A Short Film about Sectarianism

“As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a Ranger…”

But, as Tony Bennett kicks in with “Rags to Riches”, I’m not Henry Hill. I’m the Billy Batts character. More accurately, in my case, Frank Vincent plays Billy Boy. And I’m the one doing the narrating and I’m not being stabbed up and shot in the boot of a car as much as held down and punched in a patch of dirt under a rope swing knotted to a tree in the middle of a council estate in Kilbirnie, North Ayrshire.

This Scorsese movie begins with the childhood flashbacks. I’m seven years old at most and this is the first time I remember being called a hun.

It’s never taken much to beat me up. As long as you don’t let me sit on you, overcoming me physically remains relatively easy. I’m no fighter. But, in this case, I genuinely was outnumbered by three or four to one.

Or three- or four-and-a-half to one if you count my cousin Joe, whose school chums these were; Chums from a different school to mine. So he was neither joining the punch-fest nor doing much to stop it.

In fairness, though, neither was I.

I was probably still trying to work out what a hun was - was it related to my ginger hair? - and why these boys had such a lack of respect for my best clothes. I was clearly attending a cousin’s birthday party.  But they didn’t care what the animals said. What the hell did they care. So, not for the first or last time, my Gran saved me.

She’d seen a lot in life, knew how to live and let live and keep judgements to herself. But I’ll never forget the rage on her face as her eldest grandchild – her only son’s only son – took a pasting from this wee gang. I think she may have called them animals which even I, despite having my head sand-shoed into calcifying white dog jobby at the time, thought was a bit much considering their age.

God, I loved my Gran.

It was also around this time Callum Blair, from not only my school but my class, told me as we played at the derelict site of my dad’s former primary school one Saturday morning, that he didn’t like Steve Austin because Steve Austin was a Catholic. So I went home and told my mum that we shouldn’t like Steve Austin any longer because Steve Austin was a Catholic.

She needed more information.

Had Callum been referring to Steve Austin – the actual Six Million Dollar Man – or was it Lee Majors, the actor who played him? And, rather than “Catholic”, had Callum perhaps meant “bionic”?

Because, while there were undoubtedly moral issues involved in the cyborg technology used to rebuild Colonel Steve Austin  - issues the Vatican would certainly raise if His Holiness watched the same TV as us on a Friday – Callum’s parents might be bigots or Callum might just be getting shit wrong.

My mum also had more information for me on the subject. I might not know what a Catholic was but I should know she was one. My Nana - her mum - was another one of these Catholics. And my Aunt Brenda, my Uncle Ian, all the Donnachies and even my Dad’s dad - my Gran’s husband who’d died years before I was born – were all Catholic.

I suddenly wondered what Callum’s problem was. These people were all fucking great. For a start, neither Callum nor Steve Austin had ever made a Christmas cake with icing as thick and soft as my Aunt Brenda’s. And bionic was all well and good but my Nana bought me the duffle bag with the picture of our 1978 treble-winning team on it. Much better.

I knew about Celtic, obviously. My Uncle Jim – Joe’s dad – would tease me about Rangers. I found Jim’s decorated tankards and the pennants on Joe and his wee brother Philip’s bedroom wall weirdly fascinating. They were green and white versions of the stuff I had on my wall in my sister and I’s room. But mostly me and the McCluskeys just ran about playing at soldiers. And I’m pretty sure we were fighting the Wermacht rather than dodging petrol bombs on the Bogside.

Maybe if all the Donnachies had been more interested in football rather than sci-fi, music, movies, board games, Airfix soldiers and all the other stuff I loved so much, it would have been more apparent what underpinned the Old Firm rivalry but, for me, it was just a grown-up name for two big teams and I loved the one with the blue shirts that didn’t match their socks.

My Gran and her husband – "my Dad’s dad" – then my own parents experienced so much hassle from gossips when getting married, in the late 1940s and late 1960s respectively, that church and religion was never a thing for my sister and I. We were never christened in any faith other than family.

My dad, the eldest of five, was just 14 when he lost his father. There had been no life insurance. Why the hell would my dad believe in god.

My Gran, barely in her 30s when she lost her husband, worked extra jobs to support those five kids. She always felt there was someone looking over her, getting her through it. She didn’t talk about this more than once. She just attended the Park Parish Church most Sundays.

Lynn and me attended a non-denominational school – took us both years to realise there’s no such thing as a “Protestant school” – and learned that when the guy with the collar called father turned up at my Nana’s we, like the rest of my cousins, should get the Tonka Trucks out the living room.

My Nana’s oldest girl, my mum’s sister – my Aunt Jean – died when I’d just started primary school. She left behind eight Donnachies. The oldest one joined the army. The youngest few fell into my Nana’s care, which meant my Mum and my Aunt Brenda’s care.

For some of those younger cousins that started a lot of being sent to mass as show for my Nana's neighbours. But my Nana never went to mass. Neither did her husband, my Papa, who worked at the explosives factory, got pished with his mates on a Friday, kept a Celtic bunnett on the top shelf of the linen cupboard and walked me for miles all round Saltcoats in my pram as a kid.

My Papa did go blind around about the time my Nana bought me the Rangers scarf I still wear to this day but I’m sure it wasn’t related.

The woman who lived next door to me and my folks (after the original neighbours who regularly played the Orange tunes killed themselves, and nearly us with them, in the closest they ever came to being rude to us - their third attempt at passing out drunk with a chip pan on or a fag in hand) would do a lot of acting like she was amazing because she went to the same Church of Scotland outlet as my Gran but that neighbour was actually a bit of a cow.

Joe’s now a Celtic man who, when we were barely at Primary school, was sat next to me on the planks of the Centenary Stand at my first Rangers game (v Hibs). I was at his kids’ christenings. I was as honoured as I was devastated to carry my Uncle Jim’s coffin.  

I really don’t know what else to tell you.  It’s complicated and that’s what understandably annoys people with lives already so complex they’re desperate for labels. What it doesn’t excuse are the people who know better who then choose to exploit those labels for their own ends.

MSPs, for example. Maybe journalists.

There weren’t a lot of university degrees flying about in my childhood but there was compassion and sociability to honours standards. There was innate understanding of life being too short to let pish like sectarianism get in the way of enjoyment.

I’m almost certainly – must be - descended from Irish Catholics. I was at a wedding once, sat at the Charlie Tully table, with people claiming they could tell I was a Rangers fan because of my name. I’m the fifth Alexander Anderson on the trot and my dad’s the first Protestant one. Where do people get this shit?

There are Rangers supporters I wouldn’t have in the house and there are Celtic fans I’ll love til the day I die.

I sang about fenians and tims until I knew those weren’t just nicknames for Celtic fans. And then I sang those songs a little bit longer. Probably until I stopped being a virgin. Which was a few years – although not as many as I’d have liked - before I began a six year relationship with a girl whose mum and dad were devout Catholics.

Her dad had served in the army and her mum loved the Queen and Margaret Thatcher almost as much as the Pope. Why do I have to tell you this? This shouldn’t be necessary. But you don’t have to keep track of all the strands – just see how many there are, how quickly they become knotted.

My Aunt Brenda hates football and would light a candle for me at mass when I was at games because she knew people got hurt at football matches. I didn’t know this til my mum told me a few years ago and, anytime I’m on one of those foreign holidays I’m so lucky to be on when I consider how my Gran struggled and I visit the inevitable local cathedral, I light a candle for my Auntie B and my cousins, her fantastic daughter and her son who cheered on Celtic in my presence as a kid, served in Helmand fucking Province and is arguably the loveliest young man I’ve ever met.

This shouldn’t have to be explained to anyone but there it is. I’m sick of having to preface every discussion of Rangers victory celebrations with “but some of my best grandfathers are Catholic”.

Scotland is a country with more social and health problems than any other in Western Europe. Drink and drugs are the real cancers. Religion offers a healthier relief to some and football does the same. When life is shit you need a win.

My dad stopped me following his and his dad’s team because Kilmarnock, despite being champions more recently than Rangers when I was born, are generally shit. When Hampden has almost every European crowd record you can think of it’s a fair guess most working class Scots will love football so the best thing a dad can do for his son is let him support a winning team. Using your religion - or your “background” – gives that choice an instant authenticity and avoids all accusations of glory hunting.

