Punch and Judy pundits, the inner chimp and never ending Rangers noise

I have noticed a recent trend among supporters, whether online or in person on a match day, complaining about the growing weariness associated with following football. When Rangers are in a slump - you may have noticed that there has been one recently - it feels exacerbated by the constant wailing and bloodletting. When Rangers are in form and are threatening to win the title - as they were only last month - that good mood is attacked by an onslaught of biomechanics and bullshit. The noise, that never-ending noise, can partially numb the excitement and enjoyment as well as have the power to transform a once familiar sad song into an entire symphony of misery.

To what extent then, is that a new facet of modern life? Is this something that has always been with us but is now simply amplified by the galactic loudspeaker that we need surgically removed from our hands? Or has the social media age changed football into a sport that is now significantly different from its ancient ancestors? A reality TV show that, no matter how hard we press down on the remote, never turns itself off?

There is certainly something in the former. Both of the first Old Firm Cup Finals that I watched on television and then in person, were dominated by controversy. On the morning of May 20 1989 - 35 years ago next month - I jumped out of bed as if it was on fire, such was the excitement of finally being allowed to attend this fixture. A Scottish Cup Final no less and one where this Rangers team - my first true love - were going to win the coveted Treble. The man to blame for them not doing so was referee Bob Valentine, marking his final ever professional appearance with a bumbling display of incompetence. First of all, he allowed the Celtic captain Roy Aitken to take a throw-in that was very clearly a Rangers ball and, with Rangers not set up to properly defend it, this led to Joe Miller scoring the only goal of the match, right before the interval. And then, with only a few minutes remaining, he chopped off a perfectly good Terry Butcher equaliser because Davie Cooper was in roughly the same postcode as the flapping Pat Bonner. I was angry that day and continued to nurse my grievance for years to come.

Admittedly my eight-year-old self didn’t attempt to pick up the ball and suggest that Rangers move to the English leagues in order to get a fair hearing but that is what Celtic manager Davie Hay was reduced to three years earlier when Rangers won the Skol League Cup. You can read more about that game and its legacy here but the Celtic fury was down to Rangers being awarded a winning penalty when Aitken pulled down Butcher in the box and then because Maurice Johnston was sent off after a set-to with Stuart Munro while on a yellow card. As Alan Davidson of The Evening Times memorably wrote in the aftermath, "To the victors the spoils. To the losers a sense of injustice that has hovered over them, like some maiden aunt, for the best part of a century". None of this manufactured outrage was anything new.

It wasn’t until I watched the entire 90 minutes of that 1989 Final when researching Revolution that I finally had to deal with my big day being spoiled like a grown-up. Two broad themes jumped out from the screen that can still be applied to refereeing rage almost every time it raises its weekly head. Firstly, and most importantly, Rangers were bad. Due to injuries to Ray Wilkins and Ian Durrant, they never got a hold of the midfield battle but Souness could have put pride to one side and opted for Derek Ferguson in there - with whom he was having yet another fight about his off-field behaviour - instead of trying to convert Stuart Munro to that position and his decision to place himself on the bench suggested a complacent belief that he would be allowed to come on and take the final glory, the hard work having already been done.

But it wasn’t Valentine who was responsible for a flat performance on a scorched pitch. Nor was he ultimately to blame for Butcher’s weak header and the even weaker back pass from Gary Stevens - possibly only his second mistake of an almost pristine debut season - that let Miller in. It was Ally McCoist who missed a second-half sitter, not the referee. The inner eight-year-old in us all, however, needs an easy target on which to pin the blame. The simplest explanation possible for failure is instead of having to work through the hundreds of decisions taken by managers and players in the build-up to and during games, not to mention the potentially millions of options not taken over the course of 90 minutes and more. The risks not chanced, the visions unseen are foregone because that one mistake or missed opportunity, isolated by our choice alone, is deemed to be the sole determining factor in history. The rest of the match suddenly doesn’t exist.

READ MORE: Remembering Davie Cooper: The last of his kind with God-given talent, 29 years on

Secondly, the decision to rule out Butcher’s goal may have been a very soft one - in Rangers’ next competitive game, the opening of the 1989/90 season, Chris Woods was left with a broken collar bone as a result of an aerial collision with Kenny McDowall, who then tapped the ball home to give St Mirren a famous victory at Ibrox - but it was a decision that Valentine was forced to make nonetheless. Cooper did make contact with Bonner and thus it became a matter of judgement, not binary fact.

