Nutmeg Issue 1

1
Issue
The Scottish Football Periodical
Including: Stuart Cosgrove on Scottish football & the new economy. / / The making
of Pat Nevin. / / Jonathan Wilson on the Scottish roots of tiki-taka. / / Why we should
love our referees. / / Neil Forsyth on Ralph Milne. / / Goalkeepers as managers.
Michael Tierney on the last game with his father. / / The curious case of Islam Feruz.
The rise and rise of Robert Rowan. / / Gerry Hassan on the 2016 cup final aftermath.
The day time stood still in Dundee. / / Adrian Searle on Football Manager addiction.

Welcome
THE NUTMEG
By Daniel Gray
The nutmeg. Impudent, cherished,
ornamental. Arrogant, even. It is an act of
rebellion and a splash of art. It awakens
the humdrum match and embroiders the
turf with glitter. It is a playground aim and
a wistful thought about baggy-trousered
evangelists conjuring and beguiling on
sepia afternoons. It is a status symbol
flaunted by the gifted winger, and a
Molotov Cocktail hurled boldly through
the eye of a needle. It is hedonism and
affection in a cruel cruel world, a glowing
thought that footballers can still shake
free from order to enlighten and entertain.
Here is a spontaneous act of disobedience.
The crowd seldom sees it coming,
the defender is in a different time zone.
He is flummoxed and befuddled, a toddler
lost in a supermarket. The nutmegger
has twisted him and turned the pitch
hazy. He is humiliated and defeated, a
flailing leg reacting late and hanging
in the air like a suspended drawbridge.
Beyond a hefty turn and chase in pursuit
of his tormentor and his dignity, the only
escape is a crude killjoy foul. A full-back’s
arm and shoulder are locked rigid and
thrust between creator and ball, the flame
snuffed. Two arms aloft claim innocence,
a sprawled victim cries murder.
Yet that full-back has his own variation
on the theme, for the nutmeg is varied
and motley. He is the methodical
practitioner, a father in the back garden
preparing and executing the nutmegging
of a son. His chunky version will rarely
be enacted, and certainly only on one
of those ambrosian Saturday afternoons
when everything clicks. He is closeddown
by some apathetic winger, shapes
to clout the ball but instead scrolls it
beneath his jumping opponent and meets
it on the other side. The crowd cheer like
guests at a surprise party. It does not rank
high in the pantheon, but a nutmeg it is.
As such, it is as valid as the side-stroking
of a pass between tree-trunk legs, and
the stellar vintage that is spooling a ball
through a goalkeeper’s bent knees.
Majestic beyond these, though, is the
deft nutmeg which anticipates a tackler’s
every breath and defies trigonometry.
Here, the slight player has the whip
hand and draws most blood, enticing an
opponent close and rolling the ball with
an inner heel deployed like the flipper bat
on a pinball machine. He smuggles that
ball through an impossible angle, a cave
wrought from a golf hole. It is majestic
and argues poetically why this game is an
art form and not a science.
This treat sustains, its appeal base
and intrinsic – hark the young cries of
‘Megs!’ across park and field. It helps that
‘nutmeg’ is such a pleasing, gallus word
that can be rolled around and savoured,
and a treasured entry among those valueleaden
football words that bond fans
across interminable weddings and hellish
sales conferences. The nutmeg is a rare
delight to luxuriate in. l
September 2016 | nutmeg | 3

Contents
Issue 1
Welcome to the first issue of Nutmeg.
Our aim is to offer something new in
Scotland - a football publication that is
all about the writers, the writing, and
great stories told at length.
We want to free writers from the
restrictions of a news-driven agenda
and the pressures of imminent
deadlines to cover topics they care
about and at the length and breadth
the stories deserve.
When we started planning Nutmeg
the main question we were asked
was: why print? Why not digital? The
answer is that we believe print offers a
very different reading experience, one
that enhances the enjoyment of good
writing. And we take great pleasure
in the experience of receiving a
publication through the letterbox and
reading it at our leisure.
Scottish football is known for many
things; some good, some bad and
some downright rotten. But we have a
proud history and we still have people
who care deeply about the game and
its future. We count ourselves among
them.
There is no shortage of great
characters, fascinating stories and
important issues, all of which deserve
to be written about at length and by
some of the best, most informed, most
entertaining and most illuminating
writers.
We hope that you will have faith
in our ambition and will continue
to subscribe to Nutmeg. It will be
published four times a year, and we
would be delighted if you could help
us by spreading the word via social
media – or good old word-of-mouth.
Most of all we hope you enjoy the
first issue.
6 Finding my identity
My football story is different. This is how
it all began, and where it ended. Words
and pictures by Colin McPherson
16 The Nutmeg Essay: Crushed by the
wheels of industry
Scottish football and the new economy.
By Stuart Cosgrove
FAMILY TIES
28 The Last Game With My Father
A postscript to his book The First Game
With My Father. By Michael Tierney
37 BvB and Me
How Borussia Dortmund became a part of
my life. By Hugh MacDonald
40 East End Boy
I should support Hibs. My soul belongs to
West Ham. By Alastair McKay
DUNDEE UNITED
42 Remembering Ralph
Ralph Milne was many things; above all,
he was great company. By Neil Forsyth
51 14 May 1983: The day time stood still
in Dundee
One of the most remarkable climaxes to a
football season. By Richard Winton
56 Why I celebrated Dundee United’s
relegation
I know it’s wrong. But I can explain.
By Alan Pattullo
60 The making of Pat Nevin
The journey from Easterhouse to
Stamford Bridge. By Simon Hart
70 Glasgow, 1872: the birth of tiki-taka
Pep Guardiola’s debt to Queen’s Park. By
Jonathan Wilson
74 Photo essay: Day 1 of the league season
By Alan McCredie and Daniel Gray
THE MANAGERS
86 David Moyes: One year in a hotel
A home defeat in Spain. By Euan McTear
4 | nutmeg | September 2016

89 Owen Coyle: Rover’s return
He was seen as the ideal Scotland boss.
What now? By Chris Tait
94. The legacy of Bill Jeffrey
The Scot who humiliated England in
the World Cup. By Ian Thomson
103. Goalkeepers as managers:
The Wrights and wrongs.
A study of goalies as gaffers.
By Paul Forsyth
BEYOND THE GAME
106. SPL TV: A television soap opera.
Feuds, brinkmanship and wheeling and
dealing. By Paul McDonald
114. Why we should love our referees.
Abuse from players, fans and managers.
No problem. By Craig Fowler
118. The rise and rise of Robert Rowan
From a Rosyth bank to Brentford’s football
mastermind. By Richard Winton
THE PLAYERS
122. What’s up with Tony Watt?
Will it finally happen for a dazzling talent?
By Heather McKinlay
129. The curious case of Islam Feruz
The ups and downs of a potentially
supreme Scottish talent. By Chris Collins
134. No regrets
Playing with God, naked sauna parties,
kangaroo courts: Grant Smith has seen it
all. By Paul Brown
OBSESSIONS
138. ‘How do you get rid of three Dave
Bowmans?’
A football sticker-collecting addict writes.
By Alasdair McKillop
144 I confess
What could I have achieved in the time
I’ve spent on Football Manager?
By Adrian Searle
OPINION
148 A question of empathy
Thoughts on the aftermath of this year’s
Scottish Cup final. By Gerry Hassan
154 Offensive and unjustified
Supporters are being unfairly victimised.
By Chris Marshall
158 Stand up for your rights
The family-friendly match-day
experience obsession is ruining Scottish
football. By Martin Stone
TALES FROM THE MEMORY BANK
162 The Heartbreaker
The story of an unfulfilled Norwegian
genius. By Nils Henrik Smith
167 Scotland’s last genius?
The case for Davie Cooper. By Rob Smyth
170 Our national debt to Nasko Sirakov
Euro 92 and all that. By Andrew Galloway
THE BACK FOUR
176 Tactics: The history makers
Inverness Caledonian Thistle
made history as the first club from the
Highlands in the SPL. Who deserves
credit? By John Maxwell
184 Statistics
Three years of Scottish Premiership
penalties. By Thom Watt
188 Strips
Top marks. Would you like vomit on your
shirt? By John Penman
190 Poetry
Commemoration By Stephen Watt
Cup Final Day by Stephen Watt
192 Contributors
If you like what you read and you
want more of the same, then you
can subscribe here...
www.nutmegmagazine.co.uk
Full details on Page 192.
September 2016 | nutmeg | 5

A group of people watching Edinburgh City’s away match at Eyemouth United, 1995.
FINDING MY
IDENTITY
Words and Photographs
by Colin McPherson
6 | nutmeg | September 2016

The Edinburgh City management and substitutes watch on as the club host Cove
Rangers in the Scottish League 2 play-off semi-final at the Commonwealth Stadium.
The Commonwealth Stadium, my home for more than two decades.
September 2016 | nutmeg | 7

Finding my identity
IDENTITY IS THE CRISIS, CAN’T YOU SEE
IDENTITY IDENTITY
We live in an age of multiple identities.
Confirmation of this lies with the
ongoing political upheaval nationally and
globally. Mass migration means people
born in one location often end up living,
working and dying in another place. They
adapt, change, assume different habits,
customs and passports – and identities.
In Scotland, the dichotomous nature of
our nation means we define ourselves
as being some combination of Scottish,
British, European or from other ethnic
and cultural backgrounds. Gender, race,
sexuality, nationality: all up for grabs and
open to negotiation, part of some ongoing
personal journey.
But what of football fans? Typically, the
average supporter will follow one club
throughout his or her life. That we are
programmed to support a particular team
seems almost pre-ordained. Lifelong,
unbending allegiance is formed through
location, family, habit or occasionally
chosen preference when too young to
foresee the consequences of that choice.
These bonds never break and the colours
never run. A lifelong commitment; a life
sentence. Either way, most fans are stuck
forever with their favourites.
My story is different. An uncharted
voyage through Scottish football, starting
at the top, crashing to the basement and
finding redemption – and confirmation of
my current footballing identity.
This is where it all began…
Hibernian 5, Morton 0; Scottish League
First Division, 2nd November 1974,
Easter Road Stadium.
Flecks of rain drip solemnly from an
unleavened sky. A powerful wind swirls
down the street, whipping up minitornadoes
of rubbish, blowing everyday
8 | nutmeg | September 2016
detritus across our paths. Tall, dark
figures hunch against the November
chill, pushing against the gusts, their
hum and chatter barely audible on the
cacophonous breeze.
The shops are closing or already
shuttered. It is Saturday afternoon, and
trading has ceased for the weekend
everywhere except in the bars which
throw sickly, yellow illuminations across
the sodden pavement. The air is thick
with gloom. The sound of cavalry, a shuffling
mass of humanity, announces our
gathering. A group of younger lads breaks
off to the right and heads away towards
a narrow bridge. We carry on and take
the next street. After a few paces it comes
into view at last: Easter Road stadium. My
place of worship, my spiritual home.
I’m 10 years old, and this is the birthday
treat: my first-ever football match. More
importantly, my first-ever Hibs match.
The smell of beer-on-breath, the waft of
cigarette – occasionally pipe – smoke entices
us towards the turnstiles. Before I can
draw breath, my dad squeezes me through
the cold, wrought iron, the click-clicking
accompaniment announcing our arrival
inside the ground. There’s no sunshine on
Leith today but in my heart there’s joy.
The dense, wooden seats of the main
stand. The grumbling men behind me.
The occasionally volcanic eruptions of
frustration. The juice and Wagon Wheels
at half-time. And my heroes. Turnbull’s
Tornadoes, bedecked in that unique uniform,
the plain green top with matching
cuffs divided by trademark white sleeves.
Was it the strip I first fell in love with?
Or the name? Or the players? Stanton,
Blackley, Edwards and Alan Gordon – tall,
languid and deadly in front of goal. How
could it have happened that this little lad

By Colin McPherson
A young Hibby on Easter Road in 2015. It could have been me in 1974.
Little changed since 1974 when I attended my first game, here photographed in 2015.
September 2016 | nutmeg | 9

Finding my identity
from the other side of Edinburgh, none of
whose family had ever shown an interest
in Hibernian Football Club, became a fan?
I didn’t know then and I don’t know
now. All I recall is that this club, this
place, these supporters, they were me
and I was them. My identity. Unshakable,
unflinching, unbending. Forever. A Hibby.
The match flickers in my memory.
Details are hazy and my impression of the
day still centres on the feeling engendered
by the occasion, rather than its significance
or the scoreline. We won 5-0, the
record books show. I cannot remember
any sense of elation at the result, but I
recall with vividness the thrill of being
there. It was like being born all over
again.
From that dank autumn day, a passion
awoke inside me. I would cajole, nag and
plead to be taken to every game. The logic
in my young mind was simple: without
a television set in our house, going to a
match was the only way I would have of
seeing football. It worked often enough,
but as soon as I was old enough to be
trusted, I started going to home games
on my own. It felt like a small rebellion,
true independence. Doing it for myself
and self-reliance, traits and habits which
would infect my life until the present day.
But in that innocent age of flared denim
and cascading hair, something else was
stirring. Through the miasma of puberty I
was searching to express the inner rebel.
Like every teenager, I was looking for
something else. Soon I found it and it had
a name: Meadowbank Thistle.
Brechin City versus Meadowbank Thistle,
Scottish League Division Two, 7th May
1983, Glebe Park.
Sometime between the Sex Pistols
implosion that marked the end of punk
and the nascency of Joy Division which
heralded its lovechild New Wave, Poly
Styrene, the inspirational singer of
X-Ray Spex screamed at me over the
airwaves: “Identity is the crisis, can’t
you see?” I could see. I was 14 after all,
and about to embark on a regime of
torn-t-shirts and self-cropped hair. Gone
was the soundtrack to my childhood,
fuzzy pop crackling over the medium
wave, replaced now by a gathering vinyl
collection of spit-and-vomit songs,
deafening exhortations to anarchy and
change. I stumbled out of my teenage
crisis and into Edinburgh’s third Scottish
League club. Physically, this curious
football journey shifted my allegiance
barely one mile as the crow could fly
across the city, yet it transported me into
another footballing universe and allowed
me to assume a new, fresh identity.
Meadowbank Thistle, Meadowbankfucking-Thistle,
the laughing stock of
Scottish football, a club cobbled together
on a compromise to stop the Highland
advance on the Scottish League, serial
bottom-feeders of Scotland’s lowest
division with no history and little support.
Pitied by many, loved by few. It was here
I discovered the modern world. Easter
Road had become segregated, bitter and
angry, Hibs a team in decline in a rotting
atmosphere. They sent in the clowns with
George Best as ringmaster, a grotesque
annihilation of everything the club once
stood for, and got what they deserved. By
then I was out, savouring instead the long,
clean lines of the Commonwealth Stadium,
the rows of neat, upturned seats at a venue
built on Olympian hopes and dreams,
since bequeathed to a football team. It
was like no other Scottish ground and the
club’s small band of followers were like no
other supporters.
I discovered away days, pushing
boundaries well beyond my comfortable,
suburban life in the capital by visiting
some of the goriest places imaginable.
With Thatcher’s Britain as a backdrop,
I learned that despite the eponymous
train station, there was no sunny side to
Coatbridge. A trip to Rutherglen risked
encounters with unreconstructed Teddy
Boys and if you weren’t lying on the
10 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Colin McPherson
Banned fans prepare to watch Meadowbank Thistle’s last-ever match from outside the
ground, May 1995.
Two Meadowbank Thistle supporters watching as their team take on Brechin City away at
Glebe Park at the start of the club’s last season before being franchised to Livingston.
September 2016 | nutmeg | 11

Finding my identity
floor of the supporters’ bus as it reached
the top roundabout in Dumfries, your
reward would be a brick hurled towards
you. Boys openly sold Bulldog, the racist
propaganda of the far right, whilst almost
every opponents’ support seemed to consist
of cast-off mobs from the Old Firm.
Meadowbank fans were just a scruffy collection
of soulful young rebels. We didn’t
just endure the countless defeats, we
positively enjoyed them. If you can laugh
at your own misfortune it makes the
victory celebration all the more joyous. It
was win-win, all the way home.
I travelled with fellow disciples whose
friendship I would come to cherish and
value to the present day. Lads who shaped
my attitudes not only to football, but to
politics, music, relationships and life in
general. It was the punk mentality which
captivated me: not arrogant, but alternative.
Change things, don’t destroy them.
Laugh at ourselves and with others. Do it
yourself, your own way. Whilst the Tory
government was using gang-sounding
acronyms such as YOP and YTS as ways of
keeping Britain’s youth occupied, across
Scotland and beyond football supporters
wanted change and we were doing
something about it: organising, writing,
publishing, campaigning. A revolution
was at hand and even fans of the smallest
teams could be part of it.
To some extent, being involved with
football teams at Thistle’s level meant that
your support was comparatively more
important than at a bigger club. It was
invisibility against visibility. If I missed
a Hibs game, nobody cared. There were
plenty to take my place and the few quid
I handed over every fortnight was neither
here nor there. At Meadowbank, if one
of the regulars didn’t show up, questions
would be asked. A family occasion
more important than last week’s goalless
draw with Montrose? A cold or the ’flu
preventing you from making the away bus
to Methil? Holidays? During the football
season? Put bluntly, the pound you spent
at Meadowbank had to go further by far.
I viewed my primary identity now not
just as a football fan, but as member of
a particular sub-species of the human
race: a Meadowbank Thistle football fan. I
belonged. And with that came obligations.
So we arrive at Glebe Park, Brechin
standing in the pale, spring sunshine,
bathed in optimism. It’s deep into injury
time and finally, after an aeon of agony,
the referee blows his whistle to mark the
end of the game. In breathless excitement
we vault the perimeter fence and run. I
can feel the unbridled joy of it still to this
day. The pitch seems like it is a thousand
miles long as we sprint, sprint, sprint towards
the halfway line. Coming the other
way is a bigger army clad in red, arms
outstretched, faces contorted in emotion.
We meet in the middle, two tribes not at
war, but united in glorious celebration.
The result has brought promotion for both
teams. Fans collect in front of the tiny
main stand and demand an appearance
from their respective squads of heroes. I
am 18 years old and feel 18 feet tall. I wave
my black and amber scarf above my head
uncontrollably. Around me my friends are
jumping and cavorting, revelling in the
sheer impossibility of it all. In one glorious
and improbable season, Meadowbank
Thistle had flipped Scottish football on
its head and the small band of diehards,
of which I was one, could celebrate like
other fans for the first time.
Morton 0, Meadowbank Thistle 3;
Scottish League First Division, 2nd
December 1990, Cappielow Park.
The 1980s was a blissful, creative and
golden era for Meadowbank Thistle fans.
We luxuriated in the team’s successes.
The Commonwealth Stadium became
a footballing fortress where many of
Scotland’s most illustrious clubs were
beaten to a pulp by a team marshalled
from the vast open spaces opposite
the grandstand by the singular and
diminutive generalissimo Terry Christie.
12 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Colin McPherson
The club came within one league
reconstruction – all the rage during that
decade – of reaching the domestic game’s
highest level. Although we felt cheated
out of promotion in 1988, away from
the games we were at the forefront of a
phenomenon which gave fans a voice and
a way of expressing themselves: fanzines.
Although some claim you can trace
the lineage of fanzines back to the cave
drawings of Neolithic man, their evolution
really began in the late-1970s with
homespun publications dedicated to
punk music. This inspired football fans to
follow their creative instincts and by the
middle of the following decade a welter
of did-it-ourselves magazines allowed
fans to express their news and views in
an undiluted and uncensored way. The
bile and boke of Scottish football was
laid bare on photocopied pages, as fans
began to organise and agitate. Tribal,
yes, but the camaraderie which exited
between fanzines brought supporters
together at a time when violent disorder
was never far away from most football
grounds. Meadowbank Thistle fans had
had a dummy run with a publication
named Cheers but in 1986 its bastard
offspring hit the terracing. Produced in a
mouse-infested, subterranean shebeen by
a cluster of underemployed reprobates,
AWOL was an uncompromising attempt
IT WAS LIKE NO OTHER
SCOTTISH GROUND AND
THE CLUB’S SMALL BAND OF
FOLLOWERS WERE LIKE NO
OTHER SUPPORTERS.
to bring together in words, photos
and cartoons three of our most-loved
pastimes: football, music and shoplifting.
We showcased local bands, reviewed
galleries, films, bars and indeed anything
else we could sneak in to undetected. We
refused to take advertising to fund the
fanzine and drank most of the proceeds
anyway. We were outsiders, nonconformists,
defiant desperadoes during
those dislocated, dysfunctional days. This
was the way we were.
It seemed as if nothing could touch us.
On a chilly pre-Christmas day on the tail
o’ the bank, Thistle cut hosts Morton to
pieces with a display of counter-attacking
bravado which typified Christie’s cohorts.
Three goals, two points and once again
the summit was visible. We laid bets in
bookies that we were going up and the
usual dreich retreat from the soggy west
coast was enlivened by an assortment of
celebratory songs and what is these days
referred to in footballing circles as ‘banter’.
What we weren’t to know then was that
our club’s board of directors contained a
Trojan horse in the shape of the largerthan-death
figure of local businessman Bill
Hunter. He was already sowing the seeds
of our destruction. Within five years, after
a convulsive and at times repulsive campaign,
Hunter had wrestled Meadowbank
Thistle out of Edinburgh and existence and
presented it to the bewildered residents of
a new town in West Lothian, to do with it
what they wished.
It was a sorry episode, one which
Thistle supporters fought to prevent
using every manoeuvre available to a
group of average football fans. Our pleas
fell on the deaf ears of authority, our
cause not helped by a media infatuated
with the money flowing into Scottish
football during the Souness-era. In
a mirror image of the club’s decline
on the pitch, supporters were either
banned or abandoned their team and
the Commonwealth Stadium, detested
and derided by opponents, was largely
September 2016 | nutmeg | 13

Finding my identity
forgotten on match days. When the end
came for Meadowbank Thistle in 1995, it
felt like a mercy killing. Stripped of my
club, shorn of my identity, I was forced
to watch the final home game from
outwith the stadium’s perimeter as the
owner presided over a celebration of the
club’s achievements in a last, grotesque,
Soviet-style act of ignominy and orgy of
vainglory. It was a case of identity theft,
which left me bereft and turning away
from football.
Edinburgh City 2, Peebles Rovers 2, East
of Scotland League First Division, 4th
November 1995, Fernieside Recreation
Ground.
It’s six month later. My legs are grazing
against a rope which surrounds a sloping,
bumpy cabbage patch masquerading as a
football pitch. Rain permeates the space
between my neck and collar. We stand
along one touchline in a single, uncovered
row, craning to see the action as tackles
fly and the ball bobbles and dribbles
harmlessly beyond the goal. Earlier, I had
watched nets being flung over goalposts
and dog mess being scraped off the pitch.
Players of assorted sizes, shapes and
weights wearing a collection of ragged
training gear haphazardly pinged balls
about in what passed as a pre-match
warm up, before re-emerging from a
cramped Portakabin to join in battle.
Welcome to Edinburgh City, as a sign
might have read had there been one at the
ground. But in this anonymous corner
of Auld Reekie, perched on its southern
slopes in a ground hemmed in by
housing, with no visible sign indicating
the presence of senior football let alone a
half-time pie, I suddenly rediscovered my
love for the game.
The setting may have been redolent of
a pub match, but the standard was far
higher, and the interest and intensity
there to see. Within a few short months,
my friends and I were the ones doing the
spadework, laying foundations which
would eventually see Edinburgh City
scale the highest peaks, first in the East
of Scotland League, then as two-times
champions of the Lowland League before
gloriously reclaiming a place in the
Scottish League, vacated by the club of
the same name a decade before I was even
born.
But to get to those exalted reaches,
relentless toil and commitment were
required. We turned from ordinary supporters
into committee men overnight.
Scarves were swapped for shirt-and-tie.
It was our club and our responsibility to
ensure that players turned up, their kit
cleaned, the post-match food was hot and
that sufficient scratch cards were flogged
to ensure we could pay the petrol for players’
cars to away games at Hawick Royal
Albert and Eyemouth United. We applied
the same rules which had served us as
fans in our previous incarnation: we can
do this on our own. We don’t know how,
but we’ll give it a go. We’ll learn from
our mistakes and try never to fall out
with each other along the way. Punks in
blazers, doing it our way, again. We stuck
together even if we fell out with players
and managers. Dammit, we actually had
to appoint managers. How grown-up did
that make us feel? We took the club back
to our alma mater, becoming tenants at
the Commonwealth Stadium, erstwhile
ground of the doomed Meadowbank
Thistle. Home. In time, and through
persistence and bloody-mindedness we
built a club we could be pleased with and
a new identity of which we were proud.
For us, non-League was better than
Champions League any day.
East Stirlingshire 0, Edinburgh City 1;
Scottish League Two Play-off Final,
Second Leg, 15th May 2015, Ochilview
Park.
In 2013, by establishing the grandlysounding
Scottish Lowland Football
League, the game in Scotland shattered a
glass ceiling: there would be promotion
14 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Colin McPherson
Edinburgh City fans react with delight and delirium as Dougie Gair’s penalty wins
promotion against East Stirlingshire.
to the Scottish League for the first time
since its formation in 1890. This gave
ambitious clubs previously perceived as
beyond the pale the opportunity to claim
a place amongst the likes of Brechin
City, Stirling Albion and Elgin City. For
me, and my fellow Meadowbank Thistle
refuseniks, it offered the tantalising
prospect of righting an historical wrong
and proving that although money
screamed until it was blue in the face,
success could be achieved without
being bought. On that sun-kissed day
in Stenhousemuir, our hard work bore
fruit. Captain Dougie Gair’s late penalty
separated two clubs travelling in opposite
directions and secured Edinburgh
City’s place amongst Scotland’s elite. No
jumping and fist-pumping like manic
teens, rather handshakes and a feeling
of quiet satisfaction and pride? No
chance! Advancing years might rob us
of the ability to dash across the pitch in
a delirious invasion, nevertheless there
were hugs and tears amongst friends who
had metaphorically kicked every ball
for more than two decades and got the
club to where it is today. City players and
manager Gary Jardine rightly received
the plaudits, but it was us who took the
spoils.
In politics, we hear talk of the settled
will of the people. It indicates that decisions
have been made and life moves on.
After a somewhat circuitous journey, I
have finally come to my destination and
to terms with my identity, one which has
wider implications than simply being ‘a
fan of…’ Irrespective of which division
of league Edinburgh City play, there will
be no more changing colours and no
more turning away: As they sing on the
terraces: “I’m City ’til I die”. l
Words and images © Colin McPherson,
2016 all rights reserved.
September 2016 | nutmeg | 15

The Nutmeg Essay
CRUSHED BY
THE WHEELS
OF INDUSTRY
SCOTTISH FOOTBALL
& THE NEW ECONOMY
By Stuart Cosgrove
16 | nutmeg | September 2016

Where were you on March 31, 1990 as the
sun scythed down on Scotland, burning
necks and blistering dreams?
It was the day when a remarkable
match unfolded and history slipped
quietly by. The game was featured
on Sportscene and Dougie Donnelly
disbelievingly introduced it as “quite
simply one of the best ... we’ve covered
for a very long time”. All that was at stake
were three humble points, the weekly
wish of every football fan, but it turned
out to be Scottish football at its compelling
best. The final score was St Johnstone
3-1 Airdrie. Unmemorable to many, but
those that witnessed the game will never
forget its endless twists and turns, and
unconsciously, in the deepest recesses of
their memory, they will measure every
other game disappointingly against it.
More than 10,000 people crammed into
MacDiarmid Park, the first purpose-build
ground of its kind in Scotland, with the
home team needing a win to keep their
flickering title hopes alive. Airdrie just
needed to turn up. It was one-way traffic
from the outset, St Johnstone hit the bar
four times and were defied by a series
of spectacular saves by the Diamonds’
madcap keeper John Martin. Then suddenly
the script was ripped up. Against the
run of play and all reasonable justice Stevie
Gray fired Airdrie into an unlikely lead. The
huge travelling support from Lanarkshire
appeared to surge forward as one, engulfing
the net, sensing that a victory would
bring them closer to the title. Then it
turned again. The reliable and nerveless
Mark Treanor equalised from the penalty
spot. Roddy Grant headed St Johnstone into
a precious lead and as Airdrie threw everything
into the quest for an equaliser, Kenny
Ward’s injury-time goal on the counter
attack unleashed a frenzy of bottled-up
emotions around three sides of the ground.
St Johnstone won the game and soon after
the old First Division title.
The final score not only wrecked
Airdrie’s title bid but viewed from the
wider sweep of history did untold damage
to the very future of the club. Seen
retrospectively, it was a game that tells us
more about Scottish football than many
more famous games. History had crystallised
into a pulsating ninety minutes; and
Airdrieonians had been crushed by the
wheels of industry.
St Johnstone’s victory came in the warm
spring of 1990, at the height of Glasgow’s
historic reign as European City of Culture.
The tectonic plates of the Scottish
economy had been grinding into a new
gear for several decades and in the face
of international disbelief Glasgow woke
up to the clamouring realisation that not
only had heavy industry gone, but its citizens
watched with bleary enthusiasm as
the uncertain ballet of post-industrialism
unfolded. Football had played a small
part in the city’s transformation. On the
night of May 12, 1976 the European Cup
final had brought the fans of St Etienne
and Bayern Munich to Hampden Park and
in an enlightened policy initiative, the
City of Glasgow granted a special drinks
licence which allowed bars and cafes to
open late into the night. It was a small
but significant epiphany - like glimpsing
Barcelona through rusting turnstiles.
Glasgow’s journey to a new economy
divided the city at first but not in any ancient
sectarian sense. The forward-looking
wanted to re-brand the city and sandblast
the harsh soot of the past away. Others
clung frightened to the life they knew,
weaving myths and repeating the reassuring
clichés of ‘no mean city’. The Tramway,
which had once housed the city’s clanking
trams, was now a world-class centre for
experimental theatre, and the old Govan
shipyards, once the place where liners
were built and fitted, now played host to a
stunning site-specific theatre extravaganza
by the Welsh company Brith Gof.
Despairingly, most football discourse
lent towards the past and many opportunities
have been missed. Many years
September 2016 | nutmeg | 17

The Nutmeg Essay
Crushed by the wheels of industry
on, some still see the game through the
dispersing smoke of industrialism unsure
of the present let alone what the fearful
future holds. Our national game has often
been circumscribed by narrow thinking,
short-termism and baseless myth. Casually
we have come to describe the sport in
short staccato periods: the Jock Stein era,
the Souness revolution, nine-in-a-row, the
New Firm in the 1980s, the Bosman era,
Armageddon and the Offensive Behaviour
Act. All of them important but very short
chapters in an epic and sprawling novel.
Unusually, I want to break with shorttermism
and look back over a 100-year
span, to try to make sense of what is happening
now, in part for my own club, and
to understand the challenges it faces in the
Bildungsroman of the Scottish game.
Ask anyone to name the greatest year
in Scotland’s football history they will
instinctively say 1967, when three unprecedented
events coincided: Celtic won
the European Cup, Rangers met Bayern
Munich in a European Cup-Winners Cup
Final, and Scotland beat the newlycrowned
world champions England at
Wembley. That’s it, three games, 270
minutes plus a wee bit of extra time in
Nuremberg, all over in a few precious but
over-remembered weeks, mostly based on
European matches, in competitions that
were little more than a decade old. What
if we were to break with type and go back
beyond our own times and give a different
answer – what if we said the greatest era
was in the first years of the 1930s in the
troubled days of the Great Depression. In
the first full season of the new decade,
Motherwell won the league leaving Rangers
and Celtic in their wake. Leith Athletic
were relegated and went down a division
to joust with local rivals Hibernian. The
Queen Mary was about to be launched
and its gigantic ocean-going hulk sat
majestically in the William Denny Yards
in Dumbarton. A small immigrant group
of Italian designers hired to fit the first
class cabins moonlighted around Glasgow
and helped furnish Rogano’s impressive
art-deco interior. Swollen by the Irish
poor and the discarded Highlanders,
Glasgow’s population was about to reach
an all time high. In all, 1,088,000 jostling
souls lived cramped together in Britain’s
second largest city, ‘the second city of the
Empire’: home to shipbuilding, heavy
engineering and brutal poverty. It was
a time of romantic stars: Neil Dewar, a
trawlerman from Lochgilphead, was one
of Scotland’s most exciting strikers and
scored a hat-trick against France in the
Stade Colombes in Paris. Nine different
clubs competed in Scottish cup finals
across the decade, East Fife, Clyde, Hamilton
and St Mirren all taking silverware
back to their communities, where coal,
shipbuilding and textile manufacturing
reigned. The first Junior Cup winners
of the 1930s were Glasgow Perthshire, a
team originally founded by Perthshire
agrarian workers who had been drawn
to Glasgow to work in heavy industry
but as the decade unfolded shipyard
teams like Yoker Athletic and Govan’s
ACROSS THE DECADE SEVEN
DIFFERENT CLUBS BROKE
THEIR HOME ATTENDANCE
RECORDS AND THE
NATIONAL STADIUM ALSO
OUT-REACHED ITSELF, IN
1937 OVER 140,000 WATCHED
CELTIC BEAT ABERDEEN IN
THE CUP-FINAL.
18 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Stuart Cosgrove
Benburb came to dominate. It was a time
of unrivalled drama and cathartic tragedy,
most notably the death of John Thompson
from the mining town of Cardenden, the
young Celtic goalkeeper and evangelical
Protestant who died after a collision at
Ibrox in 1931. It was the decade of Jimmy
McGrory’s titanic 408 goals for Celtic, and
Dally Duncan’s mesmerising hat-trick
against England. A total of 1,333 goals
were scored in the 1932-33 league season
alone, and Falkirk, who narrowly avoided
relegation from the top league finishing
third from bottom, still scored an
astonishing 70 goals. Scotsport cameras,
which had yet to be invented, missed all
of them, so we can only imagine their
daring significance. Europe existed but it
was a place of wars not tournaments.
For those that still see crowd sizes as a
phallic proxy for success, this was the
decade that out-reached everything
before and since. Rangers broke their formidable
home record, attracting 118,000
to Ibrox for a game against Celtic. Celtic
had already broken their home record,
attracting 88,000 to Celtic Park. In 1933
Hearts played Rangers at Tynecastle in a
Scottish Cup game and 53,396 turned up.
Hearts then went on to help smash Hamilton
Academical’s record crowd when
28,690 squeezed into Old Douglas Park. It
was a quite remarkable cup contest won
eventually by Celtic when a single Jimmy
McGrory goal was enough to see off Motherwell
and in an era for records, Alloa
broke their ground record when a match
against Dunfermline attracted 13,365 to
Recreation Park. Seen from today’s vantage
point these are outrageous crowds.
Across the decade seven different clubs
broke their home attendance records and
the national stadium also out-reached
itself: in 1937 more than 140,000 watched
Celtic beat Aberdeen in the cup final.
It was an era of mass spectatorship
across society. Benny Lynch’s fights at
Shawfield, Celtic Park and Cathkin Park
attracted tens of thousands, Wild Bill
Hickok’s Travelling Wild West Circus took
up residency near Duke Street in Glasgow
in an amphitheatre that held 7,000 and
performed three shows daily, attracting
bigger crowds to sharpshooting than
Celtic today attract to low-key league
games. Rowdy musical hall theatres like
Aberdeen’s Beach Pavilion and Glasgow’s
Alhambra drew crowds that would please
many SPFL clubs today to watch the best
of Scottish variety - the gawky Glaswegian
Tommy Lorne, the ‘Laird of Inversnecky’
Harry Gordon, character comedian Will
Fyffe, and the ‘Scottish Charlie Chaplin’
Dave Willis.
Football was the king of crowds. We
have all seen the sepia pictures of huddled
masses, everyone wearing flat-caps,
woollen overcoats and grim faces; we
have seen the gentle swarm of white
handkerchiefs flocking like seagulls above
the heads, trying to attract medical help to
the wounded. It was a time of impending
war first in Spain and then across Europe.
If attendances are a measure of anything
– and it seems to be a measure of virility
to the online supporters of Scotland’s
bigger clubs – then the mid-1930s can lay
claim to being the most popular period of
Scottish football. Today we blame televised
football for the decline in crowds but the
most sudden decline came with the loss
of heavy industry, as urban areas reliant
on heavy manufacturing became depopulated,
emigration soared and the new
manufacturing and service economies
offered more diverse lifestyles and choices.
Industrialism is a complex central
character – generous and cruel in equal
measure. It provided Scotland with work,
with pitiful income and with a global
reputation for engineering. But industrialism
had calloused hands and brought
with it poverty, disease and malnutrition,
social stigmas that have yet to be chased
from the internal organs of modern
Scotland. The slums that pock-marked
September 2016 | nutmeg | 19

The Nutmeg Essay
Crushed by the wheels of industry
our major towns and cities were a fertile
breeding ground for great footballers
but gave oxygen to anti-Irish bigotry,
to squalor and to thwarted ambition. It
bequeathed a certain strand of football
mythology too, allowing a miscalculation
to take root. The 1930s misdirected us into
two lingering beliefs: that the deprivation
gave birth to footballers with supreme
skills and that the rancid waterways of
sectarianism infused Scottish football
with a unique ‘sporting rivalry’ that
supposedly we cannot survive without.
Those opinions are slowly passing but the
progress has been glacial. You frequently
hear people today bemoan the loss of the
industrial legacy - the tanner-ba’ players,
the red-blaize pitches, the back-court
tactics, midfield hard-men and changingroom
bullying. In the mangled logic of
memory some think that to compete on
a world stage we need to return to the
past. It stops short of saying ‘bring back
poverty’, but only just.
Another by-product of the shadow of
industrialism is that it shaped the
management skills of our most successful
football managers. That is also a myth
that creaks beneath the weight of closer
analysis. Sir Alex Ferguson was the son of
a plater’s helper and for 18 months was
a shipyard worker in the Govan yards
where he participated in apprentice
boys’ strikes. By the age of 19, he had
signed his first professional contract
with St Johnstone and travelled daily to
Perth by train. Miles removed from his
famous disciplinarian demeanour, he
proved to be an ill-disciplined and surly
recruit. Ferguson left the Perth club in
disgrace after breaking a management
curfew and going on holiday to Blackpool
with two teammates. Much as Ferguson
loathed it in others, discipline was not
a prominent feature of his young life,
and the leadership skills he acquired
on his way to Manchester United, and
subsequently Harvard Business School,
were learnt across a lifetime, many miles
from the shipyards of Govan. To ascribe
Ferguson’s towering career to a very short
spell in the shipyards is retro-engineering
in the extreme. Bill Shankly also left
home aged 19 to join Carlisle United. By
the time he had left home, Glenbuck in
Ayrshire, where he grew up, was already
near derelict and on its way to becoming
a ghost village. The local mine had closed
down and mines in the surrounding areas
of Lugar and Eglinton were facing extinction
too. In his biography Shankly admits
that the skill he acquired in his brief time
as a miner was not character-forming
discipline but theft, stealing vegetables
from Ayrshire farmyards to help sustain
the family. Despite the now virulent
myth, Bill Shankly never played for the
romantic Glenbuck Cherrypickers. They
had already folded and as a young man
Shankly spent more time in the Royal
Airforce than he ever did as a miner. Of
Scotland’s great industrial triumvirate,
only Jock Stein can point to a significant
time working in heavy industry, spending
ten years underground in the Lanarkshire
pits before joining the Welsh club Llanelli
as a full-time professional footballer.
Taken as an aggregate Stein, Ferguson and
Shankly spent less than 15 years in heavy
industry, less time than Shankly alone
spent at Preston North End. But such is
the powerful sway of heavy industry in
Scottish football that the myth of ‘dressing
room discipline’ and ‘industrial camaraderie’
endured long after the shipyards
and mines had closed their gates.
Industrialism has spun many yarns.
One of the most robust among them is
the fallacy that poverty was a breeding
ground of great footballers. It has been
handed down to us as a patented truth
but test it closely and again it folds under
scrutiny. To back up the theory that it
was the poverty and social deprivation
of the industrial era that bred talent you
have to ignore Denis Law and Martin
20 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Stuart Cosgrove
Buchan (Aberdeen), Dave McKay and
John White (Musselburgh), John Greig
and Sandy Jardine (Edinburgh), Billy
Bremner (Stirling), Bill Brown (Arbroath),
Alan Gilzean (Coupar Angus), Colin Stein
(Linlithgow), Charlie Cooke (St Monans),
and in more recent times, Gordon Strachan
and Graeme Souness (Edinburgh),
Paul Sturrock (Pitlochry), Ray Stewart
(Stanley), Colin Hendry (Keith), Callum
Davidson (Dunblane), and John Collins
(Galashiels). Even as post-industrialism
settled on Scotland, most of our capped
players of recent times, have not been
from traditionally deprived areas. Darren
Fletcher (Dalkeith), Kenny Miller, Craig
Gordon, Steve Whittaker and Gary
Naysmith (Edinburgh), David Weir
(Falkirk), Gary Caldwell (Stirling), Kieran
Tierney (Isle of Man), Shaun Maloney
(Malyasia), and any number of Scottish
internationalists born in England who
qualified due to their grandparents. Taken
as a list, that is a formidable register of
players, and it offers a powerful counterargument.
Many of Scotland’s greatest
talents came from communities where
heavy industry was at best peripheral or
in some cases non-existent, some drawn
from agricultural areas, many more
INDUSTRIALISM HAS SPUN
MANY YARNS. ONE OF THE
MOST ROBUST AMONG
THEM IS THE FALLACY THAT
POVERTY WAS A BREEDING
GROUND OF GREAT
FOOTBALLERS
from small towns, and as the decades
unfolded increasingly they came from
settled middle-class families, Scotland’s
new towns and the aspirational suburbs
manicured around the big cities. In the
current Scotland squad, only Robert
Snodgrass from Glasgow’s Calton area
is from an upbringing that could in any
measurable sense be described as socially
deprived. Ikeya Anya almost makes the
cut. He was brought up in the sprawling
Castlemilk housing scheme, but was
the son of a Nigerian research scientist
and a Romanian economist, and moved
with his family to home near Oxford
University after primary school. We live
in markedly different times.
Despite powerful evidence to the
contrary we still cling to the shaky
reassurance that football and industrial
deprivation are somehow linked. Maybe
in a complex way it was one of the
reasons we were so slow to build modern
facilities, naively believing that the backstreets
would suffice. The myths cling to
our game like asbestos and we have yet to
fully shake off the hangover of industrial
decline. In 1983, there were 170 working
coal mines in the UK; by the time Graeme
Souness came to manage Rangers, there
were only four, and now there are none.
At its epic height, Scottish iron production
produced 540,000 tons a year, nearly
30 per cent of British iron production.
Gartsherrie in Coatbridge was the largest
ironworks in Scotland, followed closely
by Summerlee. Local team Albion Rovers
fed on the success of the local works and
in season 1933-34 – as Scottish football
peaked with industrialism – they beat
Dunfermline to the First Division title
and spent most of the immediate pre-war
period in the top league, where crowds of
more than 20,000 were commonplace. In
1936, 28,371 packed into Cliftonhill when
Albion Rovers played host to Rangers, still
a club record. The most famous player
in the club’s history, Jock Stein, was then
a young teenager. Local historians Peter
September 2016 | nutmeg | 21

The Nutmeg Essay
Crushed by the wheels of industry
Drummond and James Smith describe
the decline. “The great Gartsherrie
furnaces which for over a century contributed
noise, smoke and verticality to
the landscape, have now been completely
covered over by a container storage and
repair area and a small industrial estate,
with only a couple of cranes to break the
skyline. The Baird company’s tied housing,
the cramped rows and squares that
marked out Gartsherrie village, have been
demolished.” In the 1940s the works were
nationalised and by 1967 – the year now
etched in Scottish football folklore – they
had closed down for good.
Industrial decline was inevitable, sudden
and cruel. Shipbuilding began its decline.
Between 1921 and 1923 the tonnage built
on the Clyde went down from 510,000 to
170,000. By the 1930s yards were closing
as orders dried up and the hegemony that
the Govan Yards had once enjoyed was
living on borrowed time. Just after World
War Two, manufacturing still accounted
for 40 per cent of the UK’s economy. Now
it is only a tenth of the UK economy and
the services industry – the diverse and
imprecise character of post-industrialism
– is now 75.8 per cent. We can marvel
now at the founding days of football when
teams from Renton and Vale of Leven in
Dunbartonshire were potent forces in
the game and drew their players from
shipyards and glass foundries. But flash
forward to the glory days of the 1930s and
we see the signs of even greater demise:
eight of the league clubs of the decade
no longer exist and six others have faced
insolvency events that have seriously
threatened their existence. Clydebank, a
strategic town synonymous with shipbuilding,
had been bombed into rubble
during the war. At the end of the war it
briefly flourished but soon joined the list
of industrial casualties, their existence
depressingly caught up in the chaotic
history of Airdrieonians, who featured in
that intense match at MacDiarmid Park –
which must now rank as one of the great
games of Scotland’s post-industrial era.
So what is meant by post-industrialism
and how does it shape Scottish football?
Most sociologists agree that it is the
stage of society’s development when the
service sector generates more wealth
than the manufacturing sector of the
economy. New industries emerge and
new types of wealth are generated. One
good example – whilst Donald Trump
campaigns noisily for the US presidency
– is the phenomenal growth of Scotland’s
golf tourism economy, buoyed by new
courses, major tournaments, better
facilities and increased numbers of
high-value visitors. Direct comparisons
are tricky but it would not be too bold
an assertion to claim that a stretch of
Scotland from St Andrews in north Fife
to Carnoustie in Angus and westwards to
Gleneagles in Perthshire now generates
more income for the nation than the
traditional steel manufacturing areas that
once congregated around Ravenscraig and
Dalzeil. In 2013, golf tourism generated
£1.171 billion in revenues in Scotland and
employed an estimated 1,480 people.
When Ravenscraig closed it cost Scotland
only 770 jobs – significant, regretful but
probably inevitable. In another bitter
paradox the Ravenscraig plant, once
Western Europe’s largest producer of
hot-strip steel, was nationalised in the
spring of 1967 as Celtic fans prepared to
leave home for Lisbon and the club’s most
famous game. By the time local team
Motherwell played their most famous
game – the 1991 Scottish cup final against
Dundee United – Ravenscraig’s closure
had been announced and a pall of decline
hung over the town. Despite a damaging
insolvency event, the club has clung
doggedly to its top-league status, defying
the many odds that are stacked against it,
and they are now navigating the difficult
transition to fan ownership.
The journey to post-industrialism
22 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Stuart Cosgrove
captured so eloquently in Glasgow’s
year as European City of Culture and the
fallout of St Johnstone’s 3-1 victory over
Airdrie in 1990 offer up harsh historic
realities. The fortunes of the two clubs
on that day could not be more different.
St Johnstone have spent successive
seasons as a top six club, have regularly
played in Europe with some very decent
results, and have won the Scottish Cup
for the first time in their history. Airdrie
by contrast have been a basket case and
their decline spectacular. An industrial
club writ large, in 1926 Airdieonians FC
were runners-up to Celtic and competed
for the league title throughout
the decade, regularly playing in front
of crowds of 20,000. Now professional
matches in Airdrie attract a meagre 800
fans. Many are not even sure who they
are supposed to be watching: the club’s
name has morphed with misfortune and
only the iconic diamond tops show any
connections with past glory. In 2000,
the auditors of KPMG moved to liquidate
the club and made Airdrie’s playing
staff redundant after Rangers chairman
David Murray reclaimed an outstanding
debt to one of his teetering network
of companies. Much has been made
of the irony of that intervention, but
Airdrie had been breathing toxic fumes
for many years before and had been a
troubled club since they sold their old
Broomfield Ground to the supermarket
chain Safeway in 1994. Change had been
brutal to the town. Even at the height of
the industrial era 50 per cent of the male
population was unemployed and traditional
industries like weaving and coal
mining had disappeared, leaving Airdrie
pockmarked by ugly brownfield sites
and dependent for work on a commuter
artery that led to nearby Glasgow. The
roads that took commuters to work were
exactly the same road that took locals
to Ibrox and Celtic Park. Unlike Perth,
Dundee, Inverness or Aberdeen, Airdrie
was simply too close to the powerful
magnetism of the big two clubs and their
growing self-importance.
Compared to the recent success-story of
community clubs such as St Johnstone,
Inverness Caledonian Thistle and Ross
County, Scotland’s industrial clubs have
suffered disproportionately. Renton and
Vale of Leven are now quaint anomalies
from a bygone era. Third Lanark no longer
exist. Clydebank folded and have been
reinvented as a Junior club. Clyde F.C. are
a feint shadow of their former selves and
have struggled for years to escape from
the lowest division. Greenock Morton
have yet to fully recover from their
demotion in 2001 when they were placed
in administration, and have been out of
the top league for 16 years. Although the
town has been battered by the decline
of shipbuilding, Greenock is curiously a
place that has characteristics that may yet
allow it to surf through the post-industrial
era: it has a long vantage onto the River
Clyde, it has cavernous old buildings
ripe for reinvention, the first wave of
warehouse lofts have already been sold
and a small arts hub has flourished
around the Beacon Theatre quadrant.
But set back from the stunning riverside,
Cappielow is in dire need of refurbishment.
As older generation die away only
fans in their mid-thirties and older can
remember when Morton last played in the
top division. There are only so many great
Andy Ritchie goals to remember before
you yearn for success in the present tense.
In 1986, Clyde, Morton and Airdrie
were all playing in a division above
St Johnstone and were broadly seen
as ‘bigger clubs’. More dramatically,
Inverness Caledonian Thistle and Ross
County had yet to join the Scottish
League. Frequently seen as poorly
supported clubs, Ross County (4,171)
Inverness (3,940) and St Johnstone
(3,624) now easily exceed the average
attendances of the industrial clubs
they have ‘displaced’: Morton (2,907),
September 2016 | nutmeg | 23