Jock Stein, the Protestant Rangers fan who married a Catholic and won Celtic the European Cup, claimed the Old Firm acted as a social pressure valve. It let out the sectarian resentment built up in the working week. It let it out in a stream of daft songs and chants.

I feel that’s now inverted. In a world where Catholics marrying Protestants is now so common it makes the prefix “mixed” redundant (is there anyone in this country today who genuinely knows no members of one sect or the other who they like if not actually love?), the Old Firm often seems like the only thing keeping sectarianism alive in Scotland.

It’s just another excuse to sing about hate, the stuff which colours fitba. If Scotland loved the game as much as it loved the opportunities it provides for spite, Scotland would be favourites for this summer’s Euros. And the holders.

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be. Just be. Anyone who felt the same would always be one of the family, my kinda good fella.

Gerrard, Galatasaray; Glory

With 55 finally achieved, what next for Rangers? The immediate challenges are obvious; retain the league, bag some domestic cups and try a major step-up in Europe. But the latter two, for this Rangers team, have always been more closely related than we perhaps appreciate.

Leicester City narrowly dropping out England’s Champions League berths just one week after lifting their first FA Cup perfectly illustrates the difficulty in adding extra silverware to the essentials. For Leicester fans, however, given their club’s historic place in English football, the FA Cup was a dream come true.

For Rangers, the league is everything essential and Europe is the essential ambition.

For Rangers, cups are good springboards and then they’re a garnish. Steven Gerrard, who never won a league title as a player, used Europe as both springboard and garnish to the SPFL Premiership as a manager.

I was so excited by our win over Galatasaray last October, our third straight Europa League play-off victory in three seasons under Gerrard, I wrote a match report without anywhere to put it.

Now, re-reading my post-match rant, it’s clear I felt a failing manager would never have been able to get those performance levels out his players, at the same pivotal stage, three seasons on the bounce.

My obvious excitement takes its particular colour from a moment in time, with huge question marks remaining over our ability to win the domestic title, confined to history by what we went on to do in that historic Premiership campaign (even if we didn’t quite blow away Ross County in the way I predicted for our next home match).

I’ll post it here, on the blog I subsequently knocked together for just such outpourings, lest we forget.

So you may read the following as a retrospective on Rangers league title number 55. Galatasaray at Ibrox was one of the first moments we felt 2020-21 was the season we’d finally bring it home. Or you can read it as a preview of Rangers in the 2021-22 Champions League qualifiers; because Europe is Steven Gerrard’s springboard and he’s made continental competition easier for us with each year he’s in charge.

But next season’s Europe, even at the qualifying and play-off stage, will be of a level Rangers couldn’t hope to cope with without three years of UEFA group campaigns in our locker… as well as that lovely wee league title.

Our hosts equalise on the night then an insane red card for us, and then another and then we’re hanging on for dear aggregate life in one of those parts of Russia you know should be an independent state playing in the Asian confederation and we’re all so drained from watching it we’re ready to hit our kips rather than the pints even though it’s barely tea time.

Then a Polish chess match over 179 smoke-addled goalless minutes only prevented from the extra time and penalties written all over it by a Jordan Jones ball in the 180th minute and an Alfredo header which sends Ibrox into raptures of gratitude, relief and ecstasy.

Then we almost threaten to blow Hell’s own Turks away in the first eleven minutes of the first half then actually do in seven second half minutes and we, the screen-watching Bears, need the visitors’ goal three minutes from the end to give us the one thing which is gradually fading from Rangers European play-off ties under Steven Gerrard: Anxiety.

I came into this season pretending a European exit before the group stages could help us win the Premiership title. I go into October pretending I’m happy Celtic have also qualified because it means they’ll have the same draining midweek commitments as us between league games.

I came into this week feeling gutted I wouldn’t see Falcao in the flesh and worried that the lack of crowd at Ibrox would be detrimental against a team as street-wise and a club as Euro-savvy as Galatasaray. I end it feeling absolutely devastated I wasn’t there to cheer Rangers off that pitch but knowing those players will be absolutely fine without us.

It’s getting harder and harder to pretend I’m seriously worried about Steven Gerrard’s Rangers in Europe.  And being unworried about Rangers in Europe is so utterly alien to me I now realise why we imploded domestically in the last two seasons: to stop the Bears getting the bends. We, as a fan base, expected to reacclimatise gently. From the fourth tier back up to the top would take at least four years - probably more - and we expected a League Cup here, a Scottish Cup there - eventually title 55. Then - only then - would we start worrying about Europe.

But before we got any of that other, regular, domestic stuff into our lungs, the worry has been sucked right out of Europe. Stevie G hitting such giddy heights so quickly from such gloomy depths means rest stops are required along the way. But there are none. So, like you, I’m giddy.

It used to be European success demanded domestic hangovers and a result like thumping an Eredivisie side by four clear goals in the Netherlands would make Fir Park one of the last places you’d want to go the following weekend. But now we follow up by doing to Motherwell on the Sunday exactly what we did to Willem II on the Thursday.

What Stevie G has achieved for us in Europe isn’t just a miracle in terms of what happened the season prior to his arrival. In terms of season-on-season over-achievement, it outstrips anything Rangers as a club have ever managed.

Yes, Rangers have reached European finals. But the first three were in a period when Dunfermline, Kilmarnock and Dundee were reaching European semi-finals and the last came just five years after Celtic fell at the final hurdle. And we pump that mob all the time.

Okay, we qualified for near endless group stages throughout the Nineties and Noughties. But the money at our disposal then and our position within the game – sometimes as the most powerful club in the British Isles – meant an actual UEFA trophy should have arrived at the end of at least one of those campaigns. 

No, the sliding European scale of expectation versus material progress has never been tipped so dramatically in our favour as it is under Steven Gerrard. And the sheer lack of doings, disappointments and general embarrassment within the Gerrard European runs – Leverkusen are the only side to beat us in 17 home games, all minnows have been thumped and absolutely no-one has hammered us  - is fairly unparalleled since we first kicked a European ball sixty-odd years ago.

From an unknown Portuguese manager embarrassing himself in a bush in Luxembourg City, trying to excuse the incompetence he’d wrought on Rangers, to a legendary Turkish opposition manager embarrassing himself in the Ibrox technical area, attempting to distract from the fact he’s just been owned; to effect this scale of transformation in three years is frightening. It’s a scarily rapid rise. I need to catch my breath. Previously the players haven’t been able to – they’ve come back from their Dubai winter break still gasping for air.

But this time I think we can just about manage another great European run without home defeats by Hamilton Accies or chucking leads at Rugby Park. The Rangers players see Fatih Terim, a UEFA Cup-winning manager, reduced to emptying his own lungs at his opposite number, being dismissed on and off the park by their own gaffer, a man who won both European Club trophies as a player, scoring in each final (one in a town called Istanbul). What we’re doing here becomes increasingly believable. This potential is becoming real. We’re all getting our lungs round it now.

Alfie, up against a national hero of his, was having a bit of a “Boumsong against Auxerre” moment when faced with a clear header at their goal, making a run through their square defence or slipping an easy ball through to Kent. But he persisted. He dummied sublimely for the opener and he left that park victorious over Radamel Falcao. A Colombian who scored three in two straight winning Europa League finals was outdone by a Colombian who’s now got his club into three straight Europa League group stages and holds the record for the most goals in the competition before Christmas. That club is Rangers. It’s us.

As Stevie G stood there post-match tonight, on Rangers TV, on the legends podium with Magnificent Souness and Sir Walter, as if his coronation was complete, the talk was of the need to win domestic trophies. Souness told his fellow European Cup-Winning Liverpool Captain that the first trophy would start the deluge. Stevie G told his fellow Rangers Manager Brought in Young to Stop a Rot that it was all about where we were in May, not tonight. I’m not arguing with those guys. But don’t tell me these group stage qualifications aren’t the equivalent of, if not superior to Scottish domestic trophies.

