Glen Kamara

He was crying. A grown man crying tears of devastation. But he confronted it – confronted everyone – and, everywhere he looked, no-one would meet his stare. The crying man was the brave man, swimming against a sea of cowards.

I was 14 so you’ll not be surprised I can’t recall the exact circumstances, where the terracing tickets came from. But I know we were all originally meant to be in the comparative calm and safety of the main stand for Scotland v England on 26 May 1984.

It wasn’t the first time I’d been on the old Hampden West Terrace - the “Rangers End” – and I can’t remember if it was section J or H behind that goal, but it was definitely the first time I’d been without an adult.

Somewhere between catching the train from Ardrossan South Beach to Glasgow Central, tartan scarf chaffing the neck, and being smuggled into what later became the Solid Rock Café on Hope Street, Coca Cola at the window table, three terracing tickets suddenly became an option for my dad and his mate Michael.

Michael’s son, Jim, and Jim’s best friend, Craig, both 15, instantly joined me in pleading our cases. I can’t remember all the conditions but the main ones were “don’t die and don’t tell your mothers”.

Maybe the dads just wanted peace but, as we hadn’t in any way curtailed their drinking, it’s more likely they thought it was a right of passage they couldn’t deny us. Or an education in the ways of the world we badly needed.

Well, it was certainly educational.

Oh, we loved it. I’d be lying if I said otherwise. Falling about the place in a crowd of well over 70,000; Cascading down a dozen steps and back when Mark McGhee headed past Peter Shilton right in front of us:

In the world of desire that was my early teenage years, seeing that ball go inside the square posts and yurt-sized nets of Mount Florida was rare fulfillment.

Being on that terrace was what I regarded, as only a kid can, as the full adult experience. And looking back I’m so happy I did old Hampden, old style, in the oldest international fixture on the planet. Played at 3pm on a Saturday too.

But I can’t be truly proud. And not just because watching a football match isn’t really, in the scheme of things, an achievement.

It was a beautiful sunny day. Although, famously, sections J and H comprised the only roofed terracing at Hampden, I remember it being warm even up the back, probably from the compacted bodies singing and jumping in the very way that made Jim, Craig and I so desperate to be in this fabled part of this fabled ground.

And there was a young black man a few rows (i.e., people) in front of us. He was older than us but probably early 20s at most. And at first I thought he was sweating. And he might have been. But he was also crying – and crying with a horrified disappointment the like of which I had never seen before, had never known, but instantly understood.

He was wearing the 1978 white Scotland away top. The one I got while in primary school (Umbro – an absolute classic). And he wore a tartan tammy and, I’m sure, sported a huge Scotland rosette on his chest. And he’d been enjoying himself up here.

It’s a sad fact that anything other than a white face on the Hampden terraces in 1984 was even rarer then than it is today. I know this man had been enjoying himself because he was briefly the exotic centre of attention from all these banterish adults my pals and I found so intoxicatingly “laddish”.

I have a recollection of him being greeted overly fondly, in a well-intended but ultimately patronising manner by immediate members of a Tartan Army that was then just a collective noun for the crowd at a Scotland home game, rather than the self-congratulatory faux lifestyle it became.

But at least that lifestyle eschewed what happened next.

That man, a fellow Scotland fan, was enjoying himself. He was at the centre of the camaraderie. And then Mark Chamberlain got the ball.

Then John Barnes got the ball.

Then Luther Blissett.  

And the "famous Hampden Roar" began dipping itself in the sewer.

The ooh-oohing started. Slowly. Imperceptibly at first. But then rising to a horrific volume, particularly up the back of that huge stereo speaker – that gargantuan loudhailer - that was a colossal, packed terrace under a comprehensive metal roof.

Chamberlain, Barnes and Blissett will have heard it next loudest – these men knew only too well the sound of animals impersonating animals - but most overpowered by this most disgusting of mass insults was the poor man in front of me and my young pals.

I know I realised straight away. I realised the horror, not of the chant – oh no – but realising that as that chant went on, rather than miles away on a distant pitch, there was a black man right in front of me. I know I was scared to see the real consequences of such behaviour. But I don’t know if I was scared or upset for him or even in any way empathetic.

I genuinely can’t remember. While I hope I sympathised, I'm pretty sure I didn't help the man and, if this behaviour from thousands of fellow working class Scots was the world I lived in, who knows how it affected me because, make no mistake, racist behaviour comes from social conditioning.

Christ, maybe I thought he’d find it funny. This was 1984 and I honestly can’t remember what I felt and thought about racism because, frankly, I didn’t have to deal with it. There was precisely one black family in all of Ardrossan. And it wasn’t mine.

I hope I was sympathetic and I certainly hope to hell I hadn’t joined in the chanting. I feel I didn’t but who knows what hormone-addled 14-year-old me would have done in an attempt to fit into the carnival of the illicit that was standing in the rowdy section without our parents.

I know I loved the singing and the swearing – I almost certainly booed God Save the Queen in the same way I’d have lustily sung it on the East Enclosure a few weeks earlier. These were the days when we weren’t so literal in our fandom – we were allowed joyful hypocrisies like that.

But I hope to hell I knew back then that making that noise whenever a black man touched a football was beyond hypocrisy and way, way beyond sport.

The one thing I haven’t said is I’m sure he couldn’t speak. At all. Every time I look back on it, and we’re talking 37 years now, I have this idea that this man literally had no voice, which is why he’d been so emotive of expression when everyone was being patronisingly nice to him.

I’m worried this detail isn't a memory so much as me retrospectively imposing a metaphor of helplessness. But I’ll never forget how his face dropped as he realised what he was hearing around him from these previously friendly, welcoming people. In front of my eyes too young to process or deal with what they were seeing, this man's spirit was slowly, visibly crushed.

He immediately began jostling and grabbing those around him. People, stood right beside him, who’d been exchanging pleasantries with him just moments earlier, were making that horrible noise at those three England players. His eyes screamed a devastated “why?” in their faces.

And those he approached refused to meet his gaze. Some briefly patted him on the back as if to dismiss it as harmless banter. Yes, banter. Even though it would be decades before I knew what to call it, that moment – seeing those Scotland fans genuinely trying to brush off horrific racist abuse as bantz - was my first awareness of white privilege.

The most he got by way of response was “it’s not you, mate – it’s them we’re doing it to, those England players”. 

And he pointed at himself. No, you’re doing it to me. When you make that noise, even if you think you’re only aiming it at those three England players, you’re doing it to me. And my family. And millions of others.

The Tartan Army should have lost its mystique for me that day, even as a kid. But that only happened in later years when the kilt-wearing, doe; a deer attention-seekers takeover caused me to look back on the incident.

Yes, at age 14 I just saw it as an “incident”, almost a fucking curio. The real import only dawned as I grew up. For that man in front of me on the Rangers End it was hell on earth, a betrayal of trust that I could understand intellectually but, in all honesty, will never be able to fully understand emotionally.

Tony Woodcock equalised for England. A 1-1 draw and, no doubt, a great day out for me and my two pals. I remember us yakking all the way back on the train to Ardrossan, sans dads (our mums knew they’d be staying in the pub anyway), and then the bus from station to end of street, and I remember feeling I’d had a big, grown-up day out.

