Give McCulloch Some Leeway

By Hugh Keevins

Rangers' captain Lee McCulloch has had an horrendous season, and not even his nearest and dearest could dispute that fact.

He's been banned for stamping on opponents and had to apologise to the club after being sent off for elbowing another visitor to Ibrox.

And those are just the occasions when he's been caught and held to account for his dubious actions. Lee has been a fugitive from justice as often as he's been brought to book.

There will be legions of Celtic fans able to tell you how McCulloch somehow escaped punishment when he clashed with Lee Griffiths and John Guidetti during the League Cup semi-final between the clubs at Hampden earlier in the season.

In fact, Lee's form has been so bad even the SFA's mis-firing Compliance Officer Tony McGlennan got a result against him with a retrospective suspension after yet another bruising incident missed by a referee.

So none of what follows could possibly be interpreted as an attempt to make excuses for the player who'll turn thirty-seven years old during the play-offs which will determine whether Rangers remain in the Championship or return to the highest level of Scottish football next season.

McCulloch has exhibited all of the signs of someone whose career is on the wane through natural causes. He's getting old and the sound of bones creaking can now be heard during games, such as the one his club were fortunate to draw with Falkirk at the weekend.

But what would have hurt more, do you think, the training ground flag that St. Mirren's veteran captain Steven Thomson turned into a spear and thereafter punctured team-mate John McGinn's thigh or the stabbing pain in the heart McCulloch must have felt when the Rangers fans booed him every time he touched the ball on Saturday?

What happened to Lee as he struggled to cope with Falkirk's pace and vitality underlines why players should celebrate whenever they score against a former club.

Fans are fickle, suffer from short term memory loss and reserve the right to believe that if they've paid to get in then they've also been given a free pass to hurl abuse about indiscriminately.

So why should their feelings be taken into account when a former player returns and scores against their team ?

McCulloch stayed when others fled after Rangers went into liquidation. The evacuees did what was best for them and deserved no criticism.

McCulloch, the cynics said, only remained at Ibrox because no-one else would have him. Have it your own way.

But the bottom line is the captain put more miles on the clock for himself by slogging through the lower divisions and now the signs of depreciation are beginning to show.

But the physical decline comes after services rendered to the club who pay your wages, and then you get booed for being human and suffering from the effects of long service.

McCulloch gets paid plenty to put up with the aging process, but that's not the point. What he got from a section of the crowd on Saturday was out of order. The same ungrateful fans will expect McCulloch to put his body on the line when Rangers go to Tynecastle on Saturday and help them make second place in the league table, thereby avoiding six play-off ties.

Luckily for them, Rangers' manager Stuart McCall will ignore the ingrates and trust in McCulloch to rise to the occasion in Edinburgh as old troopers are wont to do after a disappointing match.

Whatever happens there, and whoever plays for either side, we could do without any more conspiracy theories, thanks very much.

If Rangers win there'll be the demented ones who'll say Hearts lay down to them because they preferred to see city rivals Hibs put to the maximum test of their ability to go up.

If Falkirk lose to Hibs on the same afternoon the conspiracy theorists will say that's because the Bairns wanted to put Rangers to the maximum discomfort and see if they could keep the Ibrox cash cow in the Championship for the benefit of the other teams there.

Supporters see conspiracies where there are none and suspect low motives at every turn. It's become an embarassment.

Celtic are denied a penalty against Inverness Caley Thistle in the Scottish Cup semi-final and that's supposedly proof of institutionalised bias against the club.

Celtic are mistakenly awarded a penalty against Dundee United the following weekend and that's because they were due a dodgy decision, according to Leigh Griffiths.

It would, to use a psychological term which must soon feature in the psychiatric dictionary, do your head in.

Is there any chance people could go to a game in this country and derive any enjoyment out of it ?

Arsenal played Chelsea on Sunday and the first half was littered with penalty claims that ranged from the stonewall variety to the "Seen them given" category.

And what about Aston Villa and their struggle to avoid relegation ?

Two down to Man City at the weekend, they got back to equality and were then denied a certain penalty that would have see home keeper Joe Hart sent off.

Why ?

The match officials wrongly gave offside first of all and City then ran up the park and scored a winner.

We'd be living under martial law if that happened here. Or else the General Election would have had to be called off so that the relevant authorities could pay proper attention to the business of punishing those responsible for the non-award of spot kicks.

Our volatility is becoming the cause of a sizeable dent in our credibility. Just ask the captain of Rangers.