I began September pleased we would at least play only three European games before the group stage, conserving more energy for the domestic challenge. I hit October upset that we played one round less and only one leg each time. Why? Because if we can’t turn Gerrard’s European progress into domestic trophies, we can at least turn it into terminology as understandable as any shiny cup in our captain’s hand:

To quickly explain exactly what Steven Gerrard’s done since following on from Pedro Caixhina’s solitary European tie in 2017-18 – to make a punchy retort to the “no trophies in two seasons” slap - I’ve been saying “32 European games though”. I wanted to have shoved at least another six games onto that stat by this point. But he’s now guaranteed to break the 40 mark anyway*.

Another way of explaining it, of buffing it up, comes via the coefficient. Gerrard has almost single-handedly made it a possibility league title 55 or 56 will put us straight into the Champions League group stages.

But the best and by far the most enjoyable method of understanding what Steven Gerrard has done for Rangers, in Europe, is by simply watching us play.

When the linesman wrongly raised his flag for Alfredo’s goal in Moscow two seasons back – the one that should have put us 4-2 up on Spartak – it not only cost us the game but ruined one of the most scintillating one-touch counter-attacking goals we’ve ever scored in UEFA competition.

Last season, Alfie taking that touch at Do Dragao, before slapping it into the Porto net, arguably prevented that equaliser becoming Rangers’ best European counter-attacking goal of all-time. It couldn’t ever be as vital or legendary as Tommy McLean to Bobby Russell in Eindhoven or Ferguson to Durrant to Hateley to McCoist at Elland Road. But in terms of sheer speed, precision and aesthetic beauty, it was only that touch – in itself a lovely moment of control which probably ensured Alfie would score – which simultaneously stopped that move in Oporto becoming unbeatably slick in the annals of our continental expeditions.

When Borna took his time to get his cross in tonight – and the cross took that deflection en route – it put a disingenuously “clumsy” spin on not just the cross but the entire move. It was a construction of patience, acuity and pace. It was less a goal than an expression of high culture:

Starting from our goalie and moving across our backline at pace, crossing the pitch with easy ingenuity and working up the left flank with a precision which left only that last chamber of the lock requiring just a tad of extra concentration to pick, our captain and right back, was once again allowed to ghost in and finish a move, once again convert a cross from our left back, because Galatasaray didn’t know what the hell was happening to them.

The first goal, seven minutes earlier, was so beautifully executed I don’t want to think about the fact we weren’t all there to give it the four roofs in tribute.

It was relentless competence in the first Gerrard run – you’d not beat us at Ibrox and you’d have to fight like hell to beat us, narrowly, on your own patch. Then it was relentlessly impressive last season – you’ll lose at Ibrox and we’ll take something from your place. Now we’re annihilating Dutch sides away and at Ibrox, against Turkish giants, we’re scoring goals which border on the sublime.

Bears are all fluent these days in the language of “scar tissue” – 2012 left the Rangers support more loyal than ever but also more hurt. However, on our European skin the tissue has been forming over wounds closer to 80 than eight years old. From European bans and early exits to home stuffings by everyone from Juventus and Seville to Eintracht Frankfurt and Unirea Urziceni, Europe has always been our biggest problem. And on that podium tonight we saw three men – in fact four if ye throw in square-go specialist Neil McCann – who always went for the biggest guy in the room, knowing everyone and everything thing else would fall into line once he’d been sorted.

Europe is sorted.

Ross County don’t come to Ibrox on Sunday looking to exploit our European hangover. They come to Ibrox on Sunday knowing we don’t get those hangovers anymore. Like we’ll all have to with our European worrying, Rangers under Steven Gerrard – the man who said “Let’s go”- are learning how to let go of anything that stops us going forward. No more Progrès – only progress.

And breathe.

*Steven Gerrard's Rangers in Europe; The update:

P 45, W 24, D 15, L 6

Draws include games at Legia, Porto, Slavia and Feyenoord and four contributing to away goal head-to-head victories over Benfica and Villarreal (that’s the Villarreal contesting tonight’s Europa League final versus Manchester United). Gerrard’s lost just twice at Ibrox in Europe - once against Bundesliga powerhouses and the other when Rangers were down to nine men. The most we’ve ever lost a match by is two goals.

All this in just three seasons.

Trophy Day Morality Play

Won't somebody please think of the children... and stop Rangers looking so lovely.

I’ve reloaded the toothpaste. I changed it up last Sunday. And Sunday 18 May 2021 – can’t be confident it was still morning when I hit the shower - was certainly a day my teeth needed cleaning and my breath required freshening. Stat.

But as much as I’m enjoying the easy squeeze on my tumescent tube these past few mornings, there’s regret in those fat fluoride slugs of blue effortlessly mounting my bristles.

I slapped Rangers title celebrations in the mouth. It was me, you see. It was my fatalistic fault. My cosmic negligence put the bile on the bunting, the fury in the fanfare and the MD2020 bottle through the rear-view mirror of RFC 2020-21.

I went too soon with the Oral B Pro-Expert. Sorry, but I did.

My wife bought it a fortnight back, when she noticed my Aquafresh Fresh & Minty was no longer the huge coo’s lick of red, white & blue promised on the tube but a wafer thin, flattened husk of plastic, crumpled and rammed up into the lid like a football squad down to fifth choice centre-halves and makeshift left-backs trying to empty one last run of results out of a 56-game season.

She then noticed that, morning of Livi away, eve of Tav’s trophy-lift, the new tube remained in its box, well away from the sink. She knew what was going on and didn’t say a thing. She has her own toothpaste. Plus she knows what I’m about. She simply circumvented my attempts at a good night kiss as delicately as she could and let me carry on with my twice-daily toothpaste infusion, my water with a hint of mint – my remembrance of things plaque.

She knew I wasn’t really chasing the last micro-nodule of Aquafresh’s “24 hour sugar acid protection”. She knew I was in fact on another of my certifiable superstition missions. That tube of red, white & blue Aquafresh had, for me, symbiotically merged with a Rangers team running on empty needing three more performances to complete the league season unbeaten.

For fuck’s sake, it said “triple protection” on the side of the tube.  What else was I supposed to do?

Celtic at home, Livi away and Aberdeen at home: Three nightmare fixtures for a team with mounting injuries and suspensions and, freshly out the Scottish Cup and with the league title bagged back in March, no truly material need to win any more games:

We needed triple protection just to maintain the unbeaten run, far less break the 100 Points barrier, finish with a one hundred percent Premiership home record and concede no more than the one further goal we could afford if we wanted the British defensive record.

Ten days ago our postman might have been knocked over by my breath despite me answering the door in a facemask, but we won those three games by an aggregate of 11-1. You’re welcome.

The chances Livingston and Aberdeen missed against us – open goals. That Celtic couldn’t even convert one of those Old Firm penalties they always promised would make the difference if they were ever awarded one. That we didn’t merely avoid defeat in these games – that we didn’t just win them but romped them…

Triple goddam Protection.
 
So, waking sometime after brunch on 18 May with the previous day’s tins of San Miguel, packets of Walker’s prawn cocktail, glasses of whisky and flutes of Cava clinging to my palate as rampantly as the memories of big Kemar’s ruthless reply to Aberdeen’s 15 minutes of possession - and the aroma of my hamburger supper from Simeone’s on the journey back home as redolent as the champers dousing our captain, our manager and our trophy in that post-match presser - I was extra glad I’d paid my dues to Lady Luck, that I could now crack open the new toothpaste with the celebratory zeal you'd expect of a halitosis curative from Moët & Chandon.  

Hell, I think I’d even buttered pancakes and a cuppa at midnight just to convince myself I was back on a sober man tip. In short, my mouth was The Morning After 55.

Oral B Pro-Expert rolls out plain blue from a rather St Johnstone-liveried tube - there’s no trace of red in paste or packaging. This had me suddenly confident about who’d win the Scottish Cup final but, for Rangers, I’d gone too soon. I’d been overly previous in binning the mangled remnants of the Aquafresh. This I realised as, over the next 24 hours, the news began kicking my teeth in.

Not the news of anything untoward by Rangers, you understand – just the news: The flood of unrelenting bile and hysterical othering masquerading as coverage; the deluge of tenuous indignation and manufactured disgust dressed as analysis: the tsunami of trumped-up charges and plastic moralising infiltrating every editorial, bulletin and devolved parliamentary Tweet available.