The Nutmeg Essay
Crushed by the wheels of industry
Airdrieonians (844), Clyde (564) and
Clydebank (200). Bizarrely, it is commonplace
to hear fans of Central Belt
teams, especially Celtic fans, bemoan the
travelling distance to the Highlands, as if
Inverness and Ross County have no real
right to be in the top league, and no right
to challenge the wheezing status quo. It is
one of the many casual defamations small
clubs have to suffer in Scotland and yet
much of it is premised on past mythology.
Inverness is Scotland’s fastest-growing
city, comfortably bigger than Motherwell,
Ross County one of the best-resourced
community clubs and Perth a more populous
city than Greenock and now served
by a motorway network that makes it
more easily accessible than in the past.
It was in 1974, as Scotland were due to
face Brazil in the World Cup at Frankfurt’s
Waldstadion that the term ‘post-industrial’
first entered the vocabulary. It was the
summer that a Harvard sociologist called
Daniel Bell published his groundbreaking
book The Coming of Post-Industrial
Society. It was a term that baffled people
at first but soon surged in usage and is
now used interchangeably with other
related terms such as ‘the knowledge
economy’ and ‘the information society’.
All of these concepts have impacted
on Scottish football. The exchange of
knowledge is now crucial to a game that
draws on the expertise of nutritionists,
sports scientists and physiotherapists.
The study of all of those new disciplines is
growing within our education sector and
the campus of Stirling University, where
several professional teams train, is a centre
of excellence in sports management. The
knowledge economy is vital to the growth
of data-crunching companies such as Prozone
and Football Radar and the myriad
of metric-analysts that now populate
football. Many younger managers in the
game - Derek McInnes, Robbie Neilson,
Paul Hartley and Ray McKinnon - have
grown up in an era of shape, systems and
analytics. This is not simply superficial
modernisation: it is a fundamental break
with the management of the past and
reflects societal change in Scotland.
McInnes manages a club situated next to
Scotland’s oil and off-shore engineering
industry; Robbie Neilson works in a city
which hosts one of the most progressive
nanotechnology centres in the world, and
when Paul Hartley goes for a drink in the
café bar at the Dundee Contemporary
Arts (DCA) he looks out on Tay Street the
epicentre of Dundee’s thriving computer
games industry, where Minecraft and
the underlying code of FIFA Manager are
everyday conversations. FIFA Manager is
a great bellwether to how radical change
has become. It was first marketed by
Electronic Arts in 1997, the year that Celtic
and Scotland’s Kieran Tierney was born.
Electronic game play is an essential part of
the world Tierney grew up in and he has
probably learnt more about football from
its sub-culture than playing games with
jackets as goal posts. Rather than bemoan
that change we have to face up to it and
shape a football culture that can live with
the disruptive changes yet to come.
We now live in a global football world.
Scotland is currently struggling in the
FIFA rankings, our clubs are in danger
of being excluded from the Champions
League and players from virtually every
nation in the world have played here
in recent years. But globalisation is not
the only determinant of post-industrial
society. We live in an era of bifurcation
where the local and the global co-exist.
Many new businesses have thrived by
stressing the values of ‘localness’: organic
food, micro-brewing and stay-at-home
vacations are all examples of robust and
innovative localness. It is not too big a
leap to see Scottish football through this
bifurcating prism. The announcement
of Celtic’s summer exhibition game
against Barcelona in Dublin speaks to
global ambition, but the vast majority
24 | nutmeg | September 2016

of Scottish clubs derive their sustenance
from localness: their core fans, their local
sponsors and their economic community.
Each has to find its own ignition and
there is increasing evidence that smaller
town and cities, if they are well run
locally, can draw on the strength of community.
Ross County’s recent success in
the League Cup is a case in point and far
from being propped up by bigger clubs, St
Johnstone have thrived on localness. The
club’s stadium, on land bequeathed by a
local farmer and lifetime fan, is happily
situated next door to Tayside’s biggest
crematorium. By offering affordable
packages and free parking, the club now
derives more net income from selling
funeral packages to the bereaved than
it does from the amortised income of
visiting fans on a Saturday. They can sing
“What a shitey home support” until the
cows come home, but St Johnstone fans
just smile back ghoulishly, in the knowledge
that the club profits from death, an
industry that will never fade.
Reflecting back on Glasgow’s tumultuous
year as European City of Culture and
IT IS NOW COMMONPLACE FOR
SCOTTISH FOOTBALL FANS
TO ADMIT AN EMOTIONAL
INTEREST IN ONE OF THE
BIG GLOBAL TEAMS, OFTEN
BARCELONA, BUT ALSO
MAJOR ENGLISH CLUBS THAT
CAN BE EASILY REACHED BY
TRAIN OR PLANE
what the era of post-industrialism has
meant for Scottish football it is clear that
some clubs have benefitted from the collapse
of heavy industry whilst others have
suffered. We can also be fairly certain that
some clubs - notwithstanding periods
of serious financial stress Celtic (1994),
Rangers (2012) are now listed clubs that
are answerable to share-holder value and
overseas based investors, so they are keen
to benefit from scale and fear losing out
in the globalisation of high-end football.
Others such as Aberdeen, Ross County
and St Johnstone have placed greater faith
in regional community entrepreneurship
or localness. Others such as Stirling
Albion, Hearts, Motherwell and St Mirren
and have lent more heavily towards
fan-ownership models of success and
survival. What is not yet clear is how the
various demands of post-industrialism
will impact in the decades to come. We
are already seeing one self-evident threat:
that however strong a football club’s
connections with its local economy
are, global forces may drain emotional
memory and financial loyalty away from
the local game. It is now commonplace
for Scottish football fans to admit an
emotional interest in one of the big global
teams, often Barcelona, but also major
English clubs that can be easily reached by
train or plane. Weekend football tourism
– travelling to, say, the Milan derby – is
now on many people’s bucket-list. Almost
every week I read forum posts where a
dedicated fan is missing out on a game
because of securing tickets to Manchester
City, Liverpool or Arsenal. This is a
phenomenon that is helped by extensive
television coverage of football and the
concentration of super-talent in a small
number of the top leagues. It is a reality
every bit as formidable and threatening as
the closure of the local yards and the pain
of the P45. Only 100 years in the future
will we really be able to say how Scottish
society and its football clubs rode the
rough tackles of post-industrialism. l
September 2016 | nutmeg | 25

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FAMILY TIES
oviet Ill_layout_v4.indd 1-2 12/07/2016 22:2
28
Michael Tierney on
his last game with
his father.
“In truth this is not a story
I wanted to write. Ever.
But I knew I would have to
some day. A postscript of
sorts to a book about the life
of my father, and the only
football match we had ever
attended throughout our life
together.”
37
Hugh McDonald on
an unlikely bond
with his ‘other’
team.
“There is no signing of
forms, no application for a
season ticket, no taking of
oaths or sharing of blood.
I become a fan simply by
suddenly realising I care.”
40
Alastair McKay
on why his soul
belongs to West
Ham United.
““Supporting a football
team is not a rational choice.
If it were, I would be a
Hibernian fan.””
September 2016 | nutmeg | 27

Family ties
THE LAST
GAME WITH
MY FATHER
A POSTSCRIPT TO HIS
BOOK THE FIRST GAME
WITH MY FATHER
By Michael Tierney
28 | nutmeg | September 2016

Here’s a memory. It was summer and a
blistering hot day and I was in the back
garden of my parent’s house, sitting
alongside my father, John, who sat crosslegged
in blue jeans and a white vest.
Tanned and handsome, he ran his
large hands through his curly black
hair, and sipped from a mug of black tea
while eating on a cheese and onion crisp
sandwich. He was quiet as an Irish bog,
but smiling. He looked a little worn out. I
must have been about 12 years old.
Down at the bottom of the garden, with
the Campsie Fells in the background (we
called them the Campsie Hills), were
some of my sisters playing badminton
over a rickety fishing net held up with
bamboo sticks, and my brothers playing
football. It was a very big garden, and part
of a large house, in Bishopbriggs, on the
outskirts of Glasgow, that my father had
bought when it was rundown. We needed
a big house: my parents had nine children
and not much else to contain them.
We sat talking, mostly about football
and Celtic. And Ireland. For my father
Celtic and Ireland was basically the same
thing. If you said one it was the same as
thinking the other. Everyone knew that.
We were Celtic to the core. Celtic and
Ireland together, like a pot of old stew and
two red carrots.
We had Ireland in our bones. And Celtic
was in our DNA, though I didn’t really
know what that was so he added that it
meant we had bits of Celtic growing inside
us, like green, white and gold strands.
And it was inside him too and his father,
and his father before that, and it would be
inside our sons and daughters as well.
We were connected to Ireland by birth,
he said. We were connected to Celtic, by
Ireland. You couldn’t get the grin off his
face with a blowtorch.
But we also talked about Barra, my
mother’s family’s island home in the
Illustration by Kathleen Oakley
Outer Hebrides: a place he secretly loved
more than Ireland but would never admit
it. We would have talked, I’m sure, about
what I was going to do when I grew up
(play centre forward for Celtic, naturally),
and that I should think of studying the
law because it would mean that I might
infiltrate the Establishment and all the
nefarious and hidden powers-that-be.
I nodded enthusiastically in agreement,
but didn’t really know what the
Establishment was, nor anyone nefarious
for that matter. I knew some of the neighbours
were for the watching but that was
about it. I inherited his suspicion, like
someone inherits a chair.
My father would have been in his late
30s, only a young man compared to what
I am now (two years shy of an impossible
50). We chatted a bit longer and
then almost inexplicably he was silent. I
caught him staring again at the Campsies,
blowing smoke rings from his Benson &
Hedges cigarettes.
When he died, he said, in a voice driven
to sadness, I had to bury him in the
garden and not to fuss at all about paying
for funerals and coffins and wakes. I’d to
bury him near the gooseberry bush, or
one of the crab apple trees or maybe even
somewhere under the hedge beside his
shed. There would be none of that funeral
nonsense. None of that malarkey, son.
Waste of good money and then some. His
words were as clear as the directions for
putting on a sock.
And I nodded while he kept staring at
the Campsies, a fug of smoke around him
like a halo, and wondered how I’d tell my
mother and brothers and sisters about
the whole burying out the back carry-on
and him being deadly serious about not
spending a brown penny because why
on earth would a man want to pay good
money for a funeral if he was dead?
Besides he liked the view from the
kitchen window, peering out through the
net curtain, and down past the shed and
September 2016 | nutmeg | 29

Family ties
The last game with my father
the Christmas trees he’d rescued from the
living room every winter before planting
them after the festivities were over.
So I’m 12 years old, quiet as a box of
eggs with arms that couldn’t lift two
stamps, and him going on about the dying
stuff while eating his crisp sandwich and
me thinking about the foxes that came in
every night from the quarry, with their
hungry, yellow eyes, and how they’d dig
him up and eat every last part of him,
dead or not. I winced.
‘But it won’t be for a long time?’ I
asked, holding back wet, salty tears. Even
now, in my memory, I can feel them welling
once more.
He paused and looked at me. ‘Not
the now, son. Don’t worry.’ He rubbed
my head with his rough hands, while I
breathed in his scent of tobacco and stale
sweat. ‘I could look at those Campsie Hills
all day…’
Even now, more than 30 years later, I still
wonder if he really did want me to bury
him in the garden. And, sometimes, I still
find myself wondering if we actually had
that conversation.
So it’s a story that might be true. And I
think it is. I know, for sure, that I want it
to be. But such is the impossible nature of
memory that we cannot always reliably
recall the truth. Yet our memories give
flesh and bone to words and meaning.
And, of course, they give each of us a
place in the world.
We invent things to keep other things
alive. Just as my father did.
He was the son of a British soldier
named Michael, who I was named after,
and who had died in the Second World
War. For much of my father’s life he was
searching for the father he had lost, and
the way for him to do that was by looking
at where he came from, and many of
his family came from Ireland. So that
informed his identity which, in turn,
formed mine.
Things are passed on, but they’re
not necessarily true. Most of my life I
believed my grandfather was Irish, even
though he was born in Maryhill, like my
father. We invent ourselves: our past and,
sometimes, our future. We all do. It’s the
remembering that makes it real.
Fast-forward more than 30 years. On a
good day the decision we made seemed
right. Not calling my mother, Catherine,
home seemed sensible because she was
on her way to Barra, to bury her sister
who had died only a few days earlier.
On a bad day I am haunted by my
reluctance, our reluctance (my sister’s
and I) not to call my mother on time and
have her return to the hospital where her
husband, my father, lay dying.
I think I knew he was dying. I think we
all did. Really dying. But I didn’t want it to
be true so I convinced myself in the hospital,
that he would be fine. My mother
would only be gone for a few days and,
by the time she returned, he would have
picked up a little. If not completely better
he would have been as ill, at least, as he
had always been. He had been seriously ill
for more than a decade.
In 2002 he had suffered a devastating
stroke that rendered him unable to walk
or talk for most, if not nearly all, of that
time. More recently, I had even written
a book about it – The First Game With
My Father – that was published in 2014.
It was a story of love, loss, football and
family.
It was a story about Celtic and identity
and community and history and memory.
It was about the first football match I
attended with my father, against Sporting
Club do Portugal in November 1983. That
night, watching Celtic overturn a 2-0 first
leg deficit with an emphatic and exhilarating
5-0 victory, was my 15-year-old self,
along with my brother, Iain, and my father.
I remember his white, rusting Volkswagen
van taking us along Kirkintilloch
30 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Michael Tierney
Road, through Springburn and past
the high flats that looked like sentries
on parade. A cold dark of winter had
settled over Glasgow. The city looked big
and sharp, with needles coming out of
cathedrals and churches and halls.
I carried my Celtic scarf. My father had
brought it home to me one day when I
was much younger. It was old and tatty
even then, and I told my mother it would
be fine after a wash and that I could sew
on my new Celtic patches by myself. And
I did. And they’re still there now.
Celtic Park smelled of cheap tobacco and
stale lager and the trapped air of something
burning. We ate chips till we were as
full as a fat lady’s sock. The faces of men
and boys were just like he had promised.
Just like ours. The colour of wet cement.
The noise, meanwhile, was unlike anything
I had ever heard before, as if a latched
cage had been opened and something
monstrous had been let out. I’d waited a
long time for this. I’d waited a long time to
see my father’s face. I knew he was worried
about the cost. My mother said it would
be fine. And anyway, if they could put a
man on the moon he could find a few extra
pounds somewhere on earth.
WE SAT TALKING,
MOSTLY ABOUT
FOOTBALL AND CELTIC.
AND IRELAND. FOR MY
FATHER CELTIC AND
IRELAND WAS BASICALLY
THE SAME THING
By the end Celtic destroyed Sporting.
And my father was smiling. We all smiled
together, in the joyful brutality of the
football arena. But I knew that he was
already thinking of other things. He was
thinking about work. And the house.
And my mother. And his mother. And my
grandfather. And how much petrol cost
and how much brake pads cost and what
was the price of a new exhaust. And he
thought about his nine children. And how
he would get them through it all.
We drove home, through the High
Street. It looked sinister and dark, what
with the cathedral and the enormous
gravestones of the medieval necropolis
and the oldest house in Glasgow nestled
at the side of the road.
‘There’s the Royal Infirmary,’ he said,
pointing. ‘You wouldn’t want to be going
in there with toothache, boys. They used
to wheel the bodies in there on a horse
and cart years ago. The fellas were never
the same when they got out.’
My brother and I looked at each other.
‘I used to run electric cables in they
hospitals,’ he said. ‘Can’t stand the
places.’
Celtic remained a constant throughout
that time, like wallpaper. It was the
background of all our younger lives. It
constantly changed, but it was always
there. Yet, it would be 30 years later,
in November 2013, before the three of
us returned to Celtic Park, when Celtic
played Dundee United.
I had planned a big European night for
my father, like the one we had attended
against Sporting, but my mother said he’d
never make it past seven in the evening
and she was right. The Dundee United
game fell exactly thirty years to the day
since our memorable visit to Celtic Park
all those years ago. It was perfect.
So much time had passed. So much
football had come and gone too. I had
friends who attended every match
without fail, home and away, taking up
September 2016 | nutmeg | 31

Family ties
The last game with my father
all their time. Taking up their life. I’d
gone to games sporadically over the past
few years. I became like my father. The
radio and television suited me. It was a
reflection of our times, I supposed. Too
many distractions. Too many trips away
with work. I used to go so much more
often in my 20s but that was such a long,
long time ago that I didn’t even know that
person any more.
But the strand of Celtic, the threads
of the same cloth, was still weaving its
way through our lives. The memory was
still warm from the first time. All the
things he’d ever spoken about had made
their mark, in one way or another. The
pond had rippled. Celtic had come to
represent many of the things I held dear.
Togetherness. A community.
He looked forward to the match even
though he couldn’t say so. We drove
through Springburn and into town and
along London Road as we had done all
those years ago. Sometimes it seemed as
far away as the silver moon.
I brought my daughter, Mahoney, with
me and she wore the Celtic scarf I’d had
from childhood. It was a totem. I always
wanted to believe that it kept my father
alive. As long as I had that scarf he’d be
safe. It was ridiculous, of course. The
scarf was made of wool. And I had lost it
a hundred times. It did nothing for my
father’s survival. Still, that was what faith
was. Believing in something so utterly
preposterous that it must be true.
I took my father to that match in his
wheelchair, wrapped like an old man
against the biting rain and sleet, a shell of
his former self: freezing, brittle hands, a
lopsided grin as a result of his stroke and
a partly crushed skull where bone had
been removed to allow him to survive.
It felt good to be here again with him, in
front of Celtic Park. It felt right. Kerrydale
Street in the bright daylight. I clasped his
shoulder and watched his body slip back
and forth on his wheelchair, like a buoy
rolling on a rainy Barra tide.
He was smiling now, at the lights and
the streets and the fans walking with
their scarves and the vans selling chips
and pies and hot dogs. Mahoney fixed his
scarf for him. The area around Celtic Park
had changed. It took him a while to take
it all in. He stared at the Velodrome that
had been built beside the stadium for the
Commonwealth Games. With a quivering
finger he pointed it out. It looked like a
spaceship had landed quietly and stayed.
His face recoiled in wonder more than
anything. And I think he saw the death of
something too.
The man at the entrance to the disabled
access area opened the large, vaulted
gate. We pushed my father through the
entrance and then stopped for some
photographs. There he was, smiling in his
wheelchair, wrapped against the cold. We
took turns having our photographs taken
and he smiled in each of them and looked
amazed when he heard the noise inside
the ground.
All those years ago, standing on the
terraces of Celtic Park, I had no idea at
the time that it might be the only match
we’d ever attend together. Back then it felt
like a miracle. The only thing that really
mattered to me was Celtic. I could recite
all the players as if recalling the ten-times
table. I could barely remember them now.
They had faded, once more, like a song.
He always said it was never about how
often you went to watch football, it was
about what you brought when you did.
The singing grew louder and louder.
‘The Fields of Athenry’ was sung with
gusto and we joined in with the rest of
the crowd. I could feel myself getting a
little emotional and tried to bury it in my
throat. It wasn’t the song. It was my father
sitting in his chair, with a hood covering
his head against the rain. He was freezing.
He tried to fix the hood but his hands
didn’t work as fast as the rain did. He
wouldn’t let me fix it. He got soaked.
Yet, even in his chair, he still had poise.
32 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Michael Tierney
The rain was soaking us through. Celtic
attacked. The ball moved from left to
right. From the back of the stands the
fans shouted and screamed. Mahoney
smiled. I loved that she was there with
her grandfather. He rubbed his skull and
felt the missing bone. I watched as she
took his hand and held it for a minute or
two.
We give expression to our lives through
little things, and the little things in our
lives give expression to us. A book. A
memory. A smell. A football match.
All those years ago the little things in
my life quickly became the biggest thing.
I was obsessed by football. I played it
every day after school for hours on end
in the garden, way past my bedtime: and,
sometimes, in summer, way past my
parents’ bedtime too.
But my father didn’t take us to matches
because, quite simply, he couldn’t afford
I BROUGHT MY
DAUGHTER, MAHONEY,
WITH ME AND SHE WORE
THE CELTIC SCARF I’D
HAD FROM CHILDHOOD. IT
WAS A TOTEM. I ALWAYS
WANTED TO BELIEVE THAT
IT KEPT MY FATHER ALIVE.
AS LONG AS I HAD THAT
SCARF HE’D BE SAFE.
it. With nine children to feed, clothe, raise
and support together with my mother, it
was never highest on his list of priorities.
And yet football was always there. Celtic
was always there. And it always would be.
The book became much more about my
father than Celtic. The real reason I wrote
it was, I think, fairly simple. I knew he
was dying and I wanted to keep him alive
in a story. So I wrote the book principally
for this reason: to give my father a place
in the world. To give him a place in that
world. It’s why I still write about him
now. To preserve him.
In truth this is not a story I wanted to
write. Ever. But I knew I would have to
some day. A postscript of sorts to a book
about the life of my father, and the only
football match we had ever attended
throughout our life together.
The morning of my father’s death I
was in Glasgow at the passport office,
enjoying the cool, grey air of June, having
just returned for a brief break from Qatar
where I was working on the World Cup
2022 project. A week earlier I visited my
parents’ house and watched as the carers
hoisted him, yet again, from his bedroom
to the living room where he would sit
quietly in front of the TV. They would
return him as usual to his bed at night.
It has always been awful to watch my
father like this and worse, of course,
for my mother. The years have passed
unexpectedly quickly since 2002 and I
have watched her getting a little older
and a little more tired with every passing
day, yet always gracious and graceful. I
still don’t really know how she did it. Or
maybe I do. Maybe the hardest questions
have the simplest answers. She loved my
father more than anything. More than
anything. That’s all. And she always has
done.
And my father? Although he couldn’t
speak, I knew this much for sure. His
wound was never his stroke. It was his
inability to talk to my mother, to say a
September 2016 | nutmeg | 33

Family ties
The last game with my father
simple hello and goodbye: and to hold her
every single day.
The mobile phone rang out again.
My sister, Catherine, called a couple
of times but I had missed them while I
chatted to the amiable lady behind the
passport counter. When I answered I
knew then that something was wrong. I
held my face in my hands. He couldn’t die
that day. Please, God, no. Of all the days
over the past fourteen years it could not
be that day.
My mother was already on her way to
Barra for Mary’s funeral.
That morning she left him with a kiss
and a promise she’d be gone for only a
couple of days. My father had been his
usual self, a little sick, unable to articulate
whether he was in real pain or just a bit
uncomfortable. He had regular infections
but nothing more or less than he had
experienced before.
We would go to Barra in summers as
children, to the house belonging to my
grandmother, El, though sometimes my
father had to stay in Glasgow where he
worked as an electrician. Even though he
would be staying at home, when he drove
us all from Bishopbriggs in his precious
old van to Oban for the ferry, I don’t
think I’d ever seen a happier man, then
or since. And he always promised that he
would make a boat out of the old van, rust
and all, to help speed our return.
He also joked with my mother that he
would build her a boat that they could
both sail away on. Perhaps, that morning,
as my mother left for Barra, he believed
that it was finally ready.
We all reassured my mother that she
should go.
I counted the days in my head that she
had been away in all those years: once, to
visit my brother in Ireland and another
time to Barra, to see Mary. Perhaps fourteen
days out of more than four thousand.
It couldn’t be now.
It shouldn’t be now.
The phone rang again. Catherine gave
another update in an anguished tone.
He had an infection but was having
problems breathing. I walked quickly
along Killermont Street towards the Royal
Infirmary, where he was being taken, still
alive, but slipping in and out of consciousness.
With every step the day was
already marked on my private calendar of
grief, stamped in my new passport.
As I walked I remembered the journey
through the High Street all those years
ago coming back from the Sporting
match, and the hospital at the top of the
road. My father’s voice ringing in my ears.
God help the poor bugger who went in
there. They’d never get out the place what
with all those experiments and scientific
malarkey that the surgeons carried out
on the poor. They were still doing it, mark
my words. He’d shake his head and offer
a long whistle. The last place you’d want
to send a man and no mistake.
When the ambulance pulled into the
bay I could tell from the faces of my
sisters what lay ahead. He was quickly
MY GOD, CHILDREN…
THIS IS THE LIFE. WHO
WANTS A GAME OF
FOOTBALL? COME ON,
I’LL BEAT THE LOT OF
YOU! NINE AGAINST ONE.
COME ON. BIG CELTIC
AGAINST WEE CELTIC!
34 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Michael Tierney
taken inside and, after a few minutes, a
young doctor appeared telling us that my
father was a very ill man and did we want
to contact anyone else?
I looked at the ruins of my father’s
body as he lay in his hospital bed, startled
by the marble beauty of his hands, and
thought of my mother heading to Barra to
bury Mary in Eolaigearraidh, on the other
side of the island. He would be happy she
was there.
Remember Barra, Dad?
The boys, squashed up the back of the
van like dead pigeons, had our footballs
and second-hand Celtic jerseys and the
girls with their vanity cases and magazines.
Now and again my mother would
talk to my father in Gaelic and he would
grin, desperately wishing he understood
her native tongue.
Then him singing the Mingulay Boat
Song for my mother and my great-grandfather
who had grown up on that other
hardy, solitary island, and my mother fretting
over whether she had enough food
and money for all of us for the six weeks
we would spend in Els house.
Soon we’d be in Tangusdale or be walking
over the croft, trying not to get lost,
but usually did, as the mist descended.
And we’d climb Ben Heaval right to the
very top, where the statue of Our Lady
Star of the Sea stood like a protectorate
over our dead ancestors in the waters of
the Minch and the Atlantic – the same
way my mother had stood protecting over
my father these past years.
I can still see my mother with her black
tea looking out of the window at El’s
waiting and worrying if we’d all return
safely, amid the great croft and the burn
and the rocks. Sometimes we’d sit outside
in the evening waiting for the ferry to
arrive with fresh milk and bread, each of
us secretly hoping to see if my father was
finally coming off the ferry. My mother
wished it more than any of us. Just to see
and hear him.
That’s what she missed most about him
over the years. Being able to hear his
voice. In the past, as we shared stories
in the loft, he always talked about my
mother. Quietly, gently and with all the
admiration of the saints.
We’d be sitting up talking again, and
me barely a teenager, about Ireland
and football and Celtic and, eventually,
he would get round to my mother. He
talked about meeting her in Crinan
while she worked as a chambermaid.
Their first date at a local cinema in
Lochgilphead and my father picked her
up on his Norton motorbike (we still
have it even now) and my mother rode
pillion, scarf in her hair like a movie star.
And he talked about my mother in
Barra and about all the children they
were going to have. And he showed me
photographs from then and she was
beautiful. Not beautiful in my imagination
or my memory. But she truly was.
It’s a simple fact. And still is.
As my father lay dying my sisters and I
managed to convince each other that it
would be fine. My father would survive.
It was just another one of his episodes.
We held his hands. We tried to bring
him back to life with a word, or a smile.
We tried calling my mother but there
was no signal on the ferry to the islands.
But he couldn’t die anyway. God could
never be that cruel.
My mother arrived after midnight.
My father had already left. We pulled
the curtain and closed the door. Bathed
in the soft yellow light of the room, she
stroked his cold arm over and over and
talked and wept gently into his remains.
She left him with a warm kiss for his
journey.
My brothers and I carried my father
from his home, as my mother, sisters
and the grandchildren stood reverently
September 2016 | nutmeg | 35

Family ties
The last game with my father
By Michael Tierney
in the front garden as he left for the very
last time.
I can still see my mother’s face, like
a broken porcelain plate, her hands
clasped, her thumbs touching her lips in
prayer. She recited her words quietly and
with great dignity and, right there, God
was an inescapable fact of her existence.
She never doubted His presence. Nor
would she.
Tears in our eyes, pain in our hearts,
but more pride than I could ever have
imagined, we walked him to the hearse.
Despite the hurt, I smile at the memory of
it even now: my father finally leaving his
home and his garden.
His coffin, the wooden-boxed boundary
between the living and the dead, was
filled with little things, mementoes from
his family: a flower, Rosary beads, some
coins (he loved the weight of one pound
coins), hand-written notes from his
grandchildren, a drawing, a copy of my
book and some photographs. But mostly,
it was filled with love. And, of course, the
weight of all our sorrows.
I close my eyes. Here he is, my father,
not old, but vibrant, powerful (immensely
powerful), handsome and wearing his
blue jumper with holes at the sleeves.
Here he is on his Norton motorbike,
cigarette in hand, smiling at something
unseen. And again, this time just as a boy,
dressed for communion while growing up
in Ruchill and Maryhill.
And in another, I see him collecting
autographs of great Celtic players,
including Sean Fallon, Bertie Peacock
and Bobby Evans, and players from other
teams, including Tommy Ledgerwood,
Frank Pattison, Colin Lidell and Tommy
Baxter. I picture him going to Celtic Park
or Firhill as a youngster, on his bicycle or
by bus, and the players tipping their flat
caps and saying, of course, son, when my
father asked them to sign.
I just can’t let these memories go.
I see him taking me to our house for the
very first time. I must have been seven.
My father rubbed the grey stone with the
edge of his thumb, holding the weight of
the building like Atlas held the celestial
sphere.
That morning we went round to the
garden at the back and the snow was so
heavy. It was stunning, really beautiful. In
the background I saw the majesty of the
Campsie Hills for the very first time. And
he lifted me up on his shoulders and said
he was buying the house. There are days
when I remember it all.
But the picture I see most of all is my
father in Barra, so happy to be around
his nine children. He is lying back in the
grass, wearing his Aviator sunglasses
and sporting sunburned arms. My God,
children… this is the life. Who wants a
game of football? Come on, I’ll beat the
lot of you! Nine against one. Come on. Big
Celtic against wee Celtic!
And we all ran to his arms on Barra.
I close my eyes for the final time. Now I
see my mother, in her 70s, strong and true
as the croft of her childhood, nestling in
the foothills of old age. She misses him as
only she can. She moves gracefully to the
next stage of her life, without him for the
first time in decades. But if you love you
grieve, and there are few exceptions.
We buried our father in a grave facing
the Campsie Hills where he took us all as
children. There is a B&Q store across the
road. He used to shop there every single
week without fail, a packet of nails, some
paint or a new hammer.
It’s a perfectly ordinary spot for the end
of a football story. But looking out to these
hills of his youth and of my childhood,
stretching gently from Denny Muir to
Dumgoyne, it’s a perfect spot to finish a
love story. When I’m home I sometimes
visit him in the light, grey dawn. Other
times, if I’m lucky, it might also be a
warm afternoon, the verdant grass
beneath my feet. It’s our own patch. Our
own pitch. It’s where I remember the last
game with my father. l
36 | nutmeg | September 2016

Family ties
BVB AND ME
How Ballspielverein Borussia
09 e.V. Dortmund became a
part of life for me and my son
By Hugh MacDonald
It is April in Stuttgart. It is damp, cold and
grey. We stand in a concrete bubble, surrounded
by hundreds of people in bumble
bee yellow. It is slick underfoot with rain,
spilled beer and other mercifully unspecified
liquids. It is a scene that is the stuff of
an anxiety dream or the result of taking
the wrong mushrooms with one’s well
done bratwurst. It is, though, reality.
It is about 5pm on a dismal Saturday in
the Mercedes-Benz Arena and Borussia
Dortmund have just defeated Vfb Stuttgart
with some ease and with considerable
style. My son, Ally, and his mate, Andy,
are briefly lost in the jumping, thrashing,
mewling mass as I stand transfixed by
the aftermath of a match so one-sided it
cannot be called great but demands to be
described as memorable.
I am swathed in a Borussia bobble
hat, my Borussia scarf and my Borussia
heavyweight jacket (with fetching yellow
badge and trim). We have flown in for the
weekend for the sole reason of watching
Borussia Dortmund, though as football
fanatics we spend hours on the train the
next day travelling to and from Munich to
watch 1860 play Eintracht Braunschweig
in a second division match. We are not
immune to glamour, after all.
But it is all about BvB. It is all about
seeing them in the flesh yet again, it is all
about savouring the Bundesliga experience
that has, in our deeply prejudiced
souls, the unspoken need to be garnished
by BvB sauce.
The drama, the clamour of my immediate
surroundings does not surprise
me. Standing amid hundreds of fans
proclaiming their allegiance to BvB, I
feel no distance emotionally from their
exuberance. The Borussia experience was
once a bit of a lark for me, an occasional
rush to a plane, then a tram or subway
to a stadium, and an ever so slightly
detached view of a vibrant, enterprising
side playing in front of an extraordinary
support, home or away. But this has
changed. Somehow I have become a
Borussia supporter. Not in a renaming my
son Burki Mkhitaryan Weigl Aubamayang
Kagawa Gundogan Reuss MacDonald sort
of way. Not even in a pledging my life to
BvB and having a tattoo on the extensive
free space on the top of my bald napper
sort of way. But a supporter, nevertheless.
Ballspielverein Borussia 09 e.V.
Dortmund have somehow become part of
my life. The interior of the Mercedes Benz
Arena bounces ever so slightly, the noise
resounds off its walls, the damp seeps
slowly but into my boots. The dance goes
on, accompanied by cries of Heja BvB,
Heja BvB, Heja, Heja, Heja BvB. This can
be crudely translated as ‘Come on, BvB’
though this deprives it of its innate exuberance.
I smile. I even take what passes
for a video on my phone. I am elated. I am
happy. I am 60 years of age.
It is Anfield. But first it was Annfield. The
story of how Ally and I ended up supporting
Borussia Dortmund requires an
explanation. It is Anfield, April 16, 2016,
about a week before our trip to Stuttgart.
The dash to Liverpool has been born of
September 2016 | nutmeg | 37

Family ties
BvB and me
a need that has contempt for the normal
imperatives of finance and rationality. We
have paid the equivalent of the combined
SPFL premiership transfer budget for two
seats at the back of a stand at Anfield.
The money bothers us naught. The
fragility of the Dortmund defence is
deeply vexing, however. Famously, and
predictably, BvB play spectacularly well
for large chunks of the match, mesmerising
Liverpool with their pace and passing.
With a carelessness that would be
shocking if it were not so traditional, the
defence conspires to donate four goals.
From 3-1 up, BvB sink to 4-3 down, the
fatal goal being scored in time added on.
You may know this. It was in the papers.
The walk back to the centre of town
prompts a period of reflection that has
something to do with the power of momentum,
the fragility of a largely callow
side and the sheer tumult of Anfield. But,
more importantly, it references Annfield.
It is the late summer in the late
eighties. Ally is three years old and as
calm as Jamie Vardy on speed. He needs
to be walked like a nervous thoroughbred
and tonight’s journey takes us past
Annfield, big and brick and bold and the
home of Stirling Albion.
“What happens in there, Daddy?”
“The big men play football,” I lied.
The next day we were inside the ground,
kicking up dust on a deserted terracing,
watching 22 men assault a ball on
a piece of artificial grass. I was gently
amused, even slightly entertained. Ally
was smitten. His sister, pricking her ears
at the mention of pies and sweets at the
post-match conference in the living room,
decided to join us on future trips. We were
regulars at Stirling Albion for 10 years.
From Annfield to Ochilview to Forthbank.
Ten soddin’ years. It was a punishment on
the weans that should have attracted the
attention of social workers. But they survived.
Catriona wandered away from football,
Ally took up with Celtic. The latter is
a family illness and he was infected when
Albion were fixture-free and he went to
a Celtic match with one of my mates. He
returned with tales of might, bedlam and
glory. He was lost to the Albion.
Annfield was bulldozed. Forthbank was
given a bodyswerve worthy of Maradona
on ephedrine and Ally followed Celtic.
I, meanwhile, had surprisingly fallen
into a job as a sportswriter with all the
pre-meditation of walking along a busy
road and stepping into a manhole. I was
50 and going to games with my son was
now in the past, except, of course, for the
assignation at the main steps of Hampden
or before Brother Walfrid at Celtic where
I would hand him tickets. Football was
no longer a fully shared experience. There
would be the odd night sharing a sofa and
a pizza (the pizza was invariably tastier)
and watching a match. But these evenings
were rare.
I worked on big sports nights. It is what
editors want sportswriters to do. The
football bond now existed through text,
email or chats pre or post-match. The experience
was diluted. We could be at the
same football match – often were – but he
would be high up the stands and I would
be in the press box. He would then go
for a pint. I would, meanwhile, be trying
to persuade some footballer to explain
precisely how he and his mates won/lost/
drew a match.
I was missing in action when Borussia
came along. Like many romances, it
began quite innocently. I noticed he
was referring regularly to the Bundesliga,
most specifically to Dortmund. It
deepened quickly to Echte Liebe, the
true love proclaimed in banner and song
by BvB fans. His moment of epiphany
came when watching Dortmund play at
Manchester City in 2012. He had followed
with interest the career of Jurgen Klopp,
he had become intrigued about the Wall
that stood and throbbed at the Westfalen-
38 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Hugh MacDonald
stadion and he had been captivated by
how BvB had come back from financial
meltdown to build a club that valued the
support rather than patronised it. This is
a club with more than 100,000 members
who seek to influence how it is run.
Ally looked at the Eitihad and saw
that BvB supporters had filled an end,
snapping up released tickets as City fans
declined to buy them. He was smitten.
His casual affair immediately became
something more serious. He started flying
to Germany, accompanied by his wife,
Jill, whose tolerance is saintly, heroic. He
would bombard me with information
about BvB, about the Bundesliga, about
the genius of Klopp and the perfidy of
Bayern, the diabolical Munich force. He
was a BvB supporter. This, to me, was
delightfully odd and gently fascinating.
It suddenly became something more. It
became personal. I became a BvB fan too.
It is May in Berlin. The mass of fans in
the centre stand of the Olympic Stadium
have drifted towards the exit. I remain
in my seat. To my left, the BvB support
sings loudly as if to scare away the reality
of defeat. Ally has walked down to the
mezzanine, brandishing his scarf, not in
surrender but in defiance. It is Klopp’s last
game as BvB manager and he – and we
– have watched his side lose 3-1 to Wolfsburg
in the DFB Pokal final. Borussia, of
course, offered hope, taking the lead and
then scorning a chance to build a solid,
perhaps unbridgeable gulf. Instead, they
slip carelessly and fecklessly to defeat. It
is a night that is almost emblematic of a
disappointing season for Borussia. It is
also the night I become a BvB fan.
There is no signing of forms, no application
for a season ticket, no taking of oaths.
I simply, suddenly realise I care, that BvB
have the facility not only to entertain me
in some louche fashion but to hurt me,
sharply and surely. It comes when Ilkay
Gundogan, a midfielder of guile and
energy, shirks a tackle on the halfway line.
Craps it. Jumps up and out of the way as
if he has stepped on a land mine. I am
outraged. I rise and shout, Ally roaring at
my side. Those on sponsors’ tickets look
at us with mild disapproval. I do not care.
Gundogan has let his team down. He has
let his supporters down. He has let me
down. I am, after all, one of them.
This visceral reaction is followed by the
undeniable realisation that I am now in
thrall to yet another team that has the
capacity to wound me. As BvB meander to
defeat, I am aware of how much it hurts,
how much it matters. Yet I also know that
it matters little. The physical presence
of my son is an unnecessary reminder
of what counts and what does not. The
genius of football is that it can seem
important when it simply is not.
But that is not to deny its potency or
even its significance. In the aftermath of
the cup final defeat, Ally slipped away to a
BvB bar in Berlin. I was glad just to make
it home to the hotel on a night when the
transport system conspired to create a
hearty joke about Teutonic efficiency. It
was 1am when I flopped down on the
bed, my legs done but my mind racing.
In the calm after the Sturm und Drang,
there was a clarity. I saw how football was
not just a link with my son but a faithful
witness to our shared passions, even
obsession. I saw that his love for a team
was built on it having values that I, well,
valued. I saw how the game had taken us
over Scotland, throughout Europe. It had
now given us another love, one that led us
to know other cultures, other people. It
had helped us know each other.
In a room on Alexsanderplatz, I
glimpsed something else. I had given
football to Ally in the late eighties. He had
given it back to me. He and Jill are having
a wean. I have not will not offer recommendations
to them on a name for my
first grandchild. But on those nights when
an old man finds sleep elusive I amuse
myself by thinking that, boy or girl, Heja
BvB MacDonald has a certain ring to it. l
September 2016 | nutmeg | 39

Family ties
EAST END
BOY
I should support Hibs. But I
love Celtic. And I look out for
Brechin. However my soul
belongs to West Ham United.
By Alastair McKay
Supporting a football team is not a
rational choice. If it were, I would be a Hibernian
fan. It was, after all, the Hibs team
of the early 1970s that my dad took me
to see, and those evening games at Easter
Road formed my love of football. The
games are now statistics, but fragments
of memory remain. I remember the walk
from the car as we journeyed to Easter
Road, the view over the stands towards
the Calton Hill monument - Edinburgh’s
Disgrace - and the glow of cigarettes in
the darkness. One game was a 4-2 victory
over Hajduk Split in the 1972-3 European
Cup Winners’ Cup. The internet tells me
Hibs won 4-2, before contriving to lose
the second leg 3-0. The following year,
I saw a scoreless draw against the great
Leeds team led by Billy Bremner.
I don’t remember the details. I
remember the floodlights. But I know I
loved those trips to Easter Road. I even
remember the frisson of embarrassed
excitement when I tried to encourage
Hibs’ winger Eric Stevenson with a shout
of “Stevie Wonder”. I’m not sure my
dad found it funny. He wasn’t a shouter.
Neither was I after that.
And here we come to a distinction
between liking a team and being a fan. I
liked Hibs to the extent of adopting Pat
Stanton’s lucky habit of tying his right
shoelace first. (I still do). But Celtic had
my heart. Why? Because young boys don’t
gamble. They like to win. But also because
of Jimmy Johnstone. In Wee Jinky, Celtic
had a footballing genius who looked like
he had stepped out of The Beano. He was
five feet four, with freckles and red hair.
At least I think it was red. The television
was black-and-white. So I supported
Celtic. I was too young to cheer their 1967
European Cup win, but I remember crying
in the solitude of my bedroom when they
lost the 1970 final to Feyenoord.
But here’s the thing. I still look for
Celtic’s scores. I want them to be better
than they are. But my soul belongs to West
Ham United. Why? It’s a complicated
question with a simple answer. Although I
have a Scottish name, a Scottish education,
Scottish parents, and Scottish skin
that burns before it freckles at the thought
of sunshine… Although my introverted
passive-aggressive personality is calcified
around the flinty Calvinism of the North
East… Although I suffer an aversion to
pleasure in all its forms (my other Scottish
team is Brechin, because my grandad used
to take me to Glebe Park, and my mum’s
Auntie Elsie, who wasn’t her Auntie,
used to wash the team’s strips, and the
joke about Brechin was that they were
the strongest team in the Scottish league,
because they held all the rest up)…
Although all of that, I grew up
understanding that I was a Cockney. My
dad, who was from Montrose, used to
school me in basic rhyming slang. Apples
and pears, plates of meat. For a while, he
was an economic migrant, marooned in
London. I was an EastEnder, having been
born in my mother’s bed in Harold Wood
on a Saturday, just as the football results
were being read out. Inauspiciously, West
Ham lost 3-2 to Sheffield Wednesday,
before an Upton Park crowd of 26,453.
40 | nutmeg | September 2016

My support of the Hammers wasn’t
always pure. Children are emotionally
promiscuous, and I tried to increase my
chances of success by also following Leeds
and Manchester City. The only English strip
I had in childhood was a Man City change
strip which made me look like a Miss
World contestant. When Leeds wore little
pendants on their socks I had those, with
the number 7. But underneath, I was West
Ham. They had Bobby Moore, who won
the 1966 World Cup (and Geoff Hurst, who
baffled the Russian linesman). Four years
later, Bobby Moore’s performance against
Brazil was like a footballing moon landing.
The satellite pictures had an extra-terrestrial
tint, and David Coleman sounded
as if he was was commentating into a
Cresta bottle, but the beautiful game was
never more other-worldly. On YouTube,
it is possible to re-live the moment where
Jairzinho ran the length of the field, only
to have the ball stolen from the tips of his
toes by Moore in what is now considered
to be “the perfect tackle”. Imagine that.
The art of defence, made beautiful.
Bobby Moore came from another planet.
And yet, a couple of years after that World
Cup, my primary seven class went on a
week-long trip to London. We did the
sights: the changing of the guard from
inside the gates of Buckingham Palace,
the zoo, Heathrow, Westminster Abbey,
St Paul’s (through the bus window) and I
didn’t believe any of it was real. London
was a place on the television. I was impressed
by believable details - the Nestlé
chocolate machines on the Underground
- and I remember the sense of longing,
as we imagined getting it on with, or
perhaps just talking to, the exotic girls
from another school who were staying in
the adjoining room of our dormitory in
deepest Essex. We scratched at the door
while “Popcorn” by Hot Butter played
on the radio. The next morning, the bus
drove through Chigwell, and the driver
announced that we were going past the
street where Bobby Moore lived. It was
amazing, because Bobby Moore didn’t
live. He was a phantasm in claret and
blue.
So much for childhood. Since moving
to London 12 years ago - an economic migrant
- I have been a season ticket holder
at West Ham. It has been an education:
often boring, occasionally thrilling, frequently
exasperating. There have been moments
of exhilaration - the 2006 FA Cup
final in Cardiff which was stolen in extra
time by Steven Gerrard (and lost when
an exhausted Marlon Harewood couldn’t
nudge the ball into the Liverpool net); the
2012 play-off final at Wembley; the false
prospectus of the Icelandic owners and the
(dubious) signing of the Argentine superstars
Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano
(who couldn’t displace Hayden Mullins
in the West Ham side). There was the
boredom of the Alan Curbishley years,
the self-harm of the Avram Grant period,
the aesthetic betrayals of Fat Sam. And
then came Slaven Bilic, bringing with him
Dimitri Payet and Manuel Lanzini as the
club staged a year-long farewell to the
famous old stadium that my dad had visited
in the months before I was born. There
was a lot of talk over that year about family
tradition, sons remembering their dads,
and the places where they used to sit.
I wish I could have gone to see West
Ham with my father. But I go to see them
without him, and every time I hear the
crowd launching into a chorus of the
Irons’ pessimistic anthem “I’m Forever
Blowing Bubbles”, I remember what my
dad used to used to say.
“The pitch was a lot closer to the fans
back then,” he’d tell me. “When someone
took a corner, you could reach out and
touch them.”
You can still do that at West Ham.
You can still reach out.
You can still dream, even as the
chanting of the crowd reminds you what
happens to dreamers. l
September 2016 | nutmeg | 41

Dundee United
REMEMBERING
RALPH
Prodigiously talented,
hard-drinking, headstrong,
self-deprecating: Ralph Milne
was many things. Above all,
he was great company.
By Neil Forsyth
42 | nutmeg | September 2016

In the autumn of 2000 I was working for
an advertising company off Tottenham
Court Road. My job was to trawl through
a labyrinthine piece of software and
retrospectively confirm if clients’ adverts
had been broadcast in the correct slots.
I didn’t know how to work the software.
My boss was called Brownie. He didn’t
know how to work the software either.
The days ticked by. After unproductive
mornings, Brownie and I would retire to
the Fitzrovia pub in Goodge Street before
a short, frantic stop at the all-you-eat
Chinese buffet next door.
If you thought the mornings were
unproductive, you should have seen
the afternoons. Drowsy from lager and
wantons, Brownie read Charlton Athletic
internet message-boards and forcefully
argued for the left-back Chris Powell to
be selected for England (on the day it finally
happened Brownie woke his brother
in Australia to tell him, before chiding
his brother, who must have felt he was in
the midst of a nightmare, for not showing
sufficient excitement).
I spent the afternoons writing for football
websites and diligently conducting
business on behalf of The South London
Tangerines, an ambitious Dundee United
supporters’ club that I’d recently formed
with other misplaced Dundonians.
Sometimes, not often, I’d ask Brownie
if we should perhaps ask for some
assistance in working the software and
he’d furrow his brow and say “tomorrow
Brucie”. He called me Brucie in reference
to the entertainer Bruce Forsyth.
It was on one of those empty, thinning
afternoons that I set about tracking down
the members of Dundee United’s 1982/83
Scottish Premier League-winning team.
Most were still in the game and easy to
find. Ralph Milne was harder. Eventually
I found a community website for Nailsea,
a small town outside Bristol. It said that
Illustration by Duncan McCoshan
RALPH MADE HIS UNITED
DEBUT AT 18 AGAINST
CELTIC, SCORED FROM 25
YARDS AND WAS BRIEFLY THE
YOUNGEST EVER SCORER IN
THE PREMIER LEAGUE.
former footballer Ralph Milne ran a
local pub called The Queen’s Head. The
Queen’s Head number was answered
by someone with a Dundee accent and I
asked if it was him.
“Aye,” said Ralph.
In his autobiography What’s It All
About Ralphie? (Black and White
Publishing, 2009, co-written with Gary
Robertson) Ralph relays this phone
call and how “at first I thought it was a
wind-up by someone on the capers”. But,
he clarifies, it was “the start of a bond I’ve
kept with the South London Tangerines.”
A few weeks after the call a dozen of us
visited Nailsea for the weekend. We rolled
into Ralph’s pub and formed a half-circle
of appreciation around him. It was a
little awkward, as we talked of the train
journey down and Broughty Ferry. And
then someone asked, “Here Ralph, tell us
about the goal at Dens.”
And Ralph relaxed, smiled and briefly
put down his pint.
Ralph Milne grew up in the Douglas
council estate on Dundee’s eastern wing.
A football prodigy, he’d already turned
down Aston Villa when Dundee United
manager Jim McLean sent word he’d be
visiting the Milne household to sign the
September 2016 | nutmeg | 43

