RFCPOTY16 | Lee Wallace

[ian1964 10,724]

Young Player: McKay

John Greig Award: Wallace

Goalscorer: Waghorn

Best Goal: Tavernier

PPOTY: Waghorn

POTY: Wallace

[D'Artagnan 173]

Wonderful to see our Captain picking up awards.

 

Hopefully the next one he receives, courtesy of the club, will be a place in the Hall of Fame.

[Germinal 27]

I don't live in Glasgow, but like most people from the satellite commuter towns around the city, it's just easier to tell people that's where you come from. It's only 10 minutes up the road, after all, and I've been 'heading into town' for 30 years and more. I like going to the pictures in town because there's a better buzz than the multiplex nearby, the restaurant scene is far better, the pub choice is endless, and the patter (usually with total strangers) unbeatable. To all intents and purposes I am a Glaswegian.

 

My relationship with Edinburgh is, therefore, complex.

 

Despite being quite the arty type, I have eschewed a visit to the Edinburgh Festival on the entirely reasonable grounds that it is located in Edinburgh. I've never had to expand on this rationale to anyone from the West, incidentally - it appears to be QED. A wee downturn of the mouth, a shrug of the eyebrows and a 'ferr enuff' indicates that everyone gets it. If someone I really want to see is touring but for some bizarre, inexplicable reason opts to book the Playhouse that's me out. Not even the RSC touring The Tempest could tempt me along the M8.

 

The only exception to this was when The Velvet Underground reformed for a pension pay day and their only gig in Scotland was in The Forbidden East. Repairing thence about lunchtime with some stoner friends, we picnicked in a rather nice park, the baguettes and salami complemented by the pungent aroma of their 'home rolled' cigarettes. After a while the large number of police cars going in and out of the high rise block opposite became noticeable even to three stoned Weegies, resulting in us relocating to a spot which wasn't across the road from Lothian and Borders Police HQ. The rozzers, stunned perhaps at the sheer effrontery of West Coast youth passing an afternoon skinning joints before their very eyes, took no action, but it merely confirmed my prejuidice - you'd never have got away with that outside Helen Street office.

 

Subsequent, and reluctant, visits for Edinburgh's Hogmanay only served to emphasise the otherness of the place. While you could blether away to millions of Aussies, Kiwis or English folk up for the day, there were hardly any locals about. Possibly they were as enraged at the rivers of pish beflooding their town as the Manc's were back in 2007 and had retired home in the huff, but to me it was yet more evidence of their anti-social natures.

 

Ian Black was, I felt, the final nail in Edinburgh and its surrounding environs coffin.

 

And as for salt and sauce...it's just wrong. No one has ever stepped confidently up to the table on Masterchef, dumped a plate of that down while the voiceover lassie huskily intones 'Rab has prepared a bag uh chips, eh, drenched in salt and broon sauce. Whit's wrang wi' that, ye a Weegie ur sumthing?'

 

All the more impressive, then, that the defining images of the weekend was Three Men from the East, all of whom have built or are building our club into the thing that it is. Sandy Jardine, no longer with us in person but who will remain in spirit as long as there's a Rangers. John Grieg, beefier now, with the stiff gait which marks out the old school, play through the pain footballer, but still the same man who drove the club on, sometimes through sheer force of personality, and who defines the expression 'in with the bricks'. Although competition for the title is fierce, surely the most embarrassing, un-Rangers like episode of the last five years was the inability of John Grieg to watch Rangers play football.

 

And now, in their wake, our captain Lee Wallace has stepped forward. I didn't think he was all that special when he joined, and like so many others he went backward under Ally. But what a revelation as a player this season, and what an unusually well rounded man to find in football nowadays. It's a measure of the new management team's eye for not just a player but a person that he was immediately given the armband - Wallace really has developed into a figure as important for Ranger snow as John Grieg was then.

 

I can't think of any higher praise than that. Well done Lee Wallace, Rangers Captain and Rangers player's player of the year.

Edited April 25, 2016 by Germinal