Are Rangers heading for the quadruple or will it all end in tears?

As a Scot I’m a natural pessimist. It’s the dark winters, the rain, the bad diet and, frankly, experience that have made me this way.

Whenever I begin to think maybe it’ll be our year, up pops a Peruvian centre-forward, a dodgy Italian free kick or a Russian linesman to put me firmly back in my place.

Hope springs eternal, they say; well, not if you’re a Scottish football fan it doesn’t. Hope trickles through your fingers into the muddy radioactive dirt at your feet just when you are at your thirstiest.

As a Rangers fan I’ve less to complain about than most, but that won’t stop me complaining. So as the catchy melody of winning four competitions in one season starts to stick in my head, that nagging pessimism puts salt in my tea and realism in my Corn Flakes.

It can’t happen, can it? Well, we’ve cleared the first hurdle, the League Cup - it was the smallest fence but a few have come a cropper on it before us. The Scottish Cup also looks relatively straightforward, a replay against mid-table First Division Partick Thistle followed by a semi-final against mid-table First Division St Johnstone followed by a final against serial chokers Aberdeen or mid-table First Division Queen of the South.

Then last Saturday we again beat Celtic, our only challengers in the league. We’ve nine games left and if we can win our next six the league title is ours for a world record 52nd time. (If you say it quickly enough it sounds quite straightforward).

So with those three in the bag, there is only the small matter of winning the UEFA Cup. It is a disgrace that a club the size of Rangers have never won that trophy - surely this is the year to change that.

A quarter-final against an average Sporting Lisbon (those green hoops should be incentive enough to beat them), followed by either Fiorentina or PSV. Mid-table Italians or a Dutch team, semi-finals in Europe don’t get better than that, it is nearly a bye into the final.

And where is that final? Only a couple of hundred miles down the motorway in Manchester, practically a home match. Tell the Salford takeaways to get the deep-fried Mars Bars and the Irn Bru ready because 200,000 hungry Glaswegians are coming down for the day.

So there it is, we’re only about 10 games away from immortality. A quadruple, four shiny tin pots in front of the team for next season's photo, maybe even a piece on Radio Five Live about it (sorry, have I gone too far?), I’m almost looking ahead to next season's Champions League now.

So what can go wrong? How easy is it to take our eye off the Scottish Cup and focus on the bigger two? Only First Division opponents? Tell that to St Mirren or Motherwell. And this is Thistle's biggest game in years, a chance to show some city pride and chase the Govan millionaires back over the river doesn’t come along all that often these days.

The league is even worse, six teams can still qualify for the last UEFA Cup spot, so everything is still to play for. We've only two more home games and because of postponements two of our away games are at Celtic, arguably the hardest ground in Britain to get a result.

That’s a nightmare run-in, every game will be a battle. Some Celtic supporting striker somewhere fancies making a name for himself. And if our captain and the finest player in the league, Barry Ferguson, was to get injured or suspended, it could be disastrous. Watch a replay of the first-half against Hearts earlier this season to see what Rangers without Ferguson are like. We might be out in front but this league is easily loseable.

As for Europe, who am I kidding? Rangers always let us down in Europe. Every now and then they pull off a great result but you always know pain is only a slick, short passing move away. Sporting Lisbon, have you seen their European pedigree (or PSV’s for that matter)?

And don’t get me started on Italian teams - they were made for European football. After all, European football is only there to make the big clubs richer. They’ll change the rules before they’ll let a team from Scotland win it.

So what is it to be? Rangers, fame, fortune, adulation and a possible transfer to a mid-table jobbing Premier League team. Or the season from hell, the one we’ll always look back on and say: "At least it wasn’t as bad as 2008."