Fitba Hell

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.