All hot air as Brown

While the main plot fizzled out, derby day provoked worst from the supporting cast. By Stewart Fisher

JOEY Barton claimed that Scott Brown wouldn’t be able to get near him when the two midfield rabble-rousers contested the most eagerly awaited Old Firm midfield tussle since the days of Neil Lennon and Barry Ferguson, and to be fair, that prediction was at least half right.

For most of this match, these two presumed main protagonists were deployed so far apart at the base of their respective midfields that neither were able to get a sight of each other.

On the rare occasions when they did get up close and personal, however, it tended to be Brown, and not Barton, who got the upper hand. Praised by his manager afterwards for “doing his talking on the pitch”, it was he who won the jump-ball header between the pair that led indirectly to his team’s vital opening goal, he again who nicked the ball away when the pair squared up over a drop ball right on the centre spot.

While these episodes were details in the story of this game, the literal and metaphorical distance between these two players at the end said it all about the relative distance between these two teams. While Brown had the luxury of being withdrawn early, picking up a knock with 15 minutes to play and being rested ahead of Barcelona on Tuesday, Barton was back plugging the gaps as the despairing last line of defence in a Rangers side suddenly left with 10 men on the field, not enough of whom were defenders.

If Brown versus Barton was a bit of a non-event, as usual on Old Firm day it was the quiet ones you had to watch. The maelstrom of this match can capture even the most placid of characters, and so it was when Rangers assistant manager Davie Weir was sent to the stands by Willie Collum. His crime was protesting too vehemently to the fourth official for the referee’s failure to numerically