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.

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.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Champions.

Don't worry - this season still only ends when Rangers say it does.

It was only the second weekend of being allowed to travel outside Glasgow: We could finally go anywhere in the country and, what was more, the sun was shining all over that same country on this suddenly liberated Saturday afternoon. Added bonus – Rangers weren’t playing til Sunday; there was nothing confining me to TV or laptop. I couldn’t get myself kissed by a sailor in Times Square but I could be on the Gourock promenade overlooking the Firth of Clyde in 40 minutes, the Loch of Lomond overlooking the heather-strewn bens and stags and stuff in similarly short order.

Having been cooped up in the same city for months on end, where would this tank of diesel take us?

Ibrox, please. I want to see the new flags on the lampposts of Edmiston Drive.

Ten minutes later, although I’m arriving via the Clyde Tunnel and Shieldhall Road, I’m still wishing I’d downloaded Owen Westlake’s “So Much love”, the tune playing in Steven Gerrard’s car when he arrived at work from the Dumbreck Road side on the morning of Saturday 6^th March, as I traverse the same roundabout and take the same slow left off the dual carriageway, crawling up the white-lined incline towards the big blue gates bearing the lighter blue bluebells.

Instead of being guided in through those gates by beckoning stewards, police and football history, however, I’m pulling to a halt in the three-quarters empty Broomloan Road Stand car park, in front of the off-duty, squat, white cranes of heat lamps for the pitch on which no Scottish visitor has won for over a year. Despite the fact there’s no frenzy of smoke bombs, no crush-barriered throng roaring pre-title hysteria at our wee car, I’m happy to notice a sprinkling of others have had the same idea as me and mine today: We can’t get in but, almost more than ever, Ibrox will make a gorgeous day out.

 

Bluenoses mill about in the lunchtime sun, not so much contentedly as serenely. Very little is different, yet everything has changed. We might not have received the trophy yet but our stadium – the place we worship and its approaches - wears new ribbons, fresh bunting. Everyone’s taking photos of the row of “55” banners down the red blaes-ish central reservation in front of that gorgeous pile of Welsh red brick. Selfies are had with the “champions” poster on the billboard Stevie G saw draped with a flag of thanks before kick-off against St Mirren that amazing day.

Edmiston House is gone – a huge space behind the Copland Road stand - but the palace on Edmiston Drive is more regal than ever, a huge testament to everyone working inside it, boardroom and pitch, for the last few years.

As we nip down to the billboards on the roundabout, a woman pushes a pram past us, talking on her phone. She’s wearing the home top, the top of the champions of Scotland. Her kid is being pushed along the Street of Winners by a mum in the jersey of winners. I even take photos the roundabout – the mound of grass in the middle of that circular concrete casing intersecting Broomloan Road with Edmiston Drive; The mound across which that boy in the tracky runs to get a picture of Steven Gerrard in the first sign of the avalanche of adulation about to engulf our gaffer that day in March.

Twenty years I’ve been approaching Ibrox on foot from that direction, crossing Broomloan Road at that roundabout. I’m always thinking about what’s about to transpire inside the stadium. Now I see that roundabout as an event in itself. It’s part of why I’m here today, foregoing the open Clyde Coast for the enclosed blue (blue, blue) sea of Ibrox.

What hair I have left is rapidly greying but once a ginge, always a ginge so I don the baseball cap, like a superannuated, hyper-inflated Beastie Boy. I bought it in Chicago. I bought it in the club shop annexed to what Chicagoans call “the Mistake by the Lake” in possibly the warmest day I have ever experienced, at possibly the fattest I have ever been, after the longest Rangers season I have ever known. In July 2008 I bought a Chicago Bears baseball Cap at an empty, closed Soldier Field Stadium. It remains the only shop I’ve ever been in which sold hats big enough for my colossal head. For thirteen years, whenever it stops raining, I’ve worn a white baseball cap bearing a massive Orange C. Poetry.

A young lad sits at the base of the bluebell gates, using his stadium like the world’s staunchest deckchair. Resplendent in Castore - shades on, phone in hand – he’s waiting for someone. And that someone is probably among the handful of people I see walking towards the Portakabins of the ticket office. Are we selling briefs for a game I don’t know about?

