Fitba Hell

I feel queasy.

Scotland are playing with that familiar air of panicked desperation. Georgia are lording it over them like a playground bully who's stolen your conkers and is twirling them contemptuously, just out of reach.

I haven't seen that since ...

AGGGHHHH!!!

He's coming towards me, arms outstretched, wearing that inane yet malevolent grin.

He sings, puntuating each utterance with a taunting, drawn-out, sibilant 'z'.

"We are ze cheeky boyzzz! We are ze cheeky boyzzz! Touch my bum! Don't be shy!"

NOOO!!! IT CAN'T BE!!!

BERTI LIVES!!!

Aberdeen coach Sandy Clark pontificating about AC Milan keeper Dida on Radio Scotland tonight:

"Being Brazilian, he's obviously temperamental."

Yes, really.

MARK McGhee can look forward to a career in journalism when he leaves football management, should he wish to pursue that line of work.

A fan has just run onto the pitch at Parkhead and struck out at AC Milan keeper Dida, seconds after Celtic had scored what proved to be the winning goal.

Apparently - I'm listening to Radio Scotland - Dida ran after the fan, then stumbled melodramatically to the ground and had to be stretchered off.

Analyst Murdo MacLeod is foaming at the mouth at the Dida's apparent antics - he's making the most of it, claims MacLeod.

Enter McGhee and a voice of reason. McGhee, who has impressed with his calm and insightful thoughts on the game since becoming manager of Motherwell, chides MacLeod. Dida may be faking injury, but it is too early to draw any opinions - did the guy have a knife, did Dida have a flashback to horrific indcident when he was hit by a flare thrown by an Inter Milan fan, have we seen it from the wrong angle? We have to wait for the tempestuous atmosphere to subside and look at things with a clear head.

Some say trying to find out about the world by reading a newspaper is by telling the time with a clock that only has a seconds hand. McGhee, though, has the sort of cool rational head that makes a a journalist - never mind a football pundit - par excellence. Look out Nick Robinson.

On another note, I almost pity the idiot that ran onto the pitch and nobbled Dida. Football fans have no sense of perspective (you wonder how many see any irony in Bill Shankly's claim that it is more important than life or death) and the retribution this guy will get in the streets of Glasgow, in the workplace and in prison - if that's where he ends up - will be far more than the crime deserves.

THERE really is no escape these days. For all the media attempts to define the essence of summer as stawberries and cream at Wimbledon, tumbling in the mud at T in the Park or inane sexual shenanigans on Big Brother, fitba still creeps through the cracks of the close season and demands our attention.

Flicking through the channels late at night earlier this week, I stumbled across one of the most bizarre fillers ever to take up space on the box: Gaelic fitba. Presumably having struggled to fulfil a Gaelic broadcasting quota, Scottish Television had exclusive highlights of an amateur match from some picturesque corner of the north-west Highlands.

The game was watched in the flesh by one distracted-looking elderly chap in a bunnet and a gaggle of urchins behind one goal, intent on demonstrating their mastery of profane hand gestures to an unfortunate goalkeeper. The Gaelic-speaking commentators made game attempts at stirring up enthusiasm, but were somewhat undermined by the portly players' muted celebrations each time a goal was sclaffed into the net; they looked almost ashamed (is participation in football the act of a social pariah in shinty country?)

I had no interest in who won and neither, it seemed, did anyone else, but my neutrality and the lilting, unintelligible commentary was strangely pleasing. It was less like watching football and more like the the zen bliss of Burt Bacharach-soundtracked Teletext pages on BBC2 in the wee small hours of a Tuesday morning.

What a traitorous mercenary that Steven Naismith is. So you might expect Rangers fans to protest as one of their own stands to be pilfered by the green and white hordes.

Naismith - unlike the more bilious element that takes up much of Ibrox - seems an even-tempered, amiable type of chap. He's part of a generation where the old tribal loyalties are fading away - ever more quickly as the Scottish and European football authorities have finally cottoned on that sectarianism might not be a good thing. So who's to blame him if he moves to Parkhead if it's a better move for his career?

Even Rangers fans seem reluctant to direct vitriol at Naismith so far. He'll undoubtedly have to field abuse from a few vein-popping, blue-nosed eejits if he moves to Celtic, but a glance through the Daily Record Hotline today suggests that Ibrox regulars are more concerned about the humiliation of having lesser financial clout than their rivals - not that Naismith might ditch the chance to go to the team he's long supported.