Glen Kamara wouldn’t be born for another eleven years. The Czech Republic was still part of Czechoslovakia at that time, still a satellite of the USSR. Hampden is now an all-seater, all-covered venue and whenever I’ve been there this century I love the excuse to sit down, rest my voice and concentrate on the football.

So much has changed. So much has modernised. And yet this week a black man was racially abused in a Glasgow football stadium during a match screened live on TV.

There was no crowd at this one. Glen Kamara’s racial abuser asked him to wait while he stepped over an injured colleague to shout his disgusting abuse directly into Glen’s ear. This man was sober and sharp and he was a fellow player on that pitch meant to unite everyone who steps on it as sportsmen.

It wasn’t just a betrayal of trust and sportsmanship. It was a betrayal of human advancement. It was the basest of insults to the very emotional and intellectual principles on which Slavia Prague were formed in 1892 - formed as a literary and debating society for the advancement of the Czech language under the rule of German-speaking Austro-Hungary.  

Slavia’s opponents for the 2008 match to commemorate the redevelopment of their stadium were Oxford University, one of their first opponents back in the 19^th century when they were founded by medical students. This is a club founded by thinkers. What an inversion of their legacy.

Watching a football match without indulging in racial abuse isn’t an achievement – it’s the minimum expected of us as human beings. Watching a game of football where a player with black team-mates racially abuses an opponent isn’t more sickening than any other racist attack but it’s the true depth of this societal sickness shown in starkest relief.

What we saw on Thursday night was genuinely disturbing. And I can be as proud as I like of the Rangers team for waiting down the tunnel for Slavia, of our club for their solid defence of Glen Kamara – but I can only be sorry for Glen that he had to endure that, and truly sorry to him for every part of my miserable life where I’ve unwittingly enabled that kind of action.

I’ll never patronise him by saying I understand. By that biggest of flukes, birth, I’m white - I can’t truly understand. But I’ll join in with the rest of the Rangers support in supporting him in every way we can. By trying to make sure this never happens again.

A Legend Calls: The Slavia Prague Dossier.

Two possible scenarios here: We either go out to Slavia and everyone bemoans the opportunity missed against “someone we definitely should have been beating”, or we utterly pummel them and there’s a sense of “aye, I always knew we were way better than them anyway”.

No. Wrong. Don’t. Just don’t… ever. You need to know who we’re playing here. You need to know it’s not just a random eastern European side with a decent home record for the last couple of seasons. For the sake of properly contextualising any result Rangers get tonight, you need to know about Slavia Prague.

When I continually go on about "European club competition" I am, of course, referring to the three competitions, all begun between 1955 and 1960 open to clubs from every European association (and maybe the odd Israeli league here and there). Among the many factors paving the way for the European Cup (now Champions League) the Cup-Winners’ Cup and the Fairs cup (later the UEFA Cup, now Europa League) were technological developments in floodlighting and air travel.

But, more than that, the template had been set by other, regional, cross-border competitions. The most famous of these was the Mitropa Cup, contested by sides from central Europe. Begun in 1927, Slavia Prague reached the 1929 final and won it in 1938. 

Considering that, in between times, Slavia provided eight of the Czechoslovakia side who lost the 1934 World Cup final to Italy, in Rome, after extra time, we can be sure the Mitropa Cup was tasty. As far as I know it was never sponsored by Petrofac Training or Irn Bru. It was, in fact, sensational.

Clubs from Italy, Yugoslavia, Hugary, Austria and Czechoslovakia: Players who’d scored in the final and the semis of the three World Cups played in the 1930s – the first three World Cups; players who were bringing continental Europe up to speed with the British game a lot faster than we wanted to know, were contesting this competition in front of huge crowds in iconic stadiums.

Slavia’s best run in European football as we currently know it was reaching the 1995-96 UEFA Cup semis. There they lost out to young Zinedine Zidane’s Girondins Bordeaux, but helping invent such competitions ensures Slavia’s legend is embedded in them as deeply as Rangers is. Contesting a Uefa group stage in eight of the last fifteen seasons means their 21^st century form should also give us pause.

You see, the Czechs are like the Danes. Their league can’t hold onto its home-grown stars because football isn’t the biggest thing in their lives like it is for us. The Danes have hygge, the Czechs have ice hockey. And none of their clubs have ever reached a European club final while Scotland, with a third of Czechia’s population, has had four cubs in nine finals. Yet their national teams are sensational.

I was at Wembley for the Euro 96 final, lost on a Golden Goal by the Czechs to Germany. There were five past or current Slavia players in the side, including Patrik Berger (of Borussia Dortmund and later Liverpool) and Karel Poborksy (Manchester United, Benfica, Lazio). Vladimir Smicer – him of the long-range goal in Istanbul compounding the comeback our manager started against Milan in 2005 – began and ended his career at Slavia.

So, from one knock-out round to the next, Rangers have gone from an opponent you perhaps had to be told once reached a European final to one you might be surprised to know never has. We may sometimes accidentally call them Sparta but, in the way we maybe weren’t so familiar with 1993 European Cup-Winners’ Cup runners-up Royal Antwerp, we had all heard of Slavia Prague; as a name, an institution – a club with probable pedigree but undeniable mystique.

If, last Thursday, those 300 Czech health workers creating that strangest of things in a 2021 football stadium, an atmosphere, sang their own lyrics to the tune of Sloop John B I didn’t hear them. But it wouldn’t have been the catchiest song anyway:

Some young men - probably medical students - had a dream,
To start a sports club and a literary and debating society to encourage the Czech language,
They had much brains, bikes and books but not one single ball:
It was another six years before they started a fitba team,
But the Austro-Hungarian empire were suspicious because they favoured the German language; 
Twenty or thirty titles… depending on your opinion on the legitimacy of the leagues they won around the First World War and after the Communists took over in 1948.

Yeah, Czech history doesn’t really scan with ours. I feel old because I remember Czechoslovakia, when the Czech Republic was joined with Slovakia as one country. They split up peacefully on the last day of 1992, having previously done so, much more darkly, during the Second World War. Our opponent in this Thursday’s Last 16 Europa League second leg has lived in only one city but seen their country given a few different names. 

Slavia, twenty years younger than Rangers as an organisation (their only sport initially was cycling), go back to the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s rule under the Habsburg dynasty. Add to that the fact Slavia themselves have been one of the leading lights in Middle European football in the 1920s and 30s then ended up going through some seriously lean years, and ten name changes - and a few temporary stadiums - then we can’t even beat them on the “from the top to the bottom and back” angle.

That strip, eh. It’s a cracker. The white and red halves and the big red star denoting Slavic nationalist roots. And the stadium, Eden: Yes, it has too many connotations of “Paradise”, and indeed Slavia’s on-field legend was formed by Scottish coach John Madden, who played for Celtic in the Victorian era (long before winning the Superbowl with the Oakland Raiders).

But, depending on what source you read – and I’ve hit everything from Simon Inglis’s The Football Grounds of Europe to The Rough Gide to European Football 1999-2000 to Wikipedia - the prelapsarian ground name derived from a nickname derived from a neighbouring restaurant, or just plain sarcasm engendered by the then condition of the area of Prague Slavia were forced to move to in 1953 by the Soviet-controlled government.

