Dani Garavelli: Goal must be a socially born-again Rangers

FOR someone who spends her life bemoaning her family’s unremitting obsession with the beautiful game, I’ve found the unfolding story of Rangers’ misfortunes strangely compelling.

Though I’m the kind of person for whom the Match Of The Day theme tune is an anthem of Saturday night despair, I have on several occasions reached for the remote control to tune into the rolling analysis of the club’s helterskelter journey towards liquidation.

There are other (smaller) people, not a million miles from me, whose appetite for the story has been sharpened by a degree of schadenfraude. Though far from Celtic-minded, they are taking an unseemly pleasure in the possible demise of the team which has loomed so large over their football fandom.

My emotional engagement, however, is more akin to that of watching a Shakespearian play. Despite my disapproval of the sectarianism the club has never managed to eradicate, despite the misogyny and violence which accompany many of its matches, there is real tragedy in watching a grand, but deeply flawed, institution being driven to the brink of destruction by the hubris of one man.

It no longer matters to me that Rangers were, to a large degree, architects of their own downfall; that their nine-in-a row glory days were founded on a financial delusion; or that greed/desperation allowed them to be conned by a charlatan. It’s sad to see the hopes and dreams of tens of thousands of fellow west of Scotland citizens be treated with such casual contempt. Where the sight of grown men from across the social spectrum weeping outside Ibrox ought to provoke snorts of derision, I’ve found it moving; these fans may not share my life views, but no-one deserves to have the centre ripped out of their universe.

To be honest, I haven’t really mocked men’s (or women’s) attachment to their football club since I lived in Newcastle, where a trip to St James’s Park is an unavoidable initiation rite for new arrivals of either gender. In the early 1990s, the city was on its uppers. With jobs few and far between, the Meadow Well riots still fresh in everyone’s memory and the whole of the north-east of England in the grip of ram-raiders and pre-pubescent hoodlums, the team was something to rally round, a rare source of civic pride. The sight of massed ranks of fans, with black and white scarves, marching up the Bigg Market, chanting “Toon Army” of a Saturday afternoon was as stirring as it was scary. Since declaring yourself a fan was as much of a prerequisite to adopted citizenry as saying “Why Aye Pet” and refusing to wear a jacket in sub-zero temperatures, I was soon checking the league tables to see how “my” team was faring (something I still do from time to time to this day).

It was then I understood that following a football team could be much more than an excuse to swill lager and shout abuse from the stands, more even than a break from the rigours of the coalface or the misery of unemployment, it could be an integral part of your identity, the thing that – more than any other – told the world exactly who you were.

In Glasgow, with its two religiously affiliated and mutually contemptuous footballing rivals, the atmosphere is very different. While in Newcastle, football had the power to unite, here it divides, often in the most damaging way. We are all aware of the problem. It’s inescapable. Before Rangers went into administration, we talked of little else: the way a minority of the Celtic and Rangers support continued to fuel bigotry, with their cat-calling and sectarian singing; the way Old Firm match days saw A&E departments struggle to cope with the onslaught of victims of drunken violence.

We know this vicious rivalry – spilling over as it did last season into internet hate campaigns and parcel bombs – is a blight on the city. Nevertheless, Celtic and Rangers are as integral a part of Glasgow’s heritage as shipbuilding and trade unionism and the loss of either one of them would leave a gaping hole. Alex Salmond may have taken pelters for suggesting Celtic needed its rival, but he was right, not so much because it needs the homegrown competition, or because the lack of Old Firm fixtures would jeopardise TV deals, but because the two clubs are trapped in a symbiotic relationship, each one’s cultural identity defined and consolidated in opposition to the other’s. And the city needs Rangers too, as an anchor for those fans whose ships are currently being tossed on stormy economic seas; as a life support machine for those fans for whom following the club seems as important as breathing.

For all their faults, Glasgow without either Celtic or Rangers would be an alien landscape, as unrecognisable as London without Big Ben or Liverpool without the Mersey. Which is not to say I want the clubs to go on feeding off each other’s hatred ad infinitum just so I can feel at home. Only that I think it would be better – for football fans and non-football fans alike – if football-related sectarianism could be ended organically, by both clubs learning lessons and moving forward together, rather than as a by-product of some speculator’s folly.

So I hope Rangers will be bought or, if it can’t be bought, that it rises from the ashes of liquidation with a new and better chairman at its helm. Given another chance, the club will surely emerge not only more financially realistic and socially responsible, but determined to stamp out the residual bigotry that has tarnished the city’s reputation for so long.