Dundee United
Remembering Ralph
14-year-old Ralph on schoolboy terms.
Ralph’s father hung up the phone, panicked
and ran to the off-licence. When the
abstemious McLean arrived it was to the
sight of a kitchen table straining beneath
a carry-out as varied as it was vast. When
the bewildered McLean left with Ralph’s
signature, the youngster asked his father,
“Fuck me Dad, what was that all about
with the drink?”
Ralph made his United debut at 18
against Celtic, scored from 25 yards and
was briefly the youngest ever scorer in
the Premier Division. He was two footed,
rapid and instinctive. Playing wide or
through the middle, hanging low over
the ball, he was a searing attacking force
in a team heavy with ability. This was
the United of Hegarty, Narey, Malpas,
Gough, Bannon, Sturrock et al, and Ralph
comfortably held his own in the club’s
most successful team of all time.
Under the borderline despotic leadership
of McLean, United had won their
first trophies, the Scottish League Cups of
1979 and 1980, and Ralph arrived in time
for the most important of all: the Scottish
Premier League title of 1982-83 and the
European years that followed.
Off the pitch, his relationship with
McLean deteriorated into a blizzard of
fines which at one point saw Ralph work
labouring shifts to pay his mortgage. On
it, he created an anthology of moments
that United’s fans of that vintage still
cling to.
There was the 4-0 European Cup
victory over Standard Liege where Ralph
scored two in what many believe was
the best individual performance in the
club’s history. There was a late volley at
Parkhead which kept United in the 1982-
83 title race, a goal against Morton where
he beat four players from the halfway line
and another against Rangers at Hampden
where he outpaced their whole defence.
In all, 179 games, 45 goals, including a
club record 15 goals in Europe where
Ralph thrived on being given more
space to build up speed and dart late into
the box.
For United, and for Ralph, those were
the good times. And the goal at Dens was
the best.
The goal came on the afternoon of the
May 14, 1983, at Dundee’s Dens Park. It
was the final game of the season and a
win for United would bring the club’s
first (and, let’s face it, probably only)
Premier Division title.
Standing in the Queen’s Head pub in
Nailsea 17 years later, Ralph talked the
rapt South London Tangerines through
the goal. This was Ralph’s Everest, his My
Way. I know the words because I’ve heard
them so many times. Bit parts are played
by Paul Sturrock (Luggy), Davie Dodds,
Billy Kirkwood and the Radio Tay offices
behind Dens Park.
OFF THE PITCH, HIS
RELATIONSHIP WITH
MCLEAN DETERIORATED
INTO A BLIZZARD OF
FINES WHICH AT ONE
POINT SAW RALPH WORK
LABOURING SHIFTS TO PAY
HIS MORTGAGE. ON IT, HE
CREATED AN ANTHOLOGY OF
MOMENTS THAT UNITED’S
FANS OF THAT VINTAGE
STILL CLING TO.
44 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Neil Forsyth
“Two minutes before, Luggy had
knocked it in the corner for me and I said
‘Luggy, do you think I’ve got a fucking
motorbike?’ So next time he hit my feet.
I turned round and I had Doddsy on my
left and Kirkwood on my right. Now,
Doddsy’s left foot is for standing on and if
I’d given it to Kirkwood he would have hit
some poor cunt in Radio Tay. So I just hit
it, and the rest is history.”
The next day, we battled through hangovers
to play a team of former Bristol City
players led by Ralph. He stood chatting to
spectators on the touchline before the ball
finally came too close to ignore. Ralph
took a touch, swept the ball 50 yards to
a teammate at the far post then returned
to his conversation. As far as I know, that
was his last game.
We brought him to London for our
end-of-season awards. He handed out the
prizes and sang Suspicious Minds on the
karaoke. The next morning he said he’d
seen Jesus in the steamed mirror of his
Travelodge while lying in the bath. I said
Jesus was probably telling his friends that
he’d seen Ralph Milne in the bath.
We went back to Nailsea and played a
local side on Bristol City’s Ashton Gate
before going on to a pub to celebrate
Ralph’s 40th birthday. Brownie came on
that trip. He was keen to discuss Ralph’s
short stay at Charlton Athletic in the late
80s. Ralph told Brownie that it had been a
nightmare. Brownie agreed, with a caveat.
“To be fair Ralph, you didn’t look well.”
United sold Ralph to Charlton for
£125,000 in January 1987, his battle of
wills with McLean having been fought
to an exhausting draw. The player who
McLean had announced as “potentially
the most exciting in Scotland”, had
ultimately defeated the manager’s
varied attempts to have Ralph accept his
deadening discipline.
In a last throw of the dice that gives
an insight into his desperation, McLean
charged a hypnotist with sorting out
Ralph’s attitude, only for the session to
be ruined by Ralph repeatedly dissolving
into laughter due to the hypnotist’s
resemblance to Worzel Gummidge.
As a result, Ralph had found himself
slipping in and out United’s team. He
was unfit and unfancied. He didn’t go to
Rangers, who had chased him for years,
or the big English clubs who had made
intermittent enquiries, or Brian Clough’s
Nottingham Forrest against whom
Ralph had scored two goals in McLean’s
testimonial. Instead he went to Charlton
who were in the English First Division but
cash-strapped, playing their home games
at Crystal Palace’s Selhurst Park, and
endangered by relegation.
Ralph arrived mentally drained.
It didn’t help that United then drew
Barcelona in the UEFA Cup and he was
forced to watch their famous victories
over the Spaniards in a London hotel
room. And it didn’t help that, by his own
admittance, his drinking was steadily
escalating.
Ralph played for Charlton at Wembley
in the final of the short-lived Simod Cup
before his season ended prematurely with
a shattered cheekbone. He flew back to
Scotland, picked up his parents, and took
them to America for a month. It was a
bucket list trip. His father was dying from
terminal cancer.
The 1987-88 season started and Ralph
was out of favour. In a particularly
Ralph touch, he writes in his book of his
mystification at the lack of game time,
then talks at length of the “AK47 batteryoperated
water-pistol” he had taken to
patrolling the training ground with and
using at will against both players and club
staff. Even when a coach, then manager
Lennie Lawrence, then the club chairman
demanded he refrain from the aquatic
violence, Ralph indignantly refused,
pointing out that “I bought it in America
and it’s very precious to me”.
Escape came through a loan spell at
Third Division Bristol City. Ralph scored a
September 2016 | nutmeg | 45

Dundee United
Remembering Ralph
volley on his debut and it was the start of
a resurrection. In his book, Ralph partly
puts this down to the fact that while in
Bristol he took to drinking in the afternoons
rather than the evenings because
– and he’s genuine in his warning – you
can’t be a top-class athlete if you’re not
getting enough sleep.
City’s manager Joe Jordan showed unflagging
belief in Ralph, as the team vied
for promotion and Ralph’s form returned
to historical levels. He had been there
less than a year, but word of his revival
spread. Ralph had spotted Aberdeen’s
manager Alex Smith at a match and word
reached him the club were preparing a
bid. With his son now living in Dundee
with his ex-wife, Ralph would have welcomed
the move and when Jordan called
him into his office in November 1988 he
believed it had arrived. Jordan said he’d
accepted a bid. Ralph thanked him and
said he was ready to go home.
Jordan said he wasn’t going home, then
added, “You’ve got to call Fergie.”
In 2002 I left advertising for journalism
and Ralph was the only contact I had.
It won me my first commission. The
magazine Four Four Two told me to take
Ralph back to Old Trafford and see what
happened.
Ralph and I met at the train station and
got a taxi to Old Trafford. He found his
name on the museum’s wall of former
players and pointed out his proximity
to his friend Frank Kopel. In the lift a
steward said “You used to play here didn’t
you?” and Ralph said yes, he was Ralph
Milne, and a silence descended.
In the dressing room, Ralph told a story
about arriving on his first day and being
given a peg between Paul McGrath and
Norman Whiteside. “What fucking chance
did I have?” he laughed. And then we went
to the pub – an Irish bar in Deansgate
where Milne, McGrath and Whiteside had
once conspired to lose afternoons – and
Ralph drank and told lots of stories.
I sent in the article and the editor
sent back a raging missive. “This reads
like the Morning Star obituary for the
thwarted career of the Undersecretary of
the Boilermakers’ Union” (you remember
the bad ones). He wanted me to twist the
knife. I wouldn’t, so he did, but Ralph
never read it anyway. In hindsight, I’m
not sure if he wanted to go back to Old
Trafford at all.
At a League Manager’s Association
dinner in the early Noughties, Alex
Ferguson was asked who his worst ever
buy was. “Ralph Milne,” he answered.
“I only paid £170,000 but I still get
condemned for it.” It was a clever answer,
an easy laugh and with little judgement
attached. The truth would have been
more uncomfortable for Ferguson.
Ralph played 23 games for United,
scored three goals, and cost £170,000.
There were many, many worse buys
during Ferguson’s 27-year management
of United. A brief selection – Bebe
(£7m, 7 games), Wilfried Zaha (£15m, 4
games), Massimo Taibi (£5.4m, 4 games),
Zoran Tosic (£7million, 4 games), Dong
Fangzhou (£3.5m, 1 game), Djemba-
Djemba (£3.5m, 39 games, 10 cars, 30
RALPH PLAYED 23 GAMES
FOR MAN UNITED, SCORED
THREE GOALS, AND COST
£170,000. THERE WERE MANY,
MANY WORSE BUYS DURING
FERGUSON’S 27-YEAR
MANAGEMENT OF UNITED.
46 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Neil Forsyth
bank accounts, 1 bankruptcy). But infamy
sticks and Ralph became “Fergie’s worst
signing”.
To be fair though, he wasn’t his best.
In his book, Ralph’s account of his time
at United is endearing. His surprise
when Jordan told him about United’s bid
never abated, he seems to have spent his
two and a half years at Old Trafford in
a state of shock. Later he would tell the
Manchester Evening News that he would
have signed for the club even if it meant
“sweeping the terraces”. This self-deprecation
shouldn’t have been warranted.
Ferguson was right in judging that Ralph
had the ability to be at Old Trafford, but
Ralph’s mind was elsewhere.
He had joined a Manchester United that
today feels archaic. Ford Escort club cars,
the old Cliff training ground, no European
football because of Heysel, and Ferguson
under pressure from the fans as he tried
to patch together a winning team.
Ralph was played out of position on the
left after Ferguson told him his left foot
was “better than Strachan’s”. He started
well, scoring his first goal against former
club Charlton, then another in a Boxing
Day victory over Clough’s Nottingham
Forrest (Ralph recalls ensuring he “didn’t
over-do it with the drink” the day before).
A week later, on New Year’s Day, Ralph
played in a 3-1 win over Liverpool that
bought Ferguson another few months.
In the seven months that Ralph was at
United that season, he played 22 games,
scored three goals and Fergie thanked
him for helping young left-back Lee
Sharpe settle in behind him.
Another archaic aspect of United at that
time was the industrial drinking culture.
McGrath and Whiteside would both
ultimately be sold because of their part in
it, and club captain Bryan Robson was as
keen an advocate as any. Inevitably, Ralph
became willing collateral damage.
Amongst many other examples,
his book details a hazy trip to the
Cheltenham Festival with Robson and
Steve Bruce, a pre-season tour of Japan
where Ralph holed up in a karaoke bar
with Mark Hughes and Neil Webb, and
endless food-free “lunches” with McGrath
and Whiteside. McGrath got the call from
Ferguson to say he’d been sold while
drunk with Ralph at Robson’s house.
The new season started and Ralph
was shuffled out the team, with Sharp
pushed forward to left wing. Ferguson
was in trouble. This was the era of the
infamous “TA RA FERGIE” banner and
the face-saving Mark Robbins goal against
Nottingham Forrest. Ralph was injured
for five months, had an unsuccessful loan
spell at West Ham and was then bizarrely
given a third year at United.
That season saw him barely make the
reserve team, his life increasingly dictated
by drinking and gambling. He left United
in the summer of 1991. There can’t be
many Manchester United players who
leave the club and have their house repossessed
a couple of months later.
His reputation in Britain somewhat
troubled, Ralph went to Turkey and
Denmark in search of a club before
receiving a mysterious call. It was an
Asian football agent asking if Ralph would
trial for a club in Hong Kong. Ralph
readily agreed. There was momentary
confusion – Agent – “Meet me in Iraq.”
Ralph – “Iraq?!”
Agent – “No, Tie Rack.”
A few days later, Ralph met the agent
outside Tie Rack at London’s Victoria station.
Ralph arrived with his training gear
and his friend Gerry. The agent arrived
ready for action and, as Ralph recalls,
“must have made the journey in full kit”.
A bewildered Ralph and Gerry were led
by the agent to the nearby St James’ Park
where, in the shadow of Buckingham
Palace, Ralph changed behind a tree and
the trial began. And, as Ralph told it –
“The guy says, ‘You kick long ball’ so I
hit one like a rocket and he took it clean
in the face and decked it. When he went
September 2016 | nutmeg | 47

Dundee United
Remembering Ralph
down I was absolutely pishing myself
and Gerry’s saying ‘dinnae laugh, dinnae
laugh’. Then the bloke says, ‘OK, me and
you, one on one’ so I nutmegged him and
Gerry says ‘Fuck’s sake Ralph, dinnae
take the piss’. We ended up in some
underground place where I signed the
contract.”
Ralph lasted a year in Hong Kong,
training on Happy Valley racecourse and
drinking in a Scottish bar called Mad
Dogs where he never had to pay. Just in
case his lifestyle was threatened with improvement,
Frank McAvennie rolled into
town to play for a rival club and dutifully
join Ralph in Mad Dogs.
In 1993, Ralph came home to Bristol
where by now he had a second son. There
was a brief, three-week spell in Northern
Ireland at Derry City, which was largely
spent in a bar with fleeting teammate
Luther Blissett, and then it was done.
Ralph was an ex-player at 32. And then
his Dad died. Ralph was without both his
“best pal” and his livelihood.
In 2005 Ralph moved back to Dundee,
largely because of his mother’s failing
health. I would see him whenever I was
home and, initially, they’re cherished
memories.
For the 25th anniversary of the Premier
Division win, Davie Dodds had a function
in his Dundee pub and I found myself in
a room full of heroes. Late in the evening,
Richard Gough asked me “where’s busy?”
Ralph, myself and the Californian-based
Gough found ourselves in the Mardi Gras
nightclub, where Ralph and I watched
in unbridled delight as the following
ensued:
INT. MARDI GRAS NIGHTCLUB. NIGHT.
The nightclub is largely empty.
Tatjana’s Santa Maria blasts the
threadbare crowd. Ralph, myself
and Gough stand at the bar. Gough’s
hair, once ginger, is now golden.
His face is a deep mahogany. He
looks magnificent, and he knows it.
A MAN approaches, a little unsteady
on his feet.
MAN
Are you Richard Gough?
GOUGH
Correct.
MAN
What you up to these days big man?
Gough flicks back his golden hair.
GOUGH
Surfing.
MAN
(presuming he’d misheard)
Surfing?
GOUGH
Surfing.
MAN
Surfing?
GOUGH
Surfing.
MAN
(with growing confusion)
Surfing?
GOUGH
Surfing.
The man looks around the dark, empty
spaces of the Mardi Gras. As Santa
Maria reaches a crescendo (Santa
Maria, Santa Maria, Oh, Oh, Santa
Maria…) his whole life flashes before
his eyes. He thinks about choices
made, turnings taken, opportunities
missed. He revaluates the very core
of his being as everything he has
ever known to be true retreats in
front of him. He grips the bar, as
to find some semblance of solidity
in a world suddenly void of reason.
He turns back to the golden-haired
Gough, his body crumpled, his
eyes pleading for escape from the
escalating existential crisis, his
voice cracked and full of pain…
MAN
Surfing?!
48 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Neil Forsyth
Ralph had returned to Dundee in a blaze
of glory – settling into a flat, getting a job,
becoming a celebrated fixture in Broughty
Ferry’s pubs and making “wee cameos”
in the bedrooms of starstruck Dundonian
women. His company was as rewarding
as ever.
There was his 50th birthday party in
a packed Broughty Ferry pub where
Ralph worked the room like Sinatra
and Dave Narey stood silently in the
corner like Clint Eastwood. There was a
pre-season friendly for United against
Newcastle where Ralph chose to stay in
the social club and I picked him up again
afterwards.
There was his autobiography launch at
the Waterstone’s in Commercial Street.
I met Ralph beforehand in the Hansom
Cab pub. He was with his childhood
friend Andy McPhee, a loyal, kind man
who played, often with great difficulty,
a steadying role in Ralph’s life. Ralph
signed my copy “To Neil, who amazed me
sometimes”.
When United played a pre-season
friendly against Barcelona they held a
Parade of Legends at half time. No Legend
enjoyed it more than Ralph. He strode
RALPH WILL BE
REMEMBERED FOR THE
AFTERNOON OF MAY 14,
1983. YOU SHOULD LOOK IT
UP. IT’S ON YOUTUBE, JUST
SEARCH ‘RALPH MILNE
LEAGUE WINNING’.
majestically onto the pitch and soaked
every second from the ovation. It was a
last hurrah.
By now I had known Ralph for a decade.
There had been a thread to our meetings,
to my glimpses of his life, but I ignored
it. It was easy to do so, until the Dundee
Evening Telegraph quietly reported
that Ralph was in Dundee’s Ninewells
hospital. By the time I spoke to him he
was discharged and defiant, summarising
the medical advice as “stick to beer”.
But things started to change and
darken. There was talk of fallings
out, mutterings of pub barrings, and
(later dropped) assault charges. There
was no job. Ralph had a combustible
relationship with his new girlfriend
which culminated in a brutal, drunken
and frankly exploitative interview in a
Scottish tabloid where Ralph and his
girlfriend were photographed looking sad
in front of a table full of booze.
Seeing Ralph in this period was a
different experience. A little sadder, and
tinged with guilt. Every round bought
came with a chaser, a lurking thought
and an accusation to the self. You’re
making this worse.
In 2013, Ralph was the subject of
an episode of When the Floodlights
Fade, a documentary series on former
Manchester United players for the club’s
TV channel. Ralph took the film crew
to Douglas and talked with genuine
warmth and a welcome pride of his time
at Old Trafford. The programme ends
with Ralph interviewed at Broughty
Ferry harbour with his friend Andy
McPhee.
Andy and Ralph talk vaguely about
Ralph having recently been through
hard times. “Things can only get better,”
says Ralph, then adds, “D-Ream.” And
then he thanks Andy for his friendship
and says: “I’ve got no regrets, I’ve had a
great life.” It’s an unsettling moment.
He’s only 51.
September 2016 | nutmeg | 49

Dundee United
Remembering Ralph
By Neil Forsyth
In the summer of 2015, 15 years after I
phoned the Queen’s Head pub in Nailsea,
my mobile phone showed a missed call
from Ralph. I live in the country and
have to go outside to get a signal, so I
walked my dog and called Ralph back.
He was in ebullient mood. As I walked
over fields, we talked about how long it
had been. Ralph said it had been years.
There was more to it than that, but it had
and I felt guilty.
He was calling because he had a
pension maturing later that year. “Big
money,” he said. He and his girlfriend
wanted to go to New York, where I had
lived for a period, and he wanted hotel
recommendations. He was funny and
lucid. I told him how good it was to hear
from him. He said he would visit me.
A few weeks later, I received a text
from Andy McPhee. It said: “He’s not
hurting anymore.”
And that was it. Ralph was dead.
I tried to help him. Not nearly as much
as others I’m sure, but I did try. Ralph
was right that we hadn’t spoken for a
couple of years but he didn’t know, or
had more likely forgotten, that when he
was hospitalized the first time myself and
others put together an escape plan, to a
specialist English clinic, that Ralph didn’t
take. It was too late. Maybe from me it
was too little. But addiction is a state of
mind where friends look like enemies
and help looks like a trap. It’s hard to
know your role in the story. What’s
clearer is that it’s just all so fucking sad.
Ralph told me a story once. Over a
pre-match meal in the 1990s, Ralph’s
manager asked if he could do a job
that day on the left of midfield. Ralph,
who had presumed he wasn’t playing,
gratefully agreed, but when he got to
the dressing room the number 12 jersey
hung waiting on his hook. “He must have
smelt the drink off me,” Ralph
flatly concluded. The manager was Sir
Alex Ferguson, the club Manchester
United. This happened at Old Trafford.
He told these stories unprompted,
offering them as trinkets to grateful and
perhaps guilty pub audiences, myself
included. But it’s not those stories he
should be remembered for and it’s not
those stories which caused a shrine to be
built by strangers at Tannadice after his
death. It wasn’t those stories that saw the
stadium packed for the next home game
for a sorrowful minute’s silence. And
it wasn’t those stories that saw Ralph’s
tearful old teammates come to the
funeral without cars so they could give
their friend the send-off they knew he’d
have wanted.
The outpouring of appreciation for
Ralph’s life was because of more wholesome
treasures, and it is for them that
he will rightfully be remembered. All
those runs, all those goals, European
nights under the lights. And, more than
anything, Ralph will be remembered
for the afternoon of May 14, 1983. You
should look it up. It’s on YouTube, just
search ‘Ralph Milne league winning’.
Narey plays the ball out of defence
to Sturrock. He slides it on to Ralph,
who barely looks at the ball as he glides
across the rutted, end-of-season grass.
He looks instead at the goal, and the
positioning of Dundee’s goalie Colin
Kelly. Thirty yards out, Ralph coils and
flicks his left foot. The ball rises and
rises as Kelly flaps hopelessly beneath it.
Behind the goal, a penned mass of flesh
and tangerine watch as, almost too late,
the ball dips down into immortality and
Archie MacPherson shouts “Absolutely
unbelievable!”
As half of the ground erupts, Ralph lifts
his arms, smiles and turns southwards.
Then a thought flashes over his face and
he turns to look at United’s fans in the
main stand. He’s looking for a man who
ran through the streets of the Douglas
council estate to buy a carry-out because
Jim McLean was on his way round. He’s
looking for his Dad. l
50 | nutmeg | September 2016

Dundee United
14 MAY 1983:
THE DAY TIME STOOD
STILL IN DUNDEE
The story of one of the most
remarkable climaxes to a football
season – as remembered by
those who played in it
By Richard Winton
Amid the haze of time and of booze
that has obscured their recollections,
the one thing they all remember is the
clock. Even 30 years on, Paul Hegarty
swears it stopped at 4.30pm, while the
Dundee derby veteran Hamish McAlpine
confesses it was only that afternoon
that he first noticed it hanging above
the tunnel at Dens Park. It is no longer
there, having apparently been removed
for safety reasons, but it retains a special
place in the memories of the players who
earned Dundee United their solitary top
tier title.
It was on 14 May 1983 that Jim McLean’s
side won the league at Dens, beating their
city rivals 2-1 to hold off the challenges of
Celtic and Aberdeen. An Aberdeen side,
lest we forget, who had hoisted the Cup
Winners’ Cup three days earlier against
Real Madrid in Gothenburg and would go
on to secure the Scottish Cup under the
command of Alex Ferguson the following
weekend.
It made for a remarkable climax to the
campaign, the top three being separated
by just one point having scored 256 goals
between them and with the prospect of a
play-off to decide the champions remaining
alive until the final few seconds of the
season. As it was, United’s victory ensured
that they were the ones flying the flag,
Aberdeen’s 5-0 skelping of Hibernian and
Celtic’s 4-2 triumph over Rangers at Ibrox
being rendered moot by the Tannadice
side’s 24th league win of the campaign.
While the venue of their coronation
made it more special, their succession
only came after a fraught finale in front of
29,106 fans wedged inside a heaving Dens
Park. “It was very tense and nervy and
was a game I didn’t enjoy,” says the winger
Eamonn Bannon. “And I remember just
being physically and mentally drained.
You see players go mental after they win
leagues but I was very subdued. We didn’t
play well and it was a real anticlimax for
me. I just felt shattered.”
Such emotions are understandable
in the circumstances but the game had
September 2016 | nutmeg | 51

Dundee United
14 May 1983: The day time stood still in Dundee
started better than the league leaders
could have hoped. Ralph Milne marked
the weekend of his 22nd birthday with
a goal so breathtaking that it has since
become immortalised in song.
On the 14th of May, 1983,
Six minutes into the half,
The ball soared over Kelly’s head,
And it was Happy Birthday, Ralph.
The lyrics do not do justice to the
moment. Davie Narey won the ball in the
United half and guided it into the centre
circle for Paul Sturrock, who pivoted and
shunted a pass into the path of Milne. The
winger almost reluctantly assumed possession
near the halfway line and casually
shuffled past Stewart McKimmie before
ambling forward, his strides lengthening
as he advanced. Eventually, he seemed
to tire of such exertions, glanced up and
nonchalantly chipped the ball over the
goalkeeper Colin Kelly from 25 yards.
The bloated and broken figure of Milne
that Neil Forsyth recalls elsewhere in
these pages bore scant resemblance to the
lithe, if somewhat scruffy, talisman upon
whom the United players converged that
day in 1983. Usually deployed on the right
– although equally adept at playing off
a central striker – the Dundonian was a
key tactical pawn in McLean’s innovative
formation, something Sturrock describes
as an early 4-5-1 in which many of the
components were adaptable. “Jim McLean
was a genius as far as I was concerned,”
Sturrock once said.
“His training was revolutionary and his
coaching transformed me. When I joined
the club, I was a running-type striker, all
left foot. He said I had to do extra work
on crossing and shooting with both feet
and getting the ball fed into me. I worked
so hard on it, three afternoons a week
for three or four years, that I could run
you into the channel, I could come short
or I could turn you. I was probably three
ONLY 14 MEN PLAYED
MORE THAN FIVE TIMES
OVER THE COURSE OF
THE CAMPAIGN; SIX WERE
NATIVE TO THE CITY; 10 HAD
COME THROUGH THE YOUTH
RANKS; AND TRANSFER
FEES WERE PAID FOR JUST
TWO, A SUM OF £192,000
BEING LAVISHED ON
HEGARTY AND BANNON.
strikers rolled into one. A lot of players
will be very thankful for the work wee
Jim did with them. As for his manmanagement
skills? Well, that’s another
debate.”
McLean, after all, withheld his side’s
£50 entertainment bonus after a 7-0
win over Kilmarnock in the December
of that season, reasoning that, having
scored five times before the interval, they
did not do enough in the second half to
keep the crowd engaged. “We weren’t
best pleased but that’s just the way he
was,” says McAlpine, chuckling. “We’d all
played together for a few years and our
success was built on that spirit. We were
all on the same wages, which I think was
the lowest in the league, but the bonuses
were great so you had to win to get some
decent dosh.”
It was not the first time, and neither
would it be the last, that the manager
52 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Richard Winton
employed such a tactic. However, such
methods helped foster a togetherness
among his young squad, who banded
together against a manager whom they
all respected but very few actually liked.
Take Bannon, for example, a favourite
target for McLean’s ire. He was too clever
for his own good, the manager thought,
and too willing to defend himself when
criticised; so much so that former teammates
recall jostling for seats to the
winger’s right because of the manager’s
habit of working round the dressingroom
in an anti-clockwise direction when
berating his players.
McAlpine recalls that during the
interval that day at Dens, Bannon was upbraided
for missing a 17th-minute penalty
kick, even though he reacted quickest to
lash the rebound past the prone Kelly. “I
was never nervous taking penalties,” the
winger says. “But I remember having to
wait three or four minutes to take it and
there was all sorts going on around me. I
made the mistake of changing my mind
and the keeper saved it but I was lucky it
came back to me and I whacked it in.”
Regardless of such fortune, the twogoal
advantage appeared to confirm
that the title was heading to Tannadice.
But there was still time for a twist. Iain
Ferguson – who would score the winner
for United when they came from behind
to beat Barcelona at Camp Nou four years
later – rifled past McAlpine before the
break to haul Dundee back into the game
and set United nerves jangling. “It really
rattled us,” says Bannon. “We got anxious
and starting booting the ball rather than
passing it.”
The game remained delicately poised.
“Your deadliest enemies could stop you
winning the league; can you imagine the
pressure? You had to live in the town; if
they had been able to do that, it would
have become folklore,” said Sturrock,
speaking before Dundee added their own
chapter to the tale by officially confirming
United’s relegation from the Premiership
with a 2-1 win at Dens in May this year.
Sturrock had been unable to train during
the previous couple of months because of
a pulled hamstring, but played every game
during the run-in until the muscle finally
ruptured that day. “It felt like another 90
minutes,” he recalls of the half hour he
spent watching from the bench. “Every
time the ball went in the box you were
cringing. I couldn’t watch the last couple
of minutes, it was so nervy.”
So much so that, even United’s
phlegmatic goalkeeper was panicking. “I
kept shouting to the dugout ‘how long to
go?’ because we were hanging on,” says
McAlpine, a penalty-taking, crossbarswinging,
cult hero. “The final few
minutes seemed like an eternity.”
That it took until the last few moments
of the campaign for such doubts to creep
in were a consequence of United thinking
their title hopes were over after losing
2-0 at Celtic Park in April. That defeat
left them three points off the pace with
another trip to Parkhead pending. “At
that point, I honestly believed the league
was beyond us,” McLean later admitted.
“In fact, it’s a miracle that we’ve won this
title. At the start of the season, I certainly
didn’t believe we’d be champions, simply
because we have no depth of pool. Twelve
players – the 12 who played against
Dundee at Dens – have achieved this
tremendous success.”
The manager was being a little disingenuous
with his claim, given 20 different
players made league appearances for
United that season, but the statistics were
remarkable enough to need no exaggeration.
Only 14 men played more than five
times over the course of the campaign;
six were native to the city; 10 had come
through the youth ranks; and transfer fees
were paid for just two, a sum of £192,000
being lavished on Hegarty and Bannon.
McLean had spent 12 years building a
team to win the championship and spent
a further decade attempting to emulate
September 2016 | nutmeg | 53

Dundee United
14 May 1983: The day time stood still in Dundee
them, but in that one glorious season it
all fell into place. “That United team, it
was an exceptional side,” says Sturrock.
“People forget that the following season
we got to the European Cup semi-final
against Roma. We beat them 2-0 at
Tannadice and lost 3-0 in Italy, then found
out that the referee had taken a bribe. So
we could have been in the final against
Liverpool. I mean, Dundee United? It’s
incredible really.”
The same could be said of the conclusion
to their campaign. United’s shallow squad
roused themselves to win their final six
matches and overhaul both Celtic and
Aberdeen. Each of those games, including
three consecutive 4-0 wins ahead of the
decider, were vital but one in particular
stands out: having lost at Parkhead in
April, United returned to Glasgow and
secured a surprise 3-2 victory, despite the
dismissal of Richard Gough. “That was
the turning point, a real game-changer
because it put us a point ahead having
been written off,” insists Bannon. “All of a
sudden we had our noses in front and we
kept winning from there on in.”
For all that he recognises its importance,
Bannon’s recall of the game is sketchy. “I
remember the pitch being like a beach,
big Goughie getting sent off and Ralph
scoring a great goal but beyond that… did
we get a penalty?” They did. And Bannon
scored it, adding to Hegarty’s opener
before another virtuoso effort by Milne,
who took a cross on his chest and lashed
a 25-yard volley past Packie Bonner. The
winger had also scored twice before being
sent off in the win at Pittodrie a few weeks
earlier. “Ralph, that season, was fantastic,”
says Hegarty. “There were games that
either he or Paul Sturrock won almost by
themselves.”
The triumph in Glasgow moved McLean’s
men within a point of Celtic and they
went top for the first time that weekend,
towsing Kilmarnock while Celtic were
HALF THE PLAYERS
COULDN’T STAND UP. THEY
HAD BEEN DRINKING ALL
NIGHT. WE WERE PISHED
OUT OF OUR MINDS.
losing to Aberdeen, who were four behind
with two games in hand. The failure of
Alex Ferguson’s side to win at Easter Road
seven days later, coupled with another
thumping United win at Morton, ensured
it was in their own hands. “It clicked for
me that we had a right good chance with
about five games to go,” says McAlpine.
“But that game at Cappielow is the one
that stands out for me because I remember
the club organising buses for the fans.”
“Aye, that was a nice move by Wee Jim,”
adds Bannon. “It was like rent-a-crowd
and it made a massive difference because
our lack of away support meant we were
at a disadvantage compared to Rangers,
Celtic and Aberdeen and really had to win
games off our own back. That makes it
even more remarkable.”
So, too, does the fact United played a
chunk of that match without a recognised
goalkeeper after McAlpine went off
injured. “I got a stud above my hip, which
left a hole above the bone and seized me
up a bit,” McAlpine recalls. “But I hung
on until we were 3-0 up before I went
off and we always knew Heggy was more
than capable anyway…”
“It didn’t feel that way at the time,”
says Hegarty, who pulled on the gloves
and maintained United’s clean sheet. “I
was almost as nervous as the day at Dens,
worrying about what Wee Jim would say if
I let one in…”
54 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Richard Winton
By then, the superstitious McLean was
already riven with anxiety, the tension
having built to such an extent that he
steadfastly refused to arrange any official
celebrations before the title was won.
Hegarty recalls the players leaving Dens
and wandering the 100 yards or so down
Tannadice Street for a drink in the United
boardroom, before being obliged to attend
a supporters’ function in Coupar Angus,
then retiring to Frank Kopel’s house, the
defender and his wife having decided to
host an impromptu party that continued
until the early hours.
Bannon was there, too, but still nurses
a sense of regret that “Wee Jim was too
miserable to rent a place” for a proper
party. “It was very subdued afterwards
and everything was off the cuff and a bit
low key,” he recalls. “I wish there had
been an organised event as a club. Years
later, when I was a coach at Hibs, we lost
the League Cup final to Rangers but still
went back to a hotel in Edinburgh and
had a great night. I wish we had done
something like that.”
Not everyone had such a restrained
evening, though. Sturrock has a hazy
memory of the manager, dressed in his
pyjamas, kicking him out of his house
at 7am; something that McAlpine also
remembers. “Ken this, I couldn’t tell you
most of what happened because we had
a right few bevvies,” he says. “God knows
where we went but I know we were in
Wee Jim’s house for a while and Luggy
reckons he was given a swearing.”
“I know this much,” Sturrock adds,
grinning. “We partied big time. For about
four days solid, we were never home.”
The party continued at Station Park
the following afternoon, McLean having
committed to taking a strong team to
play a benefit match for Billy Bennett and
John Clark. Almost every member of the
league-winning side played some part
despite many of them being barely able to
stand, never mind run, with the injured
Sturrock despatched by his hungover
team-mates to find food to soak up the
alcohol. “I was sent to find a man who
had a shop that sold bridies,” Sturrock
said. “Some boy told me where the guy
lived so I knocked on his door. I don’t
know if he was the baker, but he had a
key, and he went round to heat them up.
That was my job for the day, bringing
back pies and bridies for all the players.
The subs were even eating them in the
dugout.
“We lost the game 2-1 and Wee Jim
wasn’t too happy. If I remember rightly,
he picked near enough every player that
had played the day before. It was quite
incredible. Half the players couldn’t stand
up. They had been drinking all night. We
were pished out of our minds.”
“I don’t think I played...” says McAlpine,
hesitantly. “But I was so bevvied that I’ve
no idea. I do remember Wee Jim asking
at half time if anyone wanted to come off
and everyone put their hand up.”
Bannon was one of the few absentees,
nursing his own hangover while being
kicked up and down Easter Road by
John Brownlee in a testimonial for Jim
McArthur. “I was hungover and it was
unbelievably wet; the roads were flooded.
John was on trial for Hibs that day
after breaking his leg at Newcastle and
was right up for it. Two minutes in, he
clattered me, which was the last thing I
needed because I was just trying to get
through it.”
Meanwhile, in Forfar, his colleagues
were suffering just as much. “There were
one or two thick heads and bleary eyes
but I don’t think anyone would begrudge
us,” says Hegarty, who remembers
surviving the 90 minutes. “I dunno how
we got on, to be honest… but I don’t think
we did particularly well. Just like the
game the previous day, it seemed to go on
for ever.” l
This article first appeared in The Blizzard
www.theblizzard.co.uk
September 2016 | nutmeg | 55

WHY I TOOK SOME
PLEASURE FROM
DUNDEE UNITED’S PAIN
I know it seems vindictive
to get such satisfaction from
the misfortune of someone
else, and I know I’m not the
vindictive type. But I can
explain.
By Alan Pattullo
May 2, 2016. If I am being honest, the
realisation of the fairytale that was
Leicester City’s Premier League title win
annoyed me a little, as much as I was
cheered by the achievement itself.
What anguished me was the timing.
Chelsea’s late equaliser against Spurs
which confirmed Leicester’s success,
came just a few minutes after 18 year-old
Craig Wighton’s in-my-eyes rather more
significant winning goal for Dundee
against Dundee United.
And what a story: a teenager, one who
grew up supporting Dundee, scoring
the last-minute winner to send Dundee
United down under the noses of their
own supporters. (Disappointingly,
trepidation served to keep the number
of visiting fans down when, ideally, they
would all have been there to take their
medicine.)
That, surely, would merit the full Sky
ticker-tape treatment. Breaking: Dundee
relegate rivals Dundee United – boyhood
fan side-foots home last-minute winner.
But when I eventually got back to the
Phoenix bar in Dundee’s west end – after
a quick tour of pubs nearer Dens Park –
to toast a memorable evening, ears still
ringing after the full South Enclosure
experience, it was like this historic event
had never happened.
Instead, it was wall-to-wall coverage of
bloody Leicester City’s first-ever English
bloody title win.
Big bloody deal.
For me, and a few thousand others, the
big deal was Dundee putting Dundee
United down. That is what 2/5/16 will
forever mean to those of the dark blue
persuasion.
Indeed, it might well remain all that
ever matters for I am not hopeful of
seeing Dundee lift a major trophy in my
lifetime. Those wishing to know my age
can calculate it by simply noting the last
56 | nutmeg | September 2016

time Dundee won a major cup, now 43
years ago and counting.
Which is one of the reasons why
Dundee supporters, particularly ones of
my 1973 vintage, got so worked up about
the prospect of getting something fairly
significant over on United. I have heard it
uttered that putting United down could
be as good as winning a major trophy;
perhaps better. I think I understand this.
Yes, I know it wasn’t a Dundee success
as such. I know it seems vindictive to get
such satisfaction from the misfortune of
someone else.
Even my dad, my gracious, sensitive
and sports-mad dad, was surprised by
my insistence that Dundee being the ones
to administer the final blow to United’s
survival hopes meant everything. He
noted I wasn’t the vindictive type. And I
like to think I am not.
But this is football. And where would
the game be without petty rivalries.
As W. Somerset Maugham – or was it
Ally MacLeod? – said: it is not enough
to achieve personal success, one’s best
friend must also have failed. Well, I’m the
first to admit Dundee have not enjoyed
anything like Dundee United’s success in
the last 40 years.
So hoping a nearby ‘friend’ fails is
about as good as it gets, hence the scenes
(including a tangerine-coloured coffin
being carried through the streets) on that
Monday night in May.
Not that I’d wish anything terminal on
United. The two-teams-on-a-street scenario
is something I cherish; without the
rivalry I wonder if I’d feel the same about
Dundee FC. I actually don’t think enough
is made by the city of the clubs’ closestfootball-grounds-in-Europe
status.
There should, in my eyes, be a visitor
centre somewhere on Sandeman Street/
Tannadice Street celebrating this shared
history, one which would I concede have
to chronicle the team down the road’s
remarkable emergence from the shadows
as well as Dundee’s own storied past.
So yes, there’s a basis for the bitterness.
Not all Dundee fans are psychotic enough
to wish relegation pain on United for its
own sake. It is revenge. It is payback for
the city upstarts becoming top dogs, often
at Dundee’s own expense.
But it also – and this is the rationale
which predominantly accounts for how
I feel – offers Dundee the longed-for
chance to re-establish themselves as the
premier team in town.
Not since the 1959-60 season have
Dundee been able to say they are in a
higher league than their rivals. The club
has have not been slow in seizing the
opportunity to do so in their close season
commercial activities. Season tickets are
not just for Dens Park. They are for Dens
Park – “home of the city’s Premier team”.
And quite right too.
An exorcism had taken place there
a few weeks earlier. Every Dundee fan
will have their own personal film reel of
flashbacks, some more gruesome than
others. I was fortunate to avoid witnessing
Dundee United winning their second
major trophy, which happened to be
against Dundee. At Dens Park. Where
they had also won their first major
honour a year earlier.
I was also fortunate to miss their first
and so far last Scottish Premier League
title win. Which happened to be secured
against Dundee. At Dens Park.
There is, you might notice, a theme
developing.
But I did witness countless derbies in
the 1980s and early 1990s when a talented
United side invariably swept Dundee
aside. Not always, granted. In fact,
Dundee often fared better against United
than they had any right to.
But I can still remember when Dave
Smith applauded United off the park after
an embarrassingly one-sided 3-0 win
over Dundee, again at Dens. That’s right,
Dave Smith. The Dundee manager.
September 2016 | nutmeg | 57

Dundee United
Why I celebrated Dundee United’s relegation
By Alan Pattullo
He didn’t last much longer.
I was there for the ridiculous cycle of
torment that was being knocked out of
the Scottish Cup five years in a row by
Dundee United, between 1987 and 1991. It
was unusual enough to be drawn against
the same team for five straight seasons.
But to lose, eventually (there were at
least some replays involved), every single
darned time?
The first exit, at the semi-final stage,
was particularly harrowing. Up 2-1 at
half-time against a United side that
reached the final of the Uefa Cup a couple
of weeks later, I can remember plotting
with my sister our travel arrangements
to get to Hampden for the final. Cue a
second-half turnaround that I am now
old enough and damaged enough to
realise was always likely to occur.
But back then it led to a sustained
period of teenage gloom. Head bowed
against the window of a Stagecoach bus,
the trip back to Dundee from Edinburgh
– the SFA, in their wisdom, had decided
to play the game at Tynecastle, despite
both clubs’ agreement to toss a coin to
decide on a venue in Dundee – seemed to
drag on even longer due to the number of
Dundee United supporters’ buses whizzing
by with their cargo of joyous fans.
We haven’t even done the 1990s yet.
Fortunately, Jim McLean’s powers had
begun to ebb. United were as poor as
they had been in a generation but still
managed to lift their first Scottish Cup,
the one significant claim to superiority,
other than seniority, my beloved Dundee
had left by then.
I remember studying for my finals at
university in Dundee in a flat along the
Perth Road. My pen scraped involuntarily
down the page as the cheers of the fans
gathered in the city square for the trophy
parade drifted west along the Tay, sending
jolts of pain shuddering through my body.
Even when United were relegated the
following season it was hard to derive
too much pleasure: Dundee were already
down. On the day United’s demotion was
confirmed we were in Stranraer trying
hard to look on the bright side after missing
out on promotion by a couple of goals.
But I tend to defer to author Jim Wilkie,
an eminently sensible Dundee FC fan,
when it comes to footballing matters
in Dundee. After all, he wrote the book
on the subject – the brilliant Across The
Great Divide. He confirmed my suspicion;
it might well be an age thing. In the
run-up to what Dundee fans dubbed the
“Get Doon” derby, I gave him a call. “So
Jim, what about this Dundee/Dundee
United dynamic – are you hoping Dundee
pull the trigger? Is it churlish of Dundee
fans to dearly wish for this to happen?”
A pause down the phone line, perhaps
even a little sigh. “Times have changed,”
the sage began. “You are considerably
younger than me. But we once watched
the teams week about. When Dundee
play United, there is a slight ambivalence
for me. Even today I do not want United
to go down – and I think there will be an
unpleasant experience if it is the deciding
game.
“Of course, I wanted United to win
when they won the league [at Dens]. I am
I WAS THERE FOR THE
RIDICULOUS CYCLE OF
TORMENT THAT WAS BEING
KNOCKED OUT OF THE
SCOTTISH CUP FIVE YEARS IN
A ROW BY DUNDEE UNITED,
BETWEEN 1987 AND 1991.
58 | nutmeg | September 2016

a Dundee fan. But I watched the United
team that was promoted from the second
division, with players like Ronnie Yeats
and Dennis Gillespie, I do not follow their
fortunes but I found it quite easy to go to
European games for example and support
them.”
“When it comes to the crunch, I want
to see them do well rather than badly. I
am slightly distressed by the thought of
Dundee fans singing ‘the Dees are having
a party’, or whatever the song is, if their
demise is confirmed by Dundee. How
stupid! I am uneasy with it.”
So some Dundee fans, it’s clear, are still
influenced by burnished memories of
skipping from one side of the street to the
other to watch games. Back in the 1950s
and 60s, United were not perceived to be
a threat to Dundee’s status as top team in
the city.
But the majority of Dundee supporters
now are of an age to have only lived
through the anguish of Dundee’s decline,
which was bad enough without United’s
simultaneous emergence as a European
force. Like woodworm in the old Dens
Park main stand, bitterness began to bury
deep into pores. It’s only natural.
Which is why I was surprised by the
high number of people, many of them
football literates, including Tam Cowan
on Off the Ball, who seemed genuinely
surprised to hear a Dundee supporter
might welcome the prospect of United’s
Waterloo coming at Dens.
My United supporting friends, by
contrast, expected nothing other than to
be placed under siege on social media by
a gloating Dee. They knew they’d given it
out – and more – to me over the years.
Although I have to confess something
else: as I scanned the upcoming season’s
fixture list to locate the derby dates there
was a brief, if acute, sense of loss upon
remembering there will be no league
derbies for at least 12 months. But hey,
we’ll live. l
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September 2016 | nutmeg | 59
The Scottish Football Periodical

THE MAKING OF
PAT NEVIN
Pat Nevin has always been
a man apart, as a footballer
who loved the arts and a tricky
winger with a phenomenal
appetite for the hard graft of
defending. Now one of the most
respected pundits, he recalls his
early journey from Easterhouse
to Stamford Bridge.
By Simon Hart
Pat Nevin is telling the tale of the night
the great Jock Stein decided to test his
mettle. It was early 1985 and Nevin had
been making waves in his debut season in
the First Division with Chelsea. His creative
powers had earned him the Player of the
Year award at Stamford Bridge the previous
spring, but the spotlight was burning with
extra intensity on Nevin for something else:
his offbeat off-field interests.
Here was a footballer who dressed like
a student, went to the ballet and wrote
record reviews for NME at a time most
of his peers – to judge by the old Shoot!
magazine Q&As – seemed to be
Illustration by Matthew Childers
60 | nutmeg | September 2016

listening to Phil Collins, Lionel Richie
and Diana Ross. In contemporary photos
Nevin – with pale, elfin features and
big, New Wave hair – resembles an early
prototype for a Tim Burton anti-hero. He
was a little bit different. An oddity.
Stein – manager of Celtic’s 1967
European Cup-winning team and now
in charge of the Scotland national side
– wished to find out more and chose an
Under-21 fixture in Spain as the occasion
to do just that.
Nevin takes up the story: ‘I was wearing
a beret and into my weird music and
very different from the norm. Jock didn’t
know me, so we played in this game
and half-time came. The manager, Andy
Roxburgh, was about to start his team talk
when the door opens and Jock walks in.
He walks past everybody and stands right
in front of me and gives me the whole
works. This is Jock, a godlike character,
and he is calling me a selfish, ignorant,
arrogant, little you-know-what and I just
got battered with it.
‘He then walked out and smashed the
door and the whole place was silent.
Nobody even wanted to speak to me
because it was like the Pope telling you
you’re an arse. I thought, “I’ll show him,”
and I went out and absolutely worked
my socks off. I came off at the end and I
needed a wee bit of oxygen.
‘On the coach afterwards, Jock walks
up, ruffles my hair and goes, “Brilliant,
wee man – from start to finish.” Then
it dawns on you – he sees this unusual
person and wants to know if you’re strong
enough to stand up to him because he is
thinking of putting you in the first team.
And I did. I showed him.’
It is a terrific anecdote and Nevin tells it
well, his sentences an infectious stream of
colour and detail. It is easy to see why he
is not short of work as a media pundit. If
any Everton player from the 80s was going
to end up as a regular on Radio 4’s Today
programme – and he meets me fresh from
a visit to Broadcasting House – the smart
money back then would have been on
the politically conscious, intellectually
curious, indie-music-loving Nevin.
During his Everton days, his favourite
haunt in Liverpool was Probe, the independent
record store, and it comes as no
surprise when Nevin reveals that his first
memory of arriving at the club in 1988 is
of the music playing on Colin Harvey’s
car stereo on their way from Manchester
airport.
‘We’re driving along and music is
on in the car and it’s the Cure,’ Nevin
remembers. ‘“Oh, good song,” I said. The
next song comes on and it’s New Order. I
thought, “I like this guy a lot.”’ It was one
of the compilation tapes that Harvey’s
daughters would make for their dad. ‘You
can smell honesty a mile away and that’s
Colin,’ he adds.
Unfortunately, Nevin’s ensuing Everton
career was not as successful as either man
would have wished. He was 24 when he
arrived in summer 1988, and a seemingly
key component in Harvey’s rebuilding
plans, along with fellow new boys Tony
Cottee, Stuart McCall and Neil McDonald.
He scored the goal that got Everton to that
season’s FA Cup final but his four years at
the club would see Harvey’s efforts hampered
by a divided dressing room, and his
own ambitions hindered by a manager
who did not rate him, Howard Kendall.
When he left for Tranmere Rovers in 1992,
his top-flight career was over at just 28.
The enduring perception of Nevin as a
man apart makes him a doubly intriguing
subject. He cites Harvey’s words in
the aftermath of a much-publicised fight
between Martin Keown and Kevin Sheedy
on one particularly damaging squad
night out. ‘Colin did a team talk and
said, “There are two cliques in this team.
There’s you boys and you boys. Actually,
there are three – there’s Pat as well.”’
Nevin had known the same already at
Chelsea. His team-mates took to calling
September 2016 | nutmeg | 61

