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.