Perspective from a Rangers fan

This was uploaded onto the Huddleboard last night and was originally posted upon a Motherwell Message board as well as Fat Eck's Rangers one. Shows that there are some people out there who can forget about the rivalry when it really matters.

"I was at Fir Park one year ago today. A few thousand Bluenoses were there with me - a few thousand Motherwell fans. The Rangers won the match but both sets of supporters felt like losers after this particular game, and at this particular time in their clubs’ histories. Paul Le Guen’s last game in charge, as it transpired. It was, I reported that evening, on these very cyber pages, a “horrible” day. So many Gers fans expressing something akin to hatred for a manager who’d just dropped our captain for what PLG deemed unprofessional behaviour. A manager who’d been with us just eight months. It was the beginning of a week I felt was “traumatic” in the extreme. It took me six months to “get over” what happened to my club last January.

Twelve months on and Rangers had no game today. And I’m so glad we didn’t. We’re all glad there was no Old Firm game today. The eyes of Scottish Football are once again focussed on Fir Park, Motherwell but not because of any match taking place at the home of the Steelmen. This time, terribly, it’s a real tragedy. It’s a genuine trauma. The sickeningly untimely death of a 35-yar-old professional athlete has brought the football world to a halt. And I’m not ready for it to start up again. So many of the football people who were forced to play today also felt they should have been allowed to halt. Everyone just needed to stop. A show of respect was paramount - people will argue about whether playing all the games in one man’s honour or abandoning all the games was the best way to show that respect - but, being honest, the players, fans and officials who make up the SPL’s member clubs simply didn’t have the appetite for football today. It was just far too soon to even think about kicking a ball about.

We dare not imagine what effect it’s had on his wife, children, parents and siblings but Phil O’Donnell’s leaving of this world has stunned us all. Those of us who never knew him as a person, never met him or never supported either of his Scottish club sides, were still devestated by what happened on Saturday. Why? Because we knew him through football - we knew him as a leading participant in and provider of the game we all love. Pause is needed. Reflection and respect is just as vital right now as the simple need to recover as best we can. We want to honour the man who passed away - and we want time to absorb and partially recuperate from this body blow to the game, the game which brings us all together.

All my year-old huffing and puffing about Paul Le Guen is irrelevant, is garbage, is nothing. When compared to the death of a father, son, brother, uncle and husband, football means less than nothing. When a player passes away like this the first thing which kicks in after the disbelief and the sorrow, is a crystal clear perspective on life, and football’s place in it. This has been the theme of so many of the respectful and heartfelt posts on this site since Saturday. And I understand why. Of course I do. But to be totally dismissive of football and its place in society is to do a disservice to Phil O’Donnell and to offer a complete surrender to those who wish to make our beautiful game an arena only of bitterness, myopia and even violence. Phil O’Donnell’s loss is so heart-rendering to people who never met him because he represents all that is positive about a game which can be such a positive influence on all our lives. We who never shook hands with the man or enjoyed conversation with him yet mourn Phil O’Donnell because of what he gave us - and he gave us it through football. All the hysteria and malevolence which football can generate is destroyed in an instant by events like this - quite rightly so. But all the beauty, admiration, excitement and sheer life force it generates should never be forgotten. That’s why we’re so upset - a leading exponent of a most celebrated aspect of communal life is no longer with us. He loved his family first, but Phil O’Donnell loved the positivity of football second. In other words, he was the same as so many of us - except that this love of football was blessed with a skill to play the game like so few of us.

The first thing which often happens in the reporting of such tragedies nowadays - and it’s a sad fact that we’ve seen a few over the years - is people begin wheeling out and dismantling Bill Shankly’s addage about football being more important than life or death. Anyone with an ounce of intellect knows Shankly was wrong. But that same ounce of brain matter should also lead to the question “Well, why then DO we persist so much with following this game?”. The OTHER thing which people have been doing in the posts on this site and the articles in the newspapers since Saturday, is discussing the HIGHS which Phil O’Donnell gave them. His goal in the 1991 Scottish Cup final, his part in Celtic’s first major trophy for five years and their first league title for ten years: I’ve spoken many a time with good friends who were present at these moments and shed tears of joy during these games. Phil O’Donnell made this joy happen. Phil O’Donnell is celebrated because he helped thousands of others celebrate.