For over half a century Eden, the stadium, was a bowl of basic terracing with one even more basic wooden stand. Joe Lewis’s ENIC group, them perpetually rumoured to be getting involved at Ibrox during David Murray’s reign, were perhaps the worst of the owners in the post-Communist period who continually failed to redevelop the stadium, forcing Slavia into a few tenancies in a city which is, luckily, one of the ground-hopping capitals of the world.

Well, now it’s the best football stadium in the country. It hosted Craig Levein’s innovative 6-4-0 formation when Scotland lost 1-0 to the Czechs in a Euro 2012 qualifier and, more entertainingly, Bayern beating Chelsea on penalties in the 2013 Super Cup. It’s maybe not Eden but if it’s what UEFA now see as a Super Cup kinda venue - modern, attractive, and seating 20,000 spectators – it’s conclusive proof Slavia have finally made home less hellish.

Since 2015 Slavia are owned by Communist China, initially through their energy conglomerate and now the CITIC investment group. But if Rangers eliminate this proud, proud club, the glory will be about more than simply reaching a European quarter-final. As we now know, you don’t own a legend – you just enjoy being associated with it.

Number 55: The Hated House of Love

 I like the beach ball. Just as a policeman never more in need of his Hi-Viz vest clears the flags and scarfs hurled onto Gerrard’s bonnet, just as the clouds of smoke, billowing 55 flags, inflatable league trophies and howling worship straining over ever more fragile-looking crush barriers, make it necessary to have a windscreen cleared at 10am on a dry Saturday morning in early March – an officer of the law whips the detritus of adulation off our manager’s wipers and, the second he does, a big red, white and blue-panelled beach ball splattered with Union Jacks comes bouncing across that bonnet, your screen and our manager’s vision.  

“So Much Love” was switched off in the car. As he edges left towards the incline to the parting bluebells, Steven Gerrard mustn’t be allowed a second when our love isn’t enveloping him. So much love that it will never be switched off.

You probably missed the moment Rangers were the most romantic story in Scottish football. A club demoted to the bottom tier of league football upon the liquidation of its holding company are, nine years later, national champions. The title was sealed earlier (7 March) than any in the last 119 years by a side, unbeaten in both the league and Europe, also denying their derby rivals a record tenth consecutive championship. Throw in, in his first senior managerial job, a global playing icon responsible for the most famous on-field comeback in European club football yet haunted by his lack of a domestic league title: surely we have a conjunction of emotive plot-lines worthy of any Hollywood weepie.  

The scenes filmed from Steven Gerrard’s car as he arrived at Ibrox on 6 March, hours ahead of Rangers 3pm Kick-off against St Mirren – the 3-0 win which put them within a point of the title – began to a house soundtrack, quickly resembled a variation on the images shot for Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy” or The Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony”, but were soon more worthy of a truly decadent music video, one accompanying some overwrought hymn to redemption. One by, perhaps, dare I say, Coldplay…

Children all but throw themselves in front of his Range Rover for a photo, a huge banner bearing his image adorns roadside billboards. Lloyd Wade’s voice and Owen Westlake’s track are switched off because there’s a throb and a beat behind a dozen different songs drowning it from the other side of the glass. Gerrard or his passenger – I can’t quite make out which but one knows what immortality looks like and the other how it feels – can’t believe what they’re driving towards, are stunned into silence until one quietly exclaims “fu-cking hell” as stewards and police desperately fight to clear him a path, a sliver of road through a sea of grown men exploding into a miasma of red, white and blue smoke, firecrackers and bellowing adoration.

This was precisely how we’d imagined it. This footage, hitting social media before kick-off, reflected exactly how we had always pictured the team arriving for the weekend Rangers reclaimed their place at the top of Scottish football. Playing in every lower tier available and suffering every on-and off-field humiliation possible, our fifty fifth league title was often as much myth as ambition as a burden on our breaking backs. We had plenty time to envisage the day it arrived and Edmiston Drive was always going to look like this. But, of course, on 6 March 2021, Ibrox stadium was closed to the public and these fans were all breaking Covid restrictions.

St Mirren swatted 3-0, the Rangers players ran up the emergency services access entrance to celebrate through our famous blue steel gates with those fans. On their way, as we slowly realised what they were doing instead of heading down the tunnel, they passed beneath my Main Stand Front season ticket seat. As I sat watching it on my laptop, in my little box room, in my house barely four miles away as the crow flies over the Clyde, I almost stood up to applaud them jogging along a track-side I could suddenly feel below me again. My old ticker nearly melted. It’s one of the most iconic images in the history of our club, and one of the most compassionate.

Ally McCoist joked that Mo Johnston was caught somewhere near Cessnock underground station after his Old Firm winner of November 89, but surely no Rangers player, far less the entire team, has ever gone so far off the Ibrox pitch to be with the support. In a time when stadiums must be empty, a corner of the ground we fans never paid any mind, just like that, lit up and became part of Rangers folklore.

Praise for the footballing achievement from Sky Sports News and the BBC in London and Salford was, on Monday and Tuesday, drowned out by censure of the protocol breaches from the Scottish media and devolved government. Credit where it’s due, despite our six-year impasse with BBC Scotland, Sportscene lauded us on the Saturday and Sunday. Some of it was through gritted teeth, yes, but as well as a complimentary musical montage there were old-fashioned, "How nice does it feel"vox pops on Edmiston Drive and only passing, obligatory mention of Covid safety breaches. Now that we’re champions again, the Scottish Auntie might actually want to talk to us again.

The SNP lambasted us for the same reason they lambasted Celtic’s January trip to Dubai – it distracts from the ongoing negative publicity around the Alex Salmond inquiry and their failings in more serious, legacy problems with Scotland’s public health. So it doesn’t matter that Rangers took quarter of a million fans to Manchester for the 2008 UEFA Cup final, with 40,000 watching on screens at Ibrox. There was no praise for the vast majority of that support staying home in the first weekend of March 2021.

By the following Saturday, when Rangers weren’t playing, there was legitimate comparison of Police Scotland’s peaceful, containment approach to the Rangers celebrations with the Met police’s heavy handed breaking-up of the Clapham Common vigil for Sarah Everard. But many social media comparisons – one from a freelance journalist formerly used by the Guardian and Channel Four News who refers to the Rangers support by the Nazi term Herrenvolk - were clearly, stunningly, sickeningly exploiting the horrific murder of a young woman to demonise Rangers fans. It took precisely six days from Rangers winning a football competition for things to sink this low.

Barely 24 hours of celebrating and, for the next five days I was quickly reminded the romance around Rangers will only ever be felt by Rangers fans or some people outside Scotland. Inside Scotland and for so many outside, mine is the club which, by exploiting sectarian tension, co-dominated the entire history of Scottish football (Celtic share that Scottish record of nine straight title wins with ourselves). That domination, already tainted by an anti-Catholic signing policy until the late 1980s, is itself debated. Despite the Scottish Football Association and UEFA confirming Rangers on-field heritage was transferred to new owners in 2012, rival fans claim liquidation should apply to every aspect of the club formed in 1872; they see the 2020-21 SPFL Premiership as our first major trophy rather than our 116th. 