The making of Pat Nevin
him ‘Weirdo’ because of his appearance
and interest in the arts. ‘That was one of
my nicknames but they didn’t turn on me,’
he remembers. ‘They found it funny. They
tried to wind me up mercilessly and got
confused when it had no effect whatsoever.’
The sight of him listening to his
Walkman and reading NME on the team
bus led to the popular prank of ripping
up the magazine. Nevin got round that by
keeping a second copy hidden elsewhere.
‘I did have a secret compartment in my
bag. It became a running joke that my
NME would get trashed but I always had
an NME to find out what was going on.’
Nevin’s love of music and technology
meant he would put together videos to
play for his team-mates on their bus journeys
to matches, as he explains: ‘I learned
how to make videos and copied The Tube
and Top of the Pops if there was a decent
thing on. I’d splice them together and put
on three or four songs that I could put up
with and that I knew they’d put up with
too, and then try to sneak in a track by the
Fall as well. Then I started making videos,
which would be music with a comedy bit,
and they’d watch it on the coach.’
There is a thread here to the present
and his work as a football analyst. Nevin
COLIN DID A TEAM TALK
AND SAID, “THERE ARE TWO
CLIQUES IN THIS TEAM.
THERE’S YOU BOYS AND
YOU BOYS. ACTUALLY, THERE
ARE THREE – THERE’S PAT
AS WELL.”
describes enthusiastically a BBC website
feature he produced using a programme
that allowed him to appear on a CGI
Goodison Park, walking among the players
as he explained where Everton were
going right and wrong.
Expanding on his work today, he says:
‘Away from football, I don’t have a massive
competitive instinct. I do a lot of TV and
radio, but do I want to be a top man on the
telly? No, it’d be a nightmare because you
can’t walk about the streets. The technical
stuff is much more interesting – it’s
creative, it’s informative, it’s educational.’
It is at Stamford Bridge, his other home
as a top-flight footballer, that we meet.
Outside Fulham Broadway station, a man
in red trousers offers a sartorial signpost
that this is southwest London. Just
beyond the Britannia Gate that marks the
entrance to the stadium, the faces of Eden
Hazard, Diego Costa, Thibaut Courtois
and Cesc Fàbregas smile out from a Delta
Airlines billboard ad: ‘From Stamford
Bridge to Brooklyn Bridge’ is the tagline.
The Stamford Bridge of today seems a
world apart from the ground that Nevin
knew. Then there were National Front
thugs in the Shed End and a chairman,
Ken Bates, who erected a twelve-foot
electric perimeter fence to deter the
hooligans (albeit it was never switched
on, thanks to the intervention of Greater
London Council).
But for Nevin, a twenty-year-old college
student from Glasgow, this was the place
where he made his name in English football.
‘It wasn’t a great stadium but there
were twenty thousand people turning
up and a good atmosphere around here.
They’d been a big club and I was aware
of that. And for some reason the fans just
took to me.’
They still do, judging by the middle-aged
woman who refers to him as ‘Lege’ as we
pass her on our way to the Chelsea Health
Club and Spa at the back of the stadium.
Nevin, a regular visitor for his work with
62 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Simon Hart
the club’s TV channel, was even applauded
once by the Chelsea crowd after scoring
a goal here for Everton in April 1990. ‘I
rounded the keeper and rolled it in and the
Shed did applaud. I often get asked, “Who
is it, Chelsea or Everton?” and the truth is
there was a real peak for me at Chelsea –
Player of the Year twice – and it just never
quite happened at Everton, I would argue
for a variety of reasons.
‘But I have a lot of time for both of them.
With Moyesie [David Moyes] being there
such a long time and Robbie [Martinez]
being an old mate of mine at Motherwell, I
still have loads of feeling for Everton.’
A recent encounter in the Goodison car
park with the famously musically erudite
Leighton Baines only added another layer
of affection. ‘He was somebody I’d feel
comfortable spending time with, talking
about music and anything else,’ says
Nevin, though he stresses that he and
Baines are not the only two music obsessives
to have worn Everton blue. ‘Barry
Horne very much had a hinterland and
he was probably the closest thing to me
musically. He is stunningly knowledgeable
about indie music.’
Today, at 52, the wispy-haired Nevin has
the air of an academic with his frameless
spectacles, cotton jacket and Breton top. It
takes no leap of the imagination to picture
him holding spellbound a lecture hall full
of students. Indeed, of his five siblings,
two became headteachers and another a
college lecturer. ‘There are six of us and
I’m the only one without a degree so I’m
the family failure,’ he smiles.
In truth, Nevin’s success as a footballer
was something of a family effort. A
labourer on the railways, his late father
Patrick was the man whose study of
Celtic’s training techniques led to his son
gaining the skills to build a professional
career. ‘He missed less than a handful
of games in my career and considering I
played over eight hundred, that is damn
good going for a labouring man,’ he begins
warmly. ‘He was a bit of a hero for me.’
On Saturdays, Patrick Nevin Sr took his
son to Parkhead to watch Celtic play and
then spent the rest of the week putting
him through the same drills as Jock Stein’s
players. ‘My dad and all my family were
Celtic supporters so we’d go to the games
but, more than that, my dad trained me
every day. He’d get home from work and
I had to be ready with my boots to go out
and work on skills – specific things he’d
learned by going down and watching
Celtic train. Celtic’s manager was Jock
Stein, who was not a bad guy to copy.
He’d watch people like [winger] Jimmy
Johnstone and their techniques and pass
them on to me so by seven or eight, I was
playing at Under-11 level. Even though I
was small, it wasn’t a problem.
‘If anyone knows about the Wiel
Coerver methods, they’re almost a
modernised version of what my dad was
doing,’ he adds of Coerver, the former
Dutch footballer, who in the 1970s
devised a skills-based teaching method
for boys aged five and upwards to instil
in them a mastery of the ball. In Nevin’s
case it was an hour or more a day and
he was ‘very much the only boy in the
neighbourhood doing it’.
‘My dad read a lot of books about
coaching,’ he continues. ‘He’d been a
boxer but he wanted to know as much
about the technical side as possible. He
gave that opportunity to all the family – I
was the one who stuck with it.
‘My dad might have had it in his mind
for me to play professionally but I just
loved the skill side of it. We lived in a
tenement in a rough part of Easterhouse.
Fortunately there was a school round the
back so we could go there and train. I
never played on grass until I was eleven
or twelve. It was always on black ash. So
when you played on grass, it was incredibly
easy.’
Nevin refers to the writer and thinker
Malcolm Gladwell and his 10,000-hours
concept as he highlights the impact of that
September 2016 | nutmeg | 63

The making of Pat Nevin
daily programme on his development. ‘If
you do anything for ten thousand hours
you’ll become incredibly proficient. I was
well into ten thousand hours very early
on. What my dad was trying to teach me
was to always keep my head up – I’d get
sticks in the ground and dribble around
them, trying to never look at the ball.
‘After a while you never look at the ball
and it’s a massive advantage. I thought
everyone could do that and as the years
went by I thought, “Actually, everyone’s
looking at the ball!” What a waste that
is when you don’t need to, when you
know exactly where it is. It gave me this
big advantage and was what made me
good enough to become a professional
footballer actually – getting that base.’
Easterhouse, where Nevin grew up,
was the site of a huge post-war housing
scheme on the eastern side of Glasgow,
built in response to the problem of urban
overcrowding. Its name became synonymous
with deprivation. ‘It was known as
the roughest housing district in western
Europe,’ reflects Nevin, but he remembers
a happy childhood. ‘My parents were interested
in keeping us healthy – they were
fanatical walkers and never had a car. But
education was absolutely paramount so
homework always had to be done.’
It was a Catholic upbringing too and
Nevin retains what he describes as a
‘Labour, Christian attitude’. He expands:
‘Although it was Catholic, for us it was
more morality and a socialist morality, and
we were all indoctrinated with that as well
– just caring for your fellow man. And I
didn’t need a religion for that. I thought
you could be moral without it. I think you
can be a nice person. It wasn’t drummed
into us by my mum and dad. They just led
by example, as fabulously honest people.’
His father’s footballing lessons began
to pay off as Nevin signed for Celtic Boys’
Club, having shone in an Under-12s
competition. ‘I’d played for Blue Stars
Under-12s, a street league team from the
rough East End of Glasgow. We were a
bunch of kids from ten streets and we
won the Scottish Cup. In the semi-finals
we beat Celtic Boys’ Club and the Celtic
manager walked in afterwards, congratulated
everybody, then walked over to me
and said, “You’re playing for us next year.”
‘I went to the boys’ club and from there
Celtic Football Club saw that Dundee
United were going to sign me and so they
signed me up as a schoolboy. I trained
with them but still had no concept of
making it as a footballer – I was too busy
enjoying it. I was a centre-forward or a
number ten. I never played in a wide area.
I was scoring around eighty goals a season
and playing for representative teams,
but this was all secondary because I was
studying for my O levels and my Highers,
which were much more important.’
In November 1979 Nevin received the
award for the boys’ club’s Under-15 Player
of the Year. The previous summer he had
travelled with them to the Isle of Lewis in
the Outer Hebrides. On the same trip was
an older, flame-haired defender called
David Moyes. ‘Moyesie was the captain of
the team above me. I played for the composite
team sometimes – I would be the
youngest player and Moyesie the captain.’
The leadership skills – and intensity – of
the future Everton manager were already
quite evident. ‘There was one game
that always jumps out,’ says Nevin. ‘We
were playing Eastercraigs one day and
they were our big rivals and they basically
kicked the shit out of me. I scored
a couple of goals and we were winning
at half-time but as I walked off, Moyesie
came over and grabbed me and said,
“Don’t you ever duck out of a tackle.” I
said, “He was going to kill me, he wasn’t
going for the ball.” “Never show a weakness,”
he replied. I was thinking, “You’re
just the captain,” but he was right.’
For Nevin, it was the perfect place
to learn and at the heart of it were the
teachings of Jock Stein. ‘Everything about
64 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Simon Hart
AFTER A WHILE YOU NEVER
LOOK AT THE BALL AND IT’S
A MASSIVE ADVANTAGE.
I THOUGHT EVERYONE
COULD DO THAT AND AS THE
YEARS WENT BY I THOUGHT,
“ACTUALLY, EVERYONE’S
LOOKING AT THE BALL!”
WHAT A WASTE THAT IS
WHEN YOU DON’T NEED TO,
WHEN YOU KNOW EXACTLY
WHERE IT IS.
how you should play and the way of life,
it came from Jock and filtered straight
down to the boys’ club, and we tried
to be exactly the same. Everyone who
worked under Jock learned something,
so if you see Jock you understand Sir Alex
[Ferguson]. If you know Jock, you see
David Moyes. The line is obvious for those
of us who were inside it.’
Nevin, despite his player-of-the-year accolade,
was not inside it for much longer.
At sixteen, he was released by Celtic. ‘They
said, “You’re not good enough, you’re too
small.” I think my dad was eternally a bit
disappointed but he never said anything.’
For Nevin, his interest in education ensured
a soft landing. He simply focused on
his Scottish Highers. ‘English was my favourite.
I was a fanatical reader.’ The sight
of a book squeezed into his jacket pocket
suggests nothing has changed. ‘I had my
favourite authors. At school they were
classics but quite heavy – Dostoevsky,
French stuff as well. I am going backwards
because I have got lighter and lighter. P.G.
Wodehouse is my hero now.
‘I was fortunate I had good English
teachers because then you get interested
in the theatre. For my family and people I
knew, being interested in theatre and the
arts generally was normal. And then you
become a footballer and people go, “He’s
weird,” and I think, “No, I’m not, I’m
normal.”’
At the same time as Nevin embarked
on a BA in Commerce at Glasgow College
of Technology, he also began a double life
as a footballer. He was playing for a local
club, Gartcosh United, when Craig Brown,
later manager of Scotland, invited him to
play for Clyde, then stationed in Scottish
football’s third tier. ‘We played a game
against his Clyde side and he said, “Do
you want to come and play for us?” I said,
“I study, sorry.” He said, “Well, do it parttime
and we’ll give you a couple of quid.”
‘It was only Clyde but we kept on getting
more successful. We won the league. I did
the first and second year of the degree
while I was at Clyde. It was easy because
Clyde only trained twice a week in the
evenings and I was a student – I wasn’t
doing medicine so it was very doable.’
In his first season with Clyde, 1981/82,
he scored thirteen goals to help the club
achieve promotion as champions, his
efforts also earning him the Scottish
Professional Players’ Association’s Second
Division Player of the Year award.
At this stage, Nevin was still trying to
keep the two sides of his life separate but
his on-field success made this increasingly
difficult – not least after his impact at the
1982 European Under-18 Championship.
‘I had a girlfriend at the time,’ he recalls,
‘and we were mad for each other but I
didn’t really want her to know I played
football.’ Before departing for Finland
with the Scotland squad he told her he
September 2016 | nutmeg | 65

The making of Pat Nevin
needed to get his head down to prepare
for exams. ‘I made the mistake of getting
Player of the Tournament and winning the
tournament,’ he continues. ‘We were on
the back pages of all the papers. When we
came back she just went, “Studying? You
should have mentioned it.”’
It was not just his girlfriend learning of
the feats of Clyde’s little Merlin. ‘After the
first season with Clyde, Chelsea came in
and tried to buy me. I thought, “I’ll lose the
fun of it,” so I turned them down.’ There
was interest too from Billy McNeill, the
manager of Celtic. Nevin’s career might
have unfolded differently had McNeill
actually stayed in his seat until the end of
one particular game when scouting Nevin.
‘For my style of player, plastic pitches
and icy pitches don’t work, as you can’t
turn. That night we were playing at Alloa
and it was rock-hard and I was having a
total stinker. Billy McNeill had come to
see me to buy me for Celtic, which I’d
have loved, but I couldn’t kick a ball or
run with it until with ten minutes to go
when I got the ball and started to dribble.
‘There’s no video of it but I did go
through a lot of players and the keeper
and somebody on the line and then
tapped it in. I jogged back and then had
a wee look up to Billy McNeill, but he’d
gone. It was a wee moment of fate. Lots of
Clyde fans still talk about it. Celtic came
in for me twice during my career and it
never happened. At the same time, the
players at Clyde were a good bunch and I
learned very quickly.’
It helped that, with his parallel life
as a student, he felt no pressure. ‘Celtic
releasing me made me realise that I could
just do this for fun and I immediately
improved. I was never nervous in my life
about it. What I promised myself when I
finally did leave Clyde to come down here
was to not forget that. Chelsea bought me
for ninety-five grand, which was buttons
at the time, and I still did not think at
all I’d be a professional footballer. I was
taking a two-year sabbatical.’
The Chelsea Football Club that Nevin
arrived at in 1983 was quite unlike today’s
rouble-driven powerhouse. In those days
there was no health club serving the
lemon and polenta, and chocolate and
beetroot cakes which Nevin and I are now
tucking into.
Then Stamford Bridge had a three-tier
East Stand, built in the 1970s, but the
rest of the ground was a ramshackle
place with a greyhound track circling the
pitch and cars parked behind the goal on
a match day. Moreover, Chelsea were a
Second Division side.
When Nevin turned up at Euston station,
he threatened to take a train straight
back to Glasgow on hearing the club
wanted to put him in digs with the youthteam
players. ‘I had to go and find a place
to rent. It was a fleapit in Earls Court and
was costing me a hundred quid a week. I
was earning one hundred and eighty quid
a week, I was paying tax and had twenty
quid a week to live on. I just got lucky
that I was in the team right away and the
fans took to me immediately.
‘If I had to guess why, it was because I
was playing well but I worked my socks
off. I was an incredibly hard-working
player as well as the other stuff and you
had to have both of them together. With
people who have a bit of skill and flounce
about, they can take you or leave you
sometimes. But if you put that effort in
and you have skill on top, you’ve got a
chance. My time down here, from the
start, was just about a dream. The fans
were great and I had a manager who rated
me and utterly trusted me.’
This was John Neal, a softy-spoken
County Durham man with a shrewd
football brain and an appreciation of flair,
who had previously managed Wrexham
and Middlesbrough. ‘Very early on in the
first season he does the team talk and at
the end of it says, “Give the ball to Pat and
you’ll win.” John Neal basically said to me,
“Play on the right wing but do what you
want because I know you’ll defend when
66 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Simon Hart
HE MUST BE THE ONLY
FOOTBALLER IN THE WORLD
TO HAVE ASKED HIS MANAGER
TO SUBSTITUTE HIM BEFORE
THE END OF A PRE-SEASON
FIXTURE SO HE COULD GET TO
A COCTEAU TWINS CONCERT.
you need to.” He trusted me absolutely so
I was able to go and find pockets and play
in the hole when it was vacated.’
Prior to Nevin’s arrival, Chelsea had
narrowly escaped relegation. Now he
was at the creative heart of a team with a
new-look spine, comprising goalkeeper
Eddie Niedzwiecki, centre-back Joe
McLaughlin, midfielder Nigel Spackman
and striker Kerry Dixon. Dixon would
score 28 league goals as they won promotion,
but Nevin, his chief supplier, was
the club’s Player of the Season. Of their
partnership, Nevin says: ‘I completely
understood what he wanted, where he
liked to score. He was lightning-quick. He
wasn’t a great footballer but his finishing
was phenomenal. There was a good
understanding and we liked each other
but we had nothing in common – he was
listening to his Wham! records.’
Nevin’s reputation for doing things
differently was quickly noted by the press.
‘I was asked by the Sun what I liked doing
after one of my first games and I said,
“Going to gigs.” From that the NME did an
article on me and suddenly I was Mr Post-
Punk Footballer. But I was just normal.’
He may say that but he must be the
only footballer in the world to have asked
his manager to substitute him before the
end of a pre-season fixture so he could get
to a Cocteau Twins concert.
These extra-curricular interests led to
him befriending John Peel, the BBC radio
DJ and champion of alternative music. ‘If
I had a hero it was John and it was one of
the real joys of my life to have had John
as a friend. On Wednesday nights I would
be on the Peel Show. Now and again he’d
say, “We’ve got the famous footballer in
tonight.”’
It was music too that forged a bond between
Nevin and Paul Canoville, Chelsea’s
first black player. ‘I’d go and make tapes
for him,’ says Nevin, who provided rather
more than compilation cassettes for his
team-mate, defending Canoville publicly
after he became a target for abuse from a
section of the club’s supporters.
At the time Stamford Bridge was
a magnet for right-wing extremists;
Canoville had bananas thrown at him
on his debut against Crystal Palace and it
was after another fixture against Palace,
on 14 April 1984, that Nevin spoke out. ‘I
scored the winner and I walked off just
fuming,’ he recalls. ‘Paul had been booed
on by a bunch of our fans and I came
out afterwards and said, “I’m not talking
about the game, I’m disgusted with these
people who pretend to be Chelsea fans.
There’s no place for that.”
‘There were a lot of hooligans at the time
and I’ve no time for the retrospectives
people are doing about the casual movement
now. It had a very negative effect,
particularly on the careers of players and
on fans who couldn’t travel because of the
dangers. They were thugs and they ruined
people’s lives and I think they used places
like this. Chelsea is not in any way a racist
club. Everton is not a racist club. These
people wouldn’t even go into the games
half the time, they’d go for the ruck.’
The Chelsea chairman, Ken Bates,
was unhappy with Nevin’s stance. ‘The
September 2016 | nutmeg | 67

The making of Pat Nevin
chairman got me in and said, “What the
hell do you think you’re doing, saying
things against our fans? It’s not your
fight.” I said, “Yes it is, of course it’s my
fight. I play for this club.” The next week
I walked out with Paul and they sang his
name, which was great.’
It was not just Bates who confronted
Nevin, who says he received letters from
the National Front. ‘I wrote back and said,
“I’ve read the leaflets and I don’t agree
with you.” I also met somebody who
purported to be NF in a hairdresser’s on
King’s Road. He was shaven-headed and
he wasn’t very pleased with me. I had to
talk my way out of it.’
Nevin’s campaigning continued after he
became an Everton player. Six months
before his arrival on Merseyside, a banana
was thrown at Liverpool’s John Barnes
during the FA Cup fifth-round derby at
Goodison Park. Nevin was involved with
Barnes and Steve Mungall of Tranmere
Rovers in the subsequent Merseyside
Against Racism campaign that followed.
As chairman of the Professional Footballers’
Association from 1993–97, he did
more of the same and these efforts led, in
2012, to his receiving an honorary degree
from the University of Abertay.
Amid all this, Nevin never lost focus on
his football. After morning training with
the Chelsea squad, he would do extra work
at Stamford Bridge in the afternoons on
‘the technical stuff my dad had taught me’,
sometimes with a full-back from the youth
team. Nevin would also go jogging in the
evenings and his passion for running
endures – these days he takes to the hills
near his home in the Scottish Borders.
Colin Harvey remembered Nevin doing
much the same during his Everton days –
‘He wasn’t like a professional footballer but
he was very professional,’ he told me – and
this work ethic reaped rich rewards during
his first season in the old First Division,
1984/85, when Chelsea finished sixth.
One high point of their campaign was
a 4–3 victory at Everton on the Saturday
before Christmas. In what proved Everton’s
last defeat until the following May, Welsh
striker Gordon Davies hit a hat-trick and
Nevin provided two assists. The Observer
newspaper, in its match report, lauded his
‘magical dribbling’ and described how ‘the
little man [. . .] had four men going four
ways when he delivered the ball to [Colin]
Pates for the third goal’.
Nevin remembers little of that first visit
to Goodison Park but a match he does recall
is a 4–1 home win over Manchester City
a month earlier when he took a penalty
described by an indignant-sounding Barry
Davies, commentating for the BBC, as ‘the
worst penalty I’ve ever seen at this level
of football’. Taking just one step forward,
Nevin rolled the ball at a snail’s pace
straight at City’s Alex Williams. ‘I got fined
that day by the manager for missing a
penalty – not for missing the penalty but for
laughing as I was walking back afterwards.’
Looking back, Nevin had reason to play
with a smile on his face. ‘For two years
in a row we came sixth and we scored
a bunch of goals and were exciting to
watch. It could have grown into something
big but John Neal got ill and then
the magic was broken a little bit. The team
broke up quite quickly afterwards.’
Chelsea’s relegation in 1988 was the
cue for Nevin to depart. He had a choice
of Everton or Paris Saint-Germain. Nevin
was on holiday in Corfu with Annabel,
his future wife, when a call came through
to the hotel from his flatmate back in
London. ‘My friend Peter told me, “Colin
Harvey has been on and says Everton want
to sign you.” “OK, tell him we’ll sign.” I
said to Annabel, “It’s Everton.” She asked
me if I was sure about saying no to Paris.
I said, “Why would I go to Paris? That’s
about lifestyle, not about football and you
can’t turn down the football.”’ l
Here We Go: Everton In The 1980s: The
Players’ Stories by Simon Hart.
Published by deCoubertin Books (£18.9)
68 | nutmeg | September 2016

PUBLISHING WORLD-CLASS SPORTS BOOKS SINCE 2010
September 2016 | nutmeg | 69

GLASGOW, 1872: THE
BIRTH OF TIKI-TAKA
Scotland can lay claim to
having invented modern
football, through a line that
stretches from Queen’s Park
in Victorian days to Pep
Guardiola’s Barcelona
By Jonathan Wilson
When did football begin? There will
be those who make claims for games
played with a ball by the Chinese or
Amazonian tribes several millennia
ago, but realistically the game we know
today had its origins in the mob game
of medieval Britain, which around 150
years ago developed through the English
public schools into something resembling
modern football.
But the game had many forms, dependent
on tradition and environment: those
who grew up playing on vast muddy
fields played a very different variant to
those who played on tight flag-stoned
cloisters. When pupils from different
public schools got to university, they
found every game had to be preceded by a
discussion on which school’s rules to play
under. In 1848, an attempt at drawing up
a unified code was made at Cambridge
University and those laws posted on
Parker’s Piece, an area of open grassland
in the centre of the city where sport is
still played. Finally, in 1863, in a meeting
at the Freemasons’ Arms between Covent
Garden and Holborn in London, the
Football Association was founded, drawing
up a list of 12 laws that form the basis
of the modern game.
Over the following couple of decades
the laws underwent numerous revisions,
instituting a crossbar and something approximating
to our offside law. However
perhaps the single biggest event that
transformed the sport into the modern
game of football was what happened
at the West of Scotland Cricket ground
in Partick on November 30, 1872. An
unfancied Scotland side held England to
a 0-0 draw in the first ever international
fixture, but what was important was they
way they did it. They passed the ball.
Passing, the basis of the modern game,
the key aspect of the great central stream
of tactical thought, began as an expedient
Scottish ploy to frustrate England.
The early game in England had largely
been focused on dribbling because of
the mentality reflected by Law Six, the
forerunner of the offside law: “When
a player has kicked the ball,” it stated,
“anyone of the same side who is nearer
to the opponent’s goal-line is out of play,
and may not touch the ball himself,
nor in any way whatever prevent any
other player from doing so, until he is
in play…” Going backwards or sideways
would have been subtlety too far for
70 | nutmeg | September 2016

an English culture obsessed, as David
Winner observes in his book Those Feet,
with the notion that anything subtle was
somehow unmanly. So players charged
at opponents, as described by Geoffrey
Green, the late football correspondent of
The Times, quoting an unnamed writer of
the 1870s in his history of the FA Cup: “A
really first-class player … will never lose
sight of the ball, at the same time keeping
his attention employed in the spying out
of any gaps in the enemy’s ranks, or any
weak points in the defence, which may
give him a favourable chance of arriving
at the coveted goal. To see some players
guide and steer a ball through a circle
of opposing legs, turning and twisting
as the occasion requires, is a sight not
to be forgotten… Skill in dribbling …
necessitates something more than a goahead,
fearless, headlong onslaught of the
enemy’s citadel; it requires an eye quick
at discovering a weak point, and nous
to calculate and decide the chances of a
successful passage.”
Even after Law Six had been amended
in 1866 to follow the convention pursued
at Eton and permit a forward pass provided
there were at least three members
THEY MET ENGLAND’S LOP-
SIDED 1-2-7 FORMATION
WITH A 2-2-6 AND DECIDED
TO TRY TO PASS THEIR WAY
AROUND THEIR OPPONENTS
OR, AT THE VERY LEAST, TO
DENY THEM POSSESSION
of the defensive team between its recipient
and the opponent’s goal when the ball
was played (that is, one more than the
modern offside law), the dribbling game
prevailed.
Or that’s how it was in England. When
the Queen’s Park club, which soon
became the game’s arbiter in Scotland,
was established in 1867, the version of
the offside law they adopted held that a
player was infringing only if he were both
beyond the penultimate man and in the
final 15 yards of the pitch. That, clearly,
was legislation far more conducive to
passing than either the FA’s first offside
law or its 1866 revision. Queen’s Park
accepted the three-man variant when
they joined the FA on November 9,
1870, but by then some idea of passing
was already implanted. In Scotland
the ball was there to be kicked, not
merely dribbled, as H.N. Smith’s poem
celebrating Queen’s Park’s victory over
Hamilton Gymnasium in 1869 suggests:
The men are picked – the ball is kicked,
High in the air it bounds;
O’er many a head the ball is sped…
That may have simply referred to long
clearances, which would certainly have
been part of the English game at the time
as well. More definitive evidence comes
from the report Robert Smith, a Queen’s
Park member and Scotland’s right-winger
in that first international, gave back to
his club after playing in the first of four
matches arranged by Charles W Alcock,
the secretary of the FA, between England
and a team of London-based Scots that
were the forerunners to proper internationals.
“While the ball was in play,” he
wrote, “the practice was to run or dribble
the ball with the feet, instead of indulging
in high or long balls.”
The England team Alcock brought
to Scotland for the first international
was physically much larger than their
September 2016 | nutmeg | 71

Glasgow, 1872: the birth of tiki-taka
counterparts. Estimates vary, but there is
general agreement that the English were
at least a stone a man heavier on average
than the Scots. In a running game, with
players charging into each other, there
could only realistically be one winner.
Queen’s Park provided every player on
the Scotland side and, perhaps because
they were a club side, they were able to
devise specific tactics for the game. They
met England’s lop-sided 1-2-7 formation
with a 2-2-6 and decided to try to pass
their way around their opponents or,
at the very least, to deny them possession.
“The Englishmen,” the report in
the Herald said, “had all the advantage
in respect of weight… and they also had
the advantage in pace. The strong point
with the home club was that they played
excellently well together.”
A 0-0 draw seemed to prove the
efficacy of Scotland’s method. Queen’s
Park, certainly, were convinced and their
isolation – they were able to find just
three opponents in 1871-72, which was
what prompted them to join the English
FA – meant their idiosyncrasies became
more pronounced. Playing practice games
among themselves, the passing game
was effectively hot-housed, free from the
irksome obstacle of bona fide opponents.
“In these games,’ Richard Robinson wrote
in his 1920 history of Queen’s Park, “the
dribbling and passing … which raised the
Scottish game to the level of fine art, were
developed. Dribbling was a characteristic
of English play, and it was not until very
much later that the Southerners came to
see that the principles laid down in the
Queen’s Park method of transference of
the ball, accompanied by strong backing
up, were those that got the most out of
the team. Combination was the chief
characteristic of Queen’s Park’s play.
These essentials struck Mr CW Alcock
and in one of his earlier Football Annuals
formed the keynote for a eulogium on
Scottish players, accompanied by earnest
dissertations advocating the immediate
adoption by English players of the
methods which had brought the game to
such a high state of proficiency north of
the Tweed.”
Alcock, in truth, was nowhere near
as convinced as that, reflected a general
English scepticism about passing.
Although he was intrigued by the “combination
game”, he expressed doubt in that
annual of 1879 as to whether “a wholesale
system of passing pays”.
In Scotland, though, the much
romanticised “pattern-weaving” approach
spread, evangelised by Queen’s Park. The
southward spread of the passing game
can also be attributed to Scots, most
notably Henry Renny-Tailyour and John
Blackburn, who played for Scotland in
their victory over England in the second
international. Both were lieutenants
in the army and both played their club
football for the Royal Engineers, carrying
the Scottish style with them to Kent. “The
Royal Engineers were the first football
team to introduce the ‘combination’ style
of play,” W.E. Clegg, a former Sheffield
player, wrote in the Sheffield Independent
in 1930. “Formerly the matches Sheffield
played with them were won by us,
but we were very much surprised that
between one season and another they had
considered ‘military’ football tactics” with
the result that Sheffield was badly beaten
by the new conditions of play.”
Through the 1880s, passing took hold.
The Old Carthusians side that beat the
Old Etonians 3-0 in the 1881 FA Cup
final was noted for its combinations,
particularly those between EMF Prinsep
and EH Parry, while the following
year the Old Etonian goal that saw off
Blackburn Rovers, the first northern
side to reach the final, stemmed, Green
wrote in his history of the FA Cup, from
“a long dribble and cross-pass” from
ATB Dunn that set up WH Anderson.
Once professionalism had been legalised
in English football in 1885, and power
72 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Jonathan Wilson
IN SCOTLAND THE MUCH
ROMANTICISED “PATTERN-
WEAVING” APPROACH
SPREAD, EVANGELISED BY
QUEEN’S PARK
switched to the northern cities, passing
was instilled. Many areas of the north had
had their own versions of the offside law
anyway, and so hadn’t conformed to the
pure dribbling of the public schools and
the south, and once winning rather than
playing the game in the ‘right’ way was
prioritised, so the most effective way of
playing naturally came to the fore – and
that, evidently, was passing.
In Scotland, this had been acknowledged
for years. “Take any club that has
come to the front,” the columnist ‘Silas
Marner’ wrote in the Scottish Umpire
in August 1884, “and the onward strides
will be found to date from the hour when
the rough and tumble gave place to swift
accurate passing and attending to the
leather rather than the degraded desire
merely to coup an opponent.”
It was a spring that would bubble
into one of the great rivers of tactical
evolution. In 1901, RS McColl – or Toffee
Bob was he was nicknamed because of
the chain of newsagents he ran with his
brother – left Queen’s Park, which had
remained amateur, to turn profession
with Newcastle United. He took the pass
and move ideal with him and Newcastle
were transformed form a direct team
to a possession side. In 1912 the winghalf
Peter McWilliam, having suffered
a career-ending injury, left the club to
become manager at Tottenham.
He promoted the same passing
principles there, not only among the
first team but almost among the reserves
and the youth sides, even buying the
non-league side Northfleet Town to use
as a nursery side. Although McWilliam
left in 1927, when Middlesbrough made
him the best-paid manager in the game,
he returned in 1938 to reap the benefits of
the philosophy he had instilled, inheriting
a side that included Arthur Rowe, Bill
Nicholson and Vic Buckingham.
Rowe went on to lead Spurs to
promotion and then the title while
Nicholson took them to the double.
Buckingham remains West Brom’s
longest-serving manager. He left the
Hawthorns for Ajax, returned to England
with Sheffield Wednesday and then went
back to Ajax in 1964. There he found
players eager to put his pass-and-move
ideas into practice. He gave a debut to
Johan Cruyff and prepared the ground for
Rinus Michels before moving to Fulham.
After a brief stint in Cyprus at Ethnikos,
he took charge at Barcelona in 1970 and
began to instil the ethos that Michels,
succeeding him again, would bring to
full fruition. It was Michels, of course,
who inspired Cruyff, and Cruyff who
plucked Pep Guardiola from the youth
team to give him his debut. It is no
coincidence that the last two Englishmen
to manage Barcelona are also of that line:
Bobby Robson was heavily influenced
by Buckingham at West Brom and Terry
Venables played under Nicholson at
Tottenham.
The modern Barcelona and tiki-taka,
which has had a profound influence on
how football is played, is the most recent
iteration of a proud tradition stretching
back through Ajax to Tottenham
to Newcastle to Queen’s Park. Modern
football looks as it does because of a tactical
decision taken in Glasgow in 1872. l
September 2016 | nutmeg | 73

Central Park, home of Cowdenbeath FC. It is one hour before kick off and the turnstiles
have just opened for the new season.
GROUNDS FOR
OPTIMISM
The first day of the season.
Photographs by Alan McCredie
Words by Daniel Gray
74 | nutmeg | September 2016

Grounds for optimism
By Alan McCredie and Daniel Gray
Pre-season is over, and in the home dressing room at Cowdenbeath’s Central Park the kits
are carefully placed, ready for the upcoming season.
Fixtured life recommenced
on August 6. Daniel Gray and
photographer Alan McCredie
witnessed it in Cowdenbeath,
Dunfermline, Alloa, Falkirk,
Gorgie and Perth.
August has come again. Football
is back. Such words sprinkle a
Christmas Eve feeling upon us all.
Interminable, domesticated Saturdays
have departed and familiar, fixtured
life can recommence. Resumed are
our sacred routines – scarves sifted out
and returned to necks, lucky routes
taken, matchday pubs invaded for
the first time since May, fortnightly
acquaintances greeted again with quick
enquiries of holidays and health, and
engrossed conversations about players
sold and signed.
Once more to the ground we go,
inhaling sweet catering van scents as
they hang in the air almost visible like
the vapours in a Bisto advert. Back is
the 50/50 draw and its faithful seller,
and the neatly-piled club shop with last
September 2016 | nutmeg | 75

Grounds for optimism
season’s away shorts in a £5 bin. The
new shirt, modelled by full-kit child
and corpulent granddad in crumpled
weekend jeans, looks wonderful or
awful and never in-between. Shortsleeves
are trusted by the kitted and the
rest, for the first day is always sunny, is
it not? Even an angry God couldn’t drop
rain on our August day of hope.
In pastoral Dingwall and briny
Arbroath, in remodelling Dundee and
solid Mount Florida, at scholarly Ibrox
and folksy Firhill, and at charming
Somerset Park and surprised
Meadowbank, the hopeful gather.
We can’t see them, but we know that
they are there. They share the same
darting hearts that Alan McCredie
and I witness on our nimble first day
travels to Cowdenbeath, Dunfermline,
Alloa, Falkirk, Gorgie and Perth. For the
football supporter, this is a carnival day.
While the familiar comforts us,
spying difference is a first day delight
of its own. A revamped matchday
programme with its cryptic, initialled
and hashtagged new name comes with
a 50p price rise. Fences, fittings and
awnings have been painted, cherished
turnstile lettering covered and superseded.
Even a change at the food hatch
is noticed – perhaps promotion has
been met with a new pastry supplier,
relegation with staff losses. Soon will
come the joy of sighting the pitch once
more, our Lincoln Green meadow, staggeringly
vivid as if last season we were
watching in black and white. Then, the
appraisal of new signings, their gait and
first touches evidence enough to make
an absolute judgement.
These themes are to be cherished as
part of football’s universality. Across
this country and others, we are all
feeling the hope and sniffing the
Dulux. Year and place are hardly of
consequence, no matter the changes
in the game, the world and our
As the new season begins, the old one
is honoured at Dunfermline’s East
End Park. Fireworks and pyrotechnics
accompany the raising of the League One
championship flag.
lives. In Dunfermline and Gorgie, the
pulse quickens when a chant is called
rustily back into use, just as it does in
Southampton, Mansfield, Wolfsburg,
Utrecht and Bologna. We have all come
home.
At Central Park, the 2pm shutters roll
upwards and the turnstile girls arrive
with their cash floats. The public address
system croaks into life – Chumbawamba
then Kaiser Chiefs, of course – and a
lone pair of clanking palms groggily clap
tracksuited players onto the pitch. Soon
here, there and everywhere, football will
begin again, and the week will once more
have an anchor. l
76 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Alan McCredie and Daniel Gray
Cowdenbeath head coach Liam Fox (right) and his management team watch the early
kick-off Rangers and Hamilton match before their own game against Elgin City.
Where once
fans asked for
autographs, now it
is selfies with their
heroes. Outside the
Falkirk Stadium
Jason Cummings of
Hibs poses with two
young fans.
September 2016 | nutmeg | 77

Grounds for optimism
Hand in hand up the Halbeath Road toward East End Park, Dunfermline. A sight as old as
football as the old take the young to the match and the cycle begins again.
78 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Alan McCredie and Daniel Gray
Football fans don’t always wear their team’s current strip. Shirts from previous seasons
and eras are always a favourite with the supporters, such as these at Dunfermline Athletic.
Another top flight
season begins in
Perth as St Johnstone
take on Aberdeen.
For this young fan, it
is also his first ever
match.
September 2016 | nutmeg | 79

Grounds for optimism
Losing 4-0 in the rain is not how the season should begin. A Peterhead fan leaves Alloa’s
Recreation Park for the long journey home.
What football is all about. The layoff is over and Alloa fans return to witness a perfect
opening day’s victory over Peterhead.
80 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Alan McCredie and Daniel Gray
The club shop at Central Park, Cowdenbeath. The perfect antidote to those who have grown
weary with the relentless commercialisation of football.
Matchday is back and the doors are open once again at Marv’s Emporium and Tearoom in
Dunfermline Athletic’s East End Park.
September 2016 | nutmeg | 81

Grounds for optimism
The first penalty of the season is missed and the Dunfermline fans are not happy. All will
be well in the end as they go on to defeat Dumbarton by the odd goal in seven.
The match is over and the Wasps have stung Peterhead with a 4-0 win in the rain.
82 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Alan McCredie and Daniel Gray
Hearts merchandise seller near Tynecastle. Hearts 1 Celtic 2
Ninety minutes before kick off at
Tynecastle and the programme sellers
are out in the Gorgie Road.
Tucked away behind the tenements,
Tynecastle welcomes back the fans for
the first game of the season agains the
reigning champions, Celtic.
September 2016 | nutmeg | 83

THE
MANAGERS
84 | nutmeg | September 2016

86
Euan McTear on David
Moyes’ time in Spain.
“He remained resident at what is
regarded as one of the smartest hotels
in the whole of northern Spain”
89
Chris Tait on Owen Coyle’s
US experience.
“It’s what you do now that you
are judged on. If it was going to be
about the past, Claudio Ranieri would
never have got the Leicester City job.
In his last game for Greece they lost at
home to the Faroe Islands.”
94
Ian Thomson on the
man who masterminded
England’s 1950 World Cup
defeat against the USA.
“The Scot was hailed as a hero in Brazil
too as his team’s victory had virtually
eliminated one of the host nation’s
rivals and practically ensured that the
trophy would be staying in Brazil or
going to Uruguay.”
103
Paul Forsyth on
goalkeepers as managers.
“The unique perspective from which
a goalkeeper watches the game gives
him invaluable insight. He has time
and space to think about the game as it
unfolds before him.”
September 2016 | nutmeg | 85

ONE YEAR
IN A HOTEL
It wasn’t just poor performances
on the pitch that led to David
Moyes’ early exit from Spanish
football management.
By Euan McTear
Every September the city of San
Sebastián in the Basque Country of
northern Spain hosts one of the world’s
most prestigious film festivals. Since
the festival was founded in 1952 it has
premiered many Oscar-winning movies
and has helped launch the careers of stars
such as Pedro Almodóvar and Francis
Ford Coppola. Known in the local Basque
language as Donostia Zinemaldia, it is
considered the premier film festival in
the Spanish-speaking world, but it also
screens English-language films and has
over the years handed out awards to classics
such as The Full Monty and Alien.
It is little surprise that the city’s
plushest hotel, the María Cristina, is fully
booked with movie stars and directors
come September time. It is nigh on
impossible to reserve a room during that
month unless you’re involved in one
of the festival’s movies or if your name
is Brad Pitt or Tom Hanks or Jennifer
Lawrence. Or David Moyes.
Illustration by Kathleen Oakley
Last September the María Cristina hotel
was filled as usual with movie stars. Only
one room escaped the influx of actors
and film-makers – that of David Moyes.
The Glaswegian had been staying at the
hotel ever since his move to San Sebastián
in November 2014, when he became
coach of the city’s beloved football team
Real Sociedad following his sacking by
Manchester United.
Moyes has said that he had been
searching for an apartment from the day
he arrived in the city. Ten months later
he had yet to find a home; he remained
resident at what is regarded as one of the
smartest hotels in the whole of northern
Spain. Damningly, he was staying there
at considerable cost to his new club – and
unsurprisingly this did not endear him
to the fanbase in San Sebastián. It is not
overstating things to say that Moyes’
choice of address contributed to his early
exit as Real Sociedad boss.
It did not help Moyes that he was arriving
as manager of a team whose fans had
begun to take an increasing interest in
the club’s accounts. They would still sing,
chant and whistle the referee from the
terraces like football supporters everywhere,
but would become accountants in
the most popular post-match bars afterwards.
Fans were all too aware, therefore,
of the club’s upcoming £31m stadium
renovation – it would be no major surprise
if some knew the exact cost of every
nut, bolt and screw. That is why it they
found it especially controversial that Real
Sociedad would contribute to Moyes’
hotel bill just one year in advance of this
pricey renovation.
Given how much Moyes was earning
from his basic salary, many supporters
of the blue and whites were baffled that
their club would contribute to his hotel
bill. According to France Football’s annual
report on player and manager wages,
Moyes earned £5.1m in 2014 between his
commercial deals and his Manchester
86 | nutmeg | September 2016

United and Real Sociedad payslips, which
put him joint-tenth in the world, alongside
PSG’s Laurent Blanc. Put simply, he
could have afforded any house in the city,
and fans felt he was taking one too many
cookies out of the club’s biscuit tin.
Moyes is not the first – and nor will he be
the last – footballing personality to live in
a hotel. Carlo Ancelotti never moved out
of his hotel in his two years of managing
Real Madrid, while Zlatan Ibrahimović
famously joked about buying the Parisian
hotel he was staying in when he was
struggling to find a house in the French
capital. Yet the difference is that Ancelotti
led Real Madrid to a Champions League
triumph, while Zlatan has fired his name
into the PSG history books by becoming
their all-time top scorer.
Moyes’ Real Sociedad tenure, however,
was anything but successful. No goals. No
goals. No goals. That was the story of Real
Sociedad’s first three matches in Moyes’
first full season in charge. It had not been
much better the previous campaign; Real
Sociedad won nine of 27 league fixtures
HE REMAINED RESIDENT
AT WHAT IS REGARDED AS
ONE OF THE SMARTEST
HOTELS IN THE WHOLE
OF NORTHERN SPAIN.
DAMNINGLY, HE WAS
STAYING THERE AT
CONSIDERABLE COST TO
HIS NEW CLUB.
in 2014/15 after Moyes took over. Such
uninspiring performances on the pitch
did not bring Moyes the unquestioning
loyalty of the supporters, which meant he
needed to maintain his popularity off the
pitch. Staying at a posh hotel at the club’s
expense was never going to help.
His relationship with the San Sebastiánites
had started off well. In a match against
Villarreal in January, 2014 – one of his first
home matches in charge – Moyes was sent
off for suggesting none too subtly that the
referee should have gone to Specsavers
by making the familiar glasses gesture.
Unfamiliar with the stadium layout, he
hopped over a fence and watched the rest
of the match with fans in the main stand,
even accepting some cheesy crisps from a
nearby fan, much to everyone’s amusement
and appreciation.
His initial enthusiasm for his new job
was obvious for all to see. Moyes tirelessly
toured the north of Spain, scouting players
and opposition. Reports of him being
the first one in and the last one of the
club’s Zubieta training ground appeared
to be true and not simply the often
trotted-out cliché. These were promising
early signs, but the problem was that they
never developed into anything more than
promise.
The team’s performances were a slight
improvement on what had come before,
making fans optimistic that further
advances would arrive. However Moyes’
initial enthusiasm turned out to be the
peak rather than beginning of an evolution
into the role.
Very quickly approval of their manager
among locals faded, not helped by his
continued residence at the María Cristina.
A manager’s relationship with a Spanish
club’s fanbase is as important and complex
as the putting together of a Formula
1 car: it can be ripped apart by the slightest
bump in the road. Unfortunately for
Moyes, the hotel issue was just the first of
many hiccups.
September 2016 | nutmeg | 87

The Managers
One year in a hotel
By Euan McTear
The manager started to openly criticise
his players’ performances. He relegated
to the substitute’s bench one star for
addressing him as ‘David’. After a while
he brought in his own British backroom
staff, Billy Mckinlay and Dave Billows,
rather than stick with the established
local coaches.
His lack of effort to learn Spanish also
frustrated supporters, who took it as a
sign of a lack of commitment to the club,
to the league and, most significantly, to
the city. No reasonable Real fan expected
Moyes to learn the complex Basque language,
but that he quickly gave up learning
the more straightforward Spanish
national tongue Castilian was poorly
received. Despite beginning his Spanish
lessons with great enthusiasm – even
mustering up the courage to slightly awkwardly
tell a press conference that some
B-team players had been “training with
me uno, dos, tres, cuatro times” – Moyes
soon began to slack when it came to his
Spanish homework and, unforgivably, his
Spanish teacher eventually became no
more than his interpreter.
That was when the locals at the pintxo
bars in San Sebastián began to think
that Moyes was giving up. In return, they
began to give up on him. “He’s a nice guy,
but he doesn’t fit in and he isn’t trying
to,” one local bar owner told me ahead
of the first home game of last season.
“Moyes? He’s weird,” one of the bar’s
regulars chipped in.
If you cannot achieve results on the
pitch and if you lose the support of the
barmen in a city as small as San Sebastián
then your days are numbered. Even if
the club president has your back. Jokin
Aperribay, the president who made it
his mission to entice Moyes to La Liga,
continued to believe in the man he
had hired despite seeing the team limp
meekly towards Primera División survival
in Moyes’ first season.
With his number one fan conveniently
also being his boss, Moyes should have
been able to buy himself enough time to
turn results around. Because Aperribay
still believed that Moyes was a long-term
project, the club even tried to tackle
the former Everton and Manchester
United gaffer’s unpopularity head on
by addressing his continued stay in the
hotel. In October 2015, as Tito Irazusta of
local sports station Deportes Gipuzkoa
explained, “Real Sociedad told Moyes
that, because of the image it was giving
off, he’d have to leave the Maria Cristina.”
A week later Moyes confirmed that he
would indeed be leaving the hotel for an
apartment in the centre.
For the fans it was too little, too late; 11
months too late. The anti-Moyes sentiment
was irreversible and when results did not
approve, Aperribay had no choice but to
listen to the supporters and send Moyes on
his way 363 days after his arrival.
Football is, of course, a results business
and it was Moyes’ 29% win percentage
that ultimately pushed him towards the
exit. However popular managers are often
afforded a few extra lives; Moyes’ poor
standing among the fanbase accelerated
his departure. That is why few supporters
were distraught to see Moyes depart,
although maybe the finance manager at
the María Cristina Hotel will have been
an exception. The local TV station Euskal
Irrati Telebista showed an amusing sketch
the week after Moyes’ sacking depicting
half a dozen desolate hotel workers holding
a banner which read ‘María Cristina
Hotel Hearts Moyes’.
Nobody loved Moyes, but nobody hated
him. He simply didn’t fit in, and nor did
he make much of an effort to do so. That
sort of attitude was never going to buy
Moyes much margin for error on the pitch.
Every cloud has a silver lining, though.
A couple of extra celebrities can now
stay in luxury at the smartest hotel in
town when they attend this year’s San
Sebastián film festival. l
88 | nutmeg | September 2016