 It made me sick to my ultra-minty back teeth.

From Sunday lunch into Monday evening I remote-flicked across the Scottish news channels, scrolled down Twitter and walked past the Daily Record front page in Morrisons. The very reason I’d needed Rangers to underline our brilliant season with the double of European progress and the treble of an invincible league campaign was being realised in front of my dehydrated eyes and ears still ringing with Tinie Tempah.

Being an institution means Rangers are followed by fans from all social strata. Being a football institution means many of those fans live in a permanent state of binary opposition. Being a Scottish football institution means poverty and abuse in the homes of many of our fans leads to sectarianism and alcohol-fuelled violence in public by our real, actual living people fans who can’t all get the most desirable level of education or emotional equilibrium.

Roll all this up in a big bag of Covid-restricted living for the previous 14 months - with the promised respite of reopened pubs denied to Glaswegians just the previous evening - and something was bound to go wrong.

What did go wrong was bloody horrible, and all steps should be taken to avoid a recurrence. But it was miniscule in scale. A policeman and a steward were injured when St Johnstone fans gathered illegally to celebrate the Perth side’s League Cup win in March. Scale that up to the Rangers support last weekend and we’ll be, per capita, the far better behaved fan base. 

Rangers took a quarter of a million people to Manchester for the 2008 UEFA Cup final, with another 40,000+ watching it on big screens at Ibrox. A couple of hundred people went nuts last Saturday night. It wasn’t acceptable but it wasn’t uncontainable and it wasn’t the only story of that day and it was a really strange time to start seeing such behaviour in a British city centre on a sunny Saturday night as a revelation.

For us, for the Bears, it was all about 55. No one likes us, yes – we know this. But while we don’t care about nonsense thrown at us from opposition stands, we’ve had to care about the garbage hurled at us from all forms of media ever since it played a massive part in liquidating us, making us start again in the fourth tier, undergo levels of material punishment and censure no club our size has ever endured and, rather than garner us any sympathy or even see previous enmities appeased, make us more hated than ever.

We shouldn’t care about how we’re regarded by inveterate haters. But when the narratives they peddle can cause structural harm to our club – when a fucking TikTok fit-up so blatant we were laughing at it Monday morning, became a Holyrood matter Monday afternoon, a Police Scotland matter Monday tea-time and the main Reporting Scotland headline Monday night - we need our team’s achievements scoured in triple, quadruple, ten-fold protection.

Surviving 2012 was phenomenal; getting back to the top flight admirable - becoming national champions again within a decade something of a sporting miracle. It has all been met with hate. If you give examples of this it is, in one of the more sinister forms of that hatred, condemned as “whataboutery”.

It’s not whataboutery. It’s context. And if you get rid of context (which only intoxicants, journalism and politics can) nothing means anything anymore:

Since 2012, especially as we got closer to returning to the top flight, Rangers have seen our fans given reduced allocations for an away end at a promotion play-off which, when we lost, was attacked by opposition fans. We’ve seen our entire team – just eleven men - attacked on the pitch by thousands of “celebrating” Hibernian fans in a national cup final. We’ve seen individual players targeted by individual Hibs fans and their bottles in subsequent visits to Easter Road.

We’ve seen some clubs refuse to even be involved in a two-word phrase with us yet change their entire marketing campaign to suddenly focus on their lack of liquidations.

Even putting aside the continual taunts about our club “dying”, a club which every rival in this country wanted a financial piece of for over a century – so much so that our rivalry with Celtic, the other guaranteed big crowd filling your Dickensian provincial away end, was nicknamed the Old Firm – there can be little wonder that a few dozen of our fans returned the hate of the last decade, however mistakenly, in song and deed, at the single most vindicating moment our support will ever know.

So a senior policeman talks of animalistic behaviour by some on the night of Saturday 17 May 2021 - by no more than, say, the number of other Scottish club fans who would make, flaunt and/or retweet a banner, in Spanish, claiming Alfredo Morelos' mother is "used like a mattress" - and the likes of BBC Scotland’s Tom English, in the same breath as pushing for fans to attend stadiums during a pandemic, has the ammunition with which to strafe our entire support. This while the Justice Secretary for Scotland ensures every demented Rangers-hater with a keyboard now knows any accusation they wish to make up, no matter how ridiculous, will be given all the credence and credibility it requires if it can help sully any Rangers achievement more loudly than Rangers fans celebrate it.

A Celtic fan from Govan encouraged fans of Osijek, helped the Croatian club’s ultras, to attack lone Rangers supporters in the approaches to Ibrox after kick-off in our Europa League qualifier in August 2018. Those visitors eventually sustained serious injuries themselves but the call to arms was addressed to his “Catholic brothers”. A certain Borna Barisic scored Osijek’s goal that night, Niko Katic opened the scoring for Rangers. If any Ibrox employee wants to sing lyrics insulting the Pope they won’t be doing it in the company of this pair, or of any other player in our multi-cultured, multi-ethnic, pan-religious team.

This Rangers side – one of the most disciplined ever to wear our shirt and at the forefront of promoting Black Lives Matter in Scotland- has allegedly reported an opposition player for using homophobic language this season. Upon the tragic death of Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman, both our captain, James Tavernier and star striker Kemar Roofe – who usually celebrates by indicating his children’s initials – celebrated goals with that movie’s “Wakanda forever” salute in moments of solidarity with a black icon.

Yet we have Scottish politicians, so many journalists and waves of Scottish “football fans” actively wanting these players to have chanted the phrase “Fuck the Pope”.

So, you see, while winning the league in the first week of March was remarkable, I needed the unbeaten league season for protection against the tartar of inevitable individual Rangers fan misbehaviour and the British defensive record to defy the enamel-rotting gutter press reaction but, man, with even politicians descending upon our club and players like Larry Olivier’s White Angel in Marathon Man, the sporting legacy of this miraculous season could never be safe.

By Monday the reaction to the incidents of fan misbehaviour was an ongoing negotiation of hysteria levels. So the bogus Tweet of a bogus soundtrack which, in itself, was hardly conclusive – like The Police’s (the band, that is, rather than Police Scotland’s) “So Lonely” chorus famously sounding like Sting was repeating the name of newsreader Sue Lawley, James Dornan MSP decided he couldn’t not hear “Fuck the Pope” – which was applied to genuine footage of our players singing Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline in Ibrox’s Thornton Suite, post-trophy lift, let it become a two-pronged attack.

Rangers fans and players. Get them all. Arrest the players who won that trophy, jail the fans who celebrate it.

If there is one thing that upsets some in this country far more than Rangers winning, it’s Rangers winning in record-breaking fashion. And if there’s one thing that upsets some in this country more than Rangers being linked with sectarianism, it’s Rangers becoming the victims of bigotry and mounting creditable, genuine campaigns to eradicate our support of any such myopia.

The desperation, flavouring last week’s hysteria, to discredit our Everyone Anyone campaign of inclusion, was only outdone in its toxicity by the unleashing of the most downright creepy form of racism I have ever seen in the land of my birth:

So many people clearly regarded the racist abuse of Glen Kamara in March’s Europa League tie with Slavia Prague as some sort of “win” for Rangers (what the actual fuck) and went straight for the genuine sympathy he had garnered from that incident and tried to repaint him as a hypocrite because – well - because he had been racially abused.

Okay, one of the Tweets in this respect called him out for sectarianism while simultaneously branding him a “hun”, but BBC Scotland’s Chris McLaughlin also cited Glen’s previous victimisation in these horrendous terms in his report for the main item on the Reporting Scotland of Monday 19^th May 2021.

Police Scotland’s subsequent inability to find anything criminal – anything sectarian – being chanted by the Rangers players, from a sound recording plainly not of Rangers players, did not make the headline news.

What the hell is going on here?

Some very one-note people are becoming very scared. If Rangers aren’t actually evil, if they’re even – fuck me – nice, and undeserving of abuse, then where is all that hate you feel for them really coming from?

What does this country hate more than Rangers fans booing Rangers players for blessing themselves? It’s Rangers fans not giving a shit when our entire team blesses itself and, moreover, actually sending them the kind of adoration the Magi would think unseemly.