Things are changing in west of Scotland fitba. I wouldn't have believed I'd be writing this a couple of years ago, but it looks like the singing of the Billy Boys at Ibrox will be reduced to the quaint quirk of a lunatic fringe before too long.

IT WAS a little strange to see gruff football manager Davie Moyes wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Madeleine McCann when Everton played their last game of the season. It’s a horrible thing that this little girl has vanished, and no one should doubt the good intentions of Moyes or any of the other footballers to have appealed for her safe return. But what if Moyes had appealed on his t-shirt for an end to the poverty that kills thousands of children each day, or for something to be done about the relentless killing of civilians in Iraq? Football’s governing bodies are fanatical in their efforts to keep the sport apolitical (best not to scare away the sponsors, they reason). Sadly, while Moyes is free to express sympathy for the plight of the McCann family, there are millions of other tragedies he must ignore.

MAYBE Liverpool do have the worst-behaved fans in Europe. UEFA says so, and its findings at least seem to be based on some sort of scientific, unemotive criteria. But there’s been a predictable outcry from all with even the remotest stake in English football.

Had the same findings been published 20 years ago, politicians and media pundits would have rallied round UEFA and got stuck into what was an easy target. The prevailing narrative of the day when football hit the news was that of the football thug; something for England to be ashamed of.

In 2007, the narrative has changed. Now, the English game has been buffed up by Sky to produce the shiny “best league in the world”, the bigger teams have become lifestyle choices for the chattering classes, and football gets in the news because players have famous girlfriends. The thug has no place in the sanitised rebranding of English football.

The change is crystallised in Michael Howard, that ersatz Koppite, who this week sees fit to decry UEFA’s findings. Two decades ago he was part of a government hellbent on introducing identity cards at football grounds, his leader, Margaret Thatcher, having dismissed fans as a loutish rabble to be herded away from polite society.

And yet the football thug exists, just as he did 20 years ago; less frequently to be found inside stadia, but still a persistent, influential presence. The accompanying, uncomfortable truth is that others are drawn to his seedy glamour. The dividing line between the “true” fans and the undesirable “minority” – so beloved by those in the public eye who find society’s shades of grey too complex to convey – is a fiction. But so long as it preserves the English football's squeaky-clean branding, it will continue to be peddled.

WHAT'S happened to Alan Hansen? He used to be a sharp pundit whose weary disdain was an entertaining counterweight to his more bumptious colleagues. Now, as his arching eyebrows and puffing cheeks make a feeble attempt to pass themselves of as a personality, Hansen does nothing more than spout endless truisms. He is the laziest of a tiresome boys' club that spends the whole of Match of the Day batting platitudes back and forth.

This week, there is evidence that Hansen has sunk to a new low, posted ingloriously on the BBC's website. It's his take on how Manchester United won the English league title, which has been given the insipid headline of "Consistency has been the key to Man Utd's title success". Should you make it beyond that snooze-inducing opener - in the vain belief that an idle BBC underling has done ill service to Hansen's scintillating prose - you will encounter possibly the worst example of "Will this do?" journalism ever to slump onto the web.

"The best team always wins the championship," he informs us - this is the mind-blowing premise the entire article is based on.

"I have to say that there is no great difference between the top two," he opines, comparing the merits of Manchester United and Chelsea.

A little later, he muses that "next season it will be interesting to see who the bookies make favourites for the title."

Should you have soldiered on this far, you might just make it to Hansen's staggering conclusion: "And I expect the top four at the end of next season to be the same as this season. In what order, I don't know. But it's an exciting prospect."

I don't blame Hansen for not being a great writer. But he was a great footballer and should be able to provide us Sunday League nobodies with some insight from his experience at the game's highest levels. Compare his erstwhile fellow pundit Gordon Strachan, whose sharp wit was backed up with a thought-provoking looks at tactics.

It's obvious, however, that while Strachan has spent much of the time since his playing days buzzing about the training ground, Hansen's critical faculties have been reduced to mush after too much lolling about on the Match of the Day sofa.