ROVER’S RETURN
Owen Coyle’s managerial
trajectory once looked set to
propel him from Falkirk to
the very highest level. After
17 months in MLS, he is back
in the English Championship
with Blackburn Rovers. Can a
manager once regarded as a
perfect fit for the Scotland job
get his career back on track?
By Chris Tait
The midday Texan sun burns relentlessly
overhead, beads of sweat collecting on the
brows of the small audience which has
assembled beneath a pitchside gazebo to
observe drills undertaken by the Houston
Dynamo players, themselves perspiring
liberally. The session carries all the
universal markers of football training, as a
familial squad exchanges passes, coloured
bibs and wry remarks. The tempo is
controlled by a distinctly Caledonian
cadence. It is September 2015, and this
pitch on the fringes of Houston is the
domain of Owen Coyle.
Almost a year has passed and that patch
of ground is once again under US jurisdiction,
reclaimed in May by Dynamo
following an agreement to part ways with
Coyle. The announcement of his departure
came a few days after a league defeat
in Chicago and consisted of language
customary to such occasions: the desire to
separate was mutual, everyone involved
deserves a pat on the back for their efforts
and the fans can be commended on their
support. No hard feelings and all the very
best for the future.
For Coyle that means restoring stability
and success to Blackburn Rovers, having
agreed a two-year contract with the
Lancashire club eight days after stepping
down in Texas. The swiftness of his
arrival at the English Championship club
speaks to Coyle’s eagerness to be closer
to his family, who remained in England
throughout his 17-month spell in Major
League Soccer. But it also hints at another
truth behind the 50-year-old’s exit which
has not been acknowledged, at least amid
the banalities of official club statements.
It is easier to walk out of a club when the
door is already being held open.
At the Houston training sessions Coyle
rules with a light touch and gentle
humour, joining in with the banter
as a player succumbs to a nutmeg in
the middle of a small-sided game and
when the coach joins in himself and
sets the standard during shooting drills.
Photographs taken from the sidelines as
these scenes played out at Dynamo’s suburban
base proliferated on the franchise’s
official website and social media, with
Coyle exuding visible contentment.
His disposition however became overcast
by indifferent form and an ignominious
league position. Dynamo won only 14
matches under the Glasgow-born coach,
were bottom of the Western Conference
and a long way off a place in the postseason
play-offs when Coyle boarded his
flight back to the UK. Quite a fall for a
franchise that four years previously were
finalists in the MLS Cup.
It is the sort of form which unsettles
September 2016 | nutmeg | 89

The Managers
Rover’s return
club owners, and precipitated his departure
midway through his contract in
Texas. Coyle has taken to his new position
at Ewood Park with typical alacrity but
that enthusiasm will have been tempered
by an experience in the States which in
truth became a facsimile of his other
unsuccessful spells in charge of Bolton
Wanderers and Wigan Athletic. His work
at each of his previous three clubs has
been unavailing. Success at Blackburn this
season will be essential for a man whose
career path once appeared to heading to
the very top of the British game.
Much will depend on Coyle’s ability to
bring in, or bring through, players who
are capable of shining at the highest level.
It is an ability which he regards as one of
his strongest assets.
“I’ve been very fortunate to have been
able to bring some fantastic players to
clubs that I’ve had,” says Coyle, who has
replaced Paul Lambert as manager after
the former Scotland captain exercised a
release clause in his contract at the end
of last season. “You think of the [Jack]
Wilsheres and the [Daniel] Sturridges,
boys that were at the Euros. I watched
England’s friendly versus Portugal before
the tournament and they had Gary Cahill
playing as well, who was another player I
had at Bolton. It’s great when you see these
players you’ve worked with doing so well.
“When I think back on some of the
terrific young players we’ve had on loan
at different times, players like [Benik]
Afobe at Bolton, who have gone on to
have brilliant careers. Even my last
signing at Wigan has excelled, and if the
players we bring in here go on to do half
as well as that kid has done, then we’ll be
delighted. It was Marc Albrighton, on a
month’s loan, and I think it was for about
a sixth of his salary. I watched him win
the Premier League with Leicester City
last season and it was brilliant. That’s an
important avenue we might utilise with
some elite clubs.
“Opinions and perceptions of managers
can change very quickly. When all’s said
and done, it’s what you do now that you
are judged on. If it was going to be about
the past, Claudio Ranieri would never
have got the Leicester City job - I think in
his last game for Greece they lost at home
to the Faroe Islands.
“Nothing dissuades me from moving
forward and getting this club moving in
the right direction. Of course, if people
have different opinions that’s fine. All I
would say is, let us be allowed to get on
to do our job and we will do everything
in our power to make this a team to be
proud of.”
It is perhaps no coincidence that Coyle
sought an opportunity close to the scene
of one his greatest triumphs: leading
Burnley into the Premier League seven
years ago. His fortunes since leaving
Turf Moor have been a pale reflection
of that success and a time when Coyle
was synonymous with a job well done
IT’S WHAT YOU DO NOW
THAT YOU ARE JUDGED
ON. IF IT WAS GOING TO BE
ABOUT THE PAST, CLAUDIO
RANIERI WOULD NEVER
HAVE GOT THE LEICESTER
CITY JOB. IN HIS LAST GAME
FOR GREECE THEY LOST
AT HOME TO THE FAROE
ISLANDS.
90 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Chris Tait
and realised ambitions. The one-time
Republic of Ireland forward helped
lead Falkirk to the First Division title
in his first tour as a coach; reached a
Scottish Cup semi-final as manager of
St Johnstone; triumphed in the play-off
final to earn promotion at Burnley; and
safeguarded Bolton’s place in the English
top-flight shortly after returning to the
club he once played for. He helped to
redress Wigan’s finances too after the
Lancashire club was relegated from the
Premier League.
“We brought something like £20
million into the club and I would be surprised
if we spent more than £4 million,”
he says of an otherwise uncomfortable
stint at the DW Stadium.
These achievements might appear prosaic
when recounted in black and white,
but they once amounted to a bottom line
which appealed to club chairmen and
national associations in need of a new
manager. Coyle has been linked previously
to vacancies at Celtic and Scotland,
while he has also been considered a
decent fit for Ireland.
But if social media is an accurate
barometer of Blackburn supporters’
feelings then the reception given by fans
to news of the 50-year-old’s arrival might
be described politely as “muted”. Local
enmity – Blackburn and Burnley are longstanding
rivals – might account for some
resistance, as can the inescapable perception
that he is the man wanted by Venky’s,
Blackburn’s unpopular owners. But it is
instructive that Coyle has thus been seen
as an unimaginative appointment.
This is the problem which faces the
former Airdrieonians striker. He has been
charged with improving a team which
finished last season 19 points outside the
promotion play-off places, and must also
resuscitate his own career after being
sacked from his previous two jobs in
England. Coyle was removed by Bolton
and then departed Wigan disillusioned,
his tenure curtailed as a consequence of
a fractious relationship with owner Dave
Whelan. That disillusionment mean he
declined offers from clubs in England
before returning to the game having met
what he called the “right people” in Texas.
It was a move which was met with
scepticism; MLS is not yet a universally
reputable league. But Coyle discovered
a new world across the Atlantic – albeit
at a team which included former
Derby County prodigy Giles Barnes and
erstwhile Rangers defender DaMarcus
Beasley – and is dismissive of the idea
that working in North America has been
detrimental to him. He was acquainted
with MLS following a series of pre-season
tours to the US with Burnley, Wigan
and Bolton, and trusted the quality of
American players having signed Stuart
Holden for the latter club six years
ago. The midfielder, who was born in
Aberdeenshire but grew up in Texas, was
voted Player of the Year at the conclusion
of his first full season in England.
Coyle has watched soccer improve
incrementally and is confident that the
domestic division is now comparable to
many European leagues. “The English
Championship is probably the fifth or
sixth best league in Europe and MLS is
certainly at that level,” says Coyle. “When
you look at the players they have got in
that league then, with all due respect,
when you go into the Championship you
are not going to find Kaka, David Villa,
Stevie Gerrard and everyone else. England
apart, MLS is way ahead of the standard
you see in other countries.
“I knew what the standard was like as
I had taken my teams over before. Also,
Dominic [Kinnear] had been the head
coach there. Dom came to Bolton in 1993
when myself and John McGinlay were
at the club, and we took him under our
wing for those two weeks or so. Bruce
Rioch opted not to sign him ultimately
but I always kept in touch with him,
and when Dom left to go to San Jose
September 2016 | nutmeg | 91

The Managers
Rover’s return
the season before last, the president
at Dynamo asked if the position there
would be of any interest to me. I was very
impressed.
“It’s like any league in the world: they
all have their top clubs. When you go to
England it’s your Manchester Uniteds,
your Chelseas, and those are your top
clubs. Houston Dynamo are never going
to have the wealth of LA Galaxy or
Toronto – that’s not the way they run
their business. But within that you can
still be successful.”
That appraisal might equally be
applied to Blackburn, since the English
Championship this season includes clubs
such as Newcastle United, Aston Villa,
Derby County and Wolves. The Ewood
Park side were relegated from the top
flight at the end of the 2011/2012 season
and have toiled since then. A remarkable
rate of managerial upheaval has been
their most notable achievement in recent
years. Coyle is the sixth man to be placed
in charge of the team since they returned
to the Championship, with two of his
predecessors, Henning Berg and Michael
Appleton, each lasting less than three
months in the job.
For a club which once pipped Sir Alex
Ferguson and Manchester United to
the Premier League title, this record is
wounding. Yet as far as his new club has
still to go, Coyle will be relieved that the
journey does not extend to a 5000-mile
round trip just to fulfil a league fixture.
“When I played in Scotland, managed
in Scotland, and also in England, when
you played an away game you were back
in bed that night,” says the former striker,
who made stops in Airdrie, Dunfermline
Athletic and Motherwell during a
prolonged playing career. “At the Dynamo,
if we played in Vancouver, Portland or
Seattle then we left on a Thursday and
were not back until the Sunday night. The
logistics and travel are very different and
I always equate it to us playing in Europe;
we played in Europe every second week.”
In contrast to the views of fans in
Lancashire, Blackburn players have expressed
optimism about the season ahead
under their new head coach. Of course
they are obliged to project confidence, but
there does seem to be a genuine warmth
between Coyle, who is always engaging
company, and players he has coached at
his previous clubs. Giles Barnes, who was
the Dynamo captain under Coyle, has
referred to his head coach as a “perfect fit”.
There are echoes of his influence when
national teams gather too, most pertinently
at the European Championships
during the summer. England trio Cahill,
Sturridge and Wilshere all impressed for
Coyle at Bolton, while Ireland’s James
McClean grew as an internationalist under
his guidance at Wigan.
The coach also helped to establish Steven
Fletcher as Scotland’s primary striker when
the pair worked together at Burnley. A
division of the Tartan Army remains critical
of Fletcher’s capacity to perform on the international
stage – the forward scored seven
goals as Scotland failed to qualify for Euro
2016, six of which came during the two
matches against group minnows Gibraltar
– but Coyle continues to be a committed
sponsor of his former player.
While Fletcher is targeted as a consequence
of a modest goal return, Coyle
talks instead about the Scotland’s striker’s
hidden strengths; facets of his play which
are often overlooked. “I’m obviously biased
because I signed him, but he is a wonderful
player and an outstanding young man,”
says the erstwhile Burnley manager, who
spent a club-record £3 million to recruit
Fletcher from Hibernian seven years ago.
“Steven Fletcher is a wonderful player
and works his socks off for the team. You
ask his Scotland team-mates and they will
tell you how good a player he is, because
of the work and the shift he puts in. That’s
why Gordon [Strachan] picks him for
Scotland – because he knows the quality
92 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Chris Tait
and occupies centre-backs, and does it at
international level.”
COYLE HAS BEEN LINKED
PREVIOUSLY TO VACANCIES
AT CELTIC AND SCOTLAND,
WHILE HE HAS ALSO BEEN
CONSIDERED A DECENT FIT
FOR IRELAND.
Steven Fletcher has. When you persevere
with players like that, they always come
good for you. People have criticised Fletch
in the past for not scoring, but if a striker
is not getting chances then what is he
meant to do? If he is getting guilt-edge
chances, real chances, then you can say
that he should be putting them away but
that is not what happened. You can have
the best strikers in the world but you have
got to give them service.
“If Gordon had played Leigh Griffiths,
say, and they lost that game to Georgia in
the last campaign [Scotland were defeated
1-0 in Tblisi, a result which crippled their
qualifying campaign] then the people
who want to have their opinions heard,
and who know this and know that, those
same people would be asking why Leigh
Griffiths started when he is only playing
in the Scottish Premiership. They would
ask why Gordon hadn’t started with a
striker who had been signed by a Premier
League club for £15 million.
“I would suggest as well that Steven
Fletcher doesn’t have to score in games
to contribute to the team. Sometimes you
have out-and-out goalscorers and if they
don’t score then you think, what did they
do in the game? Steven Fletcher takes
the ball in, he flicks it on, he harasses
So what of Coyle’s chances of success
with Blackburn? Owners Venky’s are detested
by the Blackburn support, and have
proven to be erratic and difficult to deal
with. The company is also culpable for
substantial financial losses at Ewood Park
and a transfer embargo enacted under
Financial Fair Play legislation which was
only lifted in December.
In Coyle’s favour, not only has he
experience of working in the English
Championship, but he has experience of
dealing with a difficult owner. He had
myriad confrontations with Wigan owner
Dave Whelan.
“The Wigan thing was quite simplistic
for me; we didn’t leave Wigan because of
football,” Coyle adds. “When a team loses
their place [in the top flight] then they
sell their best players. For example, they
sold James McCarthy for £15 million to
Everton on deadline day. But we brought
in good players – look where James
McClean is now, back in the Premier
League – and certainly believe that we
would have had them back challenging
for a place in the Premier League.
“But I have a way of working and if
somebody is trying to put stuff on me,
it’s not going to happen. I don’t work
like that. It was never going to work out,
that’s the best way I can put it, and when
things happened at Wigan, it didn’t work
out. Did I want it to go that way? No.
But I have moved on and if Dave Whelan
turned up here right now I would go over
and shake his hand.
“There has been a lot of instability [at
Blackburn] and we certainly understand
that. I’ve been at clubs where there’s been
off-field issues. What I’ve got to concentrate
on is on-field issues. When you can
do that and get a team that the fans like
to see, hopefully we can all move forward.
That’s got to be the aim and what we’re
focused on doing.” l
September 2016 | nutmeg | 93

THE ENDURING
LEGACY OF
BILL JEFFREY
A native of Edinburgh who
guided his team to victory over
England and who’s influence is
still felt on the college soccer
fields of Pennsylvania.
By Ian Thomson
Scotland manager Gordon Strachan will
lead his side into battle against England
this November with qualification for the
2018 FIFA World Cup at stake. Not since
1954 have the Auld Enemies clashed in
such circumstances and the two nations
have never met in the tournament finals.
There is however one Scot, like Strachan
a native of Edinburgh, who has lived the
dream of every Scottish manager – leading
his team to victory over England at the
World Cup.
Bill Jeffrey, who was raised in the old
fishing village of Newhaven north of
the capital’s centre, had established the
men’s soccer program at Pennsylvania
State College as the finest in America, and
when the United States Soccer Football
Association found itself scrambling for
a head coach two weeks before the 1950
World Cup in Brazil, they turned to the
57-year-old Scot. Jeffrey answered the
federation’s call to lead a group of unheralded
semi-professional players to what is
perhaps the most remarkable upset in the
tournament’s history.
At the time, the 1-0 triumph over
94 | nutmeg | September 2016

Walter Winterbottom’s Three Lions in
Belo Horizonte garnered barely a mention
in American newspapers. The rising
popularity of soccer in the U.S. has since
seen the result pass into folklore for new
generations of fans in much the same
way that Scotland’s 3-2 win over England
at Wembley Stadium in 1967 still fills
Caledonian hearts with pride.
Jeffrey’s impact on the game in the
United States is immense. Efforts to
preserve and celebrate his achievements
are strongest in the small town of
State College, hidden among the forests
and Appalachian Mountains of Central
Pennsylvania, where this trailblazing
Scottish coach won nine national championships
for Penn State during his 27-year
tenure.
Gridiron dominates sport in this part of
the world. Penn State’s American football
program has the kind of aura in its field
that the Old Firm has in Scottish football.
American universities engender a lifelong
pride in their graduates that translates
into passionate backing for their sports
programs. Penn State can call upon more
than 100,000 current and former students
to fill their gigantic Beaver Stadium
on game days.
A more modest football facility lies
across the car park in the shadow of
Beaver Stadium’s upper tiers. The 5,000-
seat venue was renamed Jeffrey Field
in honor of the storied Scottish coach
in 1972 while Penn State’s men’s team
presents its annual player of the year with
the Bill Jeffrey Award.
“Old-timers like myself have great
respect for what the people that came
before us have done,” says Bob Warming,
the team’s current head coach. “I’m a
huge fan of the history of Penn State
soccer and in particular Bill Jeffrey.”
Jeffrey came to the United States in 1912,
partly drawn by employment prospects in
Pennsylvania’s booming railroad business
and partly pushed by his mother. Jeffrey’s
uncle had previously migrated to Altoona,
about 100 miles east of Pittsburgh, in
search of work. The family connection
helped to land Jeffrey a job as a railroad
mechanic in the Altoona Shops, which
at the time was one of the world’s largest
facilities for the construction and repair
of locomotives and railroad cars.
Football had been a major pastime
of Jeffrey’s in Scotland. He took a few
months to settle into his new surroundings
before helping to organise a works
team that he would represent over the
next decade while also enjoying stints
for various clubs in the Pittsburgh area.
The game’s origins in the U.S. followed
a similar path to its early growth in the
United Kingdom with esteemed academic
institutions initially codifying football
before the labourers of heavy industry
spread its popularity. Pennsylvania-based
Bethlehem Steel became the first notable
American club with a cadre of Scottish
steelworkers helping them to four of the
first seven National Challenge Cup titles
in the 1910s. Textile workers in Fall River,
Massachusetts and Paterson, New Jersey
formed similar company-sponsored
teams that also found early success.
Jeffrey became the player-manager of
Altoona’s railroad factory team in 1923
and his dazzling outfield play caught the
eye of Penn State’s then athletics director
Hugo Bezdek during a friendly against the
school two years later. Bezdek would soon
be looking for a new coach for his unsettled
team. He asked Jeffrey to become
the program’s sixth manager in seven
years with the added incentive of steady
work as an assistant instructor in the college’s
Industrial Engineering Department
during the long offseason. Penn State was
rewarded with a legacy that inspires its
coaches and student athletes to this day.
College soccer has undergone significant
development over the 90 years since
Jeffrey took charge of the Nittany Lions, as
September 2016 | nutmeg | 95

The Managers
The enduring legacy of Bill Jeffrey
Penn State’s athletics teams are nicknamed.
More than 200 men’s programs
stretching from east coast to west coast
currently battle for the Division I national
championship with hundreds of smaller
universities and colleges represented
in Division II, Division III and in lower,
junior competitions. The women’s game
boasts more than 300 Division I programs.
Successful teams will play about
25 games between August and December
in pursuit of regionalised conference titles
and entry to a national knockout tournament
that determines the country’s top
team. Jeffrey’s nine national titles were
largely selected by a committee of the
former Intercollegiate Soccer Football
Association (ISFA) that governed the
sport, with its decisions being based on a
much smaller body of work, typically six
to eight games.
Jeffrey’s Penn State debut ended in a
3-1 loss to his former Altoona side as he
prepared his players for the 1926 college
season. They responded with five wins
and a draw to earn Jeffrey his first ISFA
championship, an honor that was jointly
awarded to Harvard and Princeton. He
won the school’s first undisputed title
three years later with six wins and a draw
to finish the season as the only undefeated
team, and Jeffrey’s third national
crown was awarded in 1933.
That third title was shared with
the Philadelphia-based University of
Pennsylvania, the first real powerhouse
of the college game. Penn’s head coach
Douglas Stewart was another Scot that
had migrated to Canada before settling in
Philadelphia as a patent lawyer. Stewart’s
share of the 1933 championship was his
third in succession and his tenth overall
since Penn first became champions in
1916.
Jeffrey had suffered personal tragedy in
November 1932 when his first wife, Doris,
was killed in a road accident in New Jersey.
He rarely spoke about the incident; instead
HE WAS ENTHUSIASTICALLY
DEMONSTRATIVE IN HIS
COACHING. STUDENT
ATHLETES RESPONDED
TO HIS WARM, PATIENT
PROMPTINGS BY PLAYING TO
WIN EVERY GAME FOR HIM.
he would philosophise about life’s shortness
and the need to make the most of
it. He was a resilient character who often
used eccentric methods to educate his
young players. Jeffrey would regale them
with anecdotes from his years of playing
football or he would recite the poetry
of Robert Burns in his native dialect to
lighten the mood and build team spirit. He
was enthusiastically demonstrative in his
coaching. Student athletes responded to
his warm, patient promptings by playing
to win every game for him.
Penn State’s burgeoning status on
the football field was furthered in 1934
when the Nittany Lions became the first
American college team to travel overseas.
Jeffrey, naturally, chose Scotland as the
destination for an eight-game autumn
schedule to give his players experience
in preparation for the defence of their
national title. School officials provided
equipment for the trip, leaving Jeffrey
and his players to raise about $150 each to
cover traveling expenses. Some of them
fell short of the target and had no choice
but to stay behind when the party of 16
set sail from New York City aboard the
S.S. Cameronia liner.
Jeffrey bolstered his depleted side by
96 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Ian Thomson
inviting along a Syracuse University graduate
named John McEwan whose younger
brother, Bill, was on the Penn State team.
The journey allowed the McEwans to visit
the land of their parents for the first time.
John made an immediate impact, scoring
four goals in the Nittany Lions’ opening
game – although they lost the match 6-4
to an amateur team from Leith). Gala
Fairydean crushed the visitors 7-2 in their
second game with the now 42-year-old
Jeffrey forced to play up front. High scoring
defeats piled up with Inverness Caley,
Thurso Pentland and Falkirk Amateurs all
putting double figures past the fatigued
Americans. Kilmarnock Academical
closed out Penn State’s tour with another
heavy loss amid torrential rain.
However those eight straight defeats
in Scotland served only to harden
Jeffrey’s students. Back in the U.S. they
destroyed most of their opponents during
the following college season, putting
together six convincing wins and a draw
to compile a record that should have
earned them another national title. The
ISFA’s committee, heavily influenced by
graduates from the rival University of
Pennsylvania, had other ideas. They failed
to recognise Penn State’s achievements,
stating that Jeffrey had broken college
sports principles by fielding non-student
athletes in Scotland. The politicking
against Jeffrey continued into the following
year when the ISFA selected Yale as its
champion. Penn State had won all seven
of its games without conceding a single
goal and Jeffrey later deemed this his best
ever side. The ones that followed before
the onset of World War Two weren’t bad
either. Five consecutive unbeaten seasons
from 1936 to 1940 saw the Nittany Lions
awarded five consecutive national titles
as the ISFA backed away from its petty
punishment.
Those titles came in the midst of a
phenomenal spell that saw Penn State
put together a 65-game unbeaten run
stretching over nine years. Only four of
those games were drawn. The sequence
began after John McEwan’s Syracuse had
beaten Jeffrey’s side in the last game of
the 1932 season and continued until a
physical United States Military Academy
team beat the Lions 1-0 in the fifth game
of the 1941 season. Some 3,000 students
and State College residents gathered in
the town’s College Avenue that night to
greet the team bus and to honour Jeffrey
and his players for setting a record that
has never been matched.
“There’s no surefire formula for
teaching soccer,” Jeffrey told a reporter
from the Pittsburgh Press newspaper in
October 1945. “If I have been successful,
it’s just because I like the game.”
The war years disrupted college soccer
with no champion being crowned for
five years, but Jeffrey’s passion had not
dwindled for a game that he frequently
joked he’d left Scotland to escape from.
His standing as a coach and a leader of
young men saw him being invited to Italy
at the conclusion of World War Two to
serve as a sports consultant training young
American soldiers stationed at the U.S.
Army’s central sports school in Rome.
It took a few years for Jeffrey to rebuild
Penn State into national championship
contenders. Eight straight wins in the
1949 season earned the Nittany Lions
an invitation to play in the ISFA’s first
“Soccer Bowl” as the governing body
sought a fairer way to determine the
country’s best team by pitting a traditional
school from the east against opposition
from the west coast where college
and professional sports were beginning
to blossom. Finding a champion was
becoming a tougher job now that more
than 100 schools were fielding teams
as opposed to the 20 or so when Jeffrey
began his coaching career.
Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis, Missouri
was the site of the inaugural Soccer Bowl
on New Year’s Day of 1950. Close to 5,000
September 2016 | nutmeg | 97

The Managers
The enduring legacy of Bill Jeffrey
fans turned up to watch San Francisco
take the lead before inside-right Harry
Little levelled for Jeffreys’ side. The
California Conference champions edged
ahead again leaving Penn State to push
for a late, late equaliser. The Nittany Lions
were awarded a contentious penalty with
10 seconds remaining when the referee
spotted a handball. Little converted the
kick to ensure a share of the national
championship. It was Jeffrey’s ninth title
as head coach. It proved to be his last
although his crowning achievement was
to follow six months later.
Scotland should have been competing
at the 1950 World Cup in Brazil while
Bill Jeffrey should have been at home in
Central Pennsylvania. The winner and
runner-up in the 1949-50 British Home
Championship were awarded berths for
the tournament by FIFA as a concession
to welcome the four home nations back
into the fold after their self-imposed exile
dating back to 1920. Yet Scottish Football
Association secretary George Graham
insisted that Scotland would only travel to
South America as British champions.
England won the group ahead of the
Scots when Chelsea striker Roy Bentley
notched the only goal in the final, decisive
game watched by more than 130,000
fans at Hampden Park on April 15, 1950.
That result should have been inconsequential.
But Graham stuck to his guns
and England traveled to Brazil as the sole
representatives from the British Isles.
Graham wasn’t alone in baulking at
the prospect of a month-long trip to
unknown, faraway lands. The United
States’ head coach Erno Schwarz backed
out of the job a few weeks before the
tournament forcing his football association
chiefs into a panicked search to find
a suitable replacement. Jeffrey ticked all
the boxes. He’d enjoyed huge success
within the college game and he had experienced
the hardships of foreign travel
with his Penn State team back in 1934. He
accepted the challenge.
The U.S. had finished third at the
inaugural World Cup in Uruguay in 1930.
Host and eventual winner Italy thumped
the Yanks four years later, and the
Americans joined the majority of Western
Hemisphere nations in boycotting the
1938 tournament in France. America’s
domestic game had regressed during
the 1930s for various reasons including
the evaporation of corporate backing for
works teams during the Great Depression
and the growing support for baseball and
gridiron. Football was a minority sport
played largely by amateur migrants by the
time the 1950 World Cup arrived. Jeffrey
still had some hard-working, talented
players to call upon, but they should have
been outmatched against the professionals
from Europe’s top clubs.
Jeffrey’s men weren’t short of endeavour
in their opening game against Spain
in Curitiba. They harried and hassled
their opponents in the early stages and
scored an unlikely goal on a breakaway by
Gino Pariani. Spain dominated thereafter.
The retreating Yanks held out until
Valencia’s Silvestre Igoa capitalised on
a mistake and the Europeans’ superior
fitness showed in the closing minutes
as Barcelona star Estanislau Basora and
THE SCOT WAS HAILED
AS A HERO IN BRAZIL TOO
AS HIS TEAM’S VICTORY
HAD VIRTUALLY ELIMINATED
ONE OF THE HOST
NATION’S RIVALS.
98 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Ian Thomson
Athletic Bilbao’s Telmo Zarra struck to
seal a 3-1 win. Jeffrey and his players
were left to claim a moral victory. They
had four days to recover before facing the
mighty England, comfortable winners
over Chile in their opener to solidify
their position as one of the tournament
favorites.
Nothing raises the competitive spirit of
a Scotsman like the chance to put one
over the English. Jeffrey harnessed that
inner drive by selecting Greenock-born
Ed McIlvenny as his captain for the second
game in Belo Horizonte. McIlvenny was
a former Clyde shipyard worker who had
migrated a year earlier to join his sister
in Philadelphia. The legendary Wolves
centre half Billy Wright lined up opposite
McIlvenny as captain of a star-studded
England side featuring Alf Ramsey in defence
and a five-man forward line of Tom
Finney, Wilf Mannion, Stan Mortensen,
Jimmy Mullen and Roy Bentley, the striker
whose goal had contributed to Scotland’s
absence.
U.S. goalkeeper Frank Borghi made an
early save from Mannion before pushing
Finney’s header over his crossbar.
England squandered a host of chances
to take a first-half lead, and those misses
drew increasingly loud heckles from the
10,151 fans inside the Independencia
Stadium. The locals sensed that the
English could be vulnerable to a counter
attack. They were right. McIlvenny found
his Philadelphia Nationals teammate
Walter Bahr with a throw-in on 37
minutes and Haitian-born forward Joe
Gaetjens deflected Bahr’s cross-cum-shot
past England goalkeeper Bert Williams.
England’s territorial dominance
continued after the interval with Jeffrey’s
10 outfielders blockading the route to
Borghi’s goal. Walter Winterbottom’s men
grew agitated as they failed to create clear
openings; when half-chances came along
they screwed their shots wide. Going into
the last 10 minutes Borghi made another
save, this time from Mullen’s header, ands
then Ramsey had to clear the ball off his
own goal line when Frank Wallace broke
away with the fight draining out of the
English. The full-time whistle brought
the Brazilian crowd storming onto the
field to carry the two heroes, Borghi and
Gaetjens, on a lap of honor.
“Those Brazilians literally went wild
when we licked the English,” Jeffrey told
a reporter from the Pittsburgh Press after
returning to State College. “They set off
giant firecrackers when we scored, then
broke through the police cordon to carry
our boys off the field after the game. It
was the noisiest demonstration I had ever
experienced.”
The Scot was hailed as a hero in Brazil
too as his team’s victory had virtually
eliminated one of the host nation’s rivals
and practically ensured that the trophy
would be staying in Brazil or going to
Uruguay. One American Embassy official
in South America later told the press that
Jeffrey’s team had done more to promote
U.S.-Brazil relations than anything else in
years.
A 5-2 defeat by Chile ended the
Americans’ World Cup adventure at the
group stage. As for England, they returned
home to ridicule from journalists and
football fans. Their exit caused members
of parliament to introduce a ministry of
sports to avoid a repeat performance. In
America, Jeffrey predicted that his team’s
result would elevate football’s standing
in the country. It was not to be, however.
Instead, he and many of his players would
be dead before the U.S. sports media
began to appreciate the magnitude of
what had been accomplished.
Jeffrey’s career wound down after that
victory over the Auld Enemy. Penn State
won another Soccer Bowl in 1951 before
Jeffrey took his players on a goodwill tour
of Iran as representatives of the United
States government. He retired from Penn
State in 1952 to accept a coaching and
September 2016 | nutmeg | 99

The Managers
The enduring legacy of Bill Jeffrey
teaching post at the University of Puerto
Rico. His final record with the Nittany
Lions stands at 153 wins, 29 draws and 24
defeats.
Penn State’s link to that famous World
Cup win was extended when Walter Bahr
followed in Jeffrey’s footsteps to coach the
men’s program from 1974 to 1987. He led
the school to one national championship
semi-final and three quarter-finals.
Bob Warming became head coach of Penn
State’s men’s team in 2010 with almost
35 years of college coaching experience
behind him. His achievements mark him
out as one of the top managers in the
circuit with more than 60 of his players
going on to play professionally and at
least one of his graduates being drafted
into Major League Soccer in every year
but one since the league began in 1996.
Erica Dambach took over Penn State’s
women’s program in 2007. She led the
Nittany Lions to their first ever national
championship game in 2012 and Penn
State returned to the final last December
to lift a first national title. Dambach
has also served as an assistant coach for
the gold medal winning United States
women’s team at the 2008 Olympics
in Beijing as well as the beaten 2011
Women’s World Cup finalists.
Warming and Dambach’s impressive
coaching pedigrees don’t allow them
to escape the legacy of their Scottish
progenitor.
“I feel very fortunate to have had a little
bit of personal contact with some of the
real legends of this sport,” Warming says.
Warming chanced upon some of
Jeffrey’s teachings when he moved into
an office tucked away down a back corridor
of Penn State’s Recreation Building.
The old athletic facility displays framed
pictures along its hallways that show
Jeffrey’s ageing figure lined up alongside
every one of his 27 teams for their
annual photographs. Warming’s cabinets
contained a 1963 book written by Jeffrey
THIS SON OF EDINBURGH
WHO HAD BEEN
RESPONSIBLE FOR
ENGLAND’S MOST
EMBARRASSING FAILURE
MISSED OUT ON WITNESSING
THEIR GREATEST TRIUMPH
WHEN ALF RAMSEY, A
MEMBER OF THAT 1950 TEAM
WHICH WAS HUMBLED IN
BRAZIL, LED THE COUNTRY
TO WORLD CUP GLORY AT
WEMBLEY LESS THAN SIX
MONTHS AFTER JEFFREY’S
DEATH.
100 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Ian Thomson
called “The Young Sportsman’s Guide to
Soccer”. It has become a treasured possession
for the current men’s coach and
one that Warming refers to when, like
Jeffrey, he occasionally wants to lighten
the mood with some poetry. The work of
Robert Burns is not included in this publication.
Rather it features Jeffrey’s own
work with tales of inept trialists failing to
impress the manager after claiming that
they could play.
Jeffrey’s influence is felt strongly by
both Penn State’s coaches during every
game at Jeffrey Field and every training
session on the practice pitch adjoining
the stadium.
“We try to make Bill Jeffrey very real
for our players,” says Dambach. The
legendary coach’s accomplishments are
taught to her incoming students every
year to inspire them when they pull on
the school’s blue and white uniforms.
Dambach recalls one game early in her
tenure at State College when the Nittany
Lions were struggling for cohesion and
trailed by a goal at half time. She and her
assistant coach Ann Cook had drilled
their players on the significance of Jeffrey
and the pride that they should have to
play on his field, one of the greatest college
venues in the country.
“There was a feeling that wins were just
going to come,” Dambach says. “And so
we’re playing really poorly in this game
and Ann lost her mind on the team at half
time. Her whole speech was about how
we have this great home field advantage
and we’ve got a lot of respect for what Bill
Jeffrey did, but he wasn’t going to win the
game for us. We still had to show up.
“They all know that the Jeffrey in Jeffrey
Field is an actual person, a very successful
person, and that they’re defending something
when they play here. It’s named
after a historical figure that impacted this
community in such a way that people
fought to have a facility named after
him.”
Jeffrey returned to the State College area
in 1959 after his stint in Puerto Rico. He
had suffered tragedy again two years
earlier when his second wife, Virginia,
disappeared without trace. Jeffrey
believed she must have accidentally
drowned while going for her regular
swim in the ocean near their home in
Mayaguez. Now in his late 60s, he devoted
his time to developing high school and
amateur football programs and leagues in
Central Pennsylvania.
He was attending a convention for college
coaches in New York City on January
7, 1966, when he collapsed and died
of a heart attack. He was 73 years old.
Jeffrey’s third wife, Blanche, and his two
children, Arthur and Margaret, survived
him. This son of Edinburgh who had been
responsible for England’s most embarrassing
failure missed out on witnessing
their greatest triumph when Alf Ramsey,
a member of that 1950 team which was
humbled in Brazil, led the country to
World Cup glory at Wembley less than six
months after Jeffrey’s death.
“A couple of years ago, I raised money
to put some wind screens on the outside
of our stadium so it would be announced
in big letters that this was Jeffrey Field,”
says Warming as he discuss his drive to
promote Jeffrey’s achievements at Penn
State. That desire was further fuelled by a
surprise email he received last
summer from a retired University of
Rhode Island teacher named Agnes
Doody, the widow of Jeffrey’s son.
Doody had written to inform Penn State’s
incumbent head coach that Jeffrey’s
six-year-old great granddaughter had
played in her first football game. Warming
has kept in contact with the family and
is working with the Penn State athletics
department’s marketing team to
develop special events honoring Jeffrey’s
life during the 2016 college season and
beyond.
“I just want to keep that guy’s name to
the fore somehow.” l
September 2016 | nutmeg | 101

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GOALKEEPERS AS MANAGERS:
THE WRIGHTS AND WRONGS
The jobs of manager and
goalkeeper have much in
common. So why are there not
more making the transition?
By Paul Forsyth
Imagine the chairman of an ambitious
football club, torn between two applicants
for the managerial vacancy. The candidates
have similar experience, identical qualifications
and they share a determination
to succeed. The only difference between
them is that one used to be a goalkeeper.
In an a ideal world, each would be
considered on his own merits, but in
the view of Campbell Money, football is
not an ideal world. The former St Mirren
goalkeeper who went on to manage
Stranraer, Ayr United and Stenhousemuir
says he is in no doubt as to which of the
two options our hypothetical chairman
would choose.
“He will go with the guy that’s played
outfield,” says Money, who is now a
performance academy director with the
Scottish FA. “That’s a fact. There is a perception
out there that goalkeepers know
less about the game than somebody else,
which is very unfair. I never felt that. I
had confidence in my ability to do the
job. But some people would feel that way.
I suppose it’s natural for people to think
‘he’s never played outfield, what would
he know about working with players?’”
If that is true, it suggests that the old
stereotype about goalkeepers still exists.
They are different. They are crazy. They
think too much for their own good.
Otherwise why would Peter Shilton hang
upside down from the bannister, John
Burridge ask his wife to throw fruit at
him and Albert Camus inspire the likes
of David Icke and Pope John Paul II to
turn the profession into a philosophical
inquiry?
Even if it is not true, there can be little
doubt that the goalkeeper is still viewed
as an ‘outsider’, which happens to be the
title of both a Camus novel and Jonathan
Wilson’s more recent study of their
history. How else to explain the chronic
shortage of them in management, a job
that presents so many other professional
players with a welcome opportunity to
prolong their career?
Yes, they are a minority in the dressing
room, but not so small a minority that
it explains their minuscule impact on
the managerial game. At the end of last
season, 17 of Scotland’s SPFL managers
were defenders, 17 were midfielders
and seven were strikers. Only one was a
goalkeeper. That he is also one of Scottish
football’s recent success stories only adds
to the conundrum.
Tommy Wright, of St Johnstone, was voted
Ladbrokes Premiership manager of the
year last season, a campaign that wasn’t
even the best of his three at the club.
With limited resources, he has guided
them to three successive top-six finishes,
as well as the 2014 Scottish Cup, the
September 2016 | nutmeg | 103

The Managers
Goalkeepers as managers: The Wrights and wrongs
first trophy in their long history.
Like many of the goalkeepers who do
find their way to the manager’s office, he
was promoted from within. The Northern
Irishman had been appointed as assistant
to Steve Lomas in 2011, partly because
he could double as a goalkeeping coach,
but when Lomas left two years later, the
board had no hesitation in asking the
former Newcastle United and Manchester
City player to step up.
Wright is grateful to St Johnstone for
recognising that goalkeepers are just as
capable as outfield players of moving into
management, and maybe even more so. In
the same way that journeymen professionals
make strong coaches because they
have worked out what comes naturally to
others, so are goalkeepers more inclined
to break down and understand the
mechanics of a team.
“People maybe haven’t been given
opportunities because perception plays a
big part in football, but perception isn’t
the reality,” says Wright. “St Johnstone
gave me an opportunity after seeing me
work as an assistant. They knew the
qualities that I had to go and manage. The
perception was that you had to be a player
to manage, but Arsene Wenger didn’t play
at a high level. Jose Mourinho hardly had
a playing career at all. There are numerous
coaches in the top leagues around Europe
who have never kicked a ball at senior
level, but they get opportunities because
they have gone into coaching early and
built up a resumé. Goalkeepers have
probably been overlooked because there
is a perception that they don’t make good
managers, but Dino Zoff did well with
Italy. Mike Walker was quite successful
with Norwich City in the 1990s. And I like
to think that I’ve proven you can be an exgoalkeeper
and a pretty decent manager.”
The goalkeeper’s potential has often
been undervalued. Wright remembers occasions
as a player when managers more
or less excluded him from their team talk.
“You were set apart,” he says. “It’s moved
on from that now, but in those days, you
were stuck away in the corner with two
or three balls, probably the worst two or
three they had in training.”
In truth, the unique perspective from
which a goalkeeper watches the game
gives him invaluable insight. He has time
and space to think about the game as it
unfolds before him. A good one is brave
when he needs to be, decisive under pressure
and willing to live or die by his own
instincts. Add to that the communication
skills needed to organise his defence,
as well as the thick skin that is almost a
prerequisite of management, and it is clear
that the two jobs have much in common.
“Being an individual in a team sport
means that you have to be strong
mentally,” says Wright. “It can be a lonely
place at times. When a goalkeeper makes
a mistake, it ends up in a goal. It’s the
same with management. When a team
doesn’t play well, the manager takes all
the criticism, especially nowadays with
social media. Looking back, I would say
that being a goalkeeper helped prepare
me for being a manager.”
Which perhaps explains why the
pantheon of great coaches is not without a
few former custodians. Zoff, who lifted the
World Cup as a player, managed Juventus
to the UEFA Cup and came within seconds
of leading Italy to success at Euro 2000.
Raymond Goethals guided Marseille to the
1993 European Cup, although his achievement
would later be over-shadowed by
the Marseille match-fixing scandal. In
Scotland, Jock Wallace helped Rangers
to win three league titles, three Scottish
Cups and four League Cups.
On the face of it, fewer goalkeepers
become managers now, but the one in
Scotland who has bucked that trend cautions
against portraying them as victims.
In the absence of any evidence to confirm
that they are overlooked for managerial
vacancies, Wright suggests that too few of
104 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Paul Forsyth
them apply in the first place.
It is a view shared by Bryan Gunn,
the former Aberdeen and Norwich City
goalkeeper who went on to have a short,
ill-fated spell as manager at Carrow Road.
He says that, in years gone by, goalkeepers
who wanted to remain in the game had
little option but to try management. Only
when Alan Hodgkinson took up a post
with Scotland in the late 1980s was there
such a thing as a goalkeeping coach.
These days, there is scarcely a professional
club that does not have a coach
devoted to the position, which means that
a plethora of jobs have become available
to those who have hung up the gloves.
“This is the era of the goalkeeping coach,
which is maybe why so many are not
going into management,” says Gunn. “It’s
a great way to stay in football. The next
best thing to being a goalkeeper is helping
another one to achieve a clean sheet at
the weekend.
“There are 92 clubs in England, 42 in
Scotland, and most of them will have a
goalkeeping coach. A lot of these positions
are highly paid, certainly in England’s
Premier League and at the top end of the
Championship. They are comfortable
roles and the job security is maybe slightly
THE UNIQUE PERSPECTIVE
FROM WHICH A GOALKEEPER
WATCHES THE GAME GIVES
HIM INVALUABLE INSIGHT.
HE HAS TIME AND SPACE TO
THINK ABOUT THE GAME AS
IT UNFOLDS BEFORE HIM.
better than being a manager. A lot have
gone down that route and been happy
with it.”
The good news is that the line between
goalkeepers and outfield players on
the coaching pathway is beginning to
blur. UEFA now requires goalkeepers to
complete a B licence before they reach
the summit of their own coaching ladder,
while many budding managers are keen
to broaden their outlook by undertaking
a course that specialises in goalkeeping.
If they continue to occupy the dugout in
such large numbers, it is surely only a
matter of time before more goalkeepers
are asked to step up, just as Wright did
three years ago.
The St Johnstone manager has achieved
so much since then that it is a wonder
more clubs have not tried to lure him from
McDiarmid Park. While young, smoothtalking
coaches are repeatedly linked with
clubs north and south of the Border, the
suspicion is that Wright’s profile is not
what the average chairman is after.
Maybe, at the age of 52, he is not regarded
as up-and-coming. Or perhaps, at
a club that is frequently under-estimated,
his work has suffered the same fate.
Surely, after all he has done, it cannot
be that his history as a goalkeeper still
counts against him? “Well, you would
hope that is not the case, but you can’t
help but think it’s possible,” says Money,
who sees Wright as a trailblazer.
“He is the model for any aspiring coach
who also happens to be a former goalkeeper.
What he has done is nothing short
of amazing. With the greatest respect to St
Johnstone, they’re not a fashionable toptier
club, but he has taken them to the top
six every season and he’s won the Scottish
Cup. I’m sure, one day, he will move
somewhere else. His time will come.”
And when it does, the hope is that other
goalkeepers will be inspired to show
beyond any doubt that, when it comes to
management, they fit like a glove. l
September 2016 | nutmeg | 105

Beyond the game
SPL TV: A
TELEVISION
SOAP OPERA
It had it all. The feuds, the
brinkmanship and the
wheeling and dealing in a
small-screen drama.
By Paul McDonald
£8.5 billion. Not the annual budget for
a department of the NHS, or an amount
ring-fenced to construct social housing,
but the sum commanded by the English
Premier League for global TV rights over
the next three seasons. The team finishing
bottom of the EPL in 2016-17 can console
themselves with the knowledge that their
broadcast revenue will be in excess of
£100m. In accountancy firm Deloitte’s
annual Money League report, clubs such
as Sunderland, Swansea and Stoke are
positioned to overtake Italian institutions
Inter, AC Milan and Roma in the world’s
top 20 richest clubs. The marketability of
the Premier League has fundamentally
changed the football landscape; the concept
of a super league of the super-rich,
one that has been threatened for years
but for a multitude of reasons has never
materialised, has now arrived, albeit via
the side door.
Last September SPFL chief executive
Neil Doncaster expressed his delight at
an agreement reached with Sky and BT
for the right to host Premiership games
until 2020. From 2017, the 12 clubs will
earn £18.75m per season, or £56.25m
over the length of the deal. It’s perfectly
106 | nutmeg | September 2016

conceivable that an English Premier
League side will pay that amount on a
single player before the season is out.
And yes, comparing the riches bestowed
upon the clubs south of the border to our
modest returns is very often a meaningless
exercise. But here it merely serves the
purpose of highlighting how our paths
have deviated in the past 15 years.
Back in 2000, the SPL was halfway
through a £46m, four-year deal which
guaranteed exclusivity of live matches
for Sky Sports. Sky had backed Scottish
football as well as the English game as it
looked to position itself in the market as
the principal broadcaster of football in the
UK and the deal at the time, while still
dwarfed by the then-English Premiership’s
£670m deal between 1997 and
2001, was, in terms of market forces and
relative size, something the clubs could
work with. The league was expanded to 12
teams for the 2000-01 campaign and with
genuinely bankable talent featuring on a
regular basis teams were financially competitive.
Furthermore, ticket prices hadn’t
extended into dubious worth and as such
the average attendance saw around 3.35m
head through the gates (for comparison,
in 2011-12 when Rangers were last in the
top flight, the number of paying customers
was 25% down on this number).
Not everything was rosy: Craig Brown’s
failure to secure qualification for Euro
2000 triggered the chain reaction that
led Scotland to Berti Vogts and 20 years
in the international dead zone, but there
was a degree of stability, just waiting to be
crushed by the most unorthodox series of
events.
November 2001. Chief executive of
the SPL, Roger Mitchell, had been in
discussions with Sky regarding a renewal
to the current TV arrangement. Murmurings
– in the media, but not perhaps in
reality – suggested a grandiose range
of numbers could be offered; £100m,
£125m, even as much as £150m – in effect
a 200% increase. Stewart Weir, journalist
and editor at the Trinity Mirror Group at
the time, recalls that Sky’s relationship
was perhaps not as celebrated as some
believed.
He recalls: “The first match of the
1998-99 season broadcast live was Hearts
versus Rangers at Tynecastle, which drew
excellent viewing figures, as did Aberdeen
defeating Celtic at Pittodrie the following
week.
“However, the third match shown was
Dundee against St Johnstone which barely
drew 20,000 viewers. The numbers were
similarly unimpressive when Motherwell
played Dundee United the Sunday after,
and from that point on Sky was wary of
the potential of Scottish football beyond
televising the Old Firm every week.
“Sky had already decided by 2001 that
they weren’t getting the value for money
they had initially thought they would. I
think Sky had sussed the Scottish game
was all about four games a season – and
so too had Mitchell, who was more
realistic about the true net worth of any
TV deal compared to some chairmen.”
As such, when the renegotiations begun
Sky informed Mitchell and the SPL that
an extension would only be agreed on the
same terms as before - £46m over four
years.
The timing was unfortunate, to say
the least. The post-millennium dotcom
bubble had yet to burst and so media
rights in a variety of disciplines were
being drastically oversold. In May 2000
Sky paid £266m to purchase Sports
Internet Group (SIG), whose main online
property was Planet Football, a site that
accumulated just 1.5m unique visitors
and is effectively forgotten today. In June
of the same year, English football broadcasters
went into overdrive, with Sky
renewing their Premiership contract for
£1.1bn, almost double the previous agreement.
ITV paid £180m for the highlights
September 2016 | nutmeg | 107