Justice Minister Humza Yousaf was not reacting to Rangers players singing sectarian lyrics. He knew they weren’t singing those lyrics.

Humza Yousaf wasn’t reacting to some of the thousands of Rangers supporters who gathered in Glasgow city centre behaving atrociously. He knew they weren’t representative of the majority of the Rangers support.

What Humza Yousaf was reacting to was Rangers winning the league. He hated that.

What he was exploiting, however, was the same thing SNP First Minister Alex Salmond exploited in a state of the nation address, broadcast live on Sky Sports News, in early March 2011 in the wake of two footballers being sent off in a cup replay and a touchline scuffle in which no punches were thrown; the easy policy substitute which is the Old Firm.

In the same way Boris Johnson would, later last week, leap on revelations about Martin Bashir’s famously gossipy interview with Princess Diana,Yousaf was simply guided by the weight of media coverage rather than the weight of the issue in question. So much the better if it was social media and no matter if it was mostly salacious nonsense – if that’s what the public want to talk about rather than drug deaths, poverty levels or the fact Scotland withdrawing from an economic and political union which is itself currently withdrawing from an even bigger one would be pretty much a disaster for the people his party wants to guide towards it, then it’s all gravy for him.

It might suit the SNP’s main ambition to align drunken mayhem with the flying of the Union Flag, albeit Union Flags with a big 55 or lion rampant printed in the middle, but there can only be limited political gain in such wanton divisiveness. Too many voters support Rangers.

Yousaf may be a Celtic supporter and we may have enjoyed it when his boss, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon was ripping into Celtic’s Covidiotic trip to Dubai in January, but this is what the Old Firm, as a pair, are to Holyrood’s inveterate opportunists: Both representatives and victims of the painful mix of Presbyterian rectitude and Catholic guilt that courses through the stereotyped character of this country like a green and orange message on a stick of rock we’re too embarrassed to be seen sucking and too ashamed to enjoy the sweet taste of.

This national trait produces lots of good stuff but it also sees Scotland always ready to produce one of two mass reactions to any major achievement – indignation or taunting.

When Rangers lifted league title number 55, in record-breaking style, the indignation was as plastic as it was sinister. But the taunting - our generally restrained taunting - was as real as it was hard earned.  

Leave the hysteria and the binary opposition to football. That’s what it’s there for, to let that part of us tire itself out in a safe space. Politics gets dragged into the match day mix by football fans but that should always be a silly move no one really takes seriously. When media and MSPs start reciprocating football’s political overtures, however, sack those journalists and vote out those MSPs before George Square becomes an actual war zone and the need for a sensationalist headline gets us all fucking killed.

And, after the month I’ve had, no-one will be able to identify me by my dental records.

Blue 55

 Just a coincidence. Beating Aberdeen first game of the greatest league season of our lives and beating Aberdeen in the last game. It’s just the way the fixtures panned out. It is symbolic, yes. It is a nice book-ending of a colossal campaign. But, in the end, it’s just coincidence; there’s nothing deeper than that to be read into it.

Rangers success and delight washes over me. I’m in agony, wailing over the absence of a beautiful friend: that’s how it started. Not caring about the world agonising and wailing over Rangers celebrations because I’m in the beautiful company of friends: that’s how it ended. Both times it was Aberdeen losing.

I was in bed early on the last night of July 2020. Maybe it was even the first few minutes of August when I clambered into my kip, sober as a very fat judge who hadn’t had a drink since February because he might as well use the enforced anti-social dynamic of Covid protocols – of locked-down Britain – to lose a few stone… especially important as I was now officially, comfortably in my early fifties:

“I know the colour of that blood. That blood is arterial blood. That blood is my death warrant.”

I might have made it to twice Keats’ age but the price I pay - and Goram bless the Scottish Health Board bowel cancer screening project for all men over 50 - is my death sentence will be contained not in evidence of consumption, Romanticism’s preferred fatal disorder, but in a discoloured stool. My knell won’t come on a stanza-scrawled parchment but a smelly square of bog paper.

Cardiac event, stroke, malignant tumour: However it actually comes at me is a mere detail. It’ll be the over-consumption that ends my tenure, long “before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain”.

Anyway, I was in bed early for a Friday. It had been a hard week. We were selling a house we no longer lived in. Negotiations had rumbled on. This after a year of being unable to lose the house to regular home buyers because our insane former neighbours, a pair of Celtic-supporting ladies who the whole street kinda protected from themselves, would accost every viewer before they got down the path.

That was annoying. As had been the fact I had to go round to check on the house at midnight each week, lest these ladies who had always been painfully neighbour-aware but had gone totally out of control since they both retired to spend every waking hour in each other’s deranged company, ran out to goad me about the latest of Celtic’s never-ending litany of domestic triumphs.

But it was far from the hardest aspect of the week now fading into the weekend. We’d been up to Aberdeen on the Monday, driving up and back from our rented Glasgow house to visit friends. And it had been hard. Masks and protocols had eventually been put aside - for the foreverest of forever hugs and the most passionate man-on-man kiss of my life (so far) - but it had been the only unhappy trip I’d ever made to that house. Probably the only sober one for a start.

In fact, it was easily the worst of any of the few dozen times I’ve ever been in the Granite City for whatever reason, and that includes the 5-1 humping at Pittodrie in January 1985 which necessitated me doing my Ayrshire paper round an hour early just to catch my supporters bus which got there four hours early which meant me spending three and a half hours drinking Coke in pubs with my uncle’s mates who were drinking stuff other than Coke as preparation for having all our nuts frozen off on the skelf-addled benches of the old Beach End as Frank McDougall celebrated every one of his four goals by goading me with a crucifix so huge he could probably have scored eight had he got rid of it, a la Laurent Fignon losing the 1989 Tour de France by eight seconds because of the drag imparted by the ponytail he refused to cut off.

Fignon died of cancer a couple of weeks after turning fifty, in 2010 - in August 2010. August. Yeah, “died of cancer” is, I know, as specific as saying someone “likes Jazz”. But I can tell you it wasn’t cancer of the ponytail. Laurent did some drugs to chill - he did other drugs to win. It’s often what we take to get through life, as much as what we take to celebrate it, which ends up taking life from us.

Luckily, the exhaustion took over from the stress in my painfully sober body, late on 31 July 2020, and she and I both passed out shortly after midnight. And then, of course, the wankers a few doors down unleashed their secondary school-age kids.

The inconsiderate, look-at-us, posh hippies down the street – all self-conscious let-the-children-express-themselves types, as if behaving like our street is a William Morris idyll excuses them from instead of confirming them as being selfish, entitled twats – who perfected the art of the loud garden party long before Covid was a thing, were at that stage of middle class pissed which sees them not give a shit all their kids are running up and down the otherwise silent, darkened street of oldsters, shouting and screaming.

A summer night, our window open, I woke up, reached across and looked at my phone. Eleven minutes before 1am. Fuck me. When it starts, this Guantanamo-esque sleep interruption from our newer neighbours usually goes on hourly, until the one or two couples attending this regular brazier-based bacchanal masquerading as a barbeque drag their spawn back to their own homes sometime after four.

The other house is almost sold. Soon we will also be moving from this street. Don’t get involved.

First day of August 2020 was a Saturday. And a Rangers Saturday. When was kick-off at Pittodrie? Noon? Half past? Whatever - it was live on Sky and while my arse was on the sofa my heart was on the floor and my head somewhere else entirely; in Aberdeen, yes – but in a different part. The part that’s home to a hospice. My head was where my friend lay.

I’d been up since 07:30, when that friend’s wife phoned to tell me he’d gone. She, of course, as everyone feels obliged to when making those phone-calls, mentioned the exact moment: Time of Death, 00:49 hrs.

A coincidence. Nothing more. Just symbolic.

Hazel, who from late the previous year had been making arrangements for his 50^th birthday – coming in September 2020 - had been segued brutally into phoning and texting details of Andrew’s sudden decline from that catastrophic April day he’d been diagnosed with incurable liver cancer. For the last four months she’d been stoically sticking to the details and the arrangements and the process – even of his basically deciding, on the Thursday, it was time to get on with the actual dying. When we’d seen him in person that Monday, when Andrew and I told each other what we had to tell each other, I knew he was just hanging on to tidy things up. Never seen anything like it. Don’t want to see it again. But what a fucking man.