This is a distinction that appears to be too often lost on us all. Despite the majority of contentious decisions being judgment calls, we still talk and scream about them as if they are a matter of indisputable truth, as clear as day if only everyone could see the world as we do. When one player makes contact with another or the ball with a hand then we are almost always thrust into the world of interpretation and multiple readings of both the law and the situation. One where contextual factors such as force, pace, control, proximity, intent and the more ethereal "occasion" and "state of the game", are factored in. As with so much of the law of the land, lawyers know that two or more outcomes can be both possible and fair. And that some judges are notoriously anal and literal whereas others will be prepared to apply a more liberal interpretation. It is, by necessity, a world for serious people.

Not for the inner child, whose opinion is fact and must be heard above all others. "All we want is consistency", is a moan that you will barely go a fortnight without hearing somewhere. Tough. In order for consistent decision-making to truly apply, you would need the same referee taking control of every single game, played in exactly the same way while he or she was in exactly the same mood. In lieu of an SPFL season being played in a parallel universe, we are then perhaps forced to accept that our view of an incident is just one of many and that is just as well because you are incredibly biased, as am I. The world of football - fans, players, managers, pundits (whether they be professional analysts or pantomime puppets) - would be far better served if, instead of asking if something is a penalty, we asked if it could be. Or, instead of always stating as fact that an incident is definitely deserving of a red card, we acknowledge that in our opinion, we think that it should be. At the very least, we could be a lot more open about the central truth throughout: we want key decisions to go our way. It is the inner child at play again.

It affects the neutral and the binary decisions too, of course. Just last weekend, the greatest FA Cup comeback story of all time was denied by everyone who doesn’t support Manchester United when Haji Wright was adjudged by the VAR official to have been offside in the buildup to a sensational winning goal for Coventry City. "Toenails" and "size 13s" were some of the cliches used to illustrate the argument that it is surely too small a margin to use, despite the law not allowing for such flexibility. Even if there was scope for "daylight", there would still be a minuscule margin for those who fall into that area and those who do not. It would just be kicking the angry can ever so infinitesimally slightly further down the road. Much to the frustration of romantics watching in their living room, offside really isn’t a matter of judgment, no matter the potential for narrative.

One wonders if the same level of consternation would have followed a similar United winner being pulled back so as to allow Coventry the chance on penalties but strangely enough, I am almost certain that if Wright had tried to bundle the ball past André Onana and the goal line technology showed that one millimetre of the ball had not, in fact, crossed the line, there would have been widespread acceptance. Perhaps there is more trust and confidence in that particular piece of digital evidence but I would bet that "ah so close, hard lines, move on" would likely have been the prevailing tone. Some decisions then, we are able to accept like adults.

What about our consumption of the actual football itself? Is the modern-day experience truly that different to those generations who followed the game before? Again, it is certainly louder but much of the origins are the same. I am sure that a morning spent in the Mitchell Library could find some hysteria from bygone days of yore but one of Radio Clyde’s imports from American sports broadcasting - the Open Line - which was introduced by Richard Parks in the mid-1980s, almost certainly raised the temperature of takes. What followed was newspaper’s more considered letters pages giving way to tabloid "hotlines" and then, of course, the explosion of the fanzine culture. By the end of the decade, fan voices were suddenly everywhere, should you wish to find them. It is also a perfect time to take the barometer of the Rangers support, what with it being right in the middle of its greatest-ever era.

READ MORE: 'Roundheads and Cavaliers' - What history tells us of Rangers, perception and success

Famously, crucifixions on X have a long history, admittedly with an interregnum of around two millennia before Elon Musk rebranded Twitter. Footballers are often left virtually bloodied by exaggerated attacks on social media although less is said about the hysterical praise they receive upon signing or on the back of a competent debut at home to Ross County, creating quite the pedestal from which to inevitably fall.