Nah. Under the overhang of the Broomloan – where the offices and stairwells above create a colonnade at ground level, is the Barcelona 72 panel. Even before I’m in the shade offered in this space I have the hat off. People aren’t just here to admire a new decoration to the stadium exterior. Heads aren’t bowed simply because the tiles engraved with white-lettered names of Rangers fans lie flat on the ground. And that beautiful central title panel, showing the clubs, score and scorers from the 1972 European Cup-Winners’ Cup final at Barcelona’s Nou Camp, does indeed look more like a flat marker headstone than a flagstone.

Yes, some of the people here are looking down on their own names. My own brick is just a few steps north, on the Willie Waddell panel – a 40^th birthday present from my Killie-supporting auntie. But the atmosphere is reverential. Floral tributes rest at various spots. We instinctively keep our voices down.

Football clubs mean the world to people, irrespective of how many trophies they win. This is our football club, and it was built on winning trophies. So many of the people who follow followed down the decades have had short, hard lives – their allegiance to Rangers was often the only success they knew and the only regular pride they felt. At times this has certainly been true for myself. 

So, for the likes of us, what happened some 32 hours later, up the other end of our beautiful stadium – inside the ground, in front of the Copland Road stand – was intensely painful. Not just because of how it happened but when it happened - that we spent every last minute of a sun-drenched weekend waiting for it to happen and then it waited until darkness had descended before it did happen. It took extra time and penalties to do something we hadn’t seen since the dark night Hamilton won at Ibrox last season. It was so dark, as our manager said, a record-breaking defence couldn’t see the most visible goalkeeper in Scottish football waltzing up to the edge of our six yard box for a corner, a la Peter Schmeichel in a different Nou Camp European final.

It was so sickening because it further emboldened the slander coming our way from the east of the city with greater frequency as we’ve steadily taken this season away from them. Consistency, apparently, now equals dour. Scoring goals, we’re informed, isn’t as meaningful as possession. Penalties you think you should have had are all theoretically converted despite the ones you actually are awarded all being saved by Allan McGregor. And winning the Scottish Premiership title on the pitch, by beating everyone else in the division, is somehow invalidated by the fact no fans were allowed into the stadiums: Real Premiership titles are the ones where you’re handed the trophy in an empty training complex, with not even an opposition team around, having failed to fulfil over 20 percent of your fixtures.

St Johnstone’s 122^nd minute equaliser was so painful because, while we’ve never previously conceded a goal exactly like it, we seem to have been heading towards it – in style, timing and gut-punching effect - for almost a decade. From Queen of the South equalising in a Challenge Cup quarter-final with the last kick of the ball then winning on penalties, through Stranraer taking our 100 percent League One record in the 94^th minute on Boxing Day, to Alloa Athletic beating us in normal time in a Challenge Cup semi-final we led 2-0 with 20 minutes remaining.

All those moments happened in the dark.

In the sunshine (on Leith), we’ve seen Raith Rovers waiting til extra time in a 4pm kick-off - on Easter fu**ing Sunday at Easter fu**ing Road - before beating us in the Challenge Cup final and, ultimately, Hibs beat us in the 92^nd minute of a Scottish Cup final we led with ten to go… after we’d failed to seal the Championship at Stark’s Park because of a 94^th minute equaliser… and ended the league season with St Mirren pegging us back in the 92^nd minute: All in the sun.

Steven Gerrard’s first league game in charge of Rangers saw Aberdeen equalise against our ten men in the 93^rd minute at a sunny Pittodrie. His third league game saw Motherwell equalise in the 94^th minute at a dank Fir Park. The late, late goal seems to have happened at Rugby Park, whatever the weather or time of day,  every time we’ve played there since returning to the top flight - but they’re all winners rather than equalisers, and only one was a Rangers winner.

And we’ve seen it this season too: At Paisley in the League Cup we equalised in injury time yet managed to lose the game before extra time. Hamilton away in the League, Benfica in Lisbon in the Europa League and St Johnstone in our last two games – all games where we conceded the equaliser with the very last kick of the ball.