We saw him on the Monday, in his house. A few days later he pulled out a few tubes and told his girls he was ready for the hospice.

That was him. Even at Uni where our mature student undergrad friendship was forged in a debauchery few of the PhD-ing friends of our own age could compete with [whatever was wrong with Andrew’s liver, I helped put it wrong], I was always a late riser who could drink til the next break of daylight whereas Andrew was always up at the crack and in bed by, well, usually around, eleven minutes to 1am.

Hazel knew those stories, was sick of them. So, on the phone that morning, me sitting up in bed as the kind of sunshine that should herald a new sporting season cracked offensively through the curtains, I told her about being woken at 00:49 that morning. She dissolved. So I told her about the time I’d phoned him from the Travelodge round the corner from The Grill on Union Street - one of planet Earth’s greatest bars - to tell him I’d be late because I’d just got out the shower to discover there were no towels in the room and he told me...

Just try spinning round on the spot. Quickly. By the time yer dry I'll have yer Tennent's topped up.

When I think about the kind of love and happiness which only studying the likes of Keats teaches you is indeed as valid as you felt it was at the time, I think of him telling me that. I think of that silly wee, magnificently enriching, invaluably sustaining moment and know it’s not just my wife and my football team who have poured through me a warmth and a joy that will last far longer than my physical being.

I had a mate so great he could make Aberdeen the only place to be.

I thought of it as Ryan Kent was put through on goal by that lovely ball from an Alfredo Morelos so recumbent he looked like he’d discovered the pleasures of The Grill at the end of the previous season. Like me, Alfie doesn’t like Aberdeen but knows how to enjoy himself there. It’s a small city, obsessed with hating Alfie and Rangers so, on a day when none of that meant much to me, it seemed strangely apt this game was the first competitive match Rangers had played in a stadium emptied by Covid.

A venue emptied in an effort to forestall death created an atmosphere which seemed to mourn someone I couldn’t save. Played in front of zero fans, the tepid pace was respectful of my friend’s passing and the final score-line, of just Kent’s subsequent calm finish to nil against ten home men, remained respectful of the city where he grew up.

Things had felt like this for a while. Being unable to visit Andrew because of Covid and thinking of him all the more as a result. Talking to him on the phone and hearing it in his voice. I even did a virtual pub crawl with him one Friday tea-time – me sending him pics of all our old haunts on the Byres, Dumbarton and Great Western Roads – and the Ashton Lane. But they were all closed. Covid. They looked literally haunted, the absence of life inside them painting what we’d lived through beyond those doors - from Brel to the Volcano, from Clatty Pats to the Queen Margaret Union – in more black than sepia.

Naff symbolism? Fuck, he’d been slagging me for that, for my need to see any kind of poetry anywhere I could get it, for as long as we’d known each other. And he one hundred percent backed me in it. I can’t remember what position he played in gridiron but Andrew knew my favourites and bought me a Hemingway first edition for my 40^th. 

And I couldn’t tell him now. I’d spent eleven years meaning to but now it was too late to tell him he’d bought me a first edition of the one major Hemingway I’d never read and the one I was saving to complete the set, once I’d got all the letters and plays and minor novels read. I couldn’t tell him about that coincidence – that poetic symbolism – of me refusing to read the hardback copy of that novel he’d bought me for my 40th lest I ruined its 70-year-old pages so I turned to the paperback copy I’d bought sometime in the late-90s and, half-way through, burying myself in it one night, I realised the paperback had around forty pages missing so I had to turn to Andrew’s first edition to save me. And I couldn’t tell him now because it was For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Symbolism. It’s just coincidence. Nothing more. And it can go fuck itself.

Yet I had just watched Aberdeen and Rangers temper their rivalry for my mate. It had to be for Andrew.
And as the locked-down weeks of mourning went on it was as though Rangers kept winning because my heart was fucking breaking. We weren’t even conceding goals. It was like they were doing everything they could to soothe me, to pick me up. But they couldn’t get me to his funeral.

His folks were from the west coast and Andrew was always more Glasgow than Aberdeen. But his dad took a job in the oil industry in the late 70s/early 80s and up they moved. A great player - a great sportsman – Andrew wouldn’t kick me at the fives where we first met, despite my more than deserving it in my crude attempts to curb his fleet-footed, cultured defending. He probably knew too well the damage he could do, being a trained physio. He worked for a ladies team when we were both students (yes, that was a good time) and briefly for Clydebank when Ian McCall was manager.

But he was a surfer at heart. Part of the reason I’d started Uni so late was I’d wanted to follow Rangers all round Scotland and found the work, straight from school, which allowed that. At the same time, before we knew even the people who would bring us together, Andrew went all round the UK catching waves, working summers in the bars of Devon & Cornwall.

This is where the opposites part of our attraction came in: I can’t swim and he was a trained lifeguard. Meeting up for a student pint after our part-time shifts, he’d reek of chlorine from the pool and me of fag smoke from the bookies. He’d cheer on Rangers with me from the sofa, was sure his dad had taken him to the Hibs game at Ibrox in 1977 which was also my first Rangers match but, while we never actually attended a Rangers game together together, Andrew did attend the Artmedia Bratislava Champions League 0-0 in a different part of Ibrox from me, with the father he occasionally mumbled had “just taken him along to see” Aberdeen returning to Pittodrie with the Cup-Winners’ Cup when he was a kid. We three drank in The Count House before and after.

And that father-and-son pair drove me up to Peterhead one day, from one of my early post-Uni visits to their adopted home town, so I could get Balmoor Stadium off the tiny list of Scottish league grounds I hadn’t attended.

But Andrew was an armchair Man U fan. Of course, he was. Because his first love in field sports was American football, playing for the Granite City Oilers back in the day. I want to say he wore shirt number 55 because that would be a coincidence that would make this a bit more bearable, but he was definitely some sort of lineman. A couple of times I knocked back the chance of going to Wembley with him and his Aberdeen mates to see an NFL match. Why? Because I always had some UEFA fixture I was saving my dough for, didn’t I. And, you know, there’d always be a next time.

When I think about that - when I think about me casually saying nah to those invites, and him and his dad, Jim - Jim, who died the fucking day before Andrew got his diagnosis – giving me the fear at Balmoor as they sportingly cheered and clapped both sides in a bitter cup derby with Cove Rangers, unaware of the simmering, inter-mixing tension all round them, it simultaneously shames me and breaks my heart.

Not because I feel sorry for either of them. Hey, they could be a pair of wankers when they wanted to – Jim would slag the shit out me for supporting Rangers when they lost and suddenly be a life-long fan when we were winning, and his son would back him all the way if I tried to point out the hypocrisy - but because life is often so hard on those who deserve it least, and just isn’t long enough to let you do all the good things with all the good people.

Rangers beat Aberdeen on the first day of the 2020-21 season and then lost in Leverkusen in a remnant of all that wasn’t finished from the previous season. Between times, as funeral arrangements became delayed and then impossible thanks to people like the eight Aberdeen players who decided to go for a pint of Covid the night Andrew died, we completed the sale of our house round the corner and something my wife and I had looked forward to celebrating hard for the last year was suddenly no more than dropping off some keys to an office followed by a Domino's on a Monday tea-time.

Domino's. Interflora. We sent a bouquet to Andrew’s funeral like we sent those pizzas to ourselves. We got to see him ravaged to the point of death but we didn’t get to share and testify on the day his remains said goodbye. The Birdie Song. His coffin went down to The Birdie Song. A naff laugh – from the man who taught me it’s the best thing you can have. We’re staying in Glasgow, he’s going in Aberdeen. The distance never felt more chasmic.

But the more Rangers won the less I drank, or ate. And as the weight dropped off and my exercising increased, the hypochondria metastasized. I had never previously, obviously, given a shit about my health. I’d been glassed in a pub, I’d been set upon by gangs in the street – I’d jogged half-marathons and played any kind of fitba that would have me. I’d drunk too much booze and always ate too much of the fatty stuff and I didn’t care. I once went to the doctors for a weird cold and was told I had tonsillitis so bad I shouldn’t be walking. I was more lazy than stoic but I never really gave a shit. And now my every actual shit had me worrying what I would see. Every ache and itch had me convinced I was a goner.

