Won't somebody please think of the children... and stop Rangers looking so lovely.
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.
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 19th 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment