Foul Play always knows when the close season is about to end, for it is then that his fingernails are at their longest. No football to look at means no anxious biting of nails a development which has resulted in Foul Play s talons attaining unusual sharpness and length over the last eight weeks. Bad news for those of us who type things for a living.
By the time the close season was shuddering to a halt, I was hunting around for pubs with Channel 5 on their decoder, so that I might subject myself to the torment of a pre-season friendly between Celtic and Newcastle (on the evidence of which, Newcastle are truly fucked this season). I was even scouring the radio listings to see which, if any, stations were carrying commentary on Rangers Champions League preliminary tie somewhere out in the arse-end of Finland.
I was unable to locate anything on the dial that day, which, given the final score in the aforesaid game, was probably for the best.
Rangers are playing Parma next week in the final eliminator for the Champions League, a re-run of a UEFA Cup game last season which saw the wily Italians squeeze through 4-2 on aggregate to the quarter-finals. Ultimately they went on to win the thing.
I have already discounted the possibility of watching next week s first leg in the company of controversial rock critic George Byrne, a man whose devotion to the Gers cause stems not so much from a love of all things blue, white and red, as from a deep and utter loathing of Celtic FC and all their works and pomps.
Watching last season s Parma v Rangers game in a Dublin hostelry with Byrne was a curious experience, made all the more interesting by his frequent shouts of Come on the Billy Boys! and the subsequent murderous glares we elicited from the other drinkers on the premises. Mindful of his provocation, and the fact that there was a snooker cue behind the bar, I nailed my colours to the mast by leaping out of my seat when Parma went ahead. Then a fellow with a Scottish accent, who I had heretofore taken as a Celtic fan, glowered at me. You can t win with these bastards.
August is usually a pleasurable month for the anti-Rangers lobby, who have generally had something to crow about over the past few years as a result of the consistant humiliation of Rangers in Europe. It offers some golden memories to cling onto during the winter months, as the Ibrox filth settle down and start beating seven bells out of Celtic in the Scottish championship.
The soft, dappled sunlight of late-summer sunsets seems strangely incomplete without the spectacle, on ITV, of Rangers fumbling and groping their way through an encounter with some crack outfit from the wilds of Cyprus, before an increasingly appalled 50,000 crowd at Ibrox. There was, of course, a strange aberration a few years ago when they walloped Russian champions Alania Vladikavkaz 7-2 in an away game, a fixture in which . . . shall we say . . . the Russkies commitment to the cause of Champions League qualification appeared, eh, less than total. But the less said here about that, the better.
Celtic have performed even more abysmally in European competition, although surely not even they can fail to give Welsh amateurs Cwmbran Town a thorough rogering in the opening round of the UEFA Cup. After that, though, with dreadnoughts like Slavia Prague and Admira Wacker lurking in wait, it looks like forty miles of bad road up ahead for John Barnes and his troops. n
Jonathan O Brien