As Rangers cruised into and through their Europa League group in one of the greatest European campaigns in our history I found myself, after a couple months of my wife telling me it was all psychosomatic and getting physically checked out might help me process it, I found myself yanking down my trousers to have my balls felt by a nice, attractive blonde doctor who, despite this middle-aged man’s fantasy-laden scenario, must have thought I had a particularly shy whelk for a penis so scared was I by the prospect of the fatal tumour she was certain to find somewhere about my abdomen, or my groin, or my … my… or my one of those areas where a man who drank and ate like me but had suddenly realised, emotionally, that that kinda stuff could separate him from his wife and from life was bound to get fatal, incurable, terminal fucking cancer.

Talking of laughing about porn tropes (Doctor: "There's absolutely nothing there, Mr Anderson". Me & Andrew: "Yes, Doc, but what about tumors? BOOM! BOOM!"), yeah, Andrew and I had our laughs with the casual ladies. Edinburgh one premillennial Hogmanay – him getting his kilted cock out for Japanese tourists on The Mound and me in the finest cut M&S tin flute for everyone’s sake was, I feel, looking back, for both of us, the final top-up on that front. The atmosphere in the Grassmarket’s Beehive Inn, pre-bells, was akin to that in the changing room at the Kelvin Hall before we starred in a win over our fit-as-fiddles brainiac PhD pals in the intramural five-a-side league; the result just as glorious – the celebrations almost as long.

[They pettily challenged us to a rematch the following Friday night. We beat them again. They had the fitness - they'll all live to 90 - and they had the moves, and they certainly had the pre- and post-match mouth, but they just didn't know fitba like me and my mucker. They didn't have the real respect that gives you the real dig. They'd never really lived.]

But Andrew and I were drinkers for a reason. His dad could be a wanker as much as he could be great and mine could drink as much as he could be even greater. We’d been raised in a way that would make the emotional aspect of “the ladies” as vital to our chats about them during marathon two-man pool tournaments in the Hogshead, across from the Kelvingrove Art Gallery, as the pints.

We were, essentially, romantics. Not the self-styled tragedian slackers but the real romantics - wannabe Romanticists - living for love. He needed his Star Wars and Peter Gabriel as much as I couldn't go long without a bit of Three Colours: White or Björk. So he knew better than most why I married the Scottish Literature graduate I married.

And, as casual as she and me tried to make our wedding – a midweek registry office job with the “reception” dominated by Andrew running back and forth to theboozer with the telly across the road to keep us updated on Man U v Bayern atthe Nou Camp – three weeks earlier he threw us the engagement party we never wanted. He had Sky at his flat. There was a match being played we needed to see live. When we got there he’d made one of his huge lasagne, gifted us a card and presented us with a quaich which has sat and will continue to sit on every mantelpiece my wee wife and I have lived and ever will live with.

In what is just another one of those stupid coincidences – never symbolism; no way - Andrew, that day, also threw in the greatest Scottish title-sealing moment in my Rangers life. You see, our “engagement party” took place on the 2^nd of May 1999. Andrew literally threw in domestic bliss. 

The Saturday after our wedding, Rangers completed the treble.

And then, as the Old Jock sessions in Tennent’s on Byres Road were tempered by his post-grad return up the road, Andrew married the local lady of his dreams and they had a gorgeous wee daughter and our friendship moved into that lovely phase of distance making the heart grow fonder and when we met up it being like we’d never left off.

Andrew and I were mature students and immature men. We started our courses about six years later than we should have and so, while I may have snatched a cradle for my future wife, in terms of accommodation, we ended up in the company of masters and PhD students. It’s how we met, through mutual flat-mates as painfully and boringly uninterested in alcohol and action movies as we had both wrongly imagined Uni life should be for us.

The pub-and-home scene from Hot Fuzz, where Nick Frost shows Simon Pegg how to chill and enjoy himself? Lived it. Andrew and I are both of those characters – I’m certainly the fattest – but Andrew literally introduced me to the joys of Point Break and we showed each other we could actually do that life-transforming Uni thang without needing to deny ourselves the bar room buffoonery and all-round bampottery we grew up with.

At a time I was still scared by wanting to write about football, just as websites and blogs were becoming a thing, Andrew came along with me and another of our mates to see Hamilton Accies v Elgin City at Firhill. As I took notes, there in the Jackie Husband Stand, he began calling me “Scoop”. Stuff like that. Love like that. He just breezily, easily, unquestioningly believed in me and what little writing I have done – I acknowledged him in my first ever book and he was so chuffed his cousin, Gillian had to tell me because he couldn’t – led me into another friendship, with a man who met Andrew at my fortieth, the night Andrew and Hazel and their Jennifer gave me that first edition (precisely ten years after I knocked the properly crazy drinking on the head following a long night in the bars of Woodlands Road led to me throwing Andrew and my sister out our Dowanhill flat because I was so drunk I didn’t know who they were*).

That friendship, last Saturday, saw me sat in a lovely garden listening to lovely music with lovely people with whom I’d just enjoyed watching Rangers complete turning their last three games of the season into the greatest statement result of 2020-21; An 11-1 aggregate win and an unbeaten league campaign and a one hundred percent home record and a British defensive record and the season which began with a slim win in Aberdeen to make me feel better about Andrew ending with a huge home win over Aberdeen to confirm this season as, for me, being all about Andrew.

That we didn’t lose a single league game, in this of all seasons, is just a coincidence. Nothing more. Just a random conflation of unconnected events.

I mean I don’t believe in him being “up there” or “looking after me”. Nah. It’s just that you can see symbolism in anything if you want to. Isn't it?

My wife helped me realise it’s the not getting to his funeral – and lockdown – which combined with how suddenly Andrew went to throw me into a much-delayed mid-life crisis (the pub, Uni - our funerals - I was always arriving late). Rather than taking a sudden interest in soft-top sports cars, I dabbled with healthy living. It almost killed me. I’m piling the weight back on, to morbidly obese levels again - with Rangers helping out by giving so many causes for celebration. But my dear departed mucker will always be the one face I miss at any party. He was the party.

Whatever Rangers achieve under Steven Gerrard they’ll struggle to match a moment in my life, upstairs in the old postgrad club in University Gardens, where Andrew and I were usually vouched for by pals and flatmates of our age who’d gone straight to uni from school like you’re supposed to.

This time, however, everyone else was down in the bar as Andrew and I hogged the pool table upstairs and nicked bites from a buffet none of the fitness- and focus-addled PhDs were daring to even acknowledge. Pint glasses draining of Black Island, we knew a return to the bar might blow the fact us undergrads had this overqualified scene all to ourselves:

Just at that moment, the barman walked into the room: “Hey. You two!”

Fuck. Rumbled. Probably gonnae get John and Photis barred for signing us in too, maybe even deported back to Galway and Greece, sans doctorates…

“Anything you don’t eat gets binned so you better get busy on that buffet. Now, can I get you more drinks from downstairs…”

That’s the heaven. That’s the heaven where we’ll meet again, mate. My round - your break.

 *Next day, Andrew was even more forgiving than usual and, knowing his penchant for heads as red as my sister’s, I have an idea his nearby flat and her sudden need for new overnight Glasgow accommodation had something to do with it. I'm not asking her though and I'm happy for him to take that one to the grave.

Changed, Changed Utterly

Wherever Blue Is Worn

Soon it will all be different. In just over 13 hours’ time everything changes. Global pandemic or not, Rangers fans, more desperate to be in our stadium tomorrow than perhaps ever before in our football-loving lives, are finding ways to be with other Rangers fans to watch, via a screen, the moment that completes the longest journey.

Right now, as a restless Friday fades into the near-mythical Saturday 15^th May 2021, we’re remembering what it was like the last time we were in our Ibrox blue bucket seats and, more exactly, the communal emotional life we’ve led there as season ticket holders for the last decade.

But, like it or not, be assured that when we do finally get back inside The Dear Blue Place, everything will be different.