It doesn't matter that we have one of the most polyglot and ethnically diverse first team squads in Scotland. It matters less that star striker Alfredo Morelos has his own charitable foundation, distributing food parcels when returning to his native Columbia. No-one remembers the club announcing last July that any fan objecting to our players taking a knee in support of Black Lives Matter was not welcome at Ibrox. In December’s trip to Ross County these players and their manager reported an opponent’s allegedly (and never proven) homophobic remark to the referee. In Scottish football, unfortunately, flagging such an incident is massively progressive.

So too is the style of play. Wingback James Tavernier, leading the season in goals and assists, was seen as defensively weak when Gerrard arrived and made him both captain and driving force of the Liverpool Lite/Diet Klopp tactics of relentless pressing and stylish possession. We have easily the most ruthless attack, relentless midfield and parsimonious defence in Scotland - we've scored the most spectacular goals and made the most sensational saves in Europe. Equally refreshing is the patience afforded Gerrard by a boardroom now full of Rangers-loving businessmen rather than the cowboys of the immediate pre- and post-liquidation years.

Gerrard, an articulate, humble, steely-eyed diplomat and father figure who in three years has celebrated on the pitch once and confronted a referee once, single-handedly rebuilt much of the infrastructure which atrophied under those opportunists, including Newcastle owner Mike Ashley. He couldn’t capitalise on pole positions achieved going into the January breaks of 2019 and 2020 but Gerrard vastly improved on the third place we achieved in the two top flight seasons before his arrival. Last season’s Europa League campaign made us the first Scottish club to exceed Celtic in any competition since we beat them in the 2016 Scottish Cup. Nevertheless, boardroom bravery made him the first Rangers manager to survive two full seasons without a trophy.

Taking us into the Europa League group stage, via four qualifying rounds, in his first season excorcised the humiliating 2017 (non-) return to continental competition under Portuguese experiment Pedro Caixinha. Reaching the last 16 in his next two seasons, providing great Ibrox victories over Porto and Feyenoord - winning in Belgium - exorcised memories of Third Division losses at Stirling Albion, and at home to Annan and Peterhead. (Although adding those proud Scottish clubs to our friends, on the way back up, is something I’d never want to forget)

Crowd-surfing in a 50,000-strong blue bedlam as we turn 2-0 down at home to Braga, after a first leg hour of a Europa League knock-out tie, into a 3-2 win on the night and a home and away victory in the Last 32 of continental competition; it eradicated my sofa swallowing me as we turned 2-0 up at Alloa with 20 minutes remaining of a Petrofac Training Challenge Cup semi-final, live on the BBC’s Gaelic language channel, into a loss in a tournament we didn't even want to be in.

What we can do in next season’s Champions League, under a man who was winning European silverware before his 21^st birthday, is further proof, on top of the eight trophies and a European final in the four full, cash-strapped, bank-owned seasons of Walter Smith’s second coming – on top of the journey from a ball on the Brechin hedge in July 2012 to an aeroplane with a banner over Tannadice in March 2021 – that Rangers are more hated than ever because we're now more unstoppably, irredeemably romantic than ever and because we served our time for our crimes and not one bluenose deserted.

We've removed the negative connotation from the phrase "glory hunters". We are now its very denotation and what we endured on that hunt - what we survived - makes our glory truly deserved. We know the scent from what we feasted on before 2012 and, having tracked down our prey once again, our haters are terrified our increasingly sated support will garner the strength to pull our past and recent glories together, covering over the chasm of demotion and banter in-between, like the 5-5 of that score with Hibernan at Easter Road, in the last game before Gerrard's arrival, those two fives slowly slamming together to sandwich and squash Neil Lennon's on-field taunting at full-time in a huge 55. They're scared we'll be allowed to forget. But we don't want to forget. We'll wear 2012-2021 like a general wears a scar. Our loyalty to our club is now irrefutably stronger than anyone else’s faith in theirs and… and… and - man - this patter. Social media really doesn’t help, does it.

Everyone’s so fucking polarised. Damn near radicalised. Jeezus. I spend my whole life, into my early 40s, loving Scottish football in its entirety, never getting in anyone’s face about their team, only seriously slagging my own club and never anyone else’s because – hey – perspective, hey - respect, hey - sportsmanship and – hey – we’re all united by our hopeless love of the game, right? And then – bang – people I didn’t even know had an interest in football, people who’ve never paid through a turnstile in their fucking life, or people who used to actively boast to me about how their club under-reported their attendances, who wore their board’s “skimming off the top” like a badge of honour, are in my face laughing at my club potentially never playing again, telling me I’m responsible for ambulance services being cut, mocking the fact that my longest ever passion might die.

What the fuck happened here, folks? I never saw a chief executive appointed to a football club with the express remit of paying as much tax as humanly possible and I never saw a lap of honour from accountants carrying a set of balanced books – not one that got a packed stadium on its feet anyway. And I never knew anyone who tried to live their politics through their football club who wasn’t an absolute sell-out in real life. Grow up and have a fucking word with yourselves.  

Archie Macpherson, the doyen of Scottish football commentators, was roundly mocked for warning Rangers demotion could mean “Armageddon” for the Scottish club game. Yes, it survived, and St Johnstone, St Mirren, Ross County, Inverness and others enjoyed first or long-needed major cup triumphs. But I didn't enjoy those in the way I might have before 2012. Some of them - and not just Hibs in 2016 - I downright resented.

That it’s still 1985 since anyone other than the Old Firm won the league I no longer find embarrassing. And, a year after Rangers hit the financial skids, the third oldest league body in the world went to the wall and the pyramid system the SFA would never approve was suddenly brought in to appease and distract. By that point, once proud of our national game's heritage, I could have cared less. I'm hanging on to my support of the national team but that's because it's still my country and I've put more time and money into it than all but perhaps 5,000 other Tartan Army types.

To forget the hate thrown my way when I needed a hand, it’ll take a few more trophies from Rangers and far more signs of respect from our group of traditional rivals. Aberdeen, at board and managerial level at least, have matured a bit in that respect recently. I hold out little hope for more but, while it's a matter of regret, it's no longer my concern. It can't be after the top flights forced me to circle the emotion wagons in 2012. I was forced to worry only about Rangers and now it's more evident than ever we still carried on and always will. And Rangers are now all about the romance and the comeback and the glory, and the love of football I no longer need to seek anywhere else. I have it all at Ibrox. So much love.

The house track has stopped. It’s stopped as the car in which it plays circles that roundabout I cross every other Saturday after parking my own car in the depths of Moorepark. Nine years and a month ago, a smaller crowd gathered on Edmiston Drive, behind fewer, and even more temporary, crush barriers. A man in a black jacket by The North Face gret for all Rangers familes. A man on crutches, wearing the Uefa Cup final Rangers top, bellowed into a camera that the league was gone but the priority now was that the house - the big house – must stay open. Well, the big house, barely visible behind the scarlet and azure plumes, is closed. Everyone's footballing house is closed. That sounds a lot like Armageddon. Perhaps for them it is. But not for Rangers. For us the league is no longer gone. From what our players are shouting out the windows and running to the front gate to tell us, it seems like the league has very much come home.

