Supporters of either of the Old Firm, like most from the great football cities of Britain, are a demanding bunch. I appreciated this for the umpteenth time while vacating my Ibrox seat on Saturday following Rangers’ 1-0 over Celtic.

In these marvellous new front-row seats that Rangers have provided for the press I have come to enjoy the dialogue with a couple of the Rangers characters who sit behind us in the stand. On Saturday, as I was heading downstairs following the Ibrox club’s win to hear out Walter Smith and Gordon Strachan, one of them duly collared me.

“Can you tell me this?” asked this well-meaning Rangers fan. “How come we keep winning when we’re so shite?”

It was a moot point. I don’t think anyone has any illusions about the flair – or lack of it – which this current Rangers team possesses. Smith is certainly not deluded. “We know we need improving, we know what we lack, and hopefully that can come in the close season,” Smith said yesterday for the umpteenth time recently.

The more I hang around Smith this season, the more I take to him. OK, his team are in the ascendency, so the argument goes, let’s see the quality of his conduct during a time of adversity. I accept all of that. Nonetheless, there is an honesty and modesty about Smith that is highly becoming of him.

With so many media people hanging around these days, a football manager’s conduct is quite important, and Smith could give quite a few a lesson in decorum and demeanour.

Nor is his team “shite”, to requote that much-favoured Scottish adjective. Given such players as Allan McGregor, Carlos Cuellar, David Weir, Barry Ferguson, Kevin Thomson, Jean-Claude Darcheville, Steven Davis and Christian Dailly, I don’t believe such a summation is accurate. Yet Smith was quite open about his immediate priorities when he took over from Paul Le Guen 15 months ago, and dallying with flair didn’t come into it.

Le Guen’s Rangers, especially in defence, had simply been brushed aside by opponents, and Smith’s first priority was to restore robustness to Ibrox, a venue where it had never usually been lacking. “Before we start winning in spate,” Smith reasoned, “let’s first try to stop losing.”

Today, if it doesn’t sound a terribly lofty ambition, that’s only because it is sometimes forgotten just how bad Rangers had been.

Smith is now in the process of completing Phase One. When it comes, Phase Two will involve less muscle and more flair, or at least, that will be the intention.

Neither Smith nor the Ibrox fans want to subject themselves to season upon season of high balls being launched like scud missiles towards Lee McCulloch, because it is not how the game should be played.

Smith, I believe, will want his team to evolve next season into something that involves a little more creativity. This is the man, remember, whose two favourite Rangers signings were Paul Gascoigne and Brian Laudrup.

The irony is, will Rangers, at any time in Smith’s second tour of duty at Ibrox, have a better season than this? The club are almost certainly going to win the Clydesdale Bank Premier League, and if I even knew how to place a bet, I’d have Rangers bang-to-rights in the last four of the Uefa Cup. For all that a little Argentinian winger calls it “antifootball”, and even a Rangers season ticket-holder calls it “shite”, this is shaping up to be a highly exciting season for Rangers. With one trophy already on his cabinet, the old greybeard called Smith appears to know what he is doing.

The Rangers manager repeated again yesterday that “you don’t get time to build a team at the Old Firm”, meaning, success must be swift, instant, at the ready. Smith once told me that, even while lolling around on a beach in summer, a Rangers manager’s head is constantly buzzing with such issues as which player to sign, which to sell, and how to bring improvement.

I think he enjoys the intensity of it. He says he is surprised by how much progress his new team has made this season, and yet, as I discovered at Ibrox on Saturday, the pressure is unrelenting on Smith to make Rangers better and better. And if there is a lull in that progress, as Gordon Strachan is discovering, the plaudits quickly turn into cleavers.

Stop chanting game

It may be time soon to draw a veil over the tit-for-tat game that is being played by some Old Firm fans before Uefa, in terms of bigotry, sectarianism, and who is singing what, where and when.

Since the Rangers punishment of 2006 for bigoted chanting, officials at Uefa have reported that a bemusing – and sometimes amusing – game has kicked-off, where fans from both sides of the Glasgow divide, with shouts of “What about them? What about them?”, have started bombarding Uefa with any bits of shaky mobile phone footage they can find which show rival supporters singing dodgy songs. The latest incident has even involved a tabloid journalist who, rather fancying that he might be able to create a story for himself, sent some footage to Uefa of some Celtic fans in somewhat dubious party mood, thus hoping to create a story with the headline: “Celtic Fans In Uefa Probe”. And it would appear, at least in terms of a gullible media, that the reporter had some success with it on Friday, as we all fell for it.

I don’t think anyone can deny that Celtic and Rangers have a problem with unsavoury singing among their more bone-headed elements. Indeed, Rangers have already suffered humiliatingly for it. But what the Uefa punishment of Rangers in 2006 appears to have done is set off a ludicrous chain of bragging rights among rival fans.

While Celtic’s supporters crow about their rivals being officially branded as the bigoted team of Glasgow, certain Rangers fans now spend day and night trawling the internet for stuff with which to throw at Uefa in search of an equaliser.

Chaps, please calm down. The battle has been won and lost. And most Rangers and Celtic fans you meet these days are not into the Queen, the Pope, the IRA or the UDA – they simply love their football team. So could the usual suspects please give Uefa a break, as its bins are full to overflowing with some of the trivia it has had to trash.

Case of ‘No, minister’

Jim Sillars, the admirable former Labour and Socialist MP, once famously referred to Scotland as a nation of “90minute nationalists”, referring to the football crowds at Hampden Park. I thought of that phrase, perversely, while watching Alex Salmond, Scotland’s First Minister, and a nationalist if ever there was one, being roundly booed as he took to the field at Hampden last Wednesday night.

The collective mood and attitude of a football crowd is intriguing, and should not be blithely dismissed. What was it they were judging about Salmond? Whatever the case, for once Salmond’s cat-that-got-the-cream smile looked even more suspect than usual.