(In case you think I've been harsh and quoted Hansen out of context, take look at the full piece at http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/eng_prem/6625445.stm)

LET’S for a moment set aside whether Match of the Day’s first female commentator is any good, and consider instead the calibre of those criticising Jacqui Oatley. The wits behind an internet petition calling for her sacking have dubbed themselves Woman Commentator On MotD - Go Back To The Kitchen. Meanwhile, Dave Bassett – the man whose thuggish teams did for football what Sex Lives of the Potato Men did for life-enhancing cinema – opined that a female commentator’s higher-pitched voice is offputting. If these hilarious dolts are her main opposition, Oatley should feel no more threatened than a Rottweiler set upon by a couple of mentally deficient hamsters.

FLORENTINO Pérez had a go at Victoria Beckham recently for allegedly distracting David Beckham from his football. Pérez appeared uneasy with the thought that Posh might just be the stronger partner in the Beckhams' marriage, and turned this strength into evidence of a dastardly use of feminine wiles to undermine an unwitting husband.

The same thing happened to Yoko Ono many years ago - a male-dominated world was uncomfortable that one of its most prominent pop-cultural icons appeared in thrall to a powerful woman. It's a scenario triggers the most unreconstructed of male reactions: undermine that horrible, threatening woman at all costs. So Ono got tarred as a gold-digger, and, when she's not being accused by away fans of a fondness for sodomy, Posh cops flak from Pérez for her husband being past it.

A crackpot idea, surely? England has three teams in the European Cup semi-finals; Manchester United blew away any lingering thoughts that Italy had the best league in Europe.

Maybe, but the really significant news in English football this week is the failure of the FA Cup semi-finals to sell out. The football association's showpiece trophy, "the best cup competition in the world" has lost its lustre.

Blackburn, remember, is only 30 or so miles from Old Trafford, where Rovers' tie against Chelsea will be played. A fan on the radio today, who claimed not to have missed a game since the seventies, said it just cost too much to take his kids along - adult tickets cost up to £55. Meanwhile, as fans of Chelsea, Manchester United and Liverpool celebrate their success in the Champions Lerague, the flipside is that supporters of every other side are getting bored with the impregnability of those three, along with Arsenal, in the top four of the Premiership.

The patience of football clubs' core support is being eroded. The authorities won't mind too much as long as big business is taking an interest, but how long can that be guaranteed with the apparent hooliganism making a comeback?

The bubble is swelling fast.

THE Italian police are brutal, the Ultras are out of control. Manchester United fans had the misfortune to be caught between the two and were utterly blameless. So you'd think by reading much the press coverage today of last night's violence at the Roma-Manchester United game, where United's fans are portrayed as meek little lambs to the slaughter.

Yet last week I went to the Scotland-Italy match in Bari, where there was not a hint of last night's trouble. It was the same story last month when Celtic played in Milan. Why the utterly different scenarios in a country where football violence is supposedly a nationwide scourge?

Perhaps the reputation of English fans precedes them, and the carabinieri and the Ultras fancied testing their mettle. But few commentators seem to have considered another factor; for all the efforts to prevent known hooligans travelling abroad, there remains among some English fans a confrontational, no-one-likes-us-we-don't-care attitude, a volatile disdain for the host country.

I write from experience of Frankfurt last summer where, for all the credulous media coverage about a new breed of friendly English fans, the overriding memories of being among tens of thousands of white-shirted beer guzzlers are of leering chants about how the RAF "from England" shot down German bombers, and bobbing past the spittle of pumped up teenage boys bellowing that there would be "No surrender, no surrender to the IRA". Far from a league-of-nations togetherness, I saw Germans looking nervously over their shoulders any time a group of ruddy-faced drunkards stumbled past.

The glossy new vision of English football that Sky and other marketeers have peddled over the last 15 years has no room for unsavoury violence, and it seems that most pundits have taken this spin as fact. The Sun is the most strident defender of the English male abroad, whether he's in fatigues or an acrylic replica top, and today went for the default headline of "Brutal cops beat Man U fans." The internet allows dissenting voices on Rupert Murroch's baby, however, and one Italian fan who claims to have been at the game suggested that United fans were responsible for much of the trouble by throwing objects into the Roma end after the Italians had scored the opening goal; "Hooliganism is in the English DNA," he suggests.

None of which is to excuse police brutality or Italian thugs, or to take sides in apportioning blame for last night's scenes. But our friends down south are mighty complacent, not to say a little deluded, if they truly believe the English disease has been cured.

