Return Ticket

 

Walking across a rubble-strewn wasteland, a no man’s land – a dead area short-cut between the buzz and buildings around the island of Bridge Street subway station carpark and the shiny brick, smooth pointing and warm welcome of the new-build flats and townhouses of the Gorbals – and my pace is hindered, as I climb a scrambler-friendly tufted incline of mud, by a buzz on the phone in my jeans pocket.

Robert’s just seen the photo. I’m five minutes from his house but he’s texting now to know if I’ve seen it too.

A season of horrible government statistics off the field ameliorated, for the chosen few, by gorgeous stats on it. And now, on the day of the final game – on the day when champions will be crowned but records will be lost or set – fate has reminded four of us who are meeting up again today for the first time in too long, of a specific time, date and moment in which we were all drinking to avoid an inevitable calamity.

Well, when I say “fate” reminded us …

“Check your Facebook memories for today.”

I already had. First thing that very morning Facebook had notified me of what I both looked like and was up to, nine years ago. I was going to wait til I got to Robert’s before I mentioned it to him and the girls. I have a penchant for coincidences which others don’t always share – which I can take too far - so I was glad it had gripped him too.

We can’t have posted the photo quickly enough nine years previously. Given my own levels of technophobia, there’s a chance I was still using those huge late-1980s yuppie brick phones on the day of Rangers last home game of 2011-12. Whatever the reason, it wasn’t posted instantly on social media: The photo of us four, plus a German, taken group selfie-style by Robert in the branch of the Louden Tavern formerly known as the Stadium Bar, during our traditional Last Home Game of the Season session, after the 0-0 with Motherwell on 5 May 2012, hadn’t gone up onto the platform until the 15^th.

Now, today, with the last digits of that year reversed, Rangers last home game of this very different season would see us all meet up again.  Facebook Memories indeed. May 15, 2009 we wondered if we’d ever see our club again. May 15, 2021 we were just beginning to see our friends, our families –anyone – again.

My only “partying” of the last fourteen months had been sitting in our front garden on a little deck chair I tucked into the corner between the hedge and the front of our house, tunes on the headphones, sinking a can or two of something like Kronenbourg 1664, looking at the space and light – and the space, so much space – amid the clouds above.

Once or twice I’d had a whisky in the house but lockdown took a hold of both me and the bottle, at an angle which made pouring – into glass and down throat – frighteningly easy. What had sustained me in a healthy fashion was Rangers. That is, Rangers just never, ever, losing. I don’t know how non-Rangers fans coped but to watch my team embark, in this hardest of times, on its greatest league campaign since Queen Victoria was on the throne, created a sanity-saving equilibrium. It was as if the hellish unreality of everyday life was being balanced out by the heavenly unreality of football life.

That the stadiums were empty. as I watched us live on laptop or telly, became strangely, perfectly apt. It provided an aesthetic and a soundtrack that somehow joined it all up to make its own sense. Two clanging outliers – attendances and Rangers form - balanced each other by both acknowledging and averring that life wasn’t normal but that football was indeed operating in that abnormality.

Football’s always been its own self-contained world. That it was now more so felt right for Rangers too. We’d gone under in financial chaos and now, amid global chaos, my club fully emerged again, flowering more beautifully than ever.

Today we’d celebrate this season and that achievement and the beginning of the end of the abnormality.

I hit the big Co-op. San Miguels or Kronenbourg for the main supply but also a wee bottle of whisky for the hosts and, as I traipsed round the low-lit aisles, inspiration hit as coincidentally as Facebook Memories earlier that morning:  A four-pack of a McEwan’s lager I had never seen before.

The association of the brand with the Rangers shirt may have aided the choice, but the 7.3% proof was as much a reason not to buy it. But what truly got it in the basket was the name of this particular product – McEwan’s Champion. That it came in packs of four, with the German long returned to Germany, made it all the more perfect. We were not train station alcoholics in need of super lager – but we were champions, and that needed celebrating.

Robert had the strip on as he came to the door. He had the laptop rigged up and the tables and chairs in his drive and the studio wired for sound, with the windows open to let it all flood out.

We’d all had our first jab. I had mine the previous Friday and felt flattened for half a day. Slept through most of it. It was worth it. The best medicine lets you know it’s working on you by giving you a taste of what you’re being saved from, and this was medicine a fat man in his fifties needed in the spring of 2021.

We’d scored before the girls even arrived. Of course we did. This is what Rangers did this season. It was all magic. It was 2-0 just after the half hour – as if Rangers were letting the girls arrive and giving us enough time to say hello like people who hadn’t seen each other all season before they distracted us again with more goals.  They saved the next two for the second half so Robert’s partner could arrive back in their place at half-time and we could rant to her like over-excited school kids trying to explain to a very patient adult why exactly we were all so over-excited and at no point did she ever say, “Look, I’ve been hearing this all year from him. Gie’s peace”. That takes class.

And so, as the cans got sunk and the dull sky lifted into nascent sunshine and the girls’ wee dog hid from Robert’s big cat, we went into the second half knowing the 100 points mark would be breached and all that remained was for us to keep a clean sheet for that all-time British defensive record.

Aberdeen proceeded to miss goals as open as those Livingston had fluffed on Wednesday when, again, just one goal conceded would have taken it away. But it wasn’t going away. The magic wasn’t going to be lost now. This season would forever be preserved in a particularly decadent frame of sumptuous invincibility.

Steven Gerrard was the hope – he was the vaccine. Our first jab was Europe, our second was turning the Old Firm games in our favour and the third was making us champions of Scotland again. Unpleasant side-effects? Oh aye, we’d had plenty of them over the course of our treatment, from missing a penalty to lose the 2019 League Cup final to an offside goal and ten Celtic players, to losing at home to Hamilton Accies in the last league game any of us had attended.