The perspective required now is not to write-off football but to ensure we focus on its propensity to lift up our lives. Phil O’Donnell’s game, his livelihood, the thing he did outside his family, is what gives us fans that arena of responsibility-free emotional expression which keeps us sane in the real world. He played the game which allows the rest of us to cope. The complete unimportance of football IS its importance. But the irrelevance of the plastic emotions we attach to it is the perspective for Phil O’Donnell’s friends and family right now. The perspective for the rest of us is to ask exactly why his death has hit us so hard. It’s because he gave us joy through football, his expression of his love of life. Those who want to use football as a vehicle of hate can leave right now.

It’s with a horrible twist of timing that, just a couple of weeks previously, I’d written a little article on football’s place in our world. It was with regard to my depressed feelings after the Lyon and Hearts gams at Ibrox in mid December. I wanted to explain exactly why the negativity from my fellow Bluenoses at these games had got me down. I too used Shankly’s line:

…The Rangers life - no, The Football life, for any fan - is NOT real life. We all know this now. As I discussed with a very dear Celtic man and a darned sound Motherwell man at my workplace just yesterday, the Shankly quote about it being more important than life and death is itself well and truly exposed. Tis sickeningly ironic that Liverpool were the club who eventually found out more brutally than most that this was one very hollow soccer aphorism. But I think I know what Bill Shankly thought he meant(!):

Football can be something which helps us all get through life. We need somewhere and something to which we can sublimate or exfoliate the rough end of the emotions which “real” life deals us. Cant tell yer line manager he’s fucking useless? - slag Barry Ferguson instead! Someone you love is having a rough time and you have to be the strong one? - have a good scream and a greet when yer team is gifted a last-minute winner by a ropey Hearts goalie! Can’t cope with the fact your mum can still beat ye at arm-wrestling? - threaten to punch a mouthy 12-year-old sat behind ye in the Govan Stand.

When times are tough ye sometimes want a pint or two. Yer not trying to run away by doing this - yer just trying to recharge the batteries. Some of us prefer, instead of a pint, the football and the alternative life it offers (It’s better than watching the Box set of Babylon 5!). Well, what happened to me last Wednesday and Satrday was the equivelant of someone not so much spitting in my pint, but sneezing onto its lovely frothy head and not offering an apology. Annoying but - fuck it - there’s better things to worry about… (http://www.fateck.co.uk/index.php/20...rborundorum-2/)

The reasons behind my ranting and railing against those who abused Rangers French manager on 2nd January 2007 are more pertinent than we’d first imagine. Basically, I don’t like to hear football fans express hatred, especially of members of their own club. Basically, I just want football to be all about the love of one’s team, the love of one’s fellow fan. I want football to be all about the LOVE.

We’re so hurt by the loss of Phil O’Donnell because he was a man who persisted, through his love of the game. He just kept going. Football is not just entertainment or social pressure valve - it can also be valuable example. Despite many injury set-backs to his career, which would have ruined the patience of a lesser man, and despite many starring roles in and contributions to many historic on-field successes which would have seen lesser men happy to surrender to the injuries and start counting his medals and regailing pub regulars with his tales of glory, Phil O’Donnell kept playing the game he loved. The game we love. He loved Celtic and he loved Motherwell. These loves bare no comparison with that of his family, but his footballing affections kept him the man that family cherish and helped make him the man so many people clearly admired.

A gut instinct which has always carried my thinking on Rangers and the “Old Firm thing” is that so many people only tell us how much they “care” when it’s something they hate. So many football fans “care” enough to slate their manager, slag one of their own players, mount protests outside the main doors of their Main Stand - but they rarely show real CARE: We rarely demonstrate patience, understanding, long-term thinking and a wish to nurture positive results through positive endorsement. Encouragement, as I reported a few weeks ago, has almost becoming an offence in the Ibrox stands at various times in my life. This depressed me and people told me not to take it so seriously - only let the good times in football count. Phil O’Donnell passes away so tragically and everyone tells us football is unimportant. Yet this man provided so many of those good times - be it when winning for Motherwell or Celtic or simply providing the quality opponent who made one of your own team’s victories worth celebrating.

Why, I’m bound to ask, do we all know Phil O’Donnell was such a lovely guy? Because the football world, to a man and woman, has been telling us so since Saturday’s tragedy first became known. The football world. Scottish fitbaw and his exemplary role within it, is the reason Phil O’Donnell’s death has hit us ALL so hard. For anyone to pass away at 35 years of age is truly tragic - but we wouldn’t know about it if it had happened to an office worker or a supermarket check-out lady or a manager of a chain of bakers shops, like my cousin, Catherine, who died suddenly during her normal working day, in Stirling last summer.

