sunday is the last but best chance we have.

We’ve beaten Celtic, or had the last word against them, every which way in our last five meetings. In October we stopped them having a shot on goal. In January we didn’t have a shot on theirs – instead letting them score our winner for us. In March we let them dominate for a bit then equalised straight away and almost nicked all three points. In April they got one of those penalties they’re always claiming would make all the difference and, just like in December 2019, in front of one of those packed Parkhead crowds they always claim would make all the difference, Greegs saved it and we won.

But Steven Gerrard’s Rangers have never scored more than two against them and we haven’t yet inflicted that all-out, exhibition annihilation all the great Rangers sides enjoy in one Old Firm derby or another. Half this Celtic team are leaving or trying to. The other half have been hiding all season. That could mean they can’t wait to crumble on Sunday or are just cowardly enough to come out all guns blazing because they think the pressure is all on us, knowing we can lose our unbeaten record – or our 100 percent home league record, our British defensive record or our chance of 100 points.

We’ve been on the other side of this equation. Twice under Graeme Murty we went to Parkhead and drew when it looked more likely we’d be pummelled. In 2016-17 we took their 100 percent home league record. But, even as our tired squad begins to creak under injuries and suspensions and the general battle fatigue of a relentless campaign, the chance for that stylish sealing of this season’s legacy is there. And we’ve had a full week off; a week to recover physically and recalibrate mentally.

So let’s do this on Sunday and all those stupid or mendacious enough to claim the St Johnstone exit somehow gives the lie to our winning of 55 will soon realise the St Johnstone defeat has itself been cancelled out as the men who won 55 in record, historic style have the final say. Avoid defeat in the two remaining games - if we win on Sunday we can talk about our horrific record in last games of recent seasons - and history is ours.

What, after all, is silverware but a sealing of your place in football history. Fans don’t really do it with their names on bricks and tiles – they do it by the lifetime of love they send to that club. And players don’t do it through the clutching of trophy handles but through memorable feats on the park. Let’s seal this most memorable league season of all with the brilliant, shining performance our players and fans deserve - against the opponent who most deserves to receive it – on our last sunny Sunday kick-off of amazing old 2020-21.

Brian's Last Words

 I’ve seen death. I’ve heard death. My paternal grandfather died six years before I was born yet dominated my childhood.  My maternal grandfather died hours after my first Scotland game, when I was ten.  I once saw a man murdered in front of me – his last words may have been “don’t” but he didn’t know they were his last words and he didn’t die that night. I’ve twice fought to stop the same happening to me - once the police saved me, once I saved myself. All I issued was threats. I’ve never said and I’ve never heard what we all mean by someone’s dying words.

Translucent but non-transparent, textured but clear, the front door of our former house was fully glazed. It had to be. Otherwise, the layout confined within this singularly undistinguished 1960s terrace of indistinguishable small homes for small families, would mean no natural light directly into what the estate agents had called, fourteen years earlier, “the hallway”.

It composed a tiny first floor landing - onto two bedrooms, one box room full of football tat and a bathroom the exact length of a bath in which I could only sit – and a thin staircase, down the western party wall, to the doormat-sized “reception area”, on which I now stood, knowing exactly to who I was about to open that revealing front door:

Brian’s grandsons. 

The boys had never looked taller. Through the height of dappled glass, interrupted only by its waist-high belt of white UPVC, they could see me fumbling for my front door keys as well as I could see the eldest - the taller of the two - stand back respectfully off the front door step, re-joining his younger sibling on the path. All as the ring – the single, modest toll of that door’s bell - clung to this carpeted ante-chamber for all it was worth.

They were clearly carrying a gift. This was too much. These boys shouldn’t have to do this. Not now.

I faltered with my key as I worried what I could say – delaying for want of a compassionate word while simultaneously hurried by an overpowering abundance of compassion for those solemn children made men too soon. Their grandfather’s words to me – whispered and stilted yet ringing in my head for a week now - suddenly echoed far louder than even the TV I’d left blaring in the adjacent front room, its far wall shared with our eastern neighbour.