And, even now, as League Title No. 55 confirmed Rangers immunity was completely rebuilt, we still had visiting goalkeepers forcing a penalty shoot-out in the 122^nd minute of a Scottish Cup exit to ensure we were in absolutely zero doubt this medicine was properly kicking in.

But when Professor Chris Whitty confirms Covid is over, that life can return to normal, it will only be the day you know you’re free again; it won’t be the day you feel it. You can celebrate the end of the contagion. And we will. But there will be another day when you properly realise, a day in the future when the return of the old life, made all the sweeter for how close we came to losing it, fully kicks in.

My emotions were all over the place from the moment I’d got on the underground. Half the Rangers support was off to George Square to watch the game on devices and celebrate in the city centre. One guy in plaster cast, Castore and crutches refused to take my seat but gladly explained to the train how he’d done his ankle in falling off a bench in March, at the title-winning celebrations. He was headed back for more.

Me? I wept like a wean when seeing the scenes filmed from Steven Gerarrd’s car as he approached Ibrox the day before Celtic officially handed us the league title. But I’d stayed away from crowds. I’d celebrated with my wife. I’d drunk a lot on my own that Sunday evening into that Monday morning in early March. So now, in mid-May, stepping onto a tube carriage full of blue jerseys and celebratory lyrics, was my first properly normal match day experience since Bayer Leverkusen turned up in Govan 14 months earlier.

A normal Ibrox match day experience which ended without me having been anywhere near our stadium.

But, with friends and beer, I watched Rangers doing that thing which brought it all home.  Roofe made it 3-0 on the hour, Jermain Defoe made it 4-0 with four minutes left and there was no way Aberdeen were ever going to score because this game was flying past in a rocket ship that had been building up speed since that last home game of 2011-12. Rangers were back, yeah. Rangers were champions again, definitely. But now a new record had been set. Even that we were out the Scottish Cup ensured there were no games left to threaten the magical end to this magical season.

Unbeaten. An entire league season unbeaten. Fewer goals conceded than any other club in the history of top flight British league football.  And all these stats became the flourish which took it beyond mere stats. We’d known since March things would never again be as bad as they had been over the last nine years. At full-time on Saturday 15 May we knew things could be even better than they’d been before that.

We’d had the jag, now the doctor had given us our lollipop. All better.

All across the world, any let up in the pandemic had allowed people to see loved ones again. The grandparents were reunited with the grandkids and the rush of joy was too much, the surfeit of emotion overwhelming. I knew we were champions. I’d drunk to it and talked and podded and Tweeted and cheered and blogged about it for two months. We’d been champions for two whole months already. We had the glory - anything else was magic.

And then the question we’d been laughingly putting to each other all day “Who’s presenting the trophy (Coz we know it won’t be the SPFL)?” was answered in a way I’ll never forget.

We knew our captain was lifting it. James Tavernier was waiting by the hastily constructed podium on the pitch. But when the cameras cut to the mouth of the Ibrox tunnel and the Premiership trophy was being carried out by John Greig… by the bricks and mortar of Ibrox made flesh, by the pounding heartbeat of Rangers entire history – by the man whose dedication my aunt and uncle would cite when trying to get me to go to bed when they babysat me in the 1970s (“John Greig is in his bed by 9 O’Clock every Friday!”) … yeah, that was too much for me. That was magic multiplied. That was something beyond stardust. That was a lineage going straight back to William Wilton, our first ever manager – the man who employed Struth; Struth who signed Waddell; Waddell who managed Greig; Greig who was now about to honour Tavernier:

 If John Greig’s in the stadium, every bluenose is in the stadium. The Greatest Ever Ranger was carrying Rangers’ greatest ever league title. Friends were reunited. All had been made whole again.

For the full-time whistle and for the lifting of the trophy, Robert had poured us all a whisky. We needed it. 

The coverage from Ibrox ended. The real socialising began. Robert showed me the Tinie Tempah video for “Glorious 55^th”. I’d had no idea about this but it just seemed to fit in perfectly. We sat in the sun that was never too sunny and the grey that never turned to rain and other nice friends of Robert arrived by bike and by foot and neighbours stopped for a beer and a chat and crisps were opened and I got one white cat confused with another and the beer was paced easy and the whisky was kept occasional and the tunes… oh, the tunes: The host knows more about music than most – hell, he is music – and the set list for the day, lilting out his studio window, had been curated to perfection. From Marley’s “Three Little Birds” to a beautiful piano solo I didn’t recognise – it was Robert. It was a recording of himself playing. Amazing. A tune by who, I asked. By Robert. He’d written the thing too – everything and everyone just floated in a balm of harmonic perfection, wondrous relief and joy absorbed through pores into souls.

We toasted with the 7.3% beer of Champions. We asked a lovely St Mirren fan to stand in for the long-gone German and we retook the photo from the last home game of 2012. Facebook Memories aligned and balanced with Facebook Now.

I only left because I knew I would stay all night and because I wanted to see my wife before I wasn’t worth seeing.

I didn’t take the wasteland short cut. I can’t even remember the Subway ride. But I bet the SPFL Championship trophy didn’t feel as beautiful in the arms of James Tavernier as the hamburger supper with gravy and two pickled onions I collected betwixt Subway and home felt in my hands, on my lips, in my gut.

A long, uphill walk past kerbside diners only happy to be socialising again; the sun setting behind the roof of the houses opposite ours. I quickly grabbed the wee deckchair and sat it on its far too usual garden spot and took the last few Kronenbourgs from the fridge, sank them in the fresh air as the street went dark. The tunes were all about Rangers, even when they weren’t.

I know she’ll have asked me “How was the game?” I hope I said “Champion.”

She definitely asked me how my day was. I hope I said it was Simply The Best.

Because it was.