She too was in her mid-thirties, seemed as fit as a fiddle. She was taken so unexpectedly, by a brain haemorrhage and it all seemed so unreal. It still does. I hadn’t seen her for a few years. That’s just the way things work in life as we all know - we drift apart from some family members. We hadn’t been close since our childhood - shared adventures at birthday parties, jubilee parties, Royal Wedding street parties or whenever we all congregated at my gran’s. It’s only family, friends and colleagues who REALLY knew of my cousin’s passing. Because it happened at work it made a small “human interest story” in a few papers - think the Daily Record even got their grubby mitts on it. But it seemed wrong for it to be in any kind of media because it was no-one’s right to share in the family grief if they didn’t know about her. As shocked as I was, I couldn’t be traumatically upset by the news because, for so many years, I knew nothing about Catherine’s life other than very small second- and third-hand snippets, related stories of how her kids were getting on, where she was living - the usual.

It’s fair to say that, since the early nineties, I shared much more “interaction” with Phil O’Donnell than with my cousin. In the years since he began his career at Motherwell, began being a player my team had to watch out for when we played the Fir Park men, then Celtic, then Motherwell once more, I would be in the stand and he would be on the pitch three or four times a year. I remember sitting down the front of the South Stand at Fir Park, back at the end of October last, watching as he argued with the ref and rallied his troops as they played The Rangers into a very tight corner for large portions of a very uncomfortable CIS cup quarter final. It was one of those little moments where yer sporting bias dissapears involuntarily and yer deeper self says “Jeezoh! Phil O’Donnell! He’s still giving us a hard time all these years later! We’ve hud some ding-dongs with you down the years, mate”.

Sounds trite now. Sounds a bit convenient for the purposes of this rant. But I remember it. I remember specifically thinking about how long Phil O’Donnell had been giving Rangers grief. Just so happens I remember very little of him specifically during the Boxing Day match when he helped his team-mates run us ragged for 20 second-half minutes in which I could see our title challenge dissapearing for a third straight year. That he played in that game, right in front of me, only days ago, sends a chill down my spine. How Motherwell fans must be feeling right now is a matter for my deepest sympathies.

I’ve only ever supported two teams. Scotland and Rangers. But I have always - ALWAYS - been aware of how much the rest of football helps me enjoy life. I never slag referees on these pages (well almost never) - not only because I’m loath to blame anyone but my own team for their failings, but because I know how difficult their job is. I know that the game wouldn’t happen without them. Opposition players I will slag rotten but I’ll also admire their skills and pride myself on the ability to recognise a player. Without the opposition players I also would have no football world to enjoy.

There’s always people around who will say that the sympathy and admiration expressed for once “hated” rivals on their passing is the major example of the hypocrisy of football fans and their world. Well, I’d say that the modus operandi of this blog of mine, has always been to show that the TRUE hypocrisy in football is that so-called “hatred” that so many of our number wish to generate each week, be it against their own team or others. I’ve always tried to say that your football team, just like your colour, creed or religion, is just a matter of birth - you almost have no choice in the matter - so why “hate” others for being stuck with a different club??!! The “” campaigners and the people compiling lip-reading video evidence on Neil Lennon should be the ones getting themselves some perspective at this moment. The devestating wave of genuine emotion for Phil O’Donnell exposes the completely pathetic “thinking” of people who fail to see the LOVE in football, of people who refuse to understand the joke we openly play on ourselves through this game, making rivals of those we have most in common with so that we can prepare for the day we have a real enemy to be strong against. That enemy will be illness, poverty, work, lost love or the death of someone dear.

Football allows us to be unhappy and worried and elated in ways whch just don’t count for anything other than to prepare us for the joys and agonies of the real world. We can’t go taking out all these emotions on our nearest and dearest on a daily basis - so we transmute them into the vagaries of the football world and a pressure valve is created. The more emotion we can get out through football, the saner we can all become the rest of the time, the stronger we can be when real problems hit us and ours. Slag opponents and “hate it” when your team lose but always, always, always keep it in perspective. And always make love and celebration your first aim when turning up at the football. Phil O’Donnell was a player and a half. He often made me me worried and unhappy by what he could do to my team - for that I will always be grateful to him.

The emotional outlet he helped give us as a player is currently helping us mourn him as an outstanding human being, gone so very long before his time."

Thanks to faither from the Huddleboard