Unemotional Stunt (Part 2: To Have and to Hold Back)

 I’ve never wept at a game because of a setback in a football competition. I store them up, the bad times. I know I’ll have the rest of my life to regret them – that I’ll live those defeats way beyond the confines of the stadium and that they’ll come pouring out the eyeballs when we next win a big one. 

I’ve always seen the “devastation” as part of the game. Even as a kid I knew that to take the pain so hard would eventually cost me my interest in the sport itself. There was an instinctive understanding of football’s long narrative, that most of us get two or three moments in life to see our team truly over-achieve, reach a peak we’d established as doable for them around age 10.

Such truly joyous moments are so few and far between you need to build up a resistance to being constantly denied them. Seeing Corporate wallies giggling in the concourse as they depart seats lifelong season ticket holders were kicked out for champions League games - that’s too much. This is where the most stunted of non-criers will vent their pain by inflicting it on those showing way too little.

Generally speaking, however, I hate the idea of a camera close-up of me, as Rangers fail to win a game they were never really expected to, being relayed to the world. Forget the obvious entertainment it would grant Celtic fans – I'd be ashamed of such outrageous self-indulgence when so many other clubs never win so much as a Scottish League Cup. There's real vanity to it.

And yet I have welled up when Rangers lost out. Mr Stoic here has indeed blubbed at defeat - twice in fact - and blubbed but good. Neither was as straightforward an incident as you might think, so perhaps it’s apt that the connection this time is Manchester City.

 In 1998 when Rangers lost the chance to win ten titles on the trot, winning our final game of the season away to Dundee United as Celtic’s home victory over St Johnstone denied us the league by two points, I was my usual self – more hollowed out with resignation than animatedly bereft.

 My sister and I listened to the game on the radio in my Glasgow (mature) student flat. The main thing in those days was that Rangers had equalled Celtic’s nine-in-a-row but, as has proven true, I knew the failure to do ten would nevertheless haunt me forever. And if I cried once what’s to stop me crying forever?

 I quietly saw my sister into the city centre and onto her train back to sunny Ayrshire. Glasgow Central station resembled a war zone as thousands of Rangers fans had been watching our game on a big screen at Ibrox (this was the last time a final day title decider would not be shown live on a TV channel) and were now bumping into celebrating Celtic fans returning from Parkhead as everyone set off home.

 All this was expected, emotionally planned for and no surprise to me. Them’s the fitba breaks. I was skint and in the middle of my finals. Hey - it was an excuse to have a frugal, healthy evening.

 I kept my head down and got back to my flat, which I shared with a Celtic-supporting bloke and a girl with a boyfriend from Galway I’d become mates with. They didn’t want to get in my way and I stayed out of theirs that night. I’d gone nuts the previous year, in the same flat, when Rangers sealed nine-in-a-row and they’d respected that: Time for me to reciprocate.

 But all this diplomacy – and my gutted, emptied mood - meant I was sat alone in my room on a Saturday night; no intention of studying and incapable of any real indulgence. BBC 2 was screening a night of football-related programmes, all in a “You don’t have to be mad to love footy but …” vein.  I think it was hosted by Mark and Lard:

 This felt perfect: I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t consumed by football feeling so to watch a movie or a game show would’ve been pointless. Yet this channel was relaying English football stories so there’d be no direct, painful references to my mob. I watched, tepidly sipping a few cans of something, hiding myself in the safety of English fan culture.

 Then a Manchester City supporter, in his 30s, began talking about his son, who he’d lost to a horrible illness. He spoke of how they went to City games together, at Maine Road. He spoke about how when City, one day, got back in the top flight, it would be for his son, who he knew would be watching.

 That was me. Gone. Gone for ages. Properly blubbing. Distraught for minutes – maybe quarter or half an hour; just gone. Quietly sobbing in my room, on a big, green fucking chair borrowed from a fellah who’s dad had won the All-Ireland with Galway.

 I’ve never quite sorted out why I went like that. Mostly it was for that man and his son – but I usually respect that kind of grief rather than indulge in something I’d been lucky enough never to feel.  But that City fan and his son were telling me why it was okay to love football so deeply. Add to that the stress of final exams which I hadn’t studied for in any way shape or form, that I was truly head-over-heels in love for the first time in my life but so much so that I wanted the girl to live her life away from me, and the other random, personal shit always thrown up by student life.

 But mostly it was because ten years of sheer football tension needed to get out. I gret like a baby after Rangers won a battle that day, after winning the war the previous year, but lost the minor campaign that followed. I did the sobbing all alone in my room and most of it came from sheer pride at what Rangers had achieved – taking that tenth season right down to the wire, running on fumes - rather than what had been lost. 

 So there was some sort of tortuously strained link when, ten years and five days later, with us again en route to losing the title to Celtic on the last day of the season, my true Rangers obsession came to fruition at Maine Road’s replacement:

 All I ever really needed was to see us in a European final. Since I was a kid, reading about "Barcelona in 1972" and later watching the video of that victory over Moscow Dynamo, I knew real success for my club would be reaching a continental showpiece. Nine-in-a-row was a domestic, local, private affair and it had to be done but, Jeezus H Christ, it was so tense and horrible so much of the time, with virtually all the pressure on Rangers. European football is freeing – like a holiday. And it’s all the more glorious for being watched and shared by an entire continent.

For as far back as I could remember, I dreamed of being there when a Rangers captain again swapped pennants on the half-way line of a neutral venue that wasn’t Hampden, with a UEFA trophy glittering in the background. Again, winning it was, like ten-in-a-row, so much nicer but not the main requirement.

So when, one year after I attended Sevilla v Espanyol at Hampden in the UEFA Cup final, the Rangers players walked past the very same trophy on the podium in the City of Manchester Stadium main stand, I could definitely feel the lips wobble, the throat dry and the eyes dampen. 

A 67-game campaign – where I’d attend 49 of them and blogged extensively about every one into the wee small hours before working a full-time job the next day, had reached its denouement. Again, the physical and mental exhaustion was kicking in. A tear or two went over the ridge and onto the No-Man’s Land of the cheeks. But I sucked the rest up and got some stiff into my upper lip, at least.   

 There was no fucking way I was taking the chance I’d be spotted on camera. For me, again, this entire run to a European final, from last-minute winners in Champions League qualifiers and finishing third in the same group as Barcelona, to endless 0-0s and tight games through the subsequent UEFA Cup knock-out rounds, was one long victory – and one you could only stop worrying about and start celebrating when you knew it was over.

The loss to Zenit finished the run and I was remaining inside that ground to applaud Zenit – managed by an Ex-Rangers manager – and to laud my team for ensuring I could die happy. With football, I cry when I’m happy, when my team make me undeniably proud.

With Manchester 2008, the only real defeat took place shortly afterwards, when I got back into the city centre. That time, my heart really did sink - for what had happened and how it would be used. But tears weren't appropriate.

 
 We only truly lost that tenth straight Scottish league title on the last day of the season. We only truly lost that UEFA Cup final in the last minute. The Saturday after Ten-in-a-row passed us by we lost the Scottish Cup final to Hearts and my mate and I joined my flat-mate from Edinburgh and toasted her Jambo dad.