Beyond the game
SPL TV: a television soap opera
package, while the BBC responded to
losing Match of the Day by agreeing a
£400m long-term deal to screen FA Cup
matches live. The eye-watering levels of
the sums involved were all eclipsed by
the newly-formed ITV Digital and their
valuation of the English football league –
i.e. everything below the Premiership – at
£315m in August 2001. Just nine months
later ITV Digital defaulted on £180m of
that sum, leaving the football league clubs
with a gaping hole in their budgets for
the next season. Director General of the
BBC, Greg Dyke, claimed: “There is hardly
anyone running a television company
who doesn’t think that they paid too
much.” This inaccurate appraisal of the
worth of TV rights impacted Scotland at
precisely the wrong moment.
Roger Mitchell and the SPL, well in
advance of renewal talks with Sky, sought
to find their own place in this volatile
market. Mitchell explains: “For 18 months
we had Mark Oliver and David Kogan,
who worked as advisors to Richard
Scudamore and the FA Premier League,
independently value our rights and they
produced a figure of between £60m-
£80m per season.
“No-one in the market thought that
the valuation was unrealistic given what
ITV Digital and others had paid, and so
when our clubs heard this there was an
almighty fight about who was going to get
the money.
“The Sky offer came in at £11.5m per
year, precisely what they had offered for
the previous four seasons. In December
2001 the clubs had Oliver and Kogan’s
detailed report in front of them and they
informed me that they wanted to reject
Sky’s proposal.”
Oliver and Kogan’s analysis had not only
taken into consideration the economic
forces at play, but also that the Old Firm,
with average attendances each in excess
of 50,000, would be required to feature
in the vast majority of matches in order
to convince a broadcaster to subscribe to
such a valuation. Any deal would need
Celtic and Rangers totally invested in
retaining their 40% share of the revenue
for more than 80% of the TV time.
Mitchell adds: “On the £60-£80m,
when you come up with a valuation like
that, you are required to granularly value
each and every game to derive your numbers.
So we worked it out and when we
had finished it was clear that 70-80% of
the matches had to involve the Old Firm.
“I spoke to Rangers and Celtic just
about every day at this point and they
would say to me, ‘Roger, this report
says that we are involved in 80% of the
matches, but are only getting 40% of the
income. Why is that?
“Eventually Celtic and Rangers said,
‘You have to change the distribution
model of the SPL or we simply won’t sign
[a new TV deal].’”
What Celtic and Rangers began pushing
for was a revenue distribution model
in excess of how Spain’s La Liga has
operated over the past decade. There,
Barcelona and Real Madrid have collected
anywhere up to 45% of the overall TV
income; in 2014-15 the Spanish giants
earned €320m of the €760m available,
WHAT CELTIC AND RANGERS
BEGAN PUSHING FOR WAS
A REVENUE DISTRIBUTION
MODEL IN EXCESS OF HOW
SPAIN’S LA LIGA HAS
OPERATED OVER THE PAST
DECADE.
108 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Paul McDonald
while third-placed Valencia banked just
€47.5m in comparison, ahead of Atletico
Madrid (€41m). The folly of the disparity
in Spain has destroyed the competitiveness
of the league, particularly in the
bottom half. Teams now treat a trip to the
Camp Nou and Santiago Bernabeu with
the same level of contempt the duopoly
has shown them, and, in the main,
merely put a cross through the fixture on
the calendar.
The Old Firm were pitching for
considerably more than 45% of the pot
as they sought to increase the viability
of the SPL by ruthlessly destroying the
ability of the other ten teams to compete
on anything akin to a level playing
field. But these discussions proved to be
completely superfluous. Their stubbornness,
complemented by the remainder
of the clubs’ belief in the SPL’s ability to
markedly increase its broadcast revenue,
sat in juxtaposition to the only real fact
available: the Sky bid had been rejected,
and another, from them or indeed any
other network, was not forthcoming.
History has written Mitchell, perhaps
unfairly, as the villain of this particular
piece. The media were keen to portray
him as the failed negotiator who had
proven irksome enough that Sky weren’t
willing to resubmit their offer. Indeed it
was suggested that Mitchell’s relationship
with Sky’s managing director, Vic Wakeling,
had deteriorated to such a degree that
the notion of the pair re-establishing a
working relationship was unfeasible.
But Mitchell has made it clear that he
simply relayed to Sky the message that
the clubs wanted transmitted. After that,
there was only one route left to explore:
launching a standalone TV channel for
Scottish football. At that point, SPL TV
entered the conversation and it was, in
effect, the emergency option.
“I wasn’t a visionary [for SPL TV],” he
admits. “Did I know that people now
would be discussing ingesting video
online and all these other things?
“No, but we had no option. The deals
were off the table and I had people asking
me, ‘is this a goer?’, and I would say ‘yes
it is!’ based around the numbers, the appetite,
all of the factors that come into it.”
So, while interest from TV companies
cooled, a straightforward model for
SPL TV was devised. In the absence of a
broadcaster willing to secure exclusive
rights to SPL matches, the league would
absorb the costs and logistics themselves
and offer the final product via a subscription
service. Granada TV were approached
to produce highlights content in addition
to ‘quarterbacking’ a minimum of two
matches per week aired live on the station
and SPL TV would be made available
via Sky set-top boxes. (The network had
piloted a similar idea in August 2001
known as Premiership Plus, where the
consumer could pay a one-off fee to access
an additional 40 live games a season. The
channel was disbanded in 2007.)
Mitchell and his team worked through
the marketing, production and subscription
plans and re-enlisted Oliver and
Kogan to derive a valuation of the fledgling
channel. This time, their assessment
was £40m-£50m per season; less than
they believed could have been generated
from major networks, but still substantial
enough to represent a significant
improvement on the Sky arrangement,
despite the associated set-up expenditure.
Oliver and Kogan were a hugely respected
duo who, in addition to their experience
with the Premier League, had provided
consultation on various other media
rights. Once again, their figures were
taken as read; in January 2001 the clubs,
including Celtic and Rangers, were fully
on board, albeit largely due to an absence
of alternatives. But as the days passed and
the idea crystallised, the more unconvincing
the calculations appeared.
Celtic and Rangers, via chief executive
Ian McLeod and chairman David Murray,
September 2016 | nutmeg | 109

Beyond the game
SPL TV: a television soap opera
publicly maintained the mirage of support
but their private concern prompted
a deeper inspection into the project’s
legitimacy. In their book Football In the
New Media Age, Raymond Boyle and
Richard Haynes reference a review from
accountancy firm KPMG that began to
establish inconsistencies in the numbers.
In it, the recommendation to revise
subscription figures would reduce the
expected income figure for year one down
to £15m, which was expected to grow as
subscriptions increased. In order to reach
these expected targets, an ambitious
total of 180,000 were required to sign up,
extended to 300,000 by year three, at a
cost of £7.99 each.
Celtic and Rangers’ concern at this
point wasn’t entirely down to the viability
of the product; rather, according
to Mitchell, their own long-term interests
came into play.
He states: “The fact of the matter was
that for Celtic and Rangers, TV revenues
only represented maybe £2m per year
to them – a small amount compared
to season ticket sales, merchandising
and such. But to the other ten clubs the
money they received, around £750,000
each per season, was absolutely essential.
“They [the Old Firm] would still have
made something in the first year of SPL
TV. It wouldn’t have been as much as the
£2m they were earning, but in general
terms it wouldn’t have been that much of
a financial issue for them.
“You need to remember that at the time
the idea of moving our clubs – not just the
Old Firm, but all of our clubs – to England
had a lot of momentum. In fact [then-
Celtic chairman] Brian Quinn said that it
was ‘inevitable within the next five years’.
People thought it would happen. And
that’s where the full thing fell down.”
Put simply, Celtic and Rangers were wary
of being tied into a domestic TV arrangement
that, should the English league
follow through with their flirtation, could
foil what they deemed to be their ultimate
destiny. They were also acutely aware that
under the SPL’s bizarrely skewed voting
system at the time, an 11-1 majority was
necessary to ratify any motion. With
their two votes the prospects of the
channel were completely at their behest.
Alongside the KPMG report, the Old
Firm’s scepticism had begun to pique and
though they remained invested in the
idea a pivotal moment arrived when, in
March 2002, ITV Digital collapsed.
The network’s commitment of £315m
had led to its bankruptcy. The majority
of football league sides had already spent
revenue that never arrived.
It was at this point that Celtic and
Rangers flipped. Sensing an opportunity,
McLeod and Murray withdrew their
support for SPL TV because, as Roddy
Forsyth references in the Daily Telegraph
in April 2002, ITV Digital’s demise had the
potential to create open positions in the
lower divisions as clubs went to the wall.
Their dissent commenced with specious
threats and caveats to the conditions of
membership to SPL TV; both wanted
clauses inserted that could facilitate their
swift exit should subscriptions not fall in
line with forecasts. Then, their involvement
was to be limited to a fixed term
(yet to be agreed) where the success of
SPL TV would be ultimately defined by
whether Celtic and Rangers benefited
from the arrangement.
Finally, it was rumoured that the Old
Firm had held clandestine talks with Sky
regarding the potential of creating their
own standalone channels to air home
matches, and although this mini-rumination
quickly disappeared, the green and
blue tide had already turned.
Mitchell recalls the day, April 7, 2002,
when they eventually announced their
withdrawal. “I met with both Celtic and
Rangers every single day. Every single day
I asked them if they were up for it, and
they said ‘yes’, until the April before we
110 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Paul McDonald
I MET WITH BOTH CELTIC AND
RANGERS EVERY SINGLE DAY.
EVERY SINGLE DAY I ASKED
THEM IF THEY WERE UP FOR
IT, AND THEY SAID ‘YES’,
UNTIL THE APRIL BEFORE WE
WERE DUE TO LAUNCH WHEN
THEY TURNED AROUND AND
SAID ‘NO’.
were due to launch when they turned
around and said ‘no’.
“The other ten clubs went absolutely
berserk. They were asking, ‘who are you
going to play?’
“It was clear that neither of the Old
Firm wanted to be tied into a domestic TV
deal while the idea of playing in England
was an option.”
Celtic chief executive Ian McLeod,
backed by Rangers vice chairman John
McClelland, went on record to explain
their reasoning; the expected subscription
base and, by association, revenue
figures should have been reassessed to
a more realistic level in the aftermath of
ITV Digital’s demise, and cited a ‘lack of
clarity’ in the SPL proposal.
As Mitchell suggests, the remaining
ten SPL clubs were indeed apoplectic at
this insubordination. On the one hand,
the Old Firm patently felt weighed down
by the responsibility of supporting
the smaller clubs by virtue of TV deals
that were worth far less without their
involvement. Conversely the Gang of
Ten (as they collectively and boorishly
became known) had long grown weary
of the Old Firm’s self-importance and the
manner in which they perceived playing
in Scotland as a necessary chore until a
better offer came along. That particular
argument could just as likely take place in
a boardroom next week, let alone 15 years
ago, but at the time the Old Firm underestimated
the Gang of Ten’s response to
the SPL TV betrayal. They tendered their
resignation from the SPL, commencing
from the 2003-04 campaign, with
officials from Aberdeen to Edinburgh
spitting forth fury.
Hibernian managing director Rod
Petrie said: “The Old Firm killed this
channel. They voted against it, undermined
it and took a decision that meant
the channel was massively damaged.”
Aberdeen chairman Stewart Milne
added: “I think they were quite shocked
and taken aback. I don’t think they
believed that the ten clubs would do that.
Perhaps that was part of the problem.
What we are seeking to do is get Scottish
football into a position where the majority
dictate the progress of the game - not
the minority.”
Chris Robinson, Hearts’ chief executive,
was more diplomatic: “I think all of the
clubs have got to do what they think is in
the best interests of the game as a whole.
The feeling is that they wanted us to go
ahead and no longer be an oppressed
majority.”
With two sides so diametrically opposed
in their objectives, the territorial positioning
was unlikely to last for too long. In
May reports leaked of conversations between
Murray, Celtic shareholder Dermot
Desmond and Keith Harris, chairman
of the Football League, and amidst the
fiscal chaos a 26-team first division was
floated, with the Old Firm in tow. The
Gang of Ten maintained their poker face
and eventually the speculation receded;
it soon became clear to all parties that a
September 2016 | nutmeg | 111

Beyond the game
SPL TV: a television soap opera
reconciliation of some kind was necessary
to avoid the 2002-03 season descending
into farce.
In late May tentative steps were made
to bring both sides to the table, the Gang
of Ten only willing to reconsider their
resignation if a change to the voting
system, from an 11-1 to an 8-4 split, was
endorsed. The Old Firm dug their heels
in, and with each unsuccessful impasse
the first fixture of the new season edged
ever closer with no camera in place to
capture the action.
By the start of July, however, Celtic
and Rangers came to the realisation that
Scottish football, in the short term, was
their only home and so conceded to a
new voting structure, and a slight reduction
in their joint television revenue. All
they needed to do now was ensure that
revenue represented more than zero.
The recession in the media market,
with ITV Digital the first domino to
fall helping to create a Europe-wide
re-examination of broadcast rights,
meant there weren’t many offers. The BBC
stepped forward holding all of the power.
A two-year, £16m deal was agreed, £7m
less than Sky’s initial offer and a lifetime
away from the figures quotes by Oliver
and Kogan. Reality had bitten. Hard.
Doomsayers in the years since SPL TV
was buried have correlated the events
around its demise with an economic
malaise that the league has never escaped
from, but while the tittle-tattle and
fantastical financials hardly helped, clubs
were already chasing an undefinable
dream.
As these events unfolded, Motherwell
entered administration, with owner John
Boyle required to invest £11m of his own
money to balance losses of more than
£2m per season. Boyle cited the SPL
TV collapse as one of the contributing
factors, but Andy Goram, John Spencer
and Ged Brannan had been tempted by
unfeasible salaries long before SPL TV
HOW WE CONSUME
FOOTBALL IS CONTINUING
TO EVOLVE AND SO IT
WOULD BE OF NO SURPRISE
IF THE CONCEPT OF SPL
TV WAS TO INFILTRATE
THE CONVERSATION ONCE
AGAIN.
was ever mentioned. The club’s wage bill
represented 97% of their earnings and
they weren’t the only ones involved in
such recklessness. Dundee and Livingston
held similarly unsustainable ratios, and
the former followed Motherwell into administration
a year later. But it wasn’t the
SPL who signed Claudio Caniggia and operated
with a 42-player first team squad,
or who brought in Fabrizio Ravanelli and
Craig Burley two months before administration
arrived with the club losing in
excess of £100,000 per week. Livingston,
too, were naïve in expecting significant
following for a club so freshly in existence
given the tribal nature of supporters. They
lasted until 2004 before the Royal Bank of
Scotland came calling for unpaid debts.
TV deals have also come and gone since
– the decision to side with Setanta in
2007 and reject Sky (once again) proved
calamitous, with Setanta’s UK operation
going bust in 2008 leaving an initial £3m
debt unpaid and a TV contract worth less
than nothing. But SPL TV was undoubtedly
a turning point, primarily in terms of
how Scottish clubs and, indeed, external
influencers viewed what could be
112 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Paul McDonald
extracted from a league where only two
teams can ever realistically compete.
Mitchell has, for a decade and a half,
denied that SPL TV was his vanity project
but feels that it could have set Scottish
football in the role of the ambitious
trendsetter – for a short while, at least.
“Do I think it was ahead of its time?
100%. In fact I would say it was maybe ten
years ahead. If it had happened I think
we could have been seen as leading the
field. In year three, if the marketing plan
was right, we would have reached our
subscriber numbers and other leagues
might have looked at our model and
wanted to follow.
“But really, it also comes down to the
size of the market. We would have got
plenty of credit for being creative and
innovative, but we would still have been
small fry because there are only five million
people in Scotland.”
The ghost of SPL TV has reappeared in
the corridors of power more than once
since 2002, most notably in 2011 when
chief executive Neil Doncaster unimaginatively
made reference to “a number of
European leagues going down this route
or exploring the option [of their own
dedicated channel]”, but with Rangers’
participation in doubt a deal was done
with Sky in August 2012 on reduced
terms. Perhaps SPL TV was just never
meant to be.
Could it have been a success in this
day and age? Mitchell is of the opinion
that the quintessential Scottish football
supporter is far more interested in club
rivalry than sustained quality and so, in
that case, the model still works.
“The fact is, does it matter that Henrik
Larsson doesn’t play in Scotland? Is the
appetite less?” Mitchell asks. “Some
Scottish football fans don’t care about
the quality on show, or whether they can
hold on to a young player for longer than
a season. It’s all about being able to turn
up with your mates. The level of oneupmanship
and bragging rights is more
important. Therefore, if you have potential
customers that are unconcerned by the
standard of football, then the subscription
numbers don’t need to be particularly
different.”
Stewart Weir, however, feels that by
televising a number of Scottish matches,
more people were exposed to the distinct
lack of depth in the division.
He states: “Archie Macpherson once
told me he used to commentate on games
during the 70s and 80s that were dire,
and he wondered how anyone could edit
fifteen minutes of highlights. But they
did, and made every game, goalless or a
5-5 draw, look like the best game ever.
“With the Sky deal and so many live
games, people sussed Scottish football –
outside the Old Firm – wasn’t that great.
After all, would you pay £150 a year to
watch Scotland’s top flight?”
How we consume football is continuing
to evolve and so it would be of no surprise
if the concept of SPL TV was to infiltrate
the conversation once again, albeit with a
refined prototype that places emphasis on
online streaming, particularly on mobile
devices. We want to consume content on
our terms, when we want, in the length
we want, from live matches to brief
highlights. We don’t want to, say, wait
until 10.30pm on a Sunday night to watch
our team when the fixture finished 36
hours previously.
Concurrently, the value of our game has
battled to find some sort of equilibrium.
From the irresponsibility at the turn of
the millennium through the collapse of
Setanta and into our current deal, we
finally seem to be in a more comfortable
position. But sometimes you are left
wondering; teams such as Hull, West
Brom and Sunderland are no more palatable
or watchable than a strong Aberdeen,
Dundee Utd or Hearts. How different
would our game look if SPL TV had been
a successful venture? l
September 2016 | nutmeg | 113

Beyond the game
WHY WE
SHOULD
LOVE OUR
REFEREES
They get abuse from the players,
venom from the stands and
criticism from the managers.
And do you know who’s fine
with all that? The referees.
By Craig Fowler
Almost six years ago Scotland’s referees
embarked on drastic and never-beforeseen
course of action to recapture the news
agenda and show the country, and the
wider world watching on, that systematic
and relentless undermining of an official’s
integrity would not be tolerated. Nonavailability
day it was called by the officials.
In layman’s terms, they went on strike.
The incident that seemingly sparked
the action took place in a Premier League
match between Celtic and Dundee United
at Tannadice. Referee Dougie McDonald,
an experienced official within the game,
awarded a penalty kick to Celtic before
changing his mind. When Neil Lennon
wanted answers for why his team had
a spot-kick withdrawn, he was told
McDonald had reversed the call on the
advice of the linesman. It wasn’t true.
McDonald had already made up his mind
to reverse the call before consulting with
his assistant. Once it came to light that
Celtic were told an incorrect version of
events, the club were incandescent and
heavily criticised the officials.
Things soon got out of hand. Contentious
calls in the coming weeks added to the
bubbling pot. Prominent figures in the
game questioned the integrity of referees,
clubs were openly critical, and managers
weren’t shy in letting their opinions be
known after matches. It was building to a
crescendo. Referees in Scotland could no
longer go about their daily lives without
fear of reprisal for what they may or may
not have got right on a football field.
Some view the McDonald incident and
subsequent fallout as the reason for the
strike. It wasn’t. It was just the tipping
point. Something had to change in this
country and referees took decisive action.
“Things are definitely better since
then,” insisted John McKendrick, former
spokesman for the Scottish Senior Football
Referees’ Association and still a member
of the union’s committee. He’s also still
a category one referee. “That was a particularly
poor phase we were in there. The
disciplinary system from the SFA wasn’t
quite as responsive as it is now. Because
things weren’t dealt with quickly, I think
managers could have the viewpoint where
they weren’t punished for what they said
last week. It allowed them to do it again
and gave them a license to do it.
“That was exceptional action. There was
not a referee that enjoyed it. I was closely
involved in it and it was not a pleasant
time. It’s not the type of thing you want to
be involved in, but it was required.”
Officials on the whole still appear to
be treated like a scourge on the game,
114 | nutmeg | September 2016

ather than a vital part of it. Abuse rains
down from the stands, managers act
like tantrum-addicted toddlers on the
sidelines, and players scream in their faces.
It’s behaviour unbecoming of one human
interacting with another and yet we accept
it because, well, that’s football. And do you
know who’s fine with that? The referees
themselves. They understand it’s a part of
the game. They just don’t want it to escape
the confines of the stadium.
“For most of the season we’re treated
the way we should be: not ignored, but
not the story either, because that’s not
what football is about,” said McKendrick.
“There will be time every season, a few
weeks where referees are harshly treated.
I don’t doubt it for a minute. It could be
an individual referee but it’s more likely
to be a couple of referees where they
complain about the standard of Scottish
refereeing in general. We’ll be harshly
treated by people writing the stories,
we may be more harshly treated by the
players because they are more likely to
react, and we’ll definitely be more harshly
treated in the street because people will
think we’re wrong. That’s what happens.”
There’s evidence from the last three
seasons to back up McKendrick’s observation.
Last year the criticism occurred
early with Stewart Regan and the SSFRA
having to release statements as early
as September 1. Two officials had been
criticised in a single weekend, with
Hearts boss Robbie Neilson revealing
he’d prepared his players in anticipation
of a red card from match official Willie
Collum which, he said, they knew would
come, a comment people took to be an
insinuation the referee had a vendetta
against the club. This finger-pointing
juxtaposed the previous campaign where
criticism peaked after the referee and additional
assistant behind the goal missed
Josh Meekings’ infamous handball in the
Scottish Cup semi-final between Celtic
and Inverness CT. In 2013, Andy Walker
and other pundits slaughtered referees in
the press after a couple of red cards were
overturned on appeal.
The waves of criticism would be fair, but
only if they were true. This isn’t even a case
of defending our officials by looking at the
bigger picture in context, where we point to
the population as an excuse for our football
woes. Five million people isn’t a huge population
and it is a commonly-held believe
that in the age of football globalisation this
affects our ability to produce a consistently
competitive national team. If this was a
legitimate factor, we could use the same
reasoning to apply to our whistlers too.
Instead, the reality is that our referees do
terrifically well in spite of the shallow pool
from which to select them.
There are 28 referees on UEFA’s list of
elite officials. These are the guys that are
handed fixtures in European competitions
and considered for the Euros and World
Cup. There are 18 different nationalities.
This is hardly surprising: the governing
body want a wide range of officials from
around Europe, and while Scottish fans
probably don’t think about it too much,
this would probably be their answer if
asked why there are two Scottish referees
among the top group. However, there are
only six countries with more than one
referee in the top 28. Scotland is one of
them. The others are England, Germany,
the Netherlands (all with two), along with
Spain and Italy (both with four). Those
countries make up the elite of football in
Europe, minus France, who only have one
official in the 28. Scotland is better than
France. If only our national team was as
“terrible” as our referees, we’d be a much
more successful football country.
“We always seem to do well at the
top level of competition,” McKendrick
pointed out. “Hugh Dallas was fourth
official at a World Cup final. Craig
Thomson refereed a World Cup final at
youth level. Willie Collum is at the
Euros. These are not run-of-the-mill
September 2016 | nutmeg | 115

Beyond the game
Why we should love our referees
Journalists – this writer included – have
been complicit in the ill-treatment of
referees, partly because officials don’t
speak to the media. We’re reliant on managers
for stories. This not only applies to
post-match press conferences or previews
of big games, it also goes for other aspects
of the job. A manager can give a journalist
he trusts a heads up about a player about
to be signed, and so forth. There is no
such relationship with referees. If a manager
criticises a referee unfairly it would
take a brave writer to challenge him on it.
Besides, it’s the business of news reportgames.
These are massive appointments.”
It is nothing more than insularity
which stops us from recognising the fact
that our referees are not among the worst
in the world, and that the real culprit is
the nature of football itself. The season
before last, former Hearts full back Adam
Eckersley was interviewed on fans’
podcast We Have No Cares. Having played
in Belgium, Denmark and England prior
to his time in Scotland, he was questioned
about the standard of refereeing
in Scotland, and whether he agreed they
were “incompetent”. “There’s been some
interesting decisions this year, but I’ve
seen some interesting decisions abroad as
well,” was Eckersley’s political answer.
“English fans think their referees are
terrible as well,” insisted former category
one referee Mike Tumilty. “Having been at
Old Trafford as a season ticket holder the
last two seasons, I can tell you that English
fans don’t have any more respect for
referees than Scottish fans do for theirs.”
A common demand of referees is that
they explain their decisions. If a mistake
is made, supporters and managers want
to know what happened. They want to
know what a referee was thinking when
he crushed their hopes and expectations.
While this is understandable in the case
of supporters – after all, when you’re
feeling incredulous, words like “why?”
and “how?” are the first things that spring
to mind – it is ironic when trotted out by
football clubs. Surely fans also want to
know why and how a defender cost the
rest of his team with a back pass from
hell, or when the midfielder put his side
down to ten men with a ridiculously
over-the-top foul, or when the striker
put the ball over the bar when it seemed
easier to miss. Yet, when it comes time
for these villains of the piece to face the
media, unless the players specifically
request otherwise, they are protected by
their clubs. If a 25-year-old professional
footballer needs protecting from uncom-
fortable questions, why doesn’t a referee?
“In an ideal world a referee should
explain their decisions,” admitted
McKendrick. “There have been times
where I’ve been desperate to talk to the
press to explain my decision, but the
reality is journalists only want to talk
to referees when we’ve made a mistake.
They’re not interested in finding out the
right interpretation because that’s not
the story. The story is the controversy, the
mistake, the error, the person with his job
on the line. They are the stories, not the
rational explanation.
“What most people want is for the referee
to come and apologise for a mistake that
he made. They say they want a referee to explain
his decisions but mostly aren’t really
interested. They’ve made their mind up.”
IF ONLY OUR NATIONAL
TEAM WAS AS “TERRIBLE”
AS OUR REFEREES, WE’D BE
A MUCH MORE SUCCESSFUL
FOOTBALL COUNTRY.
116 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Craig Fowler
ing. If a manager calls a referee “useless”,
that is news, regardless whether he’s right
or wrong. It has to be reported.
This occurs mainly in the print media,
so what about live broadcasts? “Some
journalists are phenomenal. They’ll
explain it and ultimately try and articulate
what the referee has done,” says Tumilty.
“There are others who are just disparaging,
whether it is right, wrong or indifferent.
Then there are others who just play
back what’s been said and don’t attempt
to intervene or point out any fallacies.”
Then there are those who either
don’t fully understand the rules of the
game or don’t appreciate a referee’s
role. Incredibly, a number of those are
ex-player pundits, men who operated
on the same field as officials their entire
careers and should have a greater sense of
empathy toward the man in charge.
The football rule book is extremely vague
when it comes to fouls. For instance, there
isn’t any mention in the laws of the game
of “playing the ball”, which is one of the
most commons phrases in all of football.
Instead, the rule book tells a referee to call
for a foul if a player “trips, kicks, jumps
at, charges, strikes, pushes or tackles” an
opponent in a manner which is “careless,
reckless or uses excessive force”. You can
scarcely get more ambiguous. A group of
referees could look at one incident and
have a 50/50 split on whether it constitutes
a foul or not. Instead of this being a part
of the football consciousness, we always
try to make things black and white. Is it a
foul? Yes? No? There is no maybe.
“There should be no empathy if the
referee is in the wrong place. Part of the
referee’s job, part of his DNA, is to get in
the right position on a consistent basis
to make a decision,” said Tumilty. “If
that’s not right then there should be no
empathy, but ultimately if you’re in the
right place at the right time and it’s just
so difficult [to make the right call] that’s
when you’re looking for empathy, for sure.
“It’s almost an impossibility for a referee
to go through 90 minutes without making
an error. The volume of decisions that you
have to make, regardless of the size of the
team of referees, it’s just mission impossible,”
McKendrick added. “Referees need
to be empathetic as well. We always need
to try and give the correct decision, but we
understand that when a team is dropping
out of the division or whatever, that the
fans are going to get more upset and show
an overreaction, even if the referee has got
the decision right.”
That’s the overall takeaway that comes
from talking to two experienced officials.
They don’t even want much to change.
Football players shout, swear, harass, crowd
and – sometimes – do their best to intimidate
the man in the middle. Onlookers see
the disturbing behaviour and compare it
with that of rugby, where referees are fully
respected, and say ‘why can’t it be like
that?’ Perhaps one reason is the culture
of both sports. Partisanship in football is
higher than it is in rugby and that brings
heightened emotion. And when tensions
are running high it doesn’t take much to
tip a supporter, player or manager towards
either unbridled joy, deep despair or vitriolic
anger. The referees don’t want that to
change because, above everything else, they
are fans of the game. It’s not a profession
you can get into if you don’t have a deep
love for the sport. Why would they want it
altered? Instead, they stand up to the abuse,
remain confident in their decisions, explain
it clearly to those who are willing to listen
and get on with their jobs.
“You need to be thick-skinned as a
referee, especially at the top flight,” stated
McKendrick. “You need to have confidence
in your ability and understand people’s
reactions to what you’re doing. Most of the
abuse is 90-minute abuse. Even players
who, to the punter in the stands, is being
aggressive towards the referee, 99 times
out of 100 the same player is shaking your
hand at the end of a game.” l
September 2016 | nutmeg | 117

Beyond the game
THE RISE
AND RISE
OF ROBERT
ROWAN
How does a guy working in a
bank in Rosyth end up as head of
football operations at Brentford?
By Richard Winton
“I was sitting in a toilet cubicle in a bank
in Fife listening to Brentford’s director of
football talking about salaries, contracts
and start dates...”
Robert Rowan slipped his phone back
into his pocket and returned upstairs to
his desk at the Rosyth branch of Lloyds
Bank. The customers whose loan application
he had been dealing with when Frank
McParland called had left, having been hurried
out of the door when the answerphone
message flashed up on Rowan’s screen.
It was August 2014. The Fifer had been
working in the bank for three months and
was beginning to consider it his career until
two interviews in the space of two days
rekindled his hopes of a job in football. “I’d
told the bank I needed a day off because I
had an interview with the English FA,” he
recalls, conspiratorially. “But the Brentford
thing was on my day off…”
The “Brentford thing” involved a trip to
Blackpool on a Tuesday night. The West
London club were playing Blackpool in a
Championship fixture and asked Rowan
to meet them pre-match and join them
to watch the game. “The problem was, I
was working the next morning so I had
to drive down then leave pretty much
straight away after the chat,” Rowan
says. “I remember heading up the road
to Kirkcaldy really hoping I’d get the job
but at the back of my mind I was thinking
‘fucking hell, I’ve got work in the bank
tomorrow morning’.”
He did get the job as Brentford’s scouting
co-ordinator, as confirmed in that illtimed
answerphone message a few weeks
later. But how does a guy working in a
bank in Rosyth get a job in the English
Championship?
“I told them I’d only do it if I could be the
sporting director, but Stenhousemuir
had never had one before…”
He might only have been 23 at the time,
but Rowan already had five years of senior
football experience to his name. Celtic,
Bolton, Rio Ave, Eskisehirspor and the
Scotland national team had all leaned
upon his scouting talents; he had coached
in Sweden; and he was combining his role
in the bank with a position of prominence
at a Scottish League One club.
His spell at Stenhousemuir came about
purely by chance. Much of his work with
the Scottish FA had involved doing analysis
for the national teams at all levels and,
through that, he developed a relationship
with Scotland under-17 coach Scott Booth,
who had just been appointed manager
of the Larbert club. “He asked me to get
involved and got me in front of the board
of directors. That’s when I made the
‘sporting director’ pitch,” Rowan explains.
“I didn’t think for a minute it would
work and, actually, I don’t think the
club were ever convinced they needed
118 | nutmeg | September 2016

me, but they let me have a go at it.”
While filming games, showing clips to
players and holding analysis sessions may
not seem revolutionary, it was entirely
alien to a squad being asked to turn up
for an additional third training session
every week. Then there were the continual
clandestine phone calls from a Rosyth
bank toilet. “A strange way of working,”
Rowan concedes, of trying to combine
two distinct careers. “That went on for a
couple of months, but it was probably a
mistake getting involved in the first place.”
On reflection, Rowan recognises he was
too hasty in accepting the Ochilview opportunity.
It had been a few months since
his position at the Scottish FA had been
made redundant following the dissolution
of the recruitment team and came just as
he completed his probationary period at
the bank. It felt like his last chance.
And it felt like a long time since the
day a couple of years earlier when he was
asked to meet Craig Levein’s chief scout,
Mick Oliver, at a Premier Inn beside the
Kincardine Bridge. “I’d been at Celtic for a
year when he got in touch,” Rowan recalls.
“I was given this footage of a Slovenia side
that Scotland were due to play and he
asked me to do a report. It must have been
okay because he gave me a job.”
That job entailed tracking players from
other countries, looking at potential
Scotland internationals and recruiting
performance school pupils who were only
a few years younger than the 20-year-old
Rowan. Quite a responsibility for someone
whose football experience consisted of a
few months at Celtic.
“We decided to walk to Celtic Park but
it was hosing down and our £1 umbrella
wasn’t big enough…”
Rowan had never been to Glasgow on
his own before. In fact, he hadn’t been
to many places. He was 18 and was at
college in Fife. Little wonder he was a bit
bewildered as he stepped off the bus at
Buchanan Street station.
Several weeks earlier, encouraged by
the internet leak of a scouting report
Andre Villas-Boas had compiled for Jose
Mourinho’s Chelsea, Rowan resolved to
author one of his own on the Champions
League final between Manchester United
and Barcelona in Rome. “I sent it to every
club in England and Scotland. I just got a
bunch of envelopes and addressed them
to ‘The Manager’,” he says, laughing.
“Thinking back, I wouldn’t do it that way
again.”
Remarkably, Nottingham Forest, West
Ham and Celtic replied, with the latter
inviting him to meet with David Moss, the
then head of academy recruitment. Hence
the bus trip to Glasgow. “My mate was at
university in Glasgow so he met me and we
decided, for some reason, to walk to Celtic
Park. By the time we got there we were
soaking and when I was speaking to David,
I could see my mate outside in the car park
huddled under this cheap umbrella.”
Despite this shambolic scene, Moss
was impressed enough to invite Rowan
to help with Celtic’s youth and under-21
sides, scouting opposition teams. “I was
young and naive and there was nothing
too complicated about them – it’s just 11
v 11,” he says when asked what gave him
the belief his reports were good enough.
“I wasn’t cocky but I had nothing to lose
and wanted to give it a shot.”
“I loaded up my car and drove down to
London – it was a classic hippy scene…”
There was plenty to lose when it came to
moving to Brentford, though. The promising
career in the bank. His project at
Stenhousemuir. Girlfriend Suzanne, who
was staying in Kirkcaldy for the short term
at least. “My wee Corsa was loaded up with
stuff, bits hanging out of windows, at 4am
and it wasn’t until I got halfway down the
road that I starting thinking ‘what am I
doing here?’ It was a 10-hour drive and I
didn’t really know where I was going so I
headed straight for the training ground.”
The underwhelming nature of
September 2016 | nutmeg | 119

Beyond the game
The rise and rise of Robert Rowan
By Richard Winton
Brentford’s base also came as a shock
to a man more used to the luxury of
Lennoxtown, but a familiar face helped
ease the transition. Rowan had become
friendly with assistant manager Davie
Weir through their work with the Scottish
FA and it was the former Falkirk, Hearts,
Everton and Rangers defender who
acted as his flat-mate during his first few
weeks in London. “After that, I ended up
flatsharing in the same building in with a
guy from Dunfermline who I’d never met
before,” says Rowan, who had hitherto
never lived outside Kirkcaldy.
His living arrangements are now more
conventional, with Suzanne having joined
him in Ealing, but Brentford pride themselves
on being apart from the norm.
Owner Matthew Benham is a former
hedge fund manager and professional
gambler who made his money by building
statistical models to exploit mistakes in
bookmakers’ odds. That adherence to
mathematical modelling informs everything
the Championship club does, with
more than 20 PhD holders and around 50
analysts employed in Benham’s Smartodds
company to identify the flaws in football’s
prevailing wisdom for the benefit of
Brentford or Danish side Midtjylland,
which Benham also owns. It could be
strategies to maximise set pieces, what
type of players the club should be signing
and from which markets, or even the style
of play deployed. No convention is sacred.
Rowan is an enthusiast disciple and
insisted on spending one day a week
studying at Smartodds throughout
his first year at Brentford. But Weir,
McParland and manager Mark Warburton
were not so convinced. The trio had
guided Brentford into the Championship
play-off places halfway through the
2014-15 season only to reportedly be told
that the analytics suggested that, were it
not for good fortune, they would be 11th.
Understandably, a schism opened, with
the Fifer stuck in the middle in his new
role as head of football operations.
HE MIGHT ONLY HAVE BEEN
23 AT THE TIME, BUT ROWAN
ALREADY HAD FIVE YEARS
OF SENIOR FOOTBALL
EXPERIENCE TO HIS NAME.
“That was a tricky time for me personally
but I’ve learned a lot and I’ve done a
lot,” Rowan says. “In a way, it was good
for me to be thrown into that situation
because I just had to get on with it and
it’s given me the kind of experience that
very few people my age have, in whatever
industry they work in.”
Indeed, his daily remit now is more
akin to that of a director of football. Be it
arranging pre-season, having significant
input in to the club’s recruitment, analysing
opposition, managing the training
ground or developing relations with clubs
such as Manchester City, Barcelona and
Liverpool, Rowan has a hand in almost
everything that goes on yet is still only 25.
The fact he looks like he’s had a tough
paper round helps hush some of the
carping about his age. So, too, does his
eight years of experience at international,
Champions League and Championship
level – something that was at the forefront
in the minds of those at Celtic when they
approached him in April about returning
to Scotland to work with their first team.
“It was difficult to turn them down as you
don’t get the opportunity to work for such
a big club often but I’ve now got a clear
vision of where I want to go and how I
will get there.”
Safe to say, this time it won’t be in a
clapped out Corsa, Stagecoach bus or by
walking through torrential rain. l
120 | nutmeg | September 2016

THE
PLAYERS
122
Heather McKinlay
on Tony Watt
“The goal which
plucked the lad from
Coatbridge-obscurity
into the European
spotlight; the goal which
reduced Rod Stewart
to tears; the goal which
enthused commentator
Ian Crocker to anoint
the scorer as an instant
legend; the goal which
has seemingly become an
ever-increasing-burden
on the itinerant player’s
shoulders”
129 134
Chris Collins on
Islam Feruz.
“He displayed his full
repertoire of skills and
feints with craft, guile
and precision, completing
his performance with
a sublime chip over the
Welsh goalkeeper for the
winning goal. It was a
startling demonstration of
his potential”
Paul Brown on
Grant Smith
“My day would be training
at night and then we’d all
go for dinner, all the single
boys, and we’d be out all
night, then we might have
a lie-in, go to the beach,
chill, go to the gym and it
was nice. It was just a great
lifestyle”
September 2016 | nutmeg | 121

The Players
WHAT’S
UP WITH
TONY
WATT?
Hearts is the latest destination
for a player who once seemed
to have everything. Will it
finally happen for him?
By Heather McKinlay
The young striker repeatedly twists
and turns by the corner flag, the ball
seemingly glued to his feet, hypnotising
two defenders, deftly using a team-mate
as a decoy. His unexpected Cruyffstyle
change of direction catches the
referee by surprise, forcing the official
to hop sideways. Enough is enough: the
infuriatingly skilful craftsman is hacked
down. Then again. And again. Three wild
fouls, two yellow cards for the opposition
and a couple of throw-ins later, his team
are two minutes and 22 seconds closer
to a vital 2-1 win. The chants of the
crowd ring out more loudly with every
passing second: “Olé, olé, olé, olé, Tony
Watt, Watt, Watt.” Then comes the novel
addendum in an exaggerated South East
London twang, “You wot, you wot, you
wot, you wot, you wot?” Now hobbling,
but encouraged by his fans, Tony Watt
of Charlton Athletic is double-footedly
taking on the injury-time clock as well
as Nottingham Forest. The only hoops on
display are the red and white ones on his
socks. The official CAFC clip of Watt v The
Clock has become a YouTube hit, watched
almost 400,000 times.
The scene described above took place
in March 2015, almost 28 months on
from that goal; the goal which plucked
the lad from Coatbridge-obscurity into
the European spotlight; the goal which
reduced Rod Stewart to tears; the goal
which enthused commentator Ian
Crocker to anoint the scorer as an instant
legend; the goal which has seemingly
become an ever-increasing-burden on
the itinerant player’s shoulders. While
some of his high school pals may have
celebrated their coming of age by swaggering
into the offy to buy booze legally
for the first time, this precocious 18-yearold
danced his way into the headlines:
teenage Tony Watt – once again to quote
Crocker – “taking his place in Celtic
folklore” as Barcelona-giant-slayer.
The question persists: is Tony Watt
destined to follow the journeyman’s
downhill path of other fledgling Celtic
flair players? The list is a lengthy one:
Andy Ritchie, Owen Archdeacon, Stevie
Fulton, Gerry Creaney, Simon Donnelly,
Mark Burchill, Liam Miller. All glimmered
with early promise. Most went on to
light up grounds for more lowly teams
around Scotland and the rest of the UK.
None have managed to shine as brightly
as Kenny Dalglish or sparkle like Charlie
Nicholas and Brian McClair. Other
recent prospects such as James Forrest
and Dylan McGeouch are already being
eclipsed by a new name: 16-year-old Jack
Aitchison, the latest to score on his debut.
122 | nutmeg | September 2016

One by one, they burst onto the
Parkhead scene as the next great
superstar hope. Like many of those before
him, and now another after him, Watt
undoubtedly possesses abundant natural
talent.
That much was obvious from his
two goals within five minutes of first
appearing as a Celtic sub in April 2012,
having signed a year before from Airdrie
for around £100,000. But eight clubs in
six years, including three in the second
half of last season, might suggest that this
former Bhoy’s gift of magic feet comes at
a frustrating cost.
The Brothers Grimm once wrote of
fairy-tale princesses under a spell to
dance all night, wearing out a pair
of shoes every time. Whilst no slur is
intended on Watt’s masculinity, the
resemblance seems more than cursory.
On the ball, he is a livewire, a look of
passion and determination on his face.
Yet there is somehow an air that he is not
in control of his own destiny, condemned
to perform his magic in one place after
another, having to start afresh on each
occasion.
In a corner somewhere lies his discarded
heap of rainbow-singing football
boots: red and yellow and pink and
green, purple and orange and blue. In the
Grimm fable, the king calls for a saviour
to solve the riddle of the princesses’
endless dancing, promising fame, fortune
and choice of bride to the successful
contender. Prince after handsome prince
takes up the challenge without success,
each meeting the consequence of public
beheading. Many of Watt’s mentors and
coaches over the past few years, having
failed to sort out the enigma of the dancing
footballer, have lost their heads, albeit
in less dramatic fashion.
One of the first to try and tame Watt’s
talent was Dutchman Stanley Menzo.
Despite Watt’s explosive entrance onto
the Scottish scene, by early 2013 the
still-teenage striker found his Celtic opportunities
limited.
He showed maturity and commitment
in wanting to play regularly by agreeing
to a season-long loan for 2013/14 at Lierse
S.K. in Belgium, a mid-table team in the
top division. He hit the pitch running at
his new club, scoring on his debut within
a couple of minutes of coming on from
the bench. However, while his skill could
not be questioned, both his fitness and
temperament were. Whether through
homesickness, culture clash or a more
direct personality clash with team boss
Menzo, Watt’s foray into Flanders was
tempestuous.
Watching on from Glasgow, Neil
Lennon admitted that the teenager
should apply himself better to getting into
physical condition while simultaneously
questioning the need for this to play out
in public. He also noted the potential
psychological impact of the Barcelona
goal. “The first thing I said after the game
that night was that I don’t want it to be a
millstone around his neck. Because he’s
got the talent and has the raw ingredients
to be a really good player. He just needs to
polish those off. He will be remembered,
forever maybe, for that goal, but it doesn’t
mean he can’t go on to have a good
career.”
Concerns over a cavalier attitude to
training have been publicly aired by a
succession of coaches and managers since,
none more bluntly than Mark McGhee.
When Watt was an unexpected inclusion
in the Scotland squad in March this year,
the assistant manager proclaimed that he
would like to smack him about and given
the chance would have sent the lad off to
army boot camp. Does the young striker
need this kind of tough love to bring out
his much-vaunted potential? A team-mate
in those earlier days at Lierse, Frédéric
Frans, felt that Watt would benefit from
encouragement of a more positive nature.
He told Belgian publication Sport/Voetbal:
September 2016 | nutmeg | 123

The Players
What’s up with Tony Watt?
“He wants to feel loved, then nothing’s
too much for him. Sometimes he was a
bit casual in the warm-up. Coach Stanley
Menzo put a lot of store in that so then
there was a big clash. He was only 19 and
if you started to shout at him, he blocked
it out altogether. He still needs to learn to
take criticism. But in the end it is a joint
problem. I felt that he was sometimes
picked up too much compared with
others. As a coach you shouldn’t pick on
such a boy for the slightest thing. You’re
that much older and need to be more
understanding sometimes.”
Towards the end of his loan spell, Watt
was demoted to training with the reserves
after an outspoken and unauthorised
interview in which he accused Menzo
of treating him harshly and lying. On
returning to Celtic for pre-season training
in July 2014, Lennon was gone and his
fate lay in a new pair of hands: those of
former school teacher Ronnie Deila. The
Norwegian made his mind up quickly,
berating Watt’s commitment compared
to recognised internationals and senior
professionals in the squad. Without much
ado, the Hoops accepted a bid of just
over £1m from Standard Liège and Watt
signed until June 2018. The forward was
once more packing his bags for Belgium,
swapping chips, Mars Bars and Tennent’s
Lager for the Low Country’s frites,
chocolat and Trappist beer.
In signing for Standard, Watt fell into
the clutches of multi-millionaire Belgian
businessman Roland Duchâtelet, who
had recently undertaken a pan-European
spending spree to acquire a network of
football clubs: Carl Zeiss Jena in Germany,
Újpest in Hungary, Alcorcon in Spain and
Charlton Athletic in England. As well
as Standard Liège, he also maintained
a firm interest in another Belgian club,
Sint-Truiden.
Watt’s trademark is to make an instant
impact. He achieved it on cue in Liège,
winning a decisive penalty within
minutes of stepping onto the pitch as a
substitute. Just as predictably, the Scot’s
flying start faltered. This time Watt
seemed to be getting on well with his
head coach, Guy Luzon, but Duchâtelet
is not a patient man. Standard normally
graced the top positions in the table but
were struggling in the middle of the
Pro League. The Israeli boss was soon
packed off. Watt put up a message on
social media wishing his brief mentor
well, saying he’d learnt more from Luzon
in two months than from anyone else
in two years which can be taken as a
swipe at both Menzo and Lennon. After
a couple of goals in 13 appearances, Watt,
too, was on the move once more, this
time to the bright lights of London – or
a rather mundane suburban corner of
it at Charlton. The signing on 6 January
2015 was announced as permanent at
an undisclosed fee. Duchâtelet, owner
of both selling club and buying club,
presumably enjoyed negotiating that with
himself.
More upheaval followed. Within days of
the Scot’s arrival in England, Duchâtelet
sacked the manager, the Belgian Bob
Peeters. His replacement was a welcome
familiar face for Watt: Guy Luzon. Perhaps
the Belgian owner had this masterplan
in mind all along when he moved Watt
across the Channel. Rumours had surfaced
a couple of weeks earlier from Israel
that Luzon had the Charlton role in his
sights, given credibility by the fact he was
still under contract within Duchâtelet’s
network.
Despite the fans’ cynicism at the appearance
of another Liège cast-off – he
was the fourth player in that season
to take that route into the Charlton
squad – Watt’s ability to stick the ball to
his brightly-coloured boot, waltz past
defenders and shoot into the top corner
soon endeared him to the Valley faithful.
Perhaps fate was finally conspiring for
the magic feet to find a more long-term
124 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Heather McKinlay
home? Watt turned in a string of
man-of-the-match performances as the
Addicks pulled clear of relegation danger.
Simmering unrest among fans at the
club’s lack of ambition, bizarre management
methods and failure to communicate
gradually cooled down.
Watt seemed fit and in-form as the
2015/16 season dawned so it came as a
surprise to find him missing from the
Charlton starting line-up for the first
match of the season, against London
rivals QPR. Word soon circulated that
he’d been dropped to the bench for
disciplinary reasons. There was talk of
childish behaviour. The punishment had
the desired effect: Luzon unleashed him
in the second half and he turned his pentup
frustration into tricks and treats with a
goal and an assist as the Addicks toppled
their recently-relegated neighbours. Watt
scored in the opening three matches but
as the autumn wore on, his form declined
and Charlton also started to struggle.
He fits the theoretical football business
model of an asset Duchâtelet can buy
WHEN WATT WAS AN
UNEXPECTED INCLUSION IN
THE SCOTLAND SQUAD IN,
MARK MCGHEE PROCLAIMED
THAT HE WOULD LIKE TO
SMACK HIM ABOUT AND
GIVEN THE CHANCE WOULD
HAVE SENT THE LAD OFF TO
ARMY BOOT CAMP
cheaply, refine, put in the shop window
somewhere within his network and sell
on at a profit. However, this approach
does not always succeed. Watt may have
started his career as a Diamond at Airdrie
United but several failed attempts to
polish off his rough edges have made
him one of the more challenging subjects
of this Belgian experiment. He became
more and more selfish in possession,
head down, rarely looking for a pass or
a team-mate, always trying to beat one
defender too many and often losing the
ball. His body language suggested a slump
from cocky arrogance to self-obsession
and, in an extraordinarily frank interview
with Richard Cawley of the South London
Press, his verbal language confirmed it:
“I’ve been poor recently and I know I
have. Huddersfield was the worst game
of my career. If I went right then I should
have gone left, if I went left I should have
gone right. I got every decision wrong.
I was poor in the Rotherham game and
against Fulham I was terrible.” Such
brutal honesty is rare from any sportsman
and concerning when it remains
unresolved. “I don’t know what’s up. I
can’t put my finger on it and I know I can
be so much better. It is killing me and it is
killing the gaffer (Luzon). I can tell he is
frustrated with how I’m playing because
he knows I can be better.”
His own description that when he’s good,
he’s very, very good, but when he’s bad,
he’s awful, would resonate with fans who
have watched Watt over any length of
time when he has been playing for their
team. It’s the kind of self-awareness you
would hope a sports psychologist or life
coach would seize upon. Unfortunately,
within the echo chamber of Charlton
Athletic, his cry for help fell unheeded.
Charlton used to be respected as a
model club in the English league: how a
stable approach could bring success on
modest means under the careful stewardship
of a manager such as Alan Curbishley.
September 2016 | nutmeg | 125