The cold blasted in, enveloping my suddenly nervous body with yet more chills as I was drawn into their youthful yet austere gaze and immediately realised the resemblance with their grandfather’s eyes as I had held him, seven days earlier, slumped against the back wheel of his car, on the road directly behind where his pride and joy stood now, offering me the most unnecessary thanks of my life.

What a contrast - this bleak, biting winter’s evening – with the sunlit mid-morning of the previous week, as I strolled naively up that little path of ours, past the Subbuteo pitch-sized patch of grass I’d again let grow to giant redwood heights, and onto the quiet, cul-de-sac road. Naïve for thinking my brisk walk would do anything to alleviate the litres of beer, wine and port I quaffed each weekend or the kilos of cheese, chicken and chocolate I consumed on an hourly basis.

Naïve for thinking life goes on.

I watched as a nonagenarian, who installed Browning .303s into the wings of Spitfires, stared from his deathbed at the blank wall behind me, asking who that was coming to get him. I visited my friend four days before and we said what we had to say to each other. But he had the hospice, briefly, and his family, always. I’ve written and delivered eulogies at family funerals. But I have never, ever, heard someone’s last words.

I saw before me only Brian, the retired man from three doors down, leaving the driver’s seat of his freshly parked car, turning to make for his boot. Without needing to be in any way as psychotically nosey as the retired ladies living in one of the shoeboxes between us, I knew Brian had just arrived back from a bit of shopping.

That box room of mine also contained my desk on which had sat, over the last 15 years or so, a variety of ever-shrinking home computers then laptops. In a fit of artistic pretension, when the double glazing guy came round to measure up, I asked for a single pane of glass for that room – a moveable picture window if you like – to let as much view as possible into what I wanted to look like a garret but have the light of a studio.

But all I got was a window way too heavy for its mounting when I tried to open it and an unexpurgated view of our street.

Across the road from our terraced row of two-storey houses were three-storeyed apartment blocks. Not characterful old sandstone, redbrick or brownstone Glasgow tenements. No, just another mass-produced 1960s stab at the utilitarian - rotting wood blandishments denying them even Bauhausian chic. And these flats stood further up the hill across which our street ran. Thus they loomed over our tiny, sun-bathed front gardens. At night their communal entrance lights shone down, through our front door, onto our doormat reception area, like the spotlight on a Berlin Wall machine gun nest.

Brian’s car was on the far side of the street. It was a sunny day but he was in the shade of the flats as he alighted his vehicle. I immediately slowed. I didn’t really want to talk to him. I didn’t really know him. But he’d always instinctively seemed like a great guy and part of that was he just said hello, smiled and carried on. No nosiness. I like neighbours who are polite yet keep themselves to themselves and my biggest fear, always, is I might seem lacking in either respect.

A nod and, perhaps, a mention of the weather: Then keep moving.

Brian’s wife, who I once met through, of course, her being out when a parcel was delivered, seemed more outgoing. Isn’t it always the way with the stereotypical “proper” working class couples, like my own mum and dad. The wives are more outgoing, thus fitter, thus live longer. From that big box room window I’d watched Brian go from working man – I imagined a foreman or skilled technician - to retired man, and I’d seen those young lads go from primary school to secondary school age. I’d seen them being made to wash their grandparents’ car and tidy their front garden.

Most of all, Having also passed and nodded to Brian with that joyful hue in his round cheeks and swagger in his badge-strewn blazer, as he returned from a good day and night at the local bowling club, I assumed he was the kinda guy – a worker and a socialiser who wanted his grandkids to have the same ethics that got him and his wife this lovely wee home in this lovely wee street and his daughter an even better life somewhere out of Glasgow - who would have no truck with, no respect for someone my age, size, and gender who was known to be “working from home”.