I’m not talking about Covid protocols, the relaid pitch, or the size of the gut on the season ticket holder who’s been sat beside you since before Pedro Caixinha (lockdown’s boring, okay – I needed chocolate). I’m talking about the atmosphere, the feel – the whole vibe around the Rangers home match day.

Like “the Quickening” in Highlander ("There can be only one!"... Champion of Scotland), the exorcism in, well, The Exorcist, or the scouring agency of one of those floor cleaners in a lifetime of TV ads, the lifting of the top tier title trophy by a Rangers captain – the mere sight of that hoisting for the fans and, for the man in the armband and his team-mates, the cold, solid, indisputable feel of those red, white & blue-garlanded silver-plate handles supporting that glittering weight – has an utterly transformative effect.

 Club and support will, shortly after full-time tomorrow, be fully regenerated, all evil spirits expelled and the whole Rangers experience – always beautifully colourful and proud - will be sparkling, gleaming and all shiny shine-shine shiny once again.

We were in Ibrox when the groundwork was being laid for this moment, when Gerrard had us finally winning Old Firm games and putting five past Aberdeen again. Then the Covid came and we were told to stay home. But Gerrard's rigorous maintenance work continued apace in our absence. We missed the season of it all bearing fruit - silver fruit? - for the first time. When we as a support eventually return to Ibrox, the moment of glory we've lusted after for nine years will be something that happened in the past.

The place has changed without us there. But what our players are doing on that pitch has turned Glasgow - Scotland - into one big Ibrox.

A gauntlet of fire has just exploded into the night down on the Broomielaw, about three miles from the living room and spare room where I’ve watched every Rangers game this season, and a quick walk from Ibrox, lighting up the banks of the Clyde for Steven Gerrard’s Rangers as if Elizabeth Tudor is sailing up the Thames to Greenwich Palace. This is just the beginning of this weekend’s celebrations – and like nothing we’ve ever seen before.

Every title triumph has a moment like this; A particularly explosive roar, a memorable burst into song – a new song and an idiosyncratic feeling of triumph. It tells us another transformation is upon us. Another layer has been added to the legend, yet more distance put between Rangers and mediocrity.

 

We played our last league match of last season on 8^th March 2020. A particularly uninspiring 1-0 win in Dingwall. Within 364 days we would not only be champions of Scotland but would do so without losing another league match. In fact, between Ryan Kent’s winner at Ross County last March and Celtic’s fatal inability to score at Tannadice this March, Rangers lost only last season’s Europa League last 16 tie with Bundesliga mainstays Bayer Leverkusen and, our only domestic defeat, a League Cup quarter-final in Paisley.

Now, on the eve of our final match of 2020-21, we’re one win short of completing a one hundred percent home league campaign, a clean sheet short of completing the best defensive season in British top flight history and a draw short of 100 points and an unbeaten league season.

What a thing it is when you have nothing to say about their football because your team is doing all the talking for you.

It’s physically painful to pick our Player of the Year. We all think we know what game finally convinced us “this is the season” but, really, there were just so many. You think it’s easy to choose a Goal of the Season – and Roofe may yet win the Puskas Award - but you’re forgetting about Defoe against Livi, the two versus Galatasaray and the sweeping move that put us 2-1 up against Benfica. I’m forgetting about even more.

… in Portugal. In the Stadium of Light. In Estadio da fucking Luz. We led Benfica. We led them in the venue of the Euro 2004 final and last season’s Champions League final. In the Lisbon parish of Benfica we led the hosts, the 1961 and 62 champions of Europe, by two clear goals. We led Benfica 3-1 when Ryan Kent hit the post from a delicious Ryan Jack ball. 

What happened thereafter was painful but only for the lack of extra glory it would have garnered. Losing 5-1 at home to Celtic I can’t ever experience again. Not beating Benfica 4-1 away is the most delicious disappointment I’ve ever known. Steven Gerrard’s Rangers have turned real footballing pain, the properly unbearable stuff, into something we inflict on others.

The last time we saw those friends we only see at Ibrox, we watched a 3-1 loss to Bayer Leverkusen and, frankly, were much happier about that than the previous home game – a 1-0 loss to Hamilton Academical, who will be relegated from the SPFL Premiership this Sunday.

And that last home league defeat was still, in itself, a massive improvement on the majority of what had gone on up til then, what had gone on up til Accies’ Ibrox winner, from all the way back to the summer of 2012.

It takes more than just a run of wins to eradicate our years in the lower leagues and our humiliations on returning to the top flight in 2016. It takes the winning of the SPFL Premiership title.

Done.

And it takes more than just becoming champions again to eradicate the insecurities and anxiety which underpinned every on-field mistake of the last decade, thus coming to characterise the Ibrox atmosphere and the dynamic among bluenoses:  

It takes, if not a League Cup, then a campaign undefeated against Celtic in five derbies – winning four – and, if not a Scottish Cup, winning home and away against Belgian giants, twice – and winning 4-0 at an Eredivisie club.

Done.

To have us all truly happy again takes, in short, a season like the one that ends tomorrow. And, to hammer it home – to make it real, especially if that season has been experienced only by internet and television – it takes the sight we’ve fantasised about since 2012: That most vindicating of vicarious pleasures - watching our captain lifting the league trophy.

It shall be done.

Those European group stages which seemed a million years away just, well, three years ago? Reaching them is now routine and winning them outright, unbeaten, is our new reality. We’ve turned beating Celtic into an act of contemptuous boredom. We’ve turned  clean sheets into the norm; spectacular goals, saves and midfield artistry are now guaranteed, and defeat… well, defeat is something that only happens to us in the 92^nd minute, or when we’re down to nine men – or on penalties after a 122^nd minute equaliser.

We’ve turned defeat into something that, when it happens to Rangers, Scotland stands still and gasps.

But, more than all this, we – and by “we” I mean Steven Gerrard, his backroom team, our board and you and me, mate – have turned the lowest boardroom and on-field moment in our history, and the nine subsequent years of tortuous rehabilitation, into one of the greatest seasons in the century and a half of Rangers.

Stopping Celtic’s “ten” was a distraction, a laugh. Becoming the first side to stop them winning the Cup since we last stopped them – just as we have the Scottish top flight title – was a gorgeous bonus. Doing both in such glorious style was a message we needed to send, to augment our progress under Gerrard so concretely it can continue when he eventually leaves. But sealing our fifty fifth title was absolutely everything.

While the on-field success future-proofs the club, tomorrow’s post-match formalities – the sight of Rangers lifting a proper fucking trophy - acclimatises us fans to the new reality. Winning this league two months and one week ago has let us come up for air slowly.

Tomorrow we remove the diving helmet and, when we’re back in the Edmiston Drive Palace, we’ll all be a bit giddy from the newness of it all for the cubs and the back-on-dry-land feeling for us older bears – the dry land of a Rangers team which wins big - but there shall be no danger of the bends.

Covid has wreaked a year of death, trauma, isolation and loneliness. But don’t you dare feel guilty about the joy, the celebration and the sense of togetherness coursing through you tomorrow.

As so many turned to alcohol, sloth and the low-level depression commensurate with life under a global pandemic, healthy yet visceral enjoyment was difficult to find during the lockdowns and protocols saving our lives.

But bluenoses have a community spirit undiluted by the phones, TVs and computer screens through which we’ve had to access it. It’s embodied by the reassuring ever-presence of Connor Goldson, the urbane genius of Steven Davis, the adorably sour-faced miracle-working of Allan McGregor and the explosive, relentless determination of Ryan Kent.

Our community is united by and around the big kid brilliance of the eternally loveable, often unplayable Alfredo Morelos and our desperation to give Glen Kamara a group hug as warm as his metronomic presence in our midfield makes my tummy feel.

No-one can see your smile through a mask. But when your team scores a goal, wherever you are you know your fellow fans are cheering. When James Tavernier, my Player of the Year, our captain, our top-scoring-and-assisting right-back, the man who sets the pace in a momentum-driven team, lifts that trophy tomorrow, I will know how you’re feeling and you will know how I’m feeling.

Drunk, I suspect, will be at least part of it.

And the only thing spoiled when we all meet up at Ibrox again will be us, by the football we’ve been watching since August 1, 2020; in a win over Aberdeen.