Demise of Rangers will cast ghostly shadows

SIDELINE CUT:The demotion of Rangers will not alone affect the soccer landscape in Scotland, it could ultimately lead to deeper changes within the city of Glasgow, wites KEITH DUGGAN

SO NOW that Rangers are removed from the equation in Glasgow, is there any point to Scottish football? Great will be the glee among the green-and-white hoops faithful whose members can be seen in every town and city in Ireland this weekend. Rangers’ fall from grace and expulsion from the Premier League leaves the way clear for a period of Celtic dominance, much as the Ibrox club presided at the top of the league table for most of the 1990s.

Rangers’ flaming fall from the sky has been fascinating to watch – a century of prudent accountancy and tradition and a fearsome winning tradition has all come undone through the most mundane of misdemeanours – tax evasion and financial roguery.

For Celtic fans, the consequences must seem like the realisation of wild dreams. Rangers will be erased from the cityscape and football relevance, or at least as good as, consigned to the Hades of the Third Division and forced to start from scratch.

But if Rangers are indeed gone or even transformed into a diluted parody of what

they have represented for the last 100 years, won’t Celtic fans become a little lost too?

The presence of Rangers has made life very clear for them – the team in royal blue was everything there were not.

The 20th Century antagonism between the Irish Catholic emigrants who poured into the city and the established Protestant community has been carried through decades of Old Firm games, through the naked emotion of both sets of fans and the lusty singing of poisonous songs and through Paul Gascoigne playing the flute and Mo Johnston becoming the first player to wear the colours of both clubs and through the extraordinarily warped atmosphere in which Neil Lennon, the Celtic manager, has lived in recent years.

The Old Firm rivalry is defined by hatred and bigotry and prejudices that belong to another age and because of that, it has earned its reputation of being one of the most famous and controversial sporting rivalries on the planet. If it is abruptly halted, what are Celtic fans to do? Seasons are defined by the Old Firms games in Celtic Park and at Ibrox.

Who will sing the Famine Song – “From Ireland they came/Brought us nothing but trouble and shame/ well now the Famine is over/why don’t they go home” – to the jaunty tune of The Beach Boys’ Sloop John B? Who will they row against in the streets and in the pubs and most of all, who will they measure themselves against? Beating Aberdeen is not quite the same thing.

A few years ago, Ian Jack wrote a column in the Guardian newspaper that contained a vivid memory of his teenage self attending a Scottish game in 1963.

“Rangers came to play my local football team in the east of Scotland on the day after the Kennedy assassination. The minute’s silence was drowned in booing (Kennedy was a Catholic) and my only memory of the day is a conversation with a pleasant enough Rangers supporter who was standing among the local crowd on the terraces – this was before the terraces were strictly segregated. ‘If we get beat this afternoon,’ he said, ‘I’m going to throw ma dinner at the kitchen wall’.”

The short paragraph was a startling evocation of the mood of Scottish football 40 years ago – Rangers as the visiting aristocracy, the casual bigotry and dark humour in the remark. Jack was making the point that statistical evidence indicated that domestic violence surged when Old Firm games took place on Saturdays. But he also noted that while Celtic and Rangers football clubs had once been the spiritual meeting points for the industrial enclaves of the city, they had since become the industries.

In comparison to Edinburgh, which has its castle and Hogmanay and everyone wearing kilts and speaking like the Hastings brothers, Glasgae gets a bad rap – and the emergence of the brilliant Glasvegas has not helped. It’s a pity because anyone who has been there seems to think it a brilliantly energetic city. But the bricks and mortar and charms of the city were always going to be overshadowed by the dark aura of its famous football rivalry.

Until now.

The raw passion for Glasgow Celtic among Irish fans has survived the general softening of the Tiger Years. Young men still wear the iconic jersey as a badge of honour. Supporting Celtic, with its overwhelming Irish connections, is understandable enough, but it has always seemed to me that you have to live in Glasgow to really feel and understand what the simmering tensions and primal hatred is about. For Irish fans, supporting Celtic is a means of identifying with a cause and a force of energy rich in patriotism and symbolism.

The fact that there is this army of Rangers fans that hates them makes their affiliation more meaningful and excited.

Yes, the Famine Song is insulting and incendiary and all the rest. But how many of Ireland’s Celtic fans who hit Glasgow for a weekend of boozing and football ever think about the potato blight of 1845 besides those few minutes when they are standing in Ibrox, drenched in rain and emotion and listening to the home fans taunting them?

And how much does the Old Firm rivalry have to do with Scottish football anyhow?

Years ago, before television took over the whole show, you knew it wasn’t far from tea time when they read the English and Scottish football results on BBC. It was a terribly serious business; the voice always sounded as if he was announcing the outbreak of a major war. But when it came to the Scottish results, it wasn’t the inevitable wins for the Glasgow giants that caught the ear. It was the fixtures between those mysterious other places – Stenhousemuir or Airdrie or Falkirk or Hamilton Academical – that seemed to tell the real story of Scottish football.

Or the fabled scoreline that everybody knew but that was almost never announced: East Fife 4 Forfar 5. In the lowlands and highlands, there were other games going on in the shadowland of the fame and spite generated by the enduring Glasgow rivalry.

Yesterday’s decision by the Scottish Football League clubs changes that.

Banishing Rangers to the third division is bound to have serious ramifications for all clubs in Scotland if it leads to a reduction of the €100 million five-season agreement with Sky and ESPN for TV rights – without the Old Firm, the Scottish game has no selling point.

In a braver world, the warring factions of the SFL and SPL might decide that this is the perfect time to dismantle the power structure and reunite and maybe return to sharing the gate receipts and dividing the money more evenly and trying to produce a generation of footballers that bear comparison to Kenny Dalglish or Archie Gemmil or Steve Archibald.

It might be the perfect time to recognise that behind the sulphurous theatre of the Glasgow derby, Scottish football has become a ghost league.

Either way, these are perilous days for the Old Firm tradition. Rangers have to look no further than the example of Leeds United to see how difficult it can be for a club with unwavering support and history to recover from financial disaster. A season of games against Annan Athletic and Elgin City awaits them. They have been sent hurtling into the netherworld of Scottish football.

Once they stop celebrating, it is going to be a strange season for the Celtic faithful as well. It won’t be long before they begin to miss the dreaded Hun and those seething afternoons.

It won’t be long before they wonder if Glasgow will ever be the same again.