Even when we relied on the printed word for extreme opinion - at a time when success was commonplace - no hero at Ibrox was ever truly safe. Mark Hateley can be found to be described as a "big puddin’’, Jörg Albertz a "heart lazy chance", one demanded Alexei Mikhailichenko be fined a week’s wages because he didn’t run hard enough in one match, Ian Ferguson and Erik Bo Andersen were booed onto the pitch and there were more than a few rumblings of doubt and discontent during the early moments in the Rangers careers of Brian Laudrup and Paul Gascoigne not to mention constant murmurings about Walter Smith’s ability to guide Rangers forward during an era when the club was running out of Brasso. Even the original "Goldenballs" himself, Alistair McCoist MBE, was not immune. Being too friendly with Celtic players in the media and not standing up for club colleagues who were exiled from the Scotland camp, being two of the main charges. More Rangers goals than anyone else was not enough for some when setting their own criteria for perfection.

What was often missed then, as is now, is that it is very difficult to extricate the individual contribution to a team sport. Poorer Rangers players than James Tavernier, John Lundstram and Connor Goldson have won multiple titles for the club but that matters little when assessing their contribution to history. The fact that new signing after new signing has arrived at Rangers in recent years looking for help from a leadership team who need help themselves barely registers when the anger flows. It is hard to argue that it would have looked much different if smartphones were available during nine-in-a-row. When football is used by thousands upon which to project the frustrations of life, there will always be something to moan about, even in the best of times.

And it is perhaps that season - the claustrophobic year of destiny that was 1996/97 - that most resonates today when I am reminded of that other fan habit: predicting the future. Before the Old Firm clash earlier in the month I felt certain, for two reasons, that nothing less than a win would do. Firstly, given the recent history at Parkhead, the comfort of a five-point cushion felt necessary. Secondly, given the level of performance in the weeks leading up to the game at Ibrox, it was clear that the side needed the kind of confidence and energy boost that only an Old Firm win can provide, so as to see them through the final run, lest they drop silly points elsewhere. And so, after that ridiculous 3-3 draw I tweeted that the point "probably won’t be enough in the end".

"Some miserable take that!", "We can go 2 points clear on Wednesday ffs", "Too negative" and "Martyn’s a glass half empty kind of guy. Lots of those in our ranks. Beaten before we kick a ball. Thank fvk these glass-half-empty guys are not players, gives us all hope" is a sample of the response. Similar was to follow in the general conversation that Sunday and Monday, as fans complained about the towel being thrown in by others. "It is clear", many claimed, "that some have forgotten what a title race feels like".

The truth is that it was much the same when we had been used to winning them. Reading through the newspaper hotlines and fanzines during the season that clinched nine is a contemporaneous collection of tension. Rangers won all four Old Firm league games that season but there was a constant feeling for some that the margins were too thin and that Smith’s plan to sit back and counter was too risky. "It really is frightening to think how inept we are", wrote one fan in February 1997 as a once-safe lead was being eroded and an injury list mounted up. Did we need to lose this title to finally act on the manager and coaching staff, another asked. When a good run of seven wins came to an end with a draw at Rugby Park, fines were demanded. When Rangers didn’t capitalise on a Celtic slip in December by losing at Tannadice, someone wanted their collective wages donated to the charity Cash For Kids. It was a historic season but it wasn’t always enjoyable. Weekend celebrations soon faded for many, taken over by the knife-edge worry about what might happen next.

READ MORE: The day Rangers' genius stole the Cup Final limelight from a hat-trick hero

And is that really so unreasonable? We have no control over this thing of ours. We invest money and emotion into the physical activities of others in the hope that they provide us with elation but knowing that we will often end up annoyed. We scream at them for being "losers" despite them earning thousands of pounds regardless and us being left dependent on the achievements of strangers to provide our own highest highs. To borrow from that Mitchell and Webb meme, are we the losers? Probably.

One thing is for sure and that is that we vastly inflate our own agency in the overall outcome. We are, in fact, holding no towel with which to throw. And, when there is an angry reaction to a downcast prediction, it is the impact on the reader that is the real driver, not the potential debilitating stress that a Rangers player might suffer while self-searching online. Many need their own hope reaffirmed by positive predictions and when it isn’t, the resulting snark suggests a fragility and insecurity in the faith that they so loudly proclaim. Once more, the childlike need for someone to tell us that it will all be ok comes to the fore. Given that so much of our happiness rests on an outcome that is never certain, it is a precarious business being a football fan and it always has been. We have hope to keep us going - football has told us often enough that there should always be hope - but belief wavers by the passing week. As it should do. As the evidence changes, so should one’s opinion.