It’s something that happens all the time. Except for the 15 times this season we’ve won games by a single goal.  When we seem to be returning to old ways, the pain of the past almost threatens to cloud the brilliant light this team has brought to this campaign.

All in all, it amounts to a season where Rangers have been phenomenal but tension has been virtually ever-present. The play has been coruscating, the goals have been dazzling and the consistency has been blindingly spectacular. But the score-lines, in the league, have mostly been routine. With three left to play, we’ve won six Premiership games by more than three goals. Now, that is, in itself, very impressive but perhaps doesn’t amply connote a team who sealed the title in the first week of March without losing a match. We’ve also drawn six games and none of our four goals-or-more victories came against our nearest “challengers”, Celtic and Hibs.

This is not a gripe. This is not a complaint. I would take these stats every single season for the rest of my life. But when, last Sunday, we conceded the most deflating Scottish Cup goal since the 2016 final and arguably the worst defended meaningful goal ever conceded by a Rangers team - during what could yet be officially the best defensive season in the history of British top flight football – it brought home what this Rangers season truly lacks: A gala day; A festival – a fitting on-field celebration of Rangers 55^th league title.

Yes, we want more trophies. No, Steven Gerrard has not won any cups. Yes, it’s been far too long since Rangers won any major cups.  But Ibrox is already bathed in an aura of celebration and relief. The old place oozes joy and catharsis right now. Fans might not be allowed inside but we’re built into the bloody bricks and we know we’re champions.

That league title is the most important in our history and almost deserves to have the whole trophy cabinet to itself for a season, so completely does it outshine everything else in Scotland. We want the Scottish Cup – perhaps we needed it. But what we really needed it for at this juncture was as both the final say on this season we’ve dominated and a way of underscoring that dominance ahead of next season.

Yet a double of sorts, perhaps a treble, is still on.

Believe me, finishing the 2020-21 Premiership unbeaten might not be physical silverware, but it’s another trophy – of far greater and longer-lasting repute – to sit alongside the very angular former SPL trophy. And if we want to cut loose with a win to rubber stamp our superiority and properly celebrate Title 55, Celtic at Ibrox on Sunday is the last but best chance we have.

We’ve beaten Celtic, or had the last word against them, every which way in our last five meetings. In October we stopped them having a shot on goal. In January we didn’t have a shot on theirs – instead letting them score our winner for us. In March we let them dominate for a bit then equalised straight away and almost nicked all three points. In April they got one of those penalties they’re always claiming would make all the difference and, just like in December 2019, in front of one of those packed Parkhead crowds they always claim would make all the difference, Greegs saved it and we won.

But Steven Gerrard’s Rangers have never scored more than two against them and we haven’t yet inflicted that all-out, exhibition annihilation all the great Rangers sides enjoy in one Old Firm derby or another. Half this Celtic team are leaving or trying to. The other half have been hiding all season. That could mean they can’t wait to crumble on Sunday or are just cowardly enough to come out all guns blazing because they think the pressure is all on us, knowing we can lose our unbeaten record – or our 100 percent home league record, our British defensive record or our chance of 100 points.

We’ve been on the other side of this equation. Twice under Graeme Murty we went to Parkhead and drew when it looked more likely we’d be pummelled. In 2016-17 we took their 100 percent home league record. But, even as our tired squad begins to creak under injuries and suspensions and the general battle fatigue of a relentless campaign, the chance for that stylish sealing of this season’s legacy is there. And we’ve had a full week off; a week to recover physically and recalibrate mentally.

So let’s do this on Sunday and all those stupid or mendacious enough to claim the St Johnstone exit somehow gives the lie to our winning of 55 will soon realise the St Johnstone defeat has itself been cancelled out as the men who won 55 in record, historic style have the final say. Avoid defeat in the two remaining games - if we win on Sunday we can talk about our horrific record in last games of recent seasons - and history is ours.

What, after all, is silverware but a sealing of your place in football history. Fans don’t really do it with their names on bricks and tiles – they do it by the lifetime of love they send to that club. And players don’t do it through the clutching of trophy handles but through memorable feats on the park. Let’s seal this most memorable league season of all with the brilliant, shining performance our players and fans deserve - against the opponent who most deserves to receive it – on our last sunny Sunday kick-off of amazing old 2020-21.