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.

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.