Months previously, while busily not writing something on one of those keyboards, I saw those boys leaving their grandparents’ house in their suits, looking painfully smart in only the way grandchildren can, and I saw black ties and my heart fell and then, as I got up and left the desk so neither they nor the ever-vigilant flats across the way, would see me snooping, I glimpsed Brian emerging from the house also in black tie. The West of Scotland working man, retired, was alive. Thank god. He was just insuring and ensuring his legacy again – making those boys realise their responsibilities, that death was a part of life, by taking them to the funeral of an old friend or a distant relative. They had to learn.  

Nod and keep walking. Brian’s okay.

And he certainly wouldn’t want me to have noticed him stagger a bit, as he did when I hit the top of my path that day a week earlier. Guy’s like Brian are proud. Late 60s, early 70s, no matter the age – the pride that has powered their life, to the point it lives on in their grandkids, does not go away. I deliberately noticed nothing. Let Brian get his shopping into the house. I had seen nothing.

Until he stumbled down onto one knee, on to the ground, puzzlement on his face, hands instinctively outstretched, fearing a full-on trip.

Brian dropped his car keys as he went down and looked up and saw me as he reached for them on bended knee and smiled embarrassedly on the middle of a road thankfully quiet at that time of day and I immediately jogged towards him with a host of “you can help me next time I’m staggering home from Byres Road” quips ready to soften any male hurt. He laughed and I got a hand on one of his arms as he made to pull himself back up on to both feet and then, just as I was about to jape about boozing and being jealous, he went completely. His eyes closed, his body went limp and I had to quickly reach under both his arms to support him.  This wasn’t a stumble or a trip or a fall. This was maybe it.

I hoped his wife couldn’t see this. Their house was directly opposite. I was glad they didn’t have a window like mine.  I swung him round, his back to his car, me between him and his house, before she spotted him or, worse, opened the door to let him in with their shopping and saw… well, frankly, saw what may soon be his corpse, lying on the street.

I couldn’t go in to see my gran. Couldn’t take the chance that’s how I’d remember her. I was shown my girlfriend’s unrecognisable father, his duvet pulled back, just an hour after death. Next day I sat eating, and watching the Rugby World Cup, in the same room in which he lay, his face exactly as it was in life, in the open coffin. I’ve seen our lollipop man under a tarp on the middle of the high road, surrounded by glass and hysteria. But I’ve never heard anyone’s last words, their dying words.

If I’m good for nothing else it’s lifting. But I didn’t know what I was lifting or to where. Right now I was dragging… dragging who, or what? But then Brian was mumbling and sweating and obviously not dead – yet - but that cheery, reddened face was now greyer than the flats consuming the sun and I didn’t know to do anything other than lean him against his car.

Like a miracle, a nice neighbour from the flats appeared. She wasn’t one of the border guards but one, like my wife and I, always looking over the wall to freedom. I said something to her about getting Brian’s wife to open the door to their house. And this nice neighbour told me Brian’s wife had died.

It had been her funeral. That’s why the grandkids were there. West of Scotland man? West of Scotland woman. I’d just assumed she would be following Brian and his grandkids out that door when I’d spied-cum-glimpsed the males leaving their house that day. I’d had no idea. It was Brian’s wife’s funeral. When you don’t engage in the street gossip this is what happens. You don’t know who’s dead and who’s living. Nod, smile and keep walking.

Brian was wheezing but he was a dead weight. Nice neighbour lady took his keys and opened his front door. She was the same age as, and old friends with Brian’s daughter, the mother of the young lads, and phoned her after she’d phoned an ambulance.  I carried Brian from the road, down his path, across his doormat-sized reception area and onto his sofa leaned against the wall corresponding with ours in our duplicate house. A lusher carpet, nicer furniture, a cosier home – pictures of a wife and a daughter and a son-in-law and grandchildren.

This was before the ambulance people told me you shouldn’t move people who’ve collapsed. Before they arrived and told me you should never give liquid to someone who’s collapsed, Brian’s eyes opened. Even damper of brow - more green now than grey – he muttered something inaudible, the only sound dry lips patting together.