The Players
What’s up with Tony Watt?
Ten years on from the end of that reign
and two years into the Duchâtelet era,
anxiety over the intentions of the Belgian
and his experimental network cum player
farm approach has ballooned into full
Hollywood horror. Despite initially trying
to give him the benefit of the doubt, the
vast majority of both Standard Liège and
Addicks fans will now unhesitatingly
describe Duchâtelet as a brooding, menacing
and Grimm character. The fact he
possesses a strong physical resemblance to
Christopher Walken’s portrayal of Blofeld
in the most recent James Bond film has
not gone unnoticed.
With Charlton hovering around the
relegation zone by early November 2015,
Duchâtelet’s axe fell once again on Luzon.
Bizarrely, the businessman called upon
unknown Karel Fraeye, coach of part-time
Belgian third division club VW Hamme,
to take over the reins of his multi-million
pound English Championship squad.
Fraeye was not a complete stranger to the
South Londoners – he had been assistant
coach for a few months at the end of
Duchâtelet’s first season of ownership and
he had remained on the businessman’s
payroll ever since. Nevertheless, it seemed
blindingly obvious to Addicks fans that he
lacked the track record and pedigree to
salvage the club’s season. He certainly did
nothing to resurrect Watt’s form. The lad
played just two games under the rookie
coach. He was then abruptly booted out
on loan to Cardiff. New club, new country,
new manager equals new sparkle from
the rough diamond. One of his early
man-of-the-match performances was
away at Bolton, prompting the Trotters’
manager Neil Lennon to spill the beans
that Charlton had been touting the Scot
to all and sundry, “I could have had Tony
Watt – Charlton offered him to us and we
couldn’t afford to pay him,” he told The
Bolton News. “His wages weren’t massive.
And if Tony would have been playing on
the other side of the pitch today we would
have won the game.”
Back in south east London, debate raged
among fans over the enigma of Watt
and the folly or otherwise of peddling
him to league rivals. “Madness to get rid
of him. He can do things with the ball
I can only dream of,” said one. “He’s a
lazy know-it-all and not a team player,”
came the counter attack. “He was really
nice when I met him in McDonalds
after a match once,” gossiped another,
rather revealingly. Watt does not look
overweight – indeed, he once ripped
off his shirt when playing for Lierse
to show-off his toned torso. However,
evidence from multiple sources would
suggest that he is not a hard trainer and
not strict in his adherence to personal
nutrition plans and fitness regimes. True,
he doesn’t goal hang and shirk, often
dropping back into midfield to collect
the ball and demonstrating a sharp turn
of pace over short distances. But, in the
fans’ vernacular, he is usually blowing
out of his arse well before half-time.
He’s also rather adept at the dying swan
act, reacting to a defender’s clatter by
WATT’S TRADEMARK IS TO
MAKE AN INSTANT IMPACT.
HE ACHIEVED IT ON CUE IN
LIÈGE, WINNING A DECISIVE
PENALTY WITHIN MINUTES OF
STEPPING ONTO THE PITCH
AS A SUBSTITUTE. JUST AS
PREDICTABLY, THE SCOT’S
FLYING START FALTERED
126 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Heather McKinlay
hobbling and clutching at one or other
of his legs. This can be infuriating for
spectators and for team-mates alike. Is it a
diversionary tactic to lull the opposition?
Is he really struggling from a knock? Or is
he simply desperate for a breather?
Under Russell Slade at Cardiff, Watt
appeared to find a coach who could bring
out his brio with more consistency. He
looked set to make a permanent escape
from the Charlton and Duchâtelet web, a
deal already agreed in principle at around
the figure originally paid to Celtic to
acquire him for Standard Liège. Then the
football gods made a last-ditch tackle:
Cardiff were placed under a transfer
embargo for breach of Financial Fair Play
rules. The deal was off. Watt, reluctantly,
returned to The Valley. The club had sunk
into greater turmoil. Fraeye had departed
ignominiously, having gathered two wins
in 14 games. José Riga, Belgian of course,
was the latest familiar face in charge.
He had been Duchâtelet’s first Charlton
appointment, successor to Chris Powell
less than two years before. Despite a
solid performance in securing the team’s
Championship status in that first spell,
Riga was not retained by the maverick
owner, who preferred to give a younger
man the chance – Bob Peeters, the one
briefly in the driver’s seat when Watt first
boarded the SE7 bus. No wonder fans call
it a merry-go-round.
Riga gave Watt a start for the Addicks at
home to Blackburn and the forward put
on a lively show in a 1-1 draw; enough
to remind Rovers’ boss Paul Lambert
of his talents, it transpired. No sooner
had fellow Scottish forward Jordan
Rhodes completed an £11m move to
Middlesbrough than Watt headed to the
North West, signing on loan at Ewood
Park for the rest of the season. Once
again, the prospect of a permanent deal
was on the table. Riga, facing serious
challenges in rebuilding a demoralised
squad, had shown little inclination to take
Watt under his wing. While recognising
his quality, he questioned his will to
commit to Charlton’s cause. Watt’s side
of the story is that he already felt that he
was being forced out at the time of the
loan to Cardiff and that his relationship
with the club’s senior management had
broken down. He would not be the first
to accuse the CEO or owner of broken
promises. His form at Blackburn was not
mercurial, with two goals in 11 games, but
perhaps the itchy feet finally had a chance
to settle down, a little closer to home and
under watchful eyes. With Lambert as his
club manager and Strachan and McGhee
showing a keen interest, he was being
taken in hand by some of the grandees
of the Scottish game. The Scotland
manager, with a hint of desperation, even
proclaimed that Watt could be Scotland’s
Lewandowski or Ibrahimovic.
Then fate once again took a turn for
the cursed: a couple of weeks after his
12-minute full international debut,
serious injury struck for the first time
in Watt’s career. Blackburn packed him
back to his contracted club, the relegation
madhouse of Charlton Athletic. He found
a club now viewed by its own protesting
fans, sympathetic opposition fans,
concerned past players and managers and
the media as a laughing stock / basketcase
/ soap opera (no need to delete as all
are appropriate). Whilst others scrambled
for the lifeboats, the Addicks sunk
inevitably from the Championship into
League One.
Watt played no part; his groin injury
required an operation, prematurely
ending his season. At 22, he’s not quite
in the last chance saloon but he does
find himself at a crossroads with a lot
to prove. So what’s next? Russell Slade,
who clicked with Watt at Cardiff, has
picked up the management chalice at The
Valley. Perhaps he was looking forward to
the striker’s tricks and skills terrorising
defenders from the likes of Northampton
Town, Fleetwood and Gillingham. But the
September 2016 | nutmeg | 127

The Players
What’s up with Tony Watt?
By Heather McInlay
Charlton hierarchy had their own ideas,
not keen to retain an expensive asset
on their unhealthy League One balance
sheet. A season-long loan deal has been
sealed: now his home is where the Hearts
are. The young maverick will undoubtedly
come under much closer scrutiny back
in Scotland, both on and off the pitch.
On the other hand, he is back close to
family, friends and girlfriend, providing a
more stable support network. Meanwhile,
having been tried for size by a whole host
of managers, the hero’s mantle transfers
to Robbie Nielson. Will the Jambos’ boss
be the one who finally solves the riddle of
the dancing footballer?
Curve-ball time. When Andy Murray
first emerged as a young professional, the
teenage tennis starlet clearly possessed
exceptional skill. He was also prone
to public displays of moodiness, selfcentred
outbursts and physical cramps.
Even many years on, having reached
the pinnacle of his sport, these traits
resurface now and then when things
are not going to plan. Murray can’t
completely change his character but we
are forgiving because he has a string of
achievements as testament to realised
talent. He continues to work hard and
improve. He’s got a weighty monument to
his success in the shape of a golden post
box in his Dunblane home town. Watt,
on the other hand, has a brief film of a
Europe-shattering goal, an ephemeral
moment, a few fleeting seconds.
It’s easy to think of a footballer as a
pawn on the chessboard of the beautiful
game, plucked from one squad, plonked
down into another. Watt’s career to date
has certainly suffered more than most
from that. His confidence has surely taken
many hits with all the moving about and
struggles to settle. At times he has been
the victim of lousy circumstance. Having
played this year for Duchâtelet’s Charlton,
Vincent Tan’s Cardiff and the Venkys’
Blackburn, he’s better placed than most to
tell tales about eccentric football owners.
Yet on the pitch, he is a proactive player.
He usually makes an immediate impact,
often scoring on his debut and striking
up a rapport with the crowd. His name
is ready-made for chanting. You never
come away from a game commenting
that you didn’t notice Tony Watt. He never
hides, he seeks the ball, he hogs the ball,
sometimes he does amazing things with
the ball. But the big questions remain
unanswered. Will he ever do it consistently?
Will he ever do it for Scotland, for
a national team in dire need of firepower?
In a Daily Record poll in March this year,
39% thought he would become a Scotland
star – not a majority, but a sizeable chunk
still showing belief in his ability.
The man from Coatbridge could do
worse than study the dedicated and
single-minded road to fame and fortune
taken by Dunblane’s local hero. Watt
is a talented 22-year-old athlete. By all
accounts, he is a likeable person, a bit of
a joker at times, quick-witted but also
thoughtful and self-critical. He can be
prone to mood swings. Andy Murray
shares a lot of those traits. His way to
channel things positively is to surround
himself with trusted advisers - that
onus, of course, is entirely on him as an
individual sportsperson. Watt practices
a team sport but that does not absolve
him of personal responsibility. Could he
be proactive off the pitch in assessing
his own strengths and weaknesses, in
seeking advice, maybe even finding his
own mentor, be that a personal trainer or
a sports psychologist?
Perhaps it’s time that Tony Watt stopped
itching for some club manager or coach
to sort him out, stopped itching for it
all to click into place in the right squad,
stopped itching for some spell to be lifted.
There really is no valid comparison with
the Brothers Grimm and fairy-tales of
Dancing Princesses. Perhaps it is time
Watt took his fate into his own hands – or
into his own magic feet. l
128 | nutmeg | September 2016

The Players
THE CURIOUS CASE
OF ISLAM FERUZ
Why is it that a potentially
supreme Scottish talent is
destined to wither on the vine?
By Chris Collins
People who know about these things
caution against exaggerated judgements
on any sportsman in the infancy of their
career, no matter their potential. The type
of hyperbole that leads Stevie Fulton to
be compared with Roberto Baggio is to be
avoided.
However I am going to ignore all that.
My theory is this: had Islam Feruz stayed
with Celtic rather than move to Chelsea
at the age of 16 he might by now be
Scotland’s No.10 with Gordon Strachan
arranging his team around him.
A disclaimer. This assertion is based
not on the underwhelming nature of the
last two years of his fledgling career, but
on the testimonies of those who worked
with Feruz between the ages of 12 and 18
and on the incredible potential displayed
by the adolescent player before London,
big cars and an unfortunate disregard for
good advice came into play.
The waves of excitement the prodigious
young striker created among the
Scottish football fraternity and beyond
as he emerged through the youth ranks
at Celtic have receded and the dwindling
band of observers who retain an interest
are left wondering if he will ever showcase
his talent at the highest level.
As he approaches his 21st birthday,
Feruz’s career is still in its infancy. But
his personal narrative could fill a book.
His story so far is one of hope and
identity, littered with small controversies,
unfolding on a downward arc. At this
juncture, the inescapable conclusion is
that a potentially supreme Scottish talent
is destined to wither on the vine.
So far has his star fallen that the perception
of him amongst football observers
in this country oscillates somewhere
between unfavourable and indifferent. For
a player who ran the show at under-17
international level when aged only 14,
this is unfathomable. Aged 16, Feruz was
Scotland’s youngest ever under 21 cap. He
was coveted by English Premier League
clubs and many major European clubs
from the age of 12.
Those who saw him break through
believe that had he followed the path
laid out for him at Celtic he would be on
the cusp of national hero status by now,
an asylum seeker contributing to the
sporting and cultural life of the nation
at the highest level. Yet in his truncated
loan spell at Hibs last season he managed
just six substitute appearances. Is there a
coherent explanation?
We begin in Somalia, the country of
Feruz’s birth. Today, the East African
September 2016 | nutmeg | 129

The Players
The curious case of Islam Feruz
nation is inching towards something
resembling stability. The chaos and
violent disorder of the 1990s has largely
dissipated although it ranks low on most
quality of life indicators.
Back in 1995, this nation of 10 million
people was suffering from the worst
excesses of a civil war which had begun
four years earlier. Vicious factional fighting
between armed groups had resulted
in copious bloodshed; the country was
a failed state with no central authority;
regional control was exercised through
barbarity. Even the United Nations
seemed to have given up on Somalia,
withdrawing from the country altogether.
For most Somalis, the only hope for a
decent life was to leave.
Islam Salieh Feruz was born into these
unfavourable circumstances on 10th
September that year. There is little information
about his very early life though
we know Feruz was born to mother Aisha
who had an additional three children to
protect. Two of his grandparents had died
in the civil war. He and his family moved
from Somalia to Yemen when he was
five years old – they may also have spent
some time in Tanzania – before eventually
coming to Castlemilk in Glasgow.
The extensive post-war housing scheme
on the south side of Glasgow, referred
to by Glaswegians as Chateau Lait, has
produced the likes of Alan Brazil, Ray
Houghton, Jim McInally, Andy McLaren,
and more recently the Irish internationals
Aiden McGeady and James McCarthy.
By the age of 11 Feruz was representing
Celtic’s under-14 team with distinction.
John Sludden, his youth coach at the club
for three years and now the manager of
East Stirlingshire, likened his ability at
that age to that of Paul McStay and Charlie
Nicholas. Sludden wanted to nurture and
protect what he saw as a unique talent.
Others had differing agendas. Agents
from England and Europe were beginning
to offer unsolicited gifts to the family.
Celtic kept a watchful eye on such matters
but there were other issues. Feruz was
already on the radar of youth justice
agencies around the city after various
scrapes and misdemeanours. Perhaps it
was just part and parcel of a young foreign
boy assimilating to a new language,
country and culture. It caused those in the
youth set-up some concern and certainly
spoke to a personality unaccustomed to
deference.
Five thousand miles from Somalia, on
the day of Feruz’s birth in 1995, Tommy
Burns was guiding his Celtic team to a
3-2 victory over Aberdeen at Pittodrie.
To the youngster’s good fortune, the pair
would get to know one another because
of Burns’ role in the Celtic youth set-up
the mid 2000s.
When Feruz and his family were
threatened with deportation back to
Somalia in 2007, Burns’ intervention was
critical. He personally lobbied immigration
officials on the family’s behalf, citing
the contribution Feruz would make to
Scottish sporting culture over the next
few decades. The family were successful
AGED 16, FERUZ WAS
SCOTLAND’S YOUNGEST
EVER UNDER 21 CAP. HE
WAS COVETED BY ENGLISH
PREMIER LEAGUE CLUBS
AND MANY MAJOR
EUROPEAN CLUBS FROM THE
AGE OF 12
130 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Chris Collins
and became naturalized UK citizens. The
club moved them from Castlemilk to
upmarket accommodation in the Charing
Cross area of Glasgow. Feruz was attending
Hillhead High School, and he became
the first player to represent Scotland at
youth level under new school qualifications
rule, a home nations agreement
ratified by FIFA which states that anyone
who has been educated in the country for
five years is eligible for the national team.
The Celtic hierarchy, youth coaches,
and Tommy Burns in particular had put
everything in place for Feruz to thrive.
Feruz left Celtic shortly after his 16th
birthday. The club received £300,000.
Then manager Neil Lennon went on
record to say: “We have done everything
in our power to keep the player and done
more than enough to make him feel at
home here. He does have other people in
the background who are advising him.
My take on it is that they are advising him
wrongly but we seem to be powerless in
that situation”
Subsequent comments made by the
player after he had moved to Chelsea
about this period of his life explain
1why Feruz is not exactly remembered
fondly by Celtic fans.
In 2012 Feruz tweeted: “Celtic did f***
all with me staying in this country, get
your f****** facts right and stop going
with the story you read in the papers.”
The quote prompted a rebuttal from
Gerry Collins, ex-Partick Thistle manager
and lifelong friend of Tommy Burns:
“It’s disgusting what the boy has said
and shows a terrible lack of respect for
everything Tommy did for him and his
family. He hasn’t achieved anything yet in
the game and I can tell him this, whatever
he does go on to achieve in football will
be down to Tommy Burns and he should
be eternally grateful.
“I remember Tommy telling me he had
discovered a gem in Feruz but the family
were facing deportation to a war zone
JOHN SLUDDEN, HIS YOUTH
COACH AT THE CLUB FOR
THREE YEARS LIKENED HIS
ABILITY AT THAT AGE TO
THAT OF PAUL MCSTAY AND
CHARLIE NICHOLAS
and the issue became something Tommy
fought tooth and nail to prevent. Football
was a secondary issue, it was an act of
humanity and compassion from Tommy,
which was typical of the man.”
Billy Stark, who delivered the eulogy at
Burns’ funeral and was at the time the
Scotland Under-21 manager was similarly
disappointed at Feruz’ expletive laden
tweet: “It’s hard to put into context the
lack of gratitude this kid shows with these
comments, it’s very sad.”
Feruz was active on social media gloating
about his role in the reaching the FA
Youth Cup final with Chelsea, taking a not
so veiled dig at the club that developed
and nurtured him in the process: “Here’s
a fact for you tweeps. 6-7 years at Celtic,
n never reached a cup final. One year at
Chelsea, what happens ??”
Feruz regularly posted provocative
remarks on social media in his early days
at Chelsea, one of which included him
sporting a Rangers shirt. His relationship
with Celtic was now non exisitent and
fans of the club who remained aware of
his career were rarely to be heard wishing
him well. It wasn’t always like this
though.
September 2016 | nutmeg | 131

The Players
The curious case of Islam Feruz
There was a time when Feruz was hailed
as the next Celtic and Scotland hero and
for valid reasons. It is possible the majority
of football watchers in Scotland have yet
to see Feruz play, either in the flesh or
on television. He never played in Celtic’s
first team except for an appearance in a
Tommy Burns memorial match aged 14.
He is yet to make the breakthrough at
Chelsea and was unimpressive in short
loan spells at Blackpool and Hibs. His
potential can only really be appraised on
the basis of his reputation as youngster at
Celtic, his Scotland youth international
career and his appearances for Chelsea in
the FA Youth Cup.
However as a teenager he was that good.
In the 2009 Under-16 Victory Shield match
against Wales, 90 per cent of the half-time
and full-time analysis on Sky Sports was
devoted to Islam Feruz, who was the
youngest player on the pitch and three
years younger than many of his opponents.
Despite his diminutive stature – he still
measures only 5ft 4in at the age of 20 – he
bulldozed his way around Ninian Park that
evening, his temples moist with sweat on
a cold night, felling opponents like skittles
and harassing players into mistakes. He
displayed his full repertoire of skills and
feints with craft, guile and precision, completing
his performance with a sublime
chip over the Welsh goalkeeper for the
winning goal. It was a startling demonstration
of his potential. Anyone watching on
TV that night would have heard comparisons
with Wayne Rooney being aired for
the first time. To this observer his style was
more reminiscent of Sergio Aguero; Feruz
looked every inch the intelligent frontman
– well balanced, razor sharp, able to shoot
with either foot with no advance warning
and ice cool in front of goal.
Fans in Scotland have seen their fair
share of exceptional talents over the
last 20 years but for the most part they
have arrived from foreign shores. Purists
long for the day another Johnstone,
Cooper, Dalglish or Baxter will emerge.
It explains partially why even those who
did not achieve at a high level but played
with skill and imagination – think Chic
Charnley or Andy Ritchie – are revered
as cult figures. More often than not, we
bear witness to honest and adequate
professionals, so when a genuine natural
talent emerges, it quickens the pulse.
From an early age Feruz looked like one
of those players with the rare ability to
soar above tactical orthodoxy at any level
of the game. His credentials were further
asserted with a perfect hat trick (left foot,
right foot, header) in Scotland Under-19’s
game against Switzerland. Yet again,
playing years above his natural age group,
Feruz was by common consent a superstar
in the making, with one English Premier
league scout remarking to Billy Stark that
every serious club in Europe was monitoring
him. At 17, Feruz was a potent blend
of talent and purpose: short frame, quick
feet, a mix of intelligent positioning and
IN THE 2009 UNDER-16
VICTORY SHIELD MATCH
AGAINST WALES, 90 PER
CENT OF THE HALF-TIME AND
FULL-TIME ANALYSIS ON SKY
SPORTS WAS DEVOTED TO
ISLAM FERUZ, WHO WAS THE
YOUNGEST PLAYER ON THE
PITCH AND THREE YEARS
YOUNGER THAN MANY OF
HIS OPPONENTS.
132 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Chris Collins
off-the-cuff spontaneity. Goalscoring to
him seemed as natural as breathing.
In 2012 his two goals for Chelsea in the
FA Youth Cup final, where he played
with vigour and skill throughout, further
bolstered his reputation. Having already
scored a blistering 25-yard goal at Old
Trafford in the semi-final and twice
against Nottingham Forest in the quarters,
he was the star of the tournament,
yet to celebrate his 17th birthday in a
competition full of 19-year-old players.
It was soon after he made his debut for
Chelsea on a pre-season tour of the Far
East that things began to stagnate. His
loan spell at Blackpool was probably best
remembered for an amusing if thoroughly
unprofessional tweet he sent after a
coming on as a sub in a 7-2 defeat to
Watford at Vicarage Road. “This team take
more kick offs than corners” he tweeted
just hours after the loss. Unsurprisingly,
it went down like a lead balloon with the
Blackpool hierarchy.
There is very little to say about his sojourns
to clubs in Russia and Kazakhstan
– for good reasons. Feruz went AWOL
after one day at the Kazakh club’s training
camp in Turkey, and returned to London
after only 48 hours in Russia. In between
times he irritated SFA officials by openly
discussing his desire to play in the African
Nations Cup, hinting that he could be eligible
to play for several countries because
of family connections.
By 2015 he was no longer in the frame to
represent Scotland at any level, no further
forward in breaking through at Chelsea
and underwhelming audiences when
he turned up for various trials and loan
spells in the UK and abroad. One positive
detail from this disappointing period did
emerge however: Feruz had purchased
himself an £80,000 Porsche.
At the time of writing there has been a
warrant issued for his arrest. It is reported
that Feruz failed to turn up at Glasgow
Sheriff Court to answer charges of dangerous
driving and conspiracy to pervert the
course of justice by giving a false name
when he was stopped in his Porsche.
If Feruz is looking for positive sporting
examples he could do worse than look
at the experience of his fellow Somalianborn
athlete Mo Farah. From late 2005,
Farah lived in a house in London with elite
Kenyan runners. “The Kenyans trained
hard and I mean really hard. At the end of
the session I was knackered. After their
runs they would spend 45 minutes doing
stretches. After food, they’d sleep. In the
afternoon they trained again, it was an
almost monk like existence. What was I
thinking? How could I ever hope to beat
the Kenyans in a race if I wasn’t taking my
career as seriously as they did? It was like
a switch had been turned on inside my
head, I knew I would have to work even
harder than before.”
You hope a similar switch is flicked for
Feruz before too long. To be fair, Alan
Stubbs remarked on his talent and positive
personality as his loan deal at Hibs was
cut short last season and there is no clear
evidence of a lack of training ground
application. Murmurs about his general
attitude have always been present however
and his tendency to attract trouble, ungracious
comments about Celtic’s role in his
development, the entourage of advisors
and propensity to flaunt his lifestyle on
social media do not augur well.
It would be a pity if Feruz’s explosion
on to the international youth scene comes
to represent the high point of his career.
It should have been an opening chapter.
History is littered with spoiled canvasses,
unfinished symphonies and abandoned
novels and if Feruz ever has cause to sift
through the debris of a journeyman career
he may live to regret his lack of focus. It is
still within his gift to redefine his destiny.
He may yet take a delayed, circuitous route
to the top. Having followed his career
from the outset, I certainly hope so. l
September 2016 | nutmeg | 133

The Players
NO REGRETS
From turning down Rangers
to playing with God, via naked
sauna parties in Helsinki and
kangaroo courts in Swindon,
Grant Smith has seen it all. And
his story is far from over
By Paul Brown
They say Finns can be standoffish. A
little cold. As he sits sweating in a little
wooden sauna somewhere in the Finnish
countryside, surrounded by naked girls,
Grant Smith is beginning to disagree.
It’s a far cry from the days when he was
first trying to make it as a footballer, leaving
Rangers to sign for Reading. But it’s
as good a place to start as any with a man
who’s had more clubs than most have in a
lifetime, who has travelled half the world,
and who is still only 36.
Born in Irvine, North Ayrshire to dad
Gordon, the controversial former Scottish
Football Association chief executive,
and mum Marlene, Smith ended up in
Finland because he wasn’t getting a game
any more at Dundee United under Craig
Levein. He was offered a trial at Kotka, a
city with a population of around 50,000
in the south of a country known for its
forests, lakes and Father Christmas. There
he was spotted by former Tangerines striker
Mixu Paatelainen, who was manager of
Finnish club TPS at the time. “He was like:
‘What are you doing here?’” says Smith.
“He’d seen me play for Dundee United
against Celtic about a month before. I told
him I hadn’t signed anywhere yet and 24
hours later I got a phonecall saying there
was a game and they needed a midfielder,
did I want to come? I said yes. I went to
Helsinki and ended up signing for HJK.
They were the biggest club in Finland and
they were in Europe.”
Known simply as Klubbi, which
translates literally as The Club, HJK were
and still are the powerhouse of Finnish
football, with 27 championship titles
to their name. Smith signed up in 2007
during a rare barren spell when they went
six years without winning the league.
They finished seventh the season he was
there, four places behind Paatelainen’s
TPS, and Smith says he probably never
played in front of a crowd bigger than
10,000. But he loved every minute,
despite initially feeling that he was being
given the cold shoulder.
“I loved it. And I loved Helsinki,” he
says. “It probably wasn’t the best time to
live there, from March until November.
In the winter months it’s freezing. But I
enjoyed it. There were a lot of good boys
there at the time who went on to have
good careers. Pukki went on to play for
Sevilla before going to Celtic, and one of
my team-mates was Markus Halsti, who
ended up at DC United.
“Helsinki was great in the summer. It
even has a beach, which I didn’t know
when I signed. Finns can be a bit strange.
Scottish people are the opposite. They
can’t do enough for you. It was funny
because when I first got there, there was
a holiday weekend and all the boys were
talking about it in training saying they
were going away, and they asked me what
I was doing and I said: ‘Nothing’. But not
one of them actually said well why don’t
you come with us or something. I was
134 | nutmeg | September 2016

thinking: ‘For fuck’s sake, what’s going on
here?’ But they expect you to ask. It’s just
how they are. Finnish people are kinda
standoffish but once you make a friend
you have a friend for life. After that it was
fine and I used to get invited and stuff.”
Once he’d made friends, it was in
Helsinki that Smith was introduced to
Finland’s sauna culture. “We had a couple
of team nights out,” he says, “and we’d
be in a private sports bar watching the
Champions League, and there’d be a
sauna in there and people would just walk
around in their towels! It was strange.
“It was a bit better when we went to
people’s summer cottages and there were
girls there. But it was strange with just
the guys. The few days I spent at Kotka
there was a sauna night, a kind of team
bonding thing for all the players. They
were just telling stories and getting drunk
in this sauna with a splash pool and stuff.
I kinda got a feeling for it early on. During
midsummer we were in a city in the
south of Finland, a party city and I met up
with a girl and she said do I want to come
and meet her friends, so I said okay. There
were four girls and me and another guy I
knew, in their summer cottage, and suddenly
they’re like: ‘Let’s go for a sauna’
and they’re all getting naked and stuff. So
we were like: ‘Ok, no problem!’ I’d never
seen anything like it before. Finnish girls
are pretty open, if you know what I mean.
“The only thing was we didn’t really
have a good team. They were playing me
out of position, as more of a left winger,
when I was more of a central midfielder.
We didn’t get going and there were a few
boys coming to the end of their contracts.
It made it difficult. But I loved my time
there, looking back on it. The summer. It
was a good place. I was seeing a Finnish
girl for about two and half years as well.”
Fast forward a few months and Smith is
sitting in the directors’ box at Goodison
Park next to injured Everton defender Phil
Jagielka, a good friend from his Sheffield
United days. He is not happy. It’s late on
in the 2008/09 season, a campaign in
which he started just one game, and his
life is about to take a strange twist.
Approximately 12 months earlier, Smith
had been a key part of a Carlisle team
which lost in the League One play-offs in
heartbreaking style. Leading their semi final
with Leeds 2-1 after an away win at Elland
Road, it all went badly wrong in the return
leg. Jonathan Howson scored early to pull
Leeds level on aggregate, before waiting
until the 90th minute to hit the winner.
Wembley for Leeds. Heartbreak for Carlisle.
The beginning of the end for Smith.
He wouldn’t play another full 90
minutes for the club again, making just
three more appearances for new boss
Gregg Abbott, and by the time he ended up
at Goodison as a guest of Jagielka he was
desperate for something new. Smith had
already played for 14 clubs by this point.
He would go on to play for four more.
But a chance meeting with a man named
Graham Arnold that day on Merseyside
would take him to the other side of the
world, and ultimately help lead him to a
whole new career as a football agent.
“Jags is one of my best mates,” Smith
explains. “He was injured and we were in
one of the boxes. Tim Cahill was at Everton
at the time and there was a guy in there, a
typical Australian, casual T-shirt and a pair
of jeans. We got talking to him and he was
coaching the Australian national team! He
was chatting away and I wasn’t playing
at Carlisle. I was trying to get out of my
contract and it was coming to the end of
the season.
“The year before we’d been beaten by
Leeds. And this guy, he’d seen that game,
because there were Australian guys at
Leeds, and he said: ‘Oh I remember you.
You’re left-footed aren’t you? There are no
left-footed boys in Australia, I could get
you out there.’”
Smith was interested. But as with so
much of his 13-year journeyman career
September 2016 | nutmeg | 135

The Players
No regrets
as a player, it would be far from simple.
Arnold told him to keep himself fit, and
in an attempt to leave Carlisle he went
for a trial in Singapore. “I wanted to see
the world,” he recalls. “I went over and
it was a big mass trial thing where clubs
watched you playing 11-a-side games. But
it was terrible, a really poor league, with
worse pitches. The money wasn’t great
either. I think I had two offers but it never
came to anything.” Instead, he ended up
training with an old friend at non-league
Droylsden, and even played for them
in a friendly the day before he flew out
to Australia to sign for former Rangers
midfielder Ian Ferguson, the manager of
North Queensland Fury – where he’d end
up playing with Robbie Fowler, or ‘God’,
as he’s known to Liverpool fans.
“Each club had five visa spots,” he
explains. “But they had four or five
cruciate injuries that season and one of
them was a foreign boy, so I got his spot.
They said they’d sign me until the end of
the season. It was perfect. I loved my time
there, playing with Robbie Fowler. It was
a good league.”
Like so much of Smith’s career, it
didn’t last long. “We missed the play-offs,
and then the club went bankrupt!” he
explains. “That kinda screwed it all. I
ended up at Ross County. So I went from
about 35 degrees to about minus 50. It
was just disgusting. It’s one of the
reasons I ended up chucking it in!”
Just like his time in Finland, his spell
Down Under came as a bit of a culture
shock. “Australians were the opposite
of Finns,” he laughs. “Sometimes you
wished they weren’t quite so loud and
brash… But a lot of the guys were funny. I
ended up having an Australian girlfriend
as well. It was a beach culture. I loved it.
Because it was so hot we trained at night
or early in the morning. My day would be
training at night and then we’d all go for
dinner, all the single boys, and we’d be
out all night and have a lie-in and go to
“I HAD SO MANY CLUBS IT’S
EASY TO LOSE COUNT. MY
WIKIPEDIA PAGE EVEN HAS A
FEW ADDED I NEVER REALLY
PLAYED FOR”
the beach. It was a great lifestyle.
“It was good playing with Robbie. But
his wife and kid didn’t really take to it
over there and they came home. He was
on his own and you know what’s it like
– a Scouser and a Glaswegian – we used
to hang about together. We spent a lot of
time together. It was a dangerous combination!
But we had a good time. We were
stressing too though because you know
you’re not going to be there long, and
there was always talk of the club having
money problems. He could still play. He
still had it. He was playing every game. I
played with plenty of good young players
who went on to have decent careers like
Danny Graham at Carlisle. But as far
as someone you play with that you just
know is going to score, Robbie is up there,
one of the best ever. Even in training his
finishing was top class.”
Fowler would have more of an impact
on Smith’s career than he realised. He fell
out of love with football at Ross County
and started taking his coaching badges,
looking for a new career in the game.
“I was coaching the 15s at Rangers,” he
remembers. “A few of them were asking
me about agents and I was giving them
advice about it, and then one of them
said: ‘Have you never thought about
doing it?’ A kid called Wladimir Weiss, a
Slovakian, came to Rangers and I started
136 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Paul Brown
helping him out. Then I played a little bit
for Airdrie because they’d let me look
into being an agent on the side. But once
I got my licence you’re not allowed to be
affiliated with a club so I had to leave.”
It was here that Fowler came in with
an idea. “I actually started my first agency
with Robbie,” Smith says. “He just said:
‘Why don’t we start one?’ But he wanted
to go into coaching so he did that instead.
I’ve been on my own since then. Looking
back now on my career as a player, I don’t
really have regrets. I never stayed long at
one club. But everything I did, it’s helping
me in the job I have now. The connections
I’ve got, players I’ve played with. There’s
not many people I don’t know.
“I’m not married. I suppose all the
moving around made it difficult. My
Finnish girlfriend lived over here for a bit. I
always thought I’d go back to Finland but it
never really happened. Then an Australian
girlfriend, the same thing happened with
her. She came over here in October or
November and it was just stinkingly dark
and depressing. It was summer in Australia
and I just couldn’t make her do it. Things
happen you know. It’s probably easier to get
a girlfriend in Glasgow now.”
Smith also ventured into a project called
Starsboots, billed as football’s version of
ebay, a website devoted to selling boots
and gloves worn by current players, with
a contribution from the proceeds going to
charity. Fowler and Jagielka were among
those who donated. But the company’s
Twitter account has been dormant since
2012 and its website is no longer in use.
For now, Smith is concentrating all his
talents on representing players rather
than selling their gear.
Looking back, the one regret Smith
owns up to is the way he left Swindon
Town. He spent two seasons there after
signing from Sheffield United in 2003,
where he’d played some of his best
football under Neil Warnock. At Swindon
he played for Andy King, a man he once
described as “a poor man-manager who
held grudges”. King played him at right
back in a League Cup tie against Leeds,
who were then in the Premier League, a
game in which goalkeeper Paul Robinson
scored the winner from a corner in the last
minute. Much later, Smith one day found
himself in Robinson’s house, where he saw
a big picture of that goal mounted on the
wall. He was in it, cowering somewhere
underneath the goalscorer. His relationship
with King soured when he was fined
for being sent off against Notts County in
an FA Cup replay at Meadow Lane in 2004.
In a later interview, Smith said: “We had
a kangaroo court and even though Kingy
admitted it was a dive by the other guy, he
fined me and said they wouldn’t appeal. I
wasn’t that bothered as I was suspended
for Boxing Day so I enjoyed my Christmas
Day off.”
He still feels he left under a cloud
though. “The only regret I probably have is
leaving Swindon,” he tells me. “But at the
time, they were struggling and they offered
me less money than I was on, a one-year
contract because they were struggling for
money. Bristol City were offering me two
years, good money and they were going
to be pushing for the championship.
Swindon went down the next season.”
Looking back, it was probably the right
decision. But then Grant Smith’s story
is all about making the right decisions,
all the way back to his early days at
Rangers. “I didn’t really want to sign for
Rangers because it was too hard to break
through at the time,” he says now. He
went on trial at Wycombe instead because
manager John Gregory was a friend of his
dad’s, and got spotted by Tommy Burns
at Reading, who signed him to his first
professional contract. The rest, as they say,
is history. “I had so many clubs it’s easy
to lose count,” Smith says. “My Wikipedia
page even has a few added I never really
played for.” Apart from the phantom few
on his online profile, you get the feeling
he left his mark on every single one. l
September 2016 | nutmeg | 137

138 | nutmeg | September 2016

Obsessions
‘HOW THE HELL
DO YOU GET RID
OF THREE DAVE
BOWMANS?’
A reformed football stickercollecting
addict considers some
of life’s great imponderables.
By Alasdair McKillop
Illustration by Mark Waters
The ringing of the school bell was
the signal for the day’s trading to get
underway. The goods would be removed
from the pockets of grey trousers or coats;
sometimes held together with a rubber
band, sometimes not. Others would be
liberated from their precarious existence
in bags beside jotters wrapped in brown
parcel paper or wallpaper discards. The
trading invariably took place outdoors
under the shelter of the overhanging roof
where huddles of hagglers sparked up the
day’s transactions. In the background, the
red blaze pitch, so often the scene of great
ebbing and flowing frenzies to which
a football was almost incidental, stood
empty. If there was any desperation in
the air it probably had its roots in a
variation on this problem: How the hell
do you get rid of three Dave Bowmans?
September 2016 | nutmeg | 139

Obessions
Three David Bowmans
It was time to swap football stickers.
The ethos in the playground was as much
Berlin black market as Wall Street stock
market. What was involved was a form
of haggling with your contemporaries
with few agreed rules or conventions in
place to shape the whole thing. One such
convention was that the run-of-the-mill
stickers, that is those featuring football
players, were intrinsically less valuable
than so-called shineys. These were the
sought-after stickers featuring club
badges superimposed on a shimmering,
hologram-like background.
The effect of finding one of these rarities
when shuffling through a packet of
stickers was profound and enough to give
even the badges of clubs you nominally
despised or considered inferior a certain
attractiveness. Unusual badges like those
of Dunfermline appeared even more distinct.
Questions about those squirrels on
the Kilmarnock badge entered your head
for the first time. Thus was the power
of the shiney. If you had one or more of
these in your doubles collection you knew
you would hold the whip-hand in trades
and there would be ample opportunity to
indulge in the sort of cruelties at which
children excel. Or to put it another way,
you could adopt an imperial stance, like
Britain after the Opium Wars, and impose
your will on lesser classmates who
didn’t have the sticker. It’s little wonder
one school in West Yorkshire reportedly
banned children from swapping stickers
in the playground because doing so was
resulting in fights. The school strenuously
denied the claims of mollycoddling but
I’d take little convincing such a thing had
happened somewhere, sometime.
Another widely recognised convention,
although one that was prey to the full
forces of subjectivity and partisanship,
was that stickers of famous players
were of more value than those featuring
relative unknowns. The logic was fairly
easy to understand: the more popular the
IT WAS LIKELY YOU WOULD
HAVE TO PONY-UP A GOOD
FEW STICKERS OF PARTICK
THISTLE OR FALKIRK
JOURNEYMEN TYPES IN
RETURN FOR A BRIAN
LAUDRUP OR PIERRE VAN
HOOIJDONK
player, the more sought after were the
stickers. It was simply demand operating
on supply. It was likely you would have
to pony-up a good few stickers of Partick
Thistle or Falkirk journeymen types in
return for a Brian Laudrup or Pierre van
Hooijdonk. If a trader was in any way
partial to film star good-looks or dashing
heads of hair the likes of which had rarely
been seen in the Scottish game, they
would likely keep any doubles of Laudrup
for their own purposes. If not, you should
expect to trade in stickers the same
amount of players Laudrup would skin in
scoring the average goal.
Accumulating doubles (or even triples
and quadruples) was an inevitable
consequence of the random distribution
of stickers in the packets you would
buy at newsagents or supermarkets.
While potentially a source of frustration,
being burdened with doubles
encouraged the formation of social and
economic relationships around what was
potentially a solitary pursuit. As such,
perhaps Karl Marx or Adam Smith would
have interesting things to say about the
collection and trade of football stickers.
140 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Alasdair McKillop
The obvious advantage of being part of
a trading network was that, in theory,
it would reduce your total outlay. A
professor from Cardiff University’s School
of Mathematics recently calculated it
would cost the average collector £374 to
complete Panini’s Euro 2016 album. This
worked out at 747 packets of stickers at
50p a go to get the 680 stickers required.
The best case scenario, and the one that
would be almost impossible to achieve,
would be to buy 136 packets at a cost of
£68 but this would require no doubles to
be found. The professor calculated the increasing
discounts that could be achieved
by having more and more people to trade
with but this was merely formulas confirming
what any sticker collector already
knows to be true.
An obvious question arises: how does
a child of primary school age come by
the resources necessary to complete a
whole album? Even taking into account
the smaller number of stickers and
reduced price of packets, it seems
unlikely my mid-90s habit could have
been sustained by entirely legitimate or
dignified means. As a bare minimum, I
must have become an expert at pestering
and moaning, now natural survival
skills for small children in our highlydeveloped
consumer society. Additionally,
scrounging for change was encouraged
by packets being sold for 25p. Any baleful
looks I received from shopkeepers would
have been well-deserved considering
the ratio of silver and gold to copper in
the handfuls of smash I was regularly
depositing. But it was worth it. Even
buying, say, eight packets felt like taking
delivery of a bonanza and all for only £2.
Despite the financial pressures and an
addict’s singlemindedness, with careful
husbanding, even meagre resources could
be made to stretch to some sugary or
chewy A-bomb like the late Irn-Bru bar,
Hubba Bubba or Anglo Bubbly.
A form of conditioning took place and it
is possible collecting football stickers plays
an important role in the early stages of the
development of active consumer identities
for the young people involved. In no time
at all you would find it impossible to
enter a shop without naturally scanning
the area around the till for evidence of
those Panini stickers somewhere near
the chewing gum or tobacco products,
the latter offering more lethal forms of
addiction. This was a form of reconnaissance,
the gathering of intel potentially
useful in the future but it’s likely most
collectors had their trusted locals. My
retailers of choice were the newsagents
beside Oxgangs Primary School and at the
top of Merkland Drive in Kirkintilloch.
It was a bitter disappointment indeed if
your chosen shop was out of stock, worse
still if you were momentarily tricked into
thinking otherwise by the presence of a
box of English football stickers. Collecting
English stickers was rare among my
friends and schoolmates but it’s possible
this tendency has been altered in reflection
of wider trends in the game.
Collecting football stickers was a central
feature of my early attachment to football
and I can’t think of my formative years
without thinking also of the pleasurable
memories associated with it. There
was an educational aspect although it
would be misleading to overstate its
importance. The ways in which a young
fan would learn about the game in the
pre-internet age look relatively limited
when compared to the easy access to
information that characterises the present
day. More so than newspaper reports and
more important, even, than attending
or watching matches, collecting stickers
was a way of familiarising yourself with
the names and faces of the game. This
point would apply with particular force
to the majority of teams that you did not
support. It’s entirely possible I’ve never
known as much about the personalities of
Scottish football since I stopped collecting.
September 2016 | nutmeg | 141

Obessions
Three David Bowmans
I had long assumed, based on my
own experience, that the collection
of football stickers was, in the main, a
childhood pursuit. But this is far from
the case and adult collectors no longer
hide in the shadows. Some might choose
to see this as symptomatic of a culture
with abundant examples of grown men
refusing to abandon things like video
gaming, a culture than has elevated comic
book characters into vastly profitable
film franchises. Others might choose
to see it as symptomatic of a different
aspect of society: nostalgia. Without too
much trouble, the simple act of collecting
football stickers could be framed as a
refusal to engage fully with the challenges
of adulthood in the post-industrial 21st
century or to embrace the opportunities
the future has to offer. Instead, you might
stand charged with having opted to pull
your childhood memories over you like a
protective blanket. Or something…
Grown-up collectors aren’t difficult to
track down. Lee Dent, manager at Martins
in Macclesfield, established a weekly swap
shop ahead of the Euros, while Colin
Murray used his column in the Metro
newspaper to confess his obsession is
such that he feared he would try to peel
the back off Mats Hummels if the German
player ever crossed his path. Such is the
perceived popularity of collecting football
stickers among adults, the Three Sisters
pub on the Cowgate in Edinburgh hosted
a sticker swap as part of its World Cup
festivities in 2014. And in perhaps the
ultimate tribute to the cultural credibility
of sticker collecting, the Guardian staged
a fashion photoshoot inspired by Panini
stickers back in 2014.
Quite apart from the time it takes to
follow the game itself, football offers plenty
of opportunities for collection around
the edges. This is not limited to stickers.
In his book Confessions of a Collector,
Hunter Davies reckoned there to be ten
categories of football collectibles ranging
from annuals and magazines to cigarette
cards and stickers. Today’s fans can collect
the Match Attax trading cards produced
by Topps Direct, the company that also
produces SPFL stickers having taken over
from Panini. The Italian company, founded
in 1961, has long been the dominant name
in the UK market. Before Panini there was
the Bradford firm J. Baines Ltd. which produced
different shaped stickers between
1887 and circa1920. These were more
elaborate little productions than those
produced by the likes of Panini, Merlin
or Topps, with some containing quaint
slogans such as ‘Cardiff Take the Cake’. The
end of the Baines era coincided with the
golden age of cigarette cards, which are
similar in many respects to stickers. Davies
reckoned this period spanned the 1920s
and 1930s, with the cards printed on the
cardboard used to stiffen the soft cigarette
packs of the time. Manufacturers even produced
albums for collectors to stick their
cards in and it is estimated there were
around 10,000 different cards produced
between 1900 and 1939.
More generally, Davies suggested there
COLIN MURRAY USED HIS
COLUMN IN THE METRO
NEWSPAPER TO CONFESS
HIS OBSESSION IS SUCH
THAT HE FEARED HE WOULD
TRY TO PEEL THE BACK
OFF MATS HUMMELS IF
THE GERMAN PLAYER EVER
CROSSED HIS PATH
142 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Alasdair McKillop
were two categories of collector: the serious
collector and the accumulator, with
the latter essentially a glorified hoarder.
He charted his own journey from serious
collector to accumulator and back again.
His collections spanned not only football
but the Beatles, stamps, prime ministers
and other areas. This suggests collecting
should be seen as a character trait or a
type of personality rather than simply
an extension of an interest. He argued
that collecting was a sociable pursuit at
all ages but particularly as a youngster.
The collecting bug bit him again well into
adulthood and coincided, tellingly, with
him having more time on his hands and
his children taking up less of his time.
Considering attitudes to completing
a sticker book suggests two different
categories of collector. There are those
for whom the process of collecting
is enjoyable in itself but there are
others who are collecting with a view
to eventually achieving some sort of
completion. When it came to football
stickers, I belonged, in the main, to
the first group. The most pleasure to be
had from collecting stickers was in the
anticipation of a new packet, the prospect
of getting a sticker you’d been chasing
and swapping doubles with friends. On
the other hand, adding a new sticker to
your album was somehow a fleeting and
inconsequential moment. The moment a
sticker was added (as neatly as possible)
to the album its status was somehow
transformed, its value diminished
alongside all the others. A completed
album, therefore, had an ambiguous
status and was never a primary objective.
What value does a full sticker album
have except in its ability to prompt happy
memories of the process of completing it?
Perhaps this is a minority position and
it’s not one I adhered to religiously. For
those who couldn’t complete their albums
through the normal means of buying and
swapping, Panini offered a cheat’s way
out. If you made careful note of the stickers
you needed and provided whatever
sum was required, Panini would send you
the goods. But what a way to dissipate the
thrill of the hunt and the haggle! This was
more like filling in a tax form or ordering
something from your mum’s Avon catalogue.
No doubt there was a public health
dimension to this service but on the
occasion I availed myself of it the sense of
anti-climax was severe. But apparently the
need to collect and complete can linger,
if the exchange of old stickers on website
like eBay and dedicated forums such as
Swap Stick are anything to go by.
No doubt some early collectors of
stickers will abandon their childhood
hobby to pursue the collection of
something considered to be slightly
more respectable such as match day
programmes, tickets or pennants. Others
will stop collecting altogether and still
others will stop and come back again
later in life. For all that collecting has
been sanctioned by some high-profile
names and enabled by accommodating
venues and new technology, the intensity
of my childhood connection prevents
me from considering it an entirely
legitimate hobby for an adult. Respect,
where it’s due, to those who can justify
to sceptical partners spending hundreds
of pounds at a time of economic fragility.
Conflictingly, however, I have limited
time for those who would seek to frame
people’s hobbies or personal interests as
an obstacle to be obliterated as part of
the forward march of society. At a time
when Scottish football doesn’t generate
an abundance of happy moments or,
worse, seems keen to dispense with fans
altogether, it can be useful to draw on
happier times if they are available in the
realm of memory. Happy memories: that’s
what football stickers are for me, at least
at this stage in my life. Well, happy if you
exclude all those bloody Dave Bowman
doubles. l
September 2016 | nutmeg | 143