 The day before, the day Frank Sinatra died, the day of our final finals, that other girl told me she wasn’t going anywhere without me and a year later, dear reader, we were married and that's one result that's had her crying ever since. So tears must symbolise real joy, right?

 Just like at weddings, you may cry for the joy of seeing two people in love - you may even cry at the thought your daughter is now wed to a fat football geek from Ayrshire. But if it’s a truly bad result – like you know your new father-in-law can blow the head off a rabbit from half a mile away – you need your wits about you and your eyes dry as a bone.

Unemotional Stunt (Part 1: Do You Take This Geek?)

 I got married on a Wednesday. Neither of us were fussed about a big do, we’d been living together for a year anyway and most of our pals were, like our newly graduated selves, still skint from their student days and working weekends. Registry office, pub: let’s do it.

 Best man? My sister. Oh, yeah – just when you thought you’d had enough, convention.

 It was fun to briefly make my parents think there was another reason we were heading down the carpeted aisle between the plastic chairs “in three weeks’ time?!”, although not so much hers when her farmer dad did actually own several shotguns back then.

 I upset my many relatives by keeping it small but this was because my intended's family was so small. Yet, when the registrar checked for the first available date, the most romantic gesture I could possibly make towards the actual love of my life – someone who, aherm, “knew what I liked” – was to forgo the Champions League final on her behalf.

 What? No, I don’t mean forgo playing in it.

 Eh? Miss attending the Champions League final? No – sorry – I don’t mean that either.

 I mean not watching it live on the telly.

 Hey, you don’t know me like she does, right. She knew that, for me, that was a big sacrifice. Huge.

 One of our first dates-which-was-in-absolutely-no-way-a-date came two years earlier, when I hosted a party in my student flat room for the 1997 final. About a dozen of us crammed in there to watch Dortmund upset Juve on my wee portable colour telly and toast Paul Lambert as a Scotsman winning Europe’s biggest club prize, in Munich.

 She wore shoes sprinkled as glitteringly silver as the European Cup and I was reminded of that first day I met her, after that exam, in that bar in that lane, with our various pals, when I first saw those eyes and a girl in my tutorial group remarked on those eyes, to their owner, and the eyes laughed with an embarrassed modesty that told me I was in serious trouble.

 Luckily, I was off to Romania v Bulgaria at Euro 96 in Newcastle with my mate the next day. I left the bar early. That night, Friends was on the telly – the episode where Chandler accidentally lets Rachel know Ross has always loved her. Yeah that was creepy, Ross. Don’t be friends with someone you know you actually lust after.

 So we watched the 1997 Champions League final together as pals. In my bedroom. On my bed. But there were lots of other men and women on the bed too. Friends, you might call them. But I'd buttoned down my feelings of anything other than friendship. I did the healthy thing. I buried stuff so deep I almost forgot it was there.

 Two years later, here was I, deigning to not watch the European Cup final live on telly for the first time since – well, only since 1990, actually, when it wasn’t shown on terrestrial telly because English clubs were still banned from Europe. But – hey – don’t tell her that. Am I right, lads. Am I right!

She already maintains I was so stunned anyone would have me I had to take the first available date in case she changed her mind. And that patter is as crazy as it is unoriginal, right?  Right, lads? Lads...?

 Basically, my wife and I had our “reception” the night Bayern Munich chucked the Champions League final to Manchester United, in injury time. I had shed tears of joy - in a frighteningly pertinent metaphor considering what happened to my waistline over the next few years, all those buttons popped open to set my emotion free - the day Sammy Kuffour was on his knees, pounding the Camp Nou grass in the deepest full-time whistle pain of his life.  

 Four months later, Bayern had their revenge. In the city of our marriage, in the very parish in which Sir Alex Ferguson, breaker of Bayern hearts was born -  in the group stage of the very same competition - Michael Tarnat equalised via Roque Santa Cruz’s armpit in the very final minute and I, in full physical attendance, almost breathed a sigh of relief that the world was still on its axis after knowing for the last hour the unwritten Laws of Facing FC Bayern demanded we had to follow up Jorg Albertz’s opener if we’d ever wanted to win this game.

 On the final whistle, as Sammy Kuffour strolled happily off the pitch directly below me, I turned to see my wife and my best man crying. 

 And I didn’t think “how dare you act as devastated as I feel”. I was still a nice person back then. But, as I doled out the hugs and reassurance, I did wonder why, when they attended the football so very rarely – when they would have forgotten the score and maybe even the opponent in this game within a year – why the two most important young women in my life would shed a tear for it.

Or why I wouldn’t. Or why I suddenly needed to get them out of there before the ITV cameras picked out the back of the Copland Road stand.



To be, ye know, continued.

Why Belgian Football - and Belgium - Hates Me

                         

Did I ever tell you about the time I saved my wife from a tiger? No? Well, that’s probably because my feat of heroism didn’t take place in the Indian rain forest but in the passenger lift to the top of a famous European tourist attraction. And it wasn’t so much a tiger as someone dressed as a tiger. And they were so skinny I couldn’t tell if it was a young man or a young woman (it may actually have been a leopard suit, perhaps a cheetah. I don’t know - I’m a man of action, not David bloody Attenborough) so, knowing a passport-revoking assault could also become a hate crime, my coiled-spring SAS reaction was swiftly dialled down to a decidedly huffy mince towards the pronounless jungle cat, my not-in-any-way-bothered missus, and the female photographer demanding to take a picture of my wife and I with the “tiger”,  which we would then buy for far too many Euros at the end of our visit.

 That’s Belgium for you. Or, rather, that’s Belgium for me.

 It’s a country that doesn’t hate me. In fact, I get the distinct impression it hardly thinks about me at all. Yet, despite the fact I’m as big a fan as anyone of chips with mayo, waffles with ice cream and Poirot with Suchet, it consistently throws my excitement back in my face.

 Maybe it’s the fact I don’t like mussels. Maybe it’s that I’m trying just too hard to like a country so beloved of two of my personal TV heroes, Ian Nairn and Jonathan Meades. Perhaps it’s that it has enough identity problems of its own to be bothered with a Scotland supporter who dislikes the SNP more than the England national team and was raised neither catholic nor protestant despite having a mother from one religion and a father from the other. Whatever the cause, my relationship with Belgium is… well, I believe the Flemish expression is “pffft”.

 This is neither the “name me a famous Belgian” cliché nor an aversion gleaned from the Cockpit of Europe appellation. Bar Brel, in Glasgow’s Ashton Lane, is one of my favourite bars in the world and while Jaques Brel, the man it’s named for, isn’t my favourite singer in the world, he was bloody good and seriously cool. Bowie covered his “Amsterdam” and didn’t get anywhere close.

 No, the cause is mysterious but the fact undeniable; if I’m looking forward to something Belgian, it all goes weird. If I’m concerned about something Belgian, it laughs in my face. If I’m about to get angry at something Belgian, it runs away, calling me whatever the French is for “tight git” and shutting the lift door behind it.

 The point of all this? Well, I’m not just trying to explain why last Thursday, in Belgium’s second city, against Belgium’s oldest club, I wasn’t in any way surprised to go through all of the above emotions in the space of one of the most barnstorming 90 minutes Rangers have ever played (that it was actually 105 minutes is just the start of the story). I’m giving you a solid reason why, despite our team winning that game by the odd goal in seven, we, as a support, should remain cautious about tonight’s return leg.