I FOUND myself scoffing uncharitably at some harmless-looking students on Sunday. A gaggle of Irish girls, clad in green, had descended upon Cooper’s on Great Western Road to watch their team play Wales in the Six Nations. I, too, had been dragged along by a native from across the water to watch what, in my more sour moods, I call ‘egg-chasing’.

As Ireland launched a frenetic attack, I noticed that the Irish girls were chatting away, oblivious to their team’s surge through the Welsh defence. "Look at that", I muttered to my absurdly patient better half, as, not for the first time, I moaned about the laissez-faire attitude of so many so-called rugby fans.

Then I got home and thought about it a bit more. Those girls had spent a pleasant Sunday afternoon having a leisurely drink, catching up with friends, and enjoying a bit of sport. If Ireland had lost, it probably it wouldn’t have spoiled their day too much. They had a healthy sense of perspective.

Compare the hordes of grown men across the country who pet their lips and wallow self-indulgently around their homes for days on end if they don’t see their team win (mea culpa). Who really deserves more scorn? The sunny Irish girl or the sulking man-child?

Ulises de la Cruz gives away 20 per cent of his salary to charity projects in his native Ecuador. He plays for Reading in the English Premiership, where, one newspaper calculated recently, the average player earns close to £700,000 a year. Sadly, Premiership footballers are more generally noted for losing count of their sports cars and indulging the extravagant whims of their dead-eyed Stepford wags. De la Cruz must feel like Mother Teresa at a loan sharks’ convention.

THEY might as well rush out a DVD of Saturday’s action at Ibrox and call it I Love 1992. We had lusty proclamations of allegiance to Walter Smith’s ‘army’, a 5-0 thumping of a hapless Dundee United, and Super Ally in shorts. The feelgood factor was back after six months of misery with that inscrutable Frenchman.

How very, very shortsighted. So Rangers will probably finish in the top two now. Given that Barry Ferguson’s wage packet is more than most other SPL team’s first 11 put together, that should be the natural order of things (the triumphalism of Rangers fans in seeing their team put five past such financially mismatched opposition borders on the imbecilic).

Had he stayed at Ibrox, Paul le Guen may have fallen farther into the hole he found himself in. But then again, he might have turned Rangers into an elegant, atypically Scottish team winning international kudos – and Rangers’ UEFA Cup form offered a glimmer of just such a possibility.

As it is, Rangers fans will just have to content themselves with brutish domination of wee Scottish teams and ritual humiliation against the European big boys. It really will be the 1990s all over again.

THOSE Rangers fans baying for Paul le Guen’s head should consider this: aren’t they the ones to blame for Barry Ferguson’s apparent ostracisation?

Barry Ferguson is not by nature a Roy Keane or Billy Bremner; he’s not a player whose talent is to make a bone-jarring tackle in his own penalty box, then bulldoze through midfield to thump home a goal at the other end. His skills are more subtle: deft reverse passes, dinks through tights defences, elegant changes of direction as he scans the pitch for space.

But those talents are lost on many. In Scotland, the roar of approval is for the bone-crunching tackle; the clever pass merits only a ripple of applause. This is a country where a myth persists that Paul McStay never fulfilled his potential, when what people really mean is that he became a more cerebral player than they had hoped; a country where Jim Bett, the best long passer of a ball I ever saw in the flesh, was routinely derided for his failure to "get stuck in".

Ferguson is a Rangers diehard. He wants to match up to expectations of fans who demand visceral evidence of passion for the club. So he wags his finger at team-mates, dives into stupid tackles, and goes against his natural instincts by picking the ball up from deep when he should be at the other end of the pitch, saving his energy for killer passes. All this is required to convince the Ibrox hordes of his devotion to the club.

Paul le Guen arrives at Rangers – after turning Lyon into one of the best teams in Europe – and sees a talented player trying too hard. Why, he wonders, is Ferguson wasting his efforts on snarling and pointing, when he should be opening up defences? He tries to persuade Ferguson of the errors of his ways. But the captain appears to have picked up by osmosis the attitudes of the fans, and refuses to change.

Le Guen’s stand against Ferguson is not the victimisation of an individual: it’s an indictment of a football culture where we prize misdirected effort above skill.