I went in close. What is it, Brian? You okay? Sorry to come into your house like this. The ambulance is on its way. Nice neighbour is phoning your daughter now (Christ, please let her get here even quicker than the ambulance. This is not my place, literally).

“Pat. Pat.”

What’s that, mate? Sorry?

“Patt. Patt.”

Sorry, Brian? What.

“Wat. Ter.”

Into his kitchen, where our kitchen is in our house. Better units. Nicer flooring. Drinking glasses in a different cupboard. A variation on the design of glass we’d drink from. Nice neighbour continues to stand in the middle of the living room floor while Brian passes in and out of consciousness on the sofa and I press the glass to his lips and he sips like he would sip the last drink of life and then, as I try to return to an upright position he grabs at my neck, my collar - he wants to pull me close, is desperate to tell me something. He wants to tell me to my face, look into my eyes as he says it to check it’s registered. He needs to know I heard and understood what he’s about to say.

All I really know is I shouldn’t be the one he’s telling whatever he’s about to tell.

It won’t be “Kiss me, Hardy”. It won’t be “Bugger Bognor”. But the lack of celebrity and fame makes it all the more intimate and so much more inappropriate that it should only be me hearing this man’s last wish, thought, feeling or regret. This is a proper man – a real man. This is the kind of man who wants only a job and a love and then only for his family to be safe – everything else is just a guid day at the bowling.  This, in short, is the kind of man who lives life rather than paraphrases or surfs it; it’s doubly important he is heard by those he did it all for.

Yet as Brian turns to alabaster before me – as time and life dissolve at their most acutely inexorable for him - the least I can do is man up, look him in the face, and receive what he has to say with the mournful reverence it deserves. I will have to tell his daughter, perhaps his grandchildren. I will almost certainly have to pass this on to someone whose heart it will break to hear.

Or maybe he has something to say which only a comparative stranger should hear, something for the ears of someone blissfully ignorant of the particulars of his life – just a fellow man who knows what it is to live as such.

Either way, my ears are the ones closest at this fatally singular moment. I will do my duty. Yes, Brian. What is it? Speak to me, my friend.

“There. There. There is…

No, Brian. It’s too much. Save your energy. The ambulance will be here any moment. You’ll be fine.

“No. It can’t wait;” He sees I’m shirking my responsibility. He knows no ambulance will get here in time. He fastens his gaze. Even at a time like this, he’s working – he’s filling me with the same sense of duty he imparted to his offspring. I have to listen. I must listen. It’s now or never. I shut up. I look him in the eye. He pulls me closer:

“There’s a microwave lasagne in the boot of the car. Could you get it and shove it in the freezer for me.”

I did. Brian was fine. I’ve moved now but still see him when I’m out my daily walks. He’s usually overtaking me, after the doctors told him to take it easy on the grub and do a bit more exercise, the skinny bastard.

He had to put his feet up for a couple of weeks first though. So he sent his grandkids along to ours with a bottle of wine to say thanks. Which he really didn’t have to. That was too much. After all, what else are neighbours for.

Supporting Gerd Müller

I found myself delighted when 1FFC Frankfurt striker Célia Šašić grabbed the first hat-trick of the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup finals, in a 10-0 win over Ivory Coast. I loved that the first hat-trick of the 2014 FIFA men’s World Cup was scored by Bayern Munich’s Thomas Müller. Seem like strange things for a Scotsman to remember, far less celebrate. No less so when I explain it's because both wore Germany’s number 13 - the shirt made famous by Bayern legend Gerd Müller, now aged 75.

When, in October 2015, it was announced Müller was suffering from Alzheimer’s, German football rallied round arguably the greatest striker the game has known. Following those who inherit his shirt is just one of the tenuous ways I’ve always supported “Der Bomber”, who retired from international football 41 years ago, as I turned 5.

Growing up as Scotland’s World Cup failures went from heroic to comedic and VHS tapes of football history proliferated, Germany’s tournament consistency became a stolen security blanket, Müller’s stats and story a self-help book for young adulthood.