 There’s a case for saying this is just what Rangers do now in the first leg of the Europa League Last 32. We concede more than expected against a team in much red but eventually come out on top in an epic. In that case, per the second leg against Braga last season, we’ll see out this tie in a well-drilled fashion, entertaining only for further evidencing the ongoing miracle of Steven Gerrard’s Rangers in Europe. And Alfredo’s first goal - or three - in the knockout stages.

 However, if last week’s heart-stopper was about this beef - or boeuf, or stoofvlees - between me and Belgium, I’m worried. I’m worried for Rangers. Because if you think it’s all in my head and it’s only about my holidays, think again. It’s all about the football.

 I’ve seen the Belgium national team three times in the flesh. I know many Bluenoses have little time for Scotland and I respect why. However, while I’ve never worn a kilt, I’ve always supported my local national side and at Hampden in the last few years I’ve seen Belgium win 4-0, twice, 365 days apart. Furthermore, in a World Cup qualifier 20 years ago, they equalised in injury time despite being 2-0 down within half an hour. Belgium have never won a major tournament yet I’ve seen them beat Scotland 10-2 on aggregate.

 Then there’s the anorak thing, my wee side passion: Long story short, I’ve seen 71 of the 102 teams to play in a European final. Belgium has five such clubs. The only one I’ve seen in the flesh? Anderlecht. Four times European Cup-Winners’ Cup finalists, three times Fairs/UEFA Cup finalists: I saw them in John Brown’s testimonial game.

 The famous night against Club Brugge (runners-up in the 1976 UEFA Cup and 78 European Cup)? The night Scott Nisbet scored that goal for ten men which, even now, has me crying every time I see it on YouTube? Oh, I was there alright. I was there about three hours before kick-off, trying desperately to get a spare ticket. All I got was a pennant, wet, and the train home to watch it on telly.

 That was a year before I started back in full-time education aged 24. I was still paying off the credit card I’d battered while working in order to follow follow every week since leaving school at 16. I made it to the famous Leeds and Marseille home ties that season but couldn’t afford a season ticket or even to buy all three group games up front.

 As soon as I was solvent again, at the end of that decade, I vowed I’d never miss another meaningful home game. And for the last 21 years I largely haven’t. So, of course, the Belgian sides I need to score off my list pick this season to start arriving at Ibrox, the season Covid kept everyone out the grounds.

 It was horrible for all of us not being there for the visits of Benfica (ten times European finalists) and Galatsaray (2000 UEFA Cup winners). But I’ve seen Benfica in the flesh, at Anfield. And I was at our first Ibrox meeting with Galatasaray, when Hagi Senior faced us in the Champions League. Those two great clubs are on my European finalists Got list. Club Brugge, KV Mechelen (1988 European Cup-Winners’ Cup champions), Standard Liege (1982 European Cup-Winners’ Cup runners-up) and Royal Antwerp (1993 European Cup-Winners’ Cup runners-up), however, are on my Not Got list – the one that’s taken me 36 years to get down to just 31 clubs.

 KV Mechelen don’t do much European football these days. But Standard Liege and Royal Antwerp couldn’t wait to turn up at my front door as soon as they heard I wasn’t allowed to open it. I’m convinced the only reason Rangers have beaten one of them and should eliminate the other, is the fact they can still annoy the shit out me by playing in front of my season ticket seat, knowing I can’t tick them off my list.

 Standard Liege lost the Cup-Winners’ Cup final at the Nou camp ten years after we won it there. I’ve wanted to see them ever since my gran brought me a Standard pennant back from Belgium around the same time, from one of those ferry trips to Ostend all the rage in the early 80s. It still hangs in the same room as my Rangers v Brugge pennant from 1992-93, reminders of love and failure.

 Never mind Roofe’s sensational winner in the Stade Maurice Dufrasne – I would only have been at the home tie in this season’s group stage and what a game that was. Standard wore a sensationally continental away kit - red and white half hoops with black shorts, like nothing you’d see in Scotland, defying the idea strips are now globally generic. That strip, like them twice taking the lead and us winning, epitomised the glamour of European nights. All that was missing was the most important element: me (and my wee list, and my marker pen).

 I had to attend night school to get back into full time education. As skint as I was when Royal Antwerp reached the 1993 Cup-Winners’ Cup final, I wasn’t so skint I couldn’t rough it to London and back.

 I was only 23 years old and had never been to one of these European finals that so obsessed me. But I had an exam, that very day - the day of Royal Antwerp v Parma at massive old Wembley. A crowd of 37,000 turned up. A match ticket wouldn’t have been a problem – there were 55,000 going spare. And, of course, later, I found out I’d got into Uni through my other exams. I sat my Higher Modern Studies – I missed that final - for nothing.

 Bloody Belgians.

 The tiger incident? That came during a July 2004 holiday in Brussels, with the girl I met at Uni. We like a city break. I usually go crazy with the sightseeing. I’ll never know why but in Brussels that just didn’t happen. It was great but in a very weird, slightly draining way. The window of our entirely air conditioned room looked out onto the centre of the hotel – the dining area under the atrium and the doors of all the other rooms. Weird.

 I went to Anderlecht’s Stadium and it was shut. We spent half an hour in a near-empty bar unable to get served. We kept intending to do a day trip to Brugges but never did. We found the plaque commemorating Verlaine shooting Rimbaud but didn’t go into the Musée des Beaux Arts. We did go to our first ever Ethiopian restaurant but, far from treating Brussels like Auden and Isherwood, one day we ended up in front of a TV watching the Open, from Troon – in Ayrshire - Ayrshire, where my mum and dad lived. I was in the capital of Belgium, looking at background shots of Ailsa Craig and the Isle of Arran, landmarks I could see from my bedroom window every bloody day growing up.

 And in that Ardrossan bedroom, of a schoolnight, scouring my Marshall & Cavendish Encyclopedia of World Football, I was transfixed by a black and white picture of the 1958 European Cup final between Real Madrid and Milan - in Brussels. Almost more than the action shot of Alonso saving from Juan Schiaffino, what grabbed my attention was the sight, behind the Heysel stadium, looming above the packed terraces, of what looked like a gargantuan, skeletal space ship from a 1950s B-movie; The Atomium. 

 The same year Real won that final (3-2 after extra time), Brussels also staged the famous Expo World’s Fair and built the Atomium, a 335 foot high stainless steel model of the atoms making up a cell of iron as it would appear under a microscope. Exciting, mind-bending stuff, eh? Yeah, well, maybe in 1958. And also now, apparently.

 When I got there in July 2004, having already failed to get into the Heysel Stadium (surprise, surprise - it was shut), the Atomium was falling to pieces. It was due to shut in October of 2004 for refurbishment. But the refurb was already under way. And the desperate attempt to hawk money from visitors with the indeterminate cat costume was, in its own way, perfectly apt. But if you got in the lift you could visit the various “atoms” and I knew at least one of them offered a view of Belgium’s national stadium.