And finally, what of that traditional loudspeaker, the mainstream media? By chasing hits on the new landscape, this is probably the strongest ground on which to argue that there has been fundamental change instead of the status quo just being bigger and noisier. There were always loudmouth pundits such as Brian Clough and Jimmy Hill, journalists turned polemical broadcasters like Ian Archer and Gerry McNee and Ian St John’s off-mic cheers at late goals against Rangers make Chris Sutton’s sound demure but, on the national broadcaster at least, there was a veneer of respectability and objectivity.

Sky’s razzmatazz may have hastened that pursuit of banter and controversy but initially, it looked as if it would provide time and space in the schedules for depth, not froth. In 1991, the Scottish football media was outraged that Pieter Husitra managed to escape a red card in the first Old Firm clash of the new season, for his tackle on Tommy Coyne. The new Footballer’s Football Show on Sky, however, provided the time to look in detail at the incident and, with Gary Stevens sweeping up behind and FIFA’s new "last man" directive now in place, it was deemed to be the fair outcome. Then, ignorance of the laws was a source of embarrassment. Now, it is celebrated. It is understandable that many are aggrieved when opinion consistently masquerades as fact.

Less so when it is a genuine point of view and in this case, there are once more precedents in the past. One only has to watch messers Neville and Carragher, Sutton and Boyd, to know that wearing your colours doesn’t need to stop after retirement. Balance now means having both Punch and Judy on set. Balance in the past meant looking at the game as a former professional, instead of a fan. Balance wasn’t easy to achieve for those ex-pros who came before but even when they did, it somehow still induced rage. Derek Johnstone, a Rangers legend who was an ideal fit for a media career in the 1980s and 1990s both on radio and television, managed to upset many who once adored him by offering the tame, yet accurate, view that "it would be good for the game in Scotland if Motherwell could snatch a draw against Rangers" in 1993 or when he predicted that Aberdeen would win at Ibrox in November 1995 in a match that they probably should have but had to settle for a draw in the end. "Can anyone imagine a real Ranger like Bobby Shearer coming out and saying that he thinks Rangers will get beat?", raged one fan. "Even if he thought it, he wouldn’t say it." Again, it is the base need for uniformity in order to salve internal tension.

If the inner child analogy isn’t doing it for you, then there might be a better one to sum up modern football culture. Professor Steve Peters brilliantly articulated that ancient fight or flight reaction in all of us and our need to control stress before it controls us, in his best-selling book "The Chimp Paradox". On the morning of an Old Firm game at Parkhead in March 2019, the Daily Mail’s Fraser Mackie - formerly of the Rangers News - used the theory in an article to try and explain the volatile disciplinary record of Alfredo Morelos. In extreme moments of anxiety on the field, there was a tendency for internal panic and then outward aggression. The reaction among the Rangers support perfectly encapsulates so much of the culture discussed above. There was outrage at the use of "chimp", perceived by many as a racist slur instead of the evolutionary reference that it is. For context, there had been other media pieces before that had used unquestionably racist connotations, but on this occasion, the reaction badly missed the point. Hours after publication, Morelos provided the perfect conclusion to Mackie’s article by losing his cool and getting sent off in yet another Rangers defeat.

So can football today best be described as millions of us letting our inner chimps run riot, screeching at one another and throwing shit everywhere? It sounds about right to me but, even if there is nothing truly new under the sun, where does it leave us? Surely there is a limit to how high the volume can be turned before we give up through mental exhaustion? Even as I write, there appears to be some new controversy over comments made by Connor Goldson in a podcast but, for the life of me, I cannot fathom the energy or interest to find out. It is simply too much noise about nothing.

It is sadly less likely than it was a few weeks ago but it is still possible that there will be an eight year-old boy attending his first Old Firm game at Hampden at the end of May hoping to see his team win a treble. I hope his day turns out better than mine but more so, I hope that by the time he reaches adulthood, everyone around him has managed to have the game under control. That they can let their inner impulses run wild during the 90 minutes - as they should - but find perspective and other interests soon after.

Maybe we will have our own self-help book by then, one that helps football fans consume the game without it consuming them. I think it is clear that we need one.