Derided by his first Bayern Munich coach as “the short fat Miller”, he became 1970 European Footballer of the Year through close-range scoring.  He would go on to score 365 goals in 427 Bundesliga matches for Bayern. So being classed “a lazy, poaching git” wouldn’t shame me out my teenage place in a Sunday league team.

The humble stoicism of die Nationalmannschaft was also, for me, the perfect antidote to Scotland’s extremes of international arrogance and insecurity. We capped dishevelled alcoholic geniuses apparently predestined for Culloden-esque hubris. Yet squat, inelegant Müller - fond of a bevvy and representing a nation universally unforgiven for a war which ended the year he was born - scored the winner in the final of the World Cup, European Championships and European Cup

My dad saw him score against Scotland at Hampden, my uncle against Rangers at Ibrox. While his is the only autograph I’ve ever hunted (obtained outside Glasgow City chambers in 2002), I never saw him play. Yet when Brazil’s Luís Antônio Corrêa da Costa put Scotland out the 1990 World Cup with both a strike and nickname connoting 1940s Bavaria, I knew the original “Müller’s” career would always be visceral to me.

Holland’s Marco van Basten, needing one to beat Müller’s record of 16 European Championship goals, couldn’t score throughout Euro 92. When he missed in the semi-final shoot-out against Denmark I was off the sofa, delighted he couldn’t even claim a tie-breaker.

Peter Schmeichel was still in goals for Denmark four years later when Croatia’s Davor Suker, who would reach 20 during the Euro 2000 qualifiers, equalled Müller’s record with a famous chip at Hillsborough. Sheffield “neutrals” asked Manchester United’s Schmeichel the score. I sat among them, in that high uncovered corner between the Leppings Lane End and the North Stand, knowing it was 16 each.

In 2006 I supped tea-time pints in the pub nearest my work, masochistically watching Brazil’s Ronaldo equal then overtake Gerdy’s record of 14 World Cup finals goals: His two against Japan and one versus Ghana were scored at Dortmund’s Westfalenstadion, adjacent to the Stadion Rote Erde, the site of Müller’s first international goal (and his second, third and fourth – all in the same 1968 Euros qualifier versus Albania). So it was worth waiting eight years to see Miroslav Klose reclaim that record for Germany on Brazilian soil – his fifteenth against Ghana, his sixteenth in the 7-1 rout of the hosts. 

Klose, because of that record; the Faroe Islands’ Jan Allan Müller because of his surname; and Thomas Müller because he has the surname, squad number, Champions League winners medal with Bayern and World Cup Golden Shoe:  I’ve loved seeing these players score live, simply because of their varyingly direct links with my retrospective hero.

The namesakes I saw scoring against my country at Hampden. Those 2006 post-work pints used up the last of the money I had left from travelling to Munich for the opening match and ceremony of that World Cup. Klose got a brace - two of his eventual record tally – in a 4-2 win over Costa Rica. The ceremony which preceded it saw Müller on the pitch. At Bayern’s new home ground. It was like a passing of the flame.

What’s happened since, with Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi taking goal-scoring to cartoon levels, exists in a world and game unrecognisable from the one of my day – when defenders could and would kick you to pieces - far less that of the striker they called Der Bomber. Messi and Ronaldo have their records, their Ballons d’Or and their Champions Leagues. But they have one international winner’s medal between them and it’s not for the FIFA World Cup, the final of which neither has scored in.

Müller shouted, “Ich bin Max Morlock,” while playing as a kid. 1FC Nuremberg’s Morlock, wearing 13, scored Germany’s opener in their triumphant 1954 World Cup final. When they next won a World Cup, in 1974, Müller scored the winner – his 68^th goal in his 62^nd and final match for his country - wearing his hero’s number. It embodies the beautiful memories he’s provided for millions that, four decades later, middle-aged Scotsmen could still be seen waddling round Glasgow five-a-side courts, hailing every jammy sklaff from three yards with, “I am Gerd Müller!”