 The Heysel stadium, of course, by then had completed its own refurbishment, physical and otherwise - it was now the Baudouin Stadium – in an attempt to escape its own, much darker history. It now had more and bigger stands than in 1958, and huge cantilevered roofs which I imagine blocked much of my view of the pitch. I can’t remember because (a) I was too worried about another attack from the big cat that may well, now I think about it, have been native to the Belgian Congo and (b) I seem to have lost the photos I know I must have taken that day. 

 The only stadium pictures I can find from my trip to Brussels are of the famous Edmond Machtens Stadium. It’s a ground so open on one side you can photograph it from the street. The year before I stood in the Molenbeek district sunshine holding my camera through the gates, RWD Molenbeek were forced into another merger. The following year, one of the stands I pictured was named after Raymond Goethals, the manager in charge of Standard Liege when they bribed a domestic opponent to chuck a game the week of their 1982 Cup-Winners’ Cup final, the manager of Olympique de Marseille when they did likewise the week of their 1993 Champions League final and the manager of Anderlecht for two of their three successive 1970s European cup-Winners’ Cup finals.

 That’s Anderlecht, who bribed the referee ahead of the home leg of their 1984 UEFA Cup semi-final versus Nottingham Forest. Franky Vercauteren played for Goethals at Anderlecht. Vercauteren is Royal Antwerp’s manager right now and when, last Thursday, that Bulgarian referee allowed Avenatti, Seck and Lukaku to get away with assaults on, respectively, Tav, Kent and Balogun, but booked Ryan Kent for nudging someone, I did begin to wonder.

 But mostly I wonder if the way Belgium hates me will see Royal Antwerp win by two clear goals tonight, or will it ensure we go through purely so we can draw Club Brugge in the next round? Just to piss me off. That’s Club Brugge who may well have taken money off Marseille in their final game in our 1992-93 Champions League group. Photos with a tiger or access to European finals – it’s all about money with the Belgians, while I’m just here for the sights. That’s it – that will be why we just don’t get on.

 My Not Got list remains at 31, despite the fact it should have been in the twenties. That Rangers have offered me the chance to go to the match virtually – to join in a virtual fan experience - seems like the final insult. I’m as close as I can ever be to seeing Royal Antwerp in the flesh, without really being there. And, like me getting through this entire rant without mentioning Tintin, Rangers are as close as it’s possible to be to the next round without being there yet.

Borna Claims the Baggage

You know all about Rangers 4-3 first leg victory in Antwerp in the Last 32 of this season's UEFA Europa League. If you don't, go and watch it. Watch it knowing the score and you'll only be doing what I did less than 24 hours after watching it live. That I had to, gives you a mere whiff of the drama involved. This copy of my post in the Gersnet match thread gives you more of a taste - via two bites with different-sized dentures - of the chaos. Enjoy.

I watched the full game again. Not just because, when it's as exciting a game as that, and you get the result, you kind of have to watch it again but also because watching it live was just such a stress-riddled, over-excitable experience I wasn't really able to properly judge what exactly had happened.

Can't say I was any less astounded during the second watch but, being a bit calmer, I felt, yeah, there was a bit of opening rustiness due to Kent being dropped and suspension buddies Roofe and Morelos coming back in at the same time as a not-quite-match-fit Scotty Arfield. But, as with Alfie going on to be instrumental in all four of our goals after missing a good early chance to put us in front, I feel sure we would normally have gone on to win this one very easily.

That we didn't was, for me anyway, attributable to the circumstances: I know you have to be ready for anything - especially in Europe - but most of the few mistakes we made, almost all of which were instantly punished, were down to stuff that, well, happened to us rather than was caused by us:

For example, an injury to our captain, who never gets injured, in the very week we lose the young lad who was meant to cover him, because we suspended him, and Covid protocols isolated him, because he went to a party, and then - during the injury time allowed for Tav being replaced! -  the star striker who stole the show, who stole the whole group stage, the last time we were in Belgium is injured. That had everyone wondering what the hell??

When you lose a player like Tav - a player who is never injured, never dropped and is so instrumental to our tactical vision and team identity - it will inevitably send a wee tremor through the club. When you lose him in the first half of a vital European away game, one in which you're already getting three other players back up to speed... that has to send shock waves through the team on the pitch.

Then, during the added injury time for Roofe going off - and because the paperwork for Kent coming on wasn't ready for the fourth official (Jimmy Bell's second mistake, after Rofe-gate? You can tell him) - Antwerp get the softest penalty in the history of soft penalties, and we're going in 2-1 down and looking like the gods have it in for us, after having led 1-0 and looking like we could open up our hosts at will.

Add to all that the worst-since-Beaton-at-Ibrox-v-Lennon's-Hibs refereeing performance, plus - whatever its merits or otherwise - the very fact we're not used to playing games under the auspices of VAR disrupting our flow in a way that perfectly suited an injury-riddled Antwerp side who wanted a bitty, broken-up game, and winning that leg by any score is utterly bloody magic.

Little wonder Stevie G said the players adapted to Dundee United's tactics in our next match by sorting it out on the pitch themselves. After last Thursday's tribulations they'll be able to switch formation ten times a game while solving a Rubik's cube with their left hand and doing some Sudoko with the right (pen in the mouth, filling out Jimmy's paperwork for the next sub).

My arse was on the floor at full-time on Thursday yet the players, hilariously, brilliantly - reassuringly - seemed to be just casually giving it, "Nice wee workout, that - aye, quite enjoyable". And on Sunday, after a bit of job sharing - Greegs covering the first half hour while everyone else had a lie-in - we saw that surfeit of enjoyment from Thursday pour into their legs when they just unleashed on United in a way we haven't managed to do to anyone other than Ross County this year.

But the best laugh for me in Antwerp, as the players came off the Bosuilstadion pitch, was the off-stage member of our coaching staff  hollering at Goldson - "CONNOR! CONNOR! GET HIM AWAY!" - because they thought Borna was about to go for their keeper again (the second one he'd put a penalty past), following their wee squaring-up after the winning spot-kick.
 

Borna hears this, turns to Goldson and just smiles and brushes it off as he heads over to, apparently, shake someone else kindly by the hand. But he has that exact same fixed smile, open-eyed stare on his face which could just as easily mean he's about to scalp someone, which is why I love players from the former Yugoslavia: 

They don't really do the posturing or handbags stuff. They're all skinny as rakes and their mood is either "I would die for you, my friend" or "You will die at my hands, my enemy". No in-between.


GOLDSON: "Come on, Borna. Leave it. You're on a yellow and we've already lost Tav. Get up that tunnel."

BORNA: "Leave what, big man? I'm chill. No sweat. Nae danger. Just going to shake hands with the guy".

GOLDSON: "You sure? Coz I can never tell wi you. I'll get in trouble if you lose the plot".

BORNA: "Totally sure. All forgotten. I'm 100% Karma Chameleon. We won, didn't we?! Why would I even care?! No, I'll see you in there, bro". 
 

GOLDSON: "Okay. Cool. See ye in there". [turns towards the tunnel]

BORNA:"Oh, Connor..."

GOLDSON: [turning back, disinterestedly] "Yeah?"

BORNA: "Does a severed head count as hand luggage or would I have to put that in the hold?"

GOLDSON; "Fu**ing WHAT??!"

BORNA: "I said it's all good and I'll see ye in the dressing room..."