Obsessions
I CONFESS
I wince to think of the things I
could have achieved in the time
I’ve spent on Football Manager
since becoming addicted 20
years ago.
By Adrian Searle
Imagine this is a support group. A sign
pinned to the noticeboard in the corridor
says Addiction Therapy in 72-point
Comic Sans. We’re meeting in a grim
windowless room in a community centre
with terrible strip lighting and mottled
peach wallpaper. Plastic stacking chairs
have been placed in a circle, a tea urn
bubbles in the corner. There’s a couple
of recovering alcoholics clutching plastic
cups, a coke addict rubbing his nose,
two sex addicts giving each other the
eye, and me. You spend a while trying to
guess why I’m here. A gambler perhaps?
A kleptomaniac? There’s nothing in my
dress or demeanour that offers clues.
After the others have each said their piece
it’s my turn. You sit forward waiting for
me to speak. I clear my throat, look at my
feet in shame and say, ‘My name is Adrian
and I’m addicted to Football Manager.’
For the uninitiated, Football Manager is
a computer game. Each new release sells
around one million copies worldwide.
There is a huge online community who
discuss the game every day and celebrity
fans include popstars, comedians, actors
and professional footballers themselves.
Both David Moyes and Alex McLeish have
admitted using it to identify potential
signings. A book about the game, Football
Manager Stole My Life, published by
Glasgow-based Back Page Press, was an
international bestseller.
First released in the early 1990s, the
Klondike era of computer game design,
the football management simulation was
designed by teenage brothers Ov and Paul
Collyer in their bedroom in the small
town of Church Stretton, Shropshire,
close to the Welsh border. Originally
called Championship Manager, it had no
arcade graphics to speak of, but allowed
would-be gaffers to take control of any
football team in the English or Scottish
leagues, selecting players, setting tactics
home and away, making substitutions,
buying and selling players and developing
prospects from the youth team. Games
played out via a text based commentary.
If not given enough game time, used out
of position, or not offered a pay-rise at the
right moment, managers would have to
cope with disaffected players, plummeting
form and transfer requests.
What might have been perceived as
a weakness – the relatively slow gameplay
of starting each season with several
friendlies and then playing each fixture,
including all league games, domestic and
European cups, with the option of matches
lasting everything from five minutes
(edited highlights) to the full ninety, plus
a full international schedule – turned out
to be one of Championship Manager’s
greatest strengths. The level of control and
detail allows a player to synthesise all the
emotional drama of a real football season
but, unlike the real world and all its impotence,
Football Manager offers the humble
fan the chance to actually influence what
happens on the virtual park.
From its first incarnation the game
quickly developed, new versions
adding leagues from around the world
and new features, including training
set-ups, press conferences, pre-match
mind-games and, eventually, realistic
3-D representations of the matches
144 | nutmeg | September 2016

themselves in ever-increasing detail.
What set the first Championship Manager
apart from its competition was the use
of real players, each with carefully and
accurately scouted attributes. From the
beginning, the game’s creators had the
sense to contact fans from every team
in Britain, asking them to fill out paper
questionnaires on the physical and
mental attributes of every member of
their club’s playing staff and take a guess
at each one’s potential for development.
This was a time long before a functioning
internet and data had to be gathered
by hand. But who knows a team’s players
better than the superfans who travel home
and away and even go to reserve and
youth matches? Football Manager now
has an army of 1,000 researchers covering
every major league across the world,
providing assessments of players long
before they’ve come to the attention of the
scouting networks of major clubs. At the
heart of Football Manager’s success is this
player database. For any football fan it’s an
invaluable resource for building knowledge
of football, both present and future.
Recent Celtic signing Moussa Dembélé
was in a team I managed around four or
five years ago. When Brendan Rodgers
announced his capture I knew exactly
who he was and roughly what the game
thought of his skills and potential at the
beginning of his career while still at Paris
St Germain, where he’d been marked
out as a future star. Checking the current
version’s profile, he’s still highly regarded
without necessarily having the worldbeater
potential originally assumed.
Likewise, when my team, Aberdeen,
signed 22 year-old Jayden Stockley in
June this year and everyone shouted
‘Who?!’, I was able to get an instant
assessment – doubtless from the game’s
Bournemouth scout from whence Stockley
came. It appears he is tall, approximately
6ft 2inches and, according to Football
Manager, not particularly strong, but
is a good header of the ball and can
jump. Chris Sutton he’s not but, for the
money, he could be a useful addition. For
the wages of David Goodwillie, now at
Plymouth in the bottom tier of English
league football after being released,
Aberdeen got Stockley and Miles Storey,
also 22 years old, who scored a few goals
on loan at Inverness Caledonian Thistle last
season. Football Manager reckons Storey
has great physical prowess but is nowhere
near where he should be for his age in
terms of technical ability. In other words,
he’s another Josh Magennis. We’ll need to
wait and see. Another season in the SPFL
and the scouts may revise their opinion.
I first started playing Championship
Manager in the late 1990s. I can’t
remember how I found out about the
game but I do remember becoming
addicted almost instantly. The best word
to describe the experience is immersive.
As someone whose first computer was a
Sinclair ZX81, followed by a Spectrum,
then a BBC B, this was a completely
different approach to the standard handeye
driven arcade games I was used to.
The closest comparison was with the
near-mythic space trading game Elite – a
mix of spacecraft flight simulation, shootem-up,
and a crash course in capitalism
as players bought and sold food, weapons,
slaves, narcotics and alien artefacts,
trading between planets in order to buy
bigger and better weapons with which to
kill more aliens.
Championship Manager introduced
me to the value of paying attention to
my team’s youth squad. As a manager,
unless you’re able to sell one of your stars
for a Goodwillie-sized transfer fee (an
injudicious £2m from Blackburn Rovers),
you’re very dependent on your own
youth system to provide talent. Blooding
the exotically named and long-forgotten
Dons defender Malcolm Kpedekpo or
trying to unlock the enigmatic talents of
Manchester United loanee Alex Notman
September 2016 | nutmeg | 145

Obessions
I confess
were the key objectives in my early
managerial career.
Different people play in different ways
but, when a new edition comes out I’ll
usually play one single career over the
course of 12 months which can equate to
around eight to ten full seasons. With any
luck that takes in domination of the SPFL,
success in both domestic cups, followed
by headway in the Champions League.
With the right signings (using money
from selling one of the club’s best assets
for big cash) a couple of seasons in the
group stages gives a manager a war chest
generous enough to dominate Scottish
football. Within a few seasons the big
boys come calling and, if you choose not
to be a one-club-man, you can try your
hand in the English Premiership, Serie A
or more exotic destinations.
Sometimes, if I get bored I’ll quit a game
as Aberdeen manager and start again at
Stenhousemuir, my wee team where I first
paid to watch football. Lower league management
is a very different challenge, and
mainly involves cobbling together a side
from inexperienced free agents, 18 yearold
loan players from bigger clubs and
veterans whose legs have gone. Another
great way to increase the depths of one’s
football knowledge is by taking the helm
at a lower league or medium-sized English
club. Nottingham Forest and Leicester
have always been favourites and have given
me a bizarre connection with random
I HAVE FANTASISED ABOUT
BEING SENT TO PRISON, SO
I COULD JUST SIT IN A CELL
ALL DAY ON MY COMPUTER
football characters like Eugene Bopp,
a midfielder from Bayern Munich who
signed for Forest as a 17-year-old, leaving
behind the much less fancied Phillip Lahm
and Bastien Schweinsteiger, or Andy King,
whose bit-part appearance in the Euros for
Wales this summer brought a lump to my
throat, having developed him into a great
attacking midfielder in my Leicester side of
a decade ago.
Football Manager also greatly improved
my tactical awareness. Having tried
every formation under the sun, I now
understand much better the pros and
cons of a 4-4-2 versus a 4-2-3-1, the
importance of a poor team staying narrow
to keep possession, and these days when
I watch Aberdeen I can usually predict
what substitutions the manager will make
a good few minutes before they occur.
This has increased both my enjoyment of
football and my know-it-all smugness.
My initiation as a virtual manager
coincided with the birth of my second
daughter. Although I loved her instantly,
and love her still with a ferociousness
that is a source of pride, surprise and
occasional alarm, any father will tell you
how tough the first five years of parenthood
are. She wasn’t a sleeper and would
wake at least twice a night till she went
to school. So a combination of grinding
fatigue and a dearth of baby-sitting
talent on the Southside of Glasgow meant
living with a seven-day-a-week curfew
for more than half a decade. Despite all
the positives of being a parent, which are
many, I hereby confess that those early
years could be stultifying. It was Football
Manager that got me through.
The season my daughter was born,
1999-2000, was a mixed experience
for Aberdeen fans, the start of the Ebbe
Skovdahl era. On the one hand, we signed
some exciting foreign talent, including the
mercurial forward Hicham Zerouali, killed
in a car crash in his native Morocco at the
age of 27 in 2004, and lethal striker, Arild
146 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Adrian Searle
Stavrum, for 16 years the Dons’ top scorer
in the league and who bizarrely has since
become a personal friend. That year we
had a double cup run leading to two finals
at Hampden, although both ended in
embarrassing roll-overs. But in the league,
our proud boast that Aberdeen was the
only club outside the Old Firm never to be
relegated was severely undermined when
we came bottom after a risible campaign,
only to be saved by the state of Brockville
stadium, which prevented Falkirk from
meeting Aberdeen in a play-off through
self-serving SPL rules.
As a child of the 70s and early 80s,
I’d grown up with the expectations of
the Ferguson years and this was truly
the nadir (although Steve Paterson’s
cash-strapped tenure came close). For
me, Football Manager offered the perfect
escape. Working with the same players
in a parallel universe, I turned the team
around through a combination of strong
leadership, cute tactics and some Harry
Redknapp-style wheeler-dealing in the
transfer market.
And this takes one to the heart of Football
Manager’s addictiveness. What better
way to relax after a hard day’s graft
than to retreat into a virtual dimension
where your team are, with a bit of effort,
all-conquering heroes, forgetting that in
the real world they’re still donkeys? Any
psychologist will tell you that we all yearn
for control, especially if we lack it at work
or in our personal lives. Football Manager
offers gamers the chance to be benign
dictators of their own football cosmos.
Another compulsive attraction is the
strength of the narrative. Goals are scored
and conceded in extra time to win or lose
championships. Star players get injured
just before cup finals. While talented players
flounce off to rival clubs for a paltry
thousand pounds more a week, the reliable
journeyman sticks with you, turning
out solid performances week in, week
out. You spot talented youngsters, sign
them, nurture them, put an arm round
them or boot them up the arse when they
need it, and sometimes, if you’re lucky,
they blossom into major stars, to be sold
on for millions. You feel a huge amount of
pride and ownership. You build clubs in
your own image.
Football Manager, just like real football,
is soap opera for men. There are the
heroes and villains, tragedies and twists,
underdogs and victims. But unlike real
football, in the computer game you write
your own script. And you are the principal
character at the heart of the drama.
This is what has kept me devoted for
almost 20 years. So, as we sit here in this
windowless room, in a circle, under the
grim fluorescent lights, addicts of different
kinds to my left and right, I admit that
my addiction to Football Manager has, on
occasion, been out of control. I remember
a family holiday abroad where I spent
virtually every minute I could playing
rather than engaging with my partner and
young children. I remember being spotted
by a friend driving into work during the
morning rush hour, laptop open on the
passenger seat of my car as a match (if I remember
correctly against Dundee United)
played out. Occasionally I’ve played
for 18 hours solid with only the briefest
of breaks. Train travel for work that
should have been spent wading through
paperwork was devoted to climbing the
league. I have fantasised about being sent
to prison, so I could just sit in a cell all day
on my computer. It comes as no surprise to
me that Football Manager has to date been
cited in 35 UK divorce cases.
I wince to think of the things I could
have achieved in the time I’ve spent on
Football Manager. However, I console
myself with the pleasure I’ve gained
and the knowledge I’ve gleaned about
Scottish football and the wider game. The
good news is that, although I still play,
it’s without the frantic, obsessive energy
of my younger years. Well sometimes, at
least. l
September 2016 | nutmeg | 147

Opinion
A QUESTION
OF EMPATHY
The aftermath of this year’s Scottish Cup final says much about the
state of the game – and the state of the country. By Gerry Hassan
Football saturates most of Scotland. It is
one of the things which defines us, creates
numerous identities, and for many years,
was the sole way Scotland had a profile on
an international stage. It fills numerous
conversations and dominates spaces, both
public and private – and affects attitudes,
thoughts and emotions. According to
some measures Scotland is one of the most
football mad parts of Europe, coming third
behind Iceland and Cyprus; the former of
course, now turn out to have got the hang
of how to play the game too!
This isn’t just an essay about football.
Instead it is about the wider and cultural
impact of the game in Scotland and what it
says about us. Too many football conversations
here take place as if the sport was
played in some kind of hermetically sealedoff
bubble – unconnected to our many
contested histories, identities and stories.
If you are a football fan (I guess reading
Nutmeg you might be) but also somewhat
partisan in your support, let me be clear.
I do not hate, or want to denigrate, any
of Scotland’s football clubs, Rangers and
Celtic included, while I do not see any club
as beyond redemption or above reproach.
This year’s Scottish Cup Final between
Hibs and Rangers was a captivating
game of football. Hibs dramatically won
the Scottish Cup for the first time in 114
years and then the chaos and trouble
began. A section of Hibs fans invaded the
pitch. There was aggression and violence
amongst a very small section of the minority
of Hibs fans that breached the barriers.
A tiny number of Rangers fans responded
in a similar manner looking for trouble.
All of this was on live TV. Police and
security seemed briefly stunned and
immobilised. Just as serious was the wave
of reactions, both in the immediate aftermath
and subsequently. Initially, there was
an element of hyperbole, with various TV
commentators comparing it to the Celtic
v Rangers riot at the Scottish Cup final of
1980. This was over-the-top sensationalism:
the 1980 final involved pitched battles
between fans, scores injured, and violence
which lasted for a prolonged period, rather
than the 10 to 15 minutes in May this year.
Yet, while there was the knee-jerk rush
to condemn and blow up into apocalyptic
proportions, just as serious and damning
was the collective denial of large
numbers of those connected in some way
to the day and to the two clubs. Hibs and
Rangers, fans and clubs, spoke in the immediate
period – and days after – in what
amounted to entirely different languages
148 | nutmeg | September 2016

from completely different worlds. It was
as if they were talking about entirely
separate events – bereft of a mutual language
and way of seeing things.
Many Hibs fans dismissed concerns
about misbehaviour and violence. They
ridiculed the claims of Rangers of aggression
and assault of the club’s players and
officials. They were ‘bad losers’, ‘typical
Rangers’, ‘a club in denial’ and one with
‘a wounded entitlement culture’ – unable
and unwilling to adjust to events of the
recent years. Many Rangers fans showed
their anger and fury. They attacked
anyone who wasn’t completely on their
side and those opposed to their interpretation:
‘Rangers’ haters’, ‘out to do this
club down’ and ‘terrorist supporters’.
The Rangers blogger Jonny spoke of a
systematic attempt to dehumanise the
club’s supporters and what he saw as an
‘intellectually empty, sneering, faux moral
superiority’ amongst other fans.
Why this happened seems to say much
about the state of the game and more
today. The cup final troubles seems to
act as a tinderbox and amplification of
a whole pile of simmering resentments
which have been building over the last few
years, and which the football authorities,
rather than addressing, have just hoped
would go away. There is the near-universal
loathing of Rangers in sections of society.
Never the most loved institution in
Scotland, this has reached new levels after
the club imploded, went into liquidation,
and the subsequent train of events. This
has been matched by the indignation and
bewilderment that Rangers fans feel about
being forced to start again in the lowest
league, which they see (wrongly in the
eyes of other clubs) as punishment.
Scottish football has always carried
complicated baggage. There is the feeling
of many Celtic supporters who view
the game as shaped by an anti-Celtic/
anti-Irish Catholic prejudice – from
refereeing, to the media and SFA. Many
even go further and think the roots of this
are to be found in an organised Rangers
conspiracy – which feeds into and shapes
significant sections of the media. Some
think the club has never been fully accepted
as part of Scottish society, and perpetually
see themselves as outsiders, even
underdogs (which clearly has a historical
basis in reality, considering how prevalent
anti-Catholicism and anti-Irish sentiment
was until relatively recently). All of this
leaves for the moment the nature of the
Old Firm cartel, and how Scottish football
has been run as a closed shop since the
advent of professional football in 1893.
In the here and now, there is the big
question of how we get past the hurt
feelings and passions of the last few
years. Rangers as a club never really said
‘sorry’ to their own fans and the wider
game for letting everybody down: for the
administration, liquidation and years of
maladministration and terrible stewardship
of the club beforehand. The rest of
the game mostly saw it as cathartic that
Rangers had to start again in the fourth
tier. Little attempt was made to hold the
olive branch out and understand how the
good Rangers fans had first been betrayed
by David Murray, Craig Whyte and a host
of others, and then left feeling got at by
the rest of the game. Whatever the many
rights and wrongs, it isn’t a great place to
be left: hurt, alone and badly bruised, and
thinking no one understands you.
This isn’t just about football. It is much
more important and serious. After all
rumour has it that football is just a sport,
and ultimately doesn’t matter too much. It
is about society. And it is about what can
only be described across parts of Scotland
as a chasmic public empathy deficit. This
phenomenon could be seen in the recent
Rangers implosion, the reaction of others,
and the club’s re-emergence coming
through the lower leagues. It could be witnessed
in many manifestations of the indyref
amongst some of the most blinkered
September 2016 | nutmeg | 149

Opinion
A question of empathy
zealots. But it can be seen elsewhere in the
way that Scottish politics hasn’t nurtured
pluralism: from the pursuit of the toxic
Tories in the wake of Thatcherism, to the
desire to punish Labour post-Iraq war and
post-Tony Blair and the dogmatic cheerleading
of some nationalists no matter
what they do or don’t do.
None of this emerged overnight. There is
a historical backstory founded in a myriad
of factors such as religion, geography,
terrain, climate, our ‘in bed with an
elephant’ relationship with England, brutal
industrialisation and endemic poverty
and powerlessness in our past. It also has
a more recent contemporary variant in
public life and politics where people wilfully
sit in their own comfort zones and are
happy to try to deny the right and legitimacy
of opposing views. It could be argued
that all of Scotland’s underlying problems
and challenges – economic, social, cultural,
demographic – from the long-term lower
economic growth rate compared with the
rest of the UK, to the educational attainment
gap now flavour of the month with
the Scottish Government, and ‘the Glasgow
effect’ of health inequalities – all have their
origins in this empathy gap.
As a society we have done very little to
recognise this. The exceptions are few and
far between. There is the pioneering work
of the Violence Reduction Unit attempting
to address the origins of crime and
violent behaviour; the trailblazing and
liberating activities of Sistema in Raploch,
Stirling and elsewhere; the argument
of Carol Craig’s ‘The Scots’ Crisis of
Confidence’ published over a decade ago
as a counterblast to conformist thinking,
and the writings, musing and free spirit
of the rapper Loki. These are but a few
examples, and while there are others it
would still be a very, very short list.
We have to talk about this. Rangers are
whether anyone likes it or not a Scottish
club and institution with Scottish tradi-
tions and histories. They represent and say
something about all of ‘us’ as a society. The
same is true in equal measure of Celtic.
Both of them have things to be proud of,
some blemishes, and things they could do
much, much better and confront.
How do we even begin to start facing up
to this? There is the story of recent years
and Rangers’ implosion and road back, and
then the longer story of Rangers and Celtic’s
dominance of the game. How can the
mutual non-understanding, fear and loathing
felt by many Rangers and non-Rangers
fans towards each other be tackled? What
do we do about the football and wider tensions
between the Old Firm and the rest of
football? And what can be done about the
relationship between the supposed beautiful
game and everything else in society?
All of this needs context. A large part,
if not most of the Celtic/Rangers rivalry
today, even when it spills over into violence
and intimidation, isn’t really in any literal
meaning about sectarianism. This is used
as a catch-all description to capture issues
of tribalism, belonging and identity. The
them/us duopoly of the Old Firm with its
well-worn historical reference points and
inappropriate songs celebrating Northern
Irish troubles isn’t really – to use a recent
word – about ‘Ulsterisation’ in any form,
but about mutually antagonistic sporting
traditions which began with religious
roots. The football historian Bob Crampsey
used to have a brilliant description about
how when the term Old Firm was first
coined in 1904, it caught the way the two
clubs worked to play to their captive markets
– fossilising part of Scotland in the
process in a kind of Cold War permafrost.
It is also true that the football fans
who cause trouble even in its broadest
definition are not a majority of society –
or anywhere near a majority of any club’s
supporters. But there is in places a culture
of quiet acquiescence whereby certain
clubs, Celtic and Rangers in particular,
have soft-peddled or refused to challenge
the most problematic strands of their
150 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Gerry Hassan
own traditions, and how some fans have
chosen to represent it.
This reflects football’s place, dominance,
and the emotional investment hundreds
of thousands of fans put into it. It is about
class, but not in any simplistic working
class ‘bad’ / middle class ‘good’ dichotomy,
but what is seen as permissible and not
permissible. There is a West of Scotland
dimension – which then again isn’t to say
other parts of the country are immune.
Then there is the thorny aspect of gender
and certain manifestations of Scottish masculinity.
A couple of years ago, St Andrews
University produced academic research
which showed a link between Old Firm
matches and spikes in domestic violence
in Glasgow. To some of us it didn’t seem
surprising, but it was illuminating that
Celtic and Rangers both chose publicly to
dismiss the research saying it hadn’t proved
the link: the two clubs united once more in
defence of denying domestic violence.
In the last four years, there has been
an absence of regular Celtic v Rangers
matches, with a mere two cup-ties
between the pair. After all the prophecies
of Armageddon and even one local economic
development agency calculating
that its absence could cost the Glasgow
economy £120m over three years, the
city has felt a freer, gentler, safer place.
You could almost sense it in the air: the
absence of the merry-go-round and
media circus, the build-ups and tensions,
and expectation of altercations, even
violence. Most of that is about Scottish
(and a sprinkling of Northern Irish and
Irish) men.
The Scotland with no or little empathy
is a society which doesn’t acknowledge
the rights of others. If you live and think
in a bunkerist mindset, the world looks
simple and like a battlefield. That kind
of attitude is not particularly healthy for
any individual, nor is it conducive to early
21st century life. We do need to confront
this difficult stuff. We need the courage to
face up to our own internal demons, the
bitterness and rage that still has hold in
sections of our society, and confront those
who reference past battles they know
little about to validate problem views
today. This is about so much more than
football, and how for some, no matter
how packed or empty their lives are,
football is elevated into this uncontrollable
passion when ultimately it is only a
sport. What does that say about Scotland
in 2016 and what some of us lack, and
clearly revel in lacking?
Empathy requires putting yourself in
other’s shoes. One standard defence of the
Hibs pitch invasion was that it was in the
words of Hibs fan Simon Pia “an explosion
of joy”, a ‘“carnival atmosphere” and “the
ecstasy after the agony”. Now while Simon
did go on to condemn the violence, this
was after several minutes in the above
vein, and he still talked about the troubles
being “overhyped” and “overspun”. One
Hibs fan reflected that in recent years,
“the deep hatred of Rangers has gotten
worse” and that the Offence Behaviour at
Football Act has made all this even more
poisonous, as part of Rangers’ support is
seen to act with “immunity”.
Imagine if it had all been the other way
around and Rangers, having won the cup
in the last minutes coming from behind,
celebrated in a cathartic way their first
major trophy triumph since the ignominy
of liquidation. Would large sections of
Scotland listen to their explanations of celebration
and collective joy, or would they
see it as something darker, about intimidation,
wanting to settle old scores, and an
element of triumphalism? The answer is
obvious, and it cannot be right that we
have such blatantly different criterion for
one club and another for everyone else.
At times in the last four years I have had
negative comments and threats from some
Rangers fans, when I wish their club no
ill will at all, merely to challenge some of
the worst things which have happened
September 2016 | nutmeg | 151

Opinion
A question of empathy
By Gerry Hassan
in that institution. But Rangers cannot be
singled out and treated differently from
everyone else, and the widespread conceit
self-evident in many Celtic fans (some of
whom even go blue with rage at the mention
of the term Old Firm with its implied
equivalence) is equally problematic.
It has to be possible to discuss such
subjects maturely – beyond the mental
barricades. In the aftermath of the match,
I penned a piece for the Scottish Review
reflecting some of the above, in the same
tone and avoiding making cheap, partisan
points. The response was fascinating. In
today’s world there is a propensity to say
that due to social media and the intolerance
of some, it is impossible for nuance
to be heard and thus hate and abuse often
carries all before them – the EU referendum
being the latest example cited.
However, my intervention got the exact
opposite response, including on social
media and twitter. Virtually all Rangers
fans who commented upon it, and we
are talking hundreds of responses, were
respectful and thoughtful, and recognised
that my piece tried to reach out and
understand them and their club. I found
that heartening and galvanising, and feel
that it must offer some wider points for
how football and more important matters
are discussed in Scotland. It suggests that
if empathy, nuance and subtlety can be
put forward, and black and white thinking
challenged, different voices can be heard
and have an impact, even amid the noise
and name-calling that passes for how
many public controversies are defined.
On a practical level, any thoughts of
the abolition of the badly put together
Offensive Behaviour at Football Act can
be shelved at least for a period, as can any
Jim Murphy-like relaxation of alcoholic
drinking at football grounds. There was
an air of soft, misty booziness at the cup
final, aided by sunny Glasgow weather. It
seems as if sections of Scottish society still
don’t want to grow up: a judgement amply
multiplied by the post-fracas reactions.
Somehow we have to heal the wounds
of the last few years, of the Rangers
crash and burn, and the ripples it sent
through the game and society. These were
momentous events, and we are going to
live with their after-effect for years to
come, the normal order having been severely
disrupted. For some – the football
authorities, TV broadcasters, and much
of the media – this coming season will be
a welcome return to normal service, and
the regular circus of the Old Firm fixture
and all that entails.
That seems to be the summit of aspirations
for how some of the guardians and
advocates of the game see the domestic
scene: as a kind of closed shop of competition,
offering the most predictable and
stale menu year in, year out. There is a
paradox that allows this unedifying spectacle
to be maintained with no plans or
designs to change it, with the continuing
fact that this is still overall a football-crazy
nation. The latter has bred complacency
for generations, and bizarrely, an aversion
to any kind of far-reaching change. But in
reality, in an increasingly globalised world,
maintaining Scotland’s farce of noncompetition
only condemns our football
to a slow decline, in skills, prestige and
rewards. Celtic Chief Executive Peter
Lawwell spoke of this when he commented:
“There is a colonisation of the game in
Scotland by the English Premiership,” and
that is the slow decline that is our future
(The Herald, August 29, 2014).
While Scottish football faces all of these
intense challenges, the emotional baggage
and weight the game carries in Scotland,
in many respects, burdens and holds it
back. Much of our proud and wonderful
legacy can be seen as golden memories
which prevent us from seeing the uncomfortable
truths in front of us: such as the
evoking of the England 1967 and Holland
1978 triumphs, Jim Baxter keepie-ups and
Archie Gemmell wonder goal.
Not only that, after all the epic chaos
and transformations society has gone
152 | nutmeg | September 2016

through in recent decades, we have to
ask: do parts of our society invest too
much in our game? Why do some working-class
and middle-class men fill part of
the meaning and emotional canvas of life
with football, and sometimes to an extent
which becomes a problem? This touches
on the role of masculinity, changes in
gender and work roles, the relationship
of men to fathers, and inter-generational
memories. In this age of immense change
and instability, for some football provides
this constant and emotive thread to the
past and to supposedly simpler times.
Of course, there had to be an official
report into it headed up by some bigwig.
This being Scotland, it didn’t address any
of the fundamentals and had some miserly
recommendations in ‘best’ SFA tradition.
Warning players who score from the dangers
of over-exuberance and over-exciting
fans, is straight from the world of buttonedup,
Ernie Walker land and cloud cuckoo.
What could a report have realistically
said: that the last four years carry an
open wound in Scottish football, that
the authorities just want it to go away,
that ‘Armageddon’ was avoided, but
no explanation given, and little insight
gained? That is never the point of such
reports. Instead, the disruption and
unpredictability of recent times saw
another opportunity for fundamental
change lost. It is back to business as usual,
and the football authorities (and most of
the media hope), the stale, failing duopoly
that is the ‘Old Firm’ (and yes, Celtic fans
it still exists. Ask yourself why you still
care so much?).
Football in Scotland still carries too
much baggage. It is good to dream, hope
and even escape, but some of the energies
invested in the game by some of the
football fans could well be better spent on
more important concerns. Who knows
what kind of Scotland might emerge if
we normalised our football passions? We
might be a better, more at ease, nation. l
OFFENSIVE AND
UNJUSTIFIED
The pitch invasion which marred the end of this year’s cup final could
have far-reaching consequences for the Scottish game, consequences
which supporters do not deserve says Christopher Marshall
There are certain moments seared
into the collective consciousness of the
Scottish football fan: Archie Gemmill’s
mesmeric run and goal against the Dutch
at the 1978 World Cup; Jim Baxter’s keepyuppies
when Scotland defeated the Auld
Enemy – and then world champions – in
1967 or James McFadden’s long-range
screamer against France at the Parc des
Princes in 2007.
Another indelible image to add to the
list is that of members of the Tartan Army
balancing on the crossbar at Wembley
following Scotland’s famous 1977
September 2016 | nutmeg | 153

Opinion
Offensive and unjustified
By Christopher Marshall
victory over England in the British Home
Championship.
Among the apologists for the ugly
scenes which marred the end of this year’s
Scottish Cup final between Rangers and
Hibs were those who likened the pitch invasion
at full time to the jubilation shown
by those Scottish fans nearly 40 years ago.
To make that comparison, however, is to
underplay the seriousness of the trouble
which took the sheen off Hibs’ historic
victory – just as it is unfair to suggest what
happened is in any way similar to the 1980
Hampden riot, where groups of Rangers
and Celtic fans fought running battles as
the police attempted to restore order.
But just as the 1977 pitch invasion acted
as a precursor for the dark days of the
1980s, when hooliganism was on the rise
and fans were treated with contempt by
the authorities, so too could this year’s
cup final come to mark a defining chapter
in the history of our national game.
As a young football fan in the 1980s,
I remember being transfixed by the
entirely odd – and short-lived – spectacle
of the Rous Cup. A successor to the Home
Championship, the Rous Cup ran from 1985
to 1989 and latterly became a mini league
comprising England, Scotland and a South
American nation. Brazil, Colombia and
Chile all took part before the annual fixture
was consigned to history against a backdrop
of hooliganism and the Hillsborough
tragedy. England and Scotland would not
meet again until Euro ‘96.
While Scottish football in 2016 is light
years from the controversies of the 1980s,
supporters are once again beginning to
feel victimised. Much of that anger is a
direct result of the Scottish Government’s
Offensive Behaviour at Football and
Threatening Communications Act, which
came into force in March 2012.
This much-maligned piece of legislation
grew out of the reaction to the Old
Firm “shame game” of 2011 when three
Rangers players were sent off and police
made more than 30 arrests within the
confines of Celtic Park. There was also
the infamous touchline bust-up between
managers Ally McCoist and Neil Lennon.
There is undoubtedly a bigger issue
about the effect Old Firm games have on
crime levels, with the associated spike in
domestic violence incidents being particularly
shameful. But those are not the sort
of incidents the Offensive Behaviour Act
was brought in to deal with.
The Act applies to incidents “at, on
the way to or from” matches, as well as
anywhere a game is being broadcast (with
the exception of private homes). Keen to
be seen to do something following the
2011 “shame game”, the SNP government
hurriedly introduced the legislation, now
widely regarded as a knee-jerk reaction.
It is fair to say the Act has not been short
of critics. Sir Tom Devine, one of Scotland’s
most eminent historians, described
it as the “most illiberal and counterproductive”
ever passed by the Scottish
Parliament. Stuart Waiton, an academic
at Abertay University in Dundee, calls the
Act the “logical development” of the “intolerant
times” in which we live. “Speech
crimes are becoming the norm in a
culture which encourages a thin-skinned,
chronically offended and anti-social
individual to flourish,” he says.
“The problem is not this one bill, it’s
all the other laws that have undermined
basic liberal principles of free speech
based on politically correct ideas that
appear progressive but replace politics
and arguments with policing and prison.”
Moves are now under way to have the
legislation repealed at Holyrood; a very
real possibility after the nationalists lost
their majority at May’s election. But an
even bigger development, which could
have far-reaching implications for the
national game, could soon be on the way.
Following the trouble at May’s cup final,
Justice Secretary Michael Matheson once
again raised the possibility of Scotland
154 | nutmeg | September 2016

adopting so-called “strict liability”. The
Scottish Government minister has left
Scotland’s clubs under no illusion: kick
violence and disorder out of the game or
have strict liability imposed on you.
Already used in European competition,
strict liability can see clubs fined, docked
points or forced to play games behind
closed doors as a punishment for the
behaviour of their fans. Both Celtic and
Rangers have fallen foul of this legislation
in recent years while playing in the
Champions League and Europa League.
Regardless of what happens to the
Offensive Behaviour Act and to strict
liability, Scottish football appears to be at
a bit of a crossroads. Indeed, a report by
Sheriff Principal Edward Bowen into the
trouble at the cup final has called for the
Scottish Government to consider making it
an offence to run onto a football pitch.
No-one wants to see a repeat of the
scenes which marred Hibs’ first Scottish
Cup win in 114 years, but legislating for
trouble hasn’t worked. Strict liability may
be one answer, but another is to treat fans
with the respect they deserve.
The overwhelming majority of Scottish
football supporters follow their team in a
peaceful and law-abiding fashion. While
bringing back alcohol at matches is probably
a step too far, initiatives such as the
introduction of safe standing at Celtic Park
are vital for improving the lot of supporters
left feeling increasingly disenfranchised
from the running of the national game.
If as much attention had been paid to
issues such as ticket prices and fan ownership
as it has to criminalising supporters
over the past few years, the average
Scottish football fan would be revelling
in the here and now, not just constantly
re-living glories of the past. l
STAND UP FOR
YOUR RIGHTS
The quest for a family-friendly match-day experience is ruining
Scottish football for the average fan. No standing, no booze, no pyro
often means no atmosphere and no enjoyment. Why are supporters
in Scotland treated so differently from those in other countries?
By Martin Stone
Since the inception of the SPL in 1998,
Scottish football has pursued a relentless
agenda of promoting our game as
a family-friendly ‘product’. All-seated
stadia, legislation to deal specifically
with the issues of ‘offensive behaviour’ at
matches, special police units dedicated to
enforcing this legislation – just some of
the initiatives aimed at smoothing off the
rough edges of our national sport in the
hope of attracting more families through
the turnstiles.
September 2016 | nutmeg | 155

Opinion
Stand up for your rights
Against the backdrop of a downward
trajectory in attendances, any attempt
to encourage kids to forgo the myriad of
alternative pursuits should be applauded.
Securing the next generation of fans is vital
to the long-term health of our game. The
wee guy dragged along to the fitba – who
barely watches the hoof ball played out in
front of him and only really cares about the
crappy mascots – will hopefully be gripped
by the same fervour as so many of us have
and be taking our place in years to come.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the
strategy has been a qualified success: the
numbers of families attending games
appears to this observer to have increased
dramatically in the past 15 years.
However, the continued obsession with
honing the match-day experience to the
family audience, to the exclusion of all
other demographics, is based on a fallacy:
the assumption that there are swathes of
families waiting to be converted to the
cause if only the authorities can make
the experience that bit safer, that bit
friendlier, that bit more sanitised.
According to a survey of almost 7,000
Scottish football fans carried out in 2012,
the need for a more family-friendly
environment didn’t register in the top 10
reasons given as barriers to respondents
attending more home fixtures. The biggest
obstacle was the price of tickets. Other
factors included the quality of football on
display, the prohibition of standing within
the stadiums, poor match atmosphere
and the inability to buy alcohol within the
stadium.
In fact, when asked about the importance
of various elements of the matchday
experience, the fily-friendly factor
was ranked as 7th out of 14. Even more
tellingly, respondents felt that clubs were
outperforming expectations in the familyfriendly
stakes, while falling well short in
terms of the atmosphere at games, which
was rated as the 2nd most important
factor.
The results of the survey are conclusive.
There is a consensus that the match day
experience is suitably family friendly.
There appears to be little to be gained by
pushing this agenda any further.
And what of those left behind in the
wake of the relentless march towards the
family-friendly utopia?
The same survey showed that the
crowds at Scottish football matches are
still overwhelmingly comprised of the
traditional lifeblood of the game – blokes
aged between 18 and 40, many of whom
like a few drinks before the game, who
head along to support their team and
have a laugh with their mates. You’d
expect given the amount of money they
pour into the coffers that their opinions
would be respected and their support
highly valued. You’d be wrong.
These punters are not only being ignored
but are increasingly being trampled
beneath the family-friendly juggernaut.
Over the past few years the following
measures have been rolled out by the
Scottish Government, Police Scotland and
the governing bodies:
l The Scottish Government introduced
specific legislation (The Offensive
Behaviour at Football and Threatening
Communications Act 2012) to differentiate
between “offensive behaviour” carried
out at football matches from anywhere
else in Scotland. Why football required
its own law and what actually constitutes
behaviour offensive enough to merit
prosecution is another matter.
l Soon after the act was passed a
full-time unit was established by Police
Scotland to ensure the law was pursued to
its fullest extent. The FOCUS unit is made
up of 14 specialist officers whose only
job is to seek out those guilty of footballrelated
offensive behaviour on match days
and on social media.
l In January this year came the latest
brainchild of the SPFL: the potential introduction
of facial recognition software
at Scottish grounds. The theory being that
156 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Martin Stone
already impoverished clubs would install
expensive equipment at the turnstiles to
scan the face of every paying customer in
a bid to weed out potential troublemakers.
Thankfully the idea appears to have
been kicked into the long grass with the
refusal of the Scottish Government to
subsidise the scheme to the tune of £4m.
The trouble is that the idea gained any
credence in the first place. This is not
some dystopian vision of the future, this
is Scotland in 2016.
Supporters are now accusing the
authorities of being criminalised by them
and it’s a notion which is hard to argue
with when you look at the draconian
measures being inflicted upon us. The
detachment between the authorities and
a significant number of fans should be
sounding alarm bells in the corridors of
power. There appears to be a real danger
that those fans who follow their teams
the length and breadth of the country
may decide it just isn’t worth the hassle
any more. The game they fell in love with
increasingly feels like it’s slipping away,
replaced with a pale, sterile imitation.
What I wanted to know was whether
our story is unique or are the same
feelings of supporter dissatisfaction being
echoed in stadiums across Europe? Are
our feelings of persecution justified or is
the game alienating fans on a wider level?
I decided to have a look at the matchday
experiences of fans in European
leagues comparable with our own. I
needed a yardstick to measure how
bad we’ve got it in Scotland. Are other
There is a
consensus that
the match day
experience is suitably family
friendly. There appears to be
little to be gained by pushing
this agenda any further.
countries able to balance the need to attract
more families without marginalising
their traditional fan base?
I settled on Denmark, Sweden and
Norway as the basis for this case study. All
three countries have suffered the same
downward trend in attendances over the
past decade and are battling to attract fans
back through the turnstiles. They are also
having the same discussions as us: league
reconstruction, the merits of summer
versus winter football and the use of artificial
surfaces. However, their discussions
are taking place against a backdrop of fan
engagement and match-day experience
light years ahead of our own.
There were three areas in particular
which they are getting right which would
have a transformative effect on our game
if we were able to follow suit: standing
at games, the sale of alcohol inside the
stadiums and the use of pyrotechnics.
1. Safe Standing
Standing within Scottish top-flight
stadiums has been banned since 1994
in the aftermath of the tragic events at
Hillsborough. What I hadn’t realised until
recently is that although the recommendations
of the Taylor Report, which was
released in the aftermath of Hillsborough,
are enshrined in English law, the requirement
for all-seated stadiums in Scotland
was applied on a voluntary basis; there is
no requirement for it in Scots law.
In 2011, spurred on by pressure applied
by the Celtic Trust, Celtic approached the
SPL about the possibility of introducing
safe-standing sections, as pioneered
in the Bundesliga, to Celtic Park. In an
uncharacteristic display of rationality, the
SPL conditionally approved the introduction
of safe standing in Scotland.
More than five years later, only now
is Celtic’s 2,600-capacity innovative
seating/standing hybrid section in place.
The tortuous process that Celtic had to go
through to turn this pioneering proposal
into reality says much about the attitude
September 2016 | nutmeg | 157

Opinion
Stand up for your rights
of the powers-that-be towards Scottish
clubs and their fans.
In their wisdom, when the SPL made
their landmark announcement in 2011 they
also slipped in the caveat that the implementation
of standing sections would be
conditional on approval by local authority
safety committees and the police.
Prior to this, Scottish Police Federation
chairman Les Gray had set out his stall
when he released the following statement
to the media: “People have this romantic
idea about standing areas. There’s nothing
further from the truth, they are dangerous.
People go into a standing area because
they want to misbehave. They will tell you
it’s for the atmosphere but invariably you
get a crowd of people who misbehave. If
you’re in a seat you are easily identifiable.
It starts off with great intentions but even
with a small controlled number, it doesn’t
work. We have all-seater stadiums for a
reason. Standing areas are a nightmare.”
By rights the only involvement from the
police should have been in an advisory
capacity as part of local authority safety
committees. No laws were being broken
nor amended. However, their stance was
clear: they would object to these proposals
at every turn and do everything in
their power to obstruct them.
Celtic followed up their initial
representations to the SPL with a formal
application to Glasgow City Council (GCC)
in 2012. This application was finally approved
in June 2015 following a gruelling
process which included two rejections of
the proposal. The process required Celtic
to commission numerous feasibility studies,
the preparation of an independent
study by a subject matter expert and a
massive amount of administrative work.
The process is estimated to have cost
Celtic in excess of £100k.
The basis for the two rejections by the
GCC Safety Advisory Group (SAG) and the
justification for delaying the approval by
three years are poorly documented. What
is clear is that Police Scotland was able
Vålerenga will be
the first Norwegian
club to utilise “safe
standing” rail seating when
their new stadium is opened
in 2017. In sharp contrast with
Celtic’s travails this installation
has not been subject to a
protracted approval process;
in fact no governing body
intervention was required.
to exert an inordinate amount of control
on the SAG. I spoke to various sources
who were stunned by the extent of Police
Scotland’s influence in what is essentially
not a matter for the police. I heard
numerous allegations about the reasons
behind Police Scotland’s objections, including
personal politicking, self-interest
and a refusal to back the proposals due
to the association with Celtic’s Green
Brigade group.
The most worrying allegation was that
the objections were not even based on
safety concerns but instead centred on
the ease of policing standing sections.
This was allegedly confirmed during
one meeting of the SAG when the police
raised the possibility of erecting fencing
around the standing area. Given the role
fencing played in historic stadium disasters,
the short sightedness of this proposal
seems incredible.
The standing section at Celtic Park is
effectively being used as a trial run for the
rest of Scottish football. Whether Police
Scotland allow it to be successful remains
to be seen.
Meanwhile, despite suffering crowd
trouble during the 1970s and 80s, standing
spectators have been an enduring sight
in Scandinavian football. Standing is
currently allowed in all three of the Nordic
158 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Martin Stone
countries I looked at. All 16 top-flight
stadiums in Sweden contain standing sections
and the concept of “safe standing”
does not even enter the thinking - many
grounds retain old-school terracing long
since lost from the UK.
Vålerenga will be the first Norwegian
club to utilise “safe standing” rail seating
when their new stadium is opened in
2017. In sharp contrast with Celtic’s travails
this installation has not been subject
to a protracted approval process; in fact no
governing body intervention was required.
Scandinavian fans regard it as a fundamental
right of supporters to choose how
they watch the game. Standing isn’t viewed
as intrinsically less safe than sitting.
2. Booze Ban
In the aftermath of large scale rioting
in the 1980 Scottish Cup final between
Rangers and Celtic, the sale of alcohol
within football stadiums in Scotland
was made illegal by the passing of the
Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 1980. That
final was the culmination of drink-fuelled
violence that had blighted the Scottish
game for years.
The footballing and cultural landscape
has changed dramatically in the 30 odd
years since the ban was introduced. Even
though half of all people attending games
today take a drink before the game,
violent disorder within stadiums has been
virtually eradicated.
Recent years have seen a groundswell of
opinion advocating a rethink. A total of
62% of respondents to the 2014 SDS poll
were in favour of lifting the alcohol ban,
while 72% advocated the introduction of a
small-scale trial.
There have been sporadic efforts at
relaxing the restrictions, most recently a
populist move by former Scottish Labour
leader Jim Murphy in 2014. Yet again
Police Scotland was hot on his heels,
Chief Constable Stephen House stating
at the time that he would be “extremely
concerned by any proposal to amend
legislation in respect of alcohol at
football matches in Scotland.”
Detractors will point to the recent
trouble at the Scottish Cup final as
evidence that widespread disorder at
matches is only ever just over the brow of
the hill. This isolated incident, completely
uncharacteristic of Scottish football in the
past few decades, will now be cited by
governing bodies and lawmakers as justification
for refusing to even contemplate
removing the ban.
There is a phrase in legal circles
which feels particularly pertinent when
considering the wider impact this game
should be allowed to have on our liberties
as fans: “Hard cases make bad law”.
That game represented an almost
unique set of circumstances: a more
volatile than normal atmosphere amongst
the fans due to recent spats between
the clubs which was then exacerbated
by a last-minute winner which ended
Hibernian’s 114 year wait to lift the trophy.
Even then, the explosion of emotion from
both sets of fans at the final whistle could
have been contained had it not been for,
somewhat ironically, inadequate policing.
The highly improbable confluence
of these contributing factors shouldn’t
be allowed to inform our match-going
experience for years to come. The 99%
of us who are able to drink sensibly and
act like responsible adults should be
allowed to do so, while the police ensure
any trouble is handled in the same way as
any other alcohol-fuelled incident which
occurs on any given Saturday night across
the country.
As you might have guessed the story
across the North Sea is very different.
Alcohol is readily available at all grounds
in Sweden and Denmark. A modicum
of control is in place with the alcohol content
of the beer on sale being restricted:
2.1 to 3.5% in Sweden and 3.5 to 4.1% in
Denmark.
The availability of booze means fans
arrive earlier at the ground than we
September 2016 | nutmeg | 159

Opinion
Stand up for your rights
are accustomed to in Scotland. Fans in
Sweden and Denmark arrive between
30 and 90 minutes before kick-off. They
enjoy a few pints, have some food, pump
much-needed revenue into their clubs
and generally contribute to an atmosphere
that builds to kick-off.
3. No Pyro, No Party?
The use of pyro (i.e. smoke bombs and
flares) within stadiums doesn’t do much
for me personally as I’ve no real desire to
stand in a plume of smoke while trying
to watch the game. There is however a
section of fans in Scotland, enthralled by
images of sweeping curvas in European
stadiums lit up with flares and draped in
flags, that is determined pyro should be
part of our match-day experience.
Norway allows pyro displays providing
they are sanctioned by the clubs in
advance and are carried out by trained
individuals. In theory it is the same
situation in Sweden and Denmark, but
both countries are currently working out
the finer details of how these rules will be
implemented.
The key difference is how the
Scandinavian authorities deal with the
demand for pyro. Nordic associations,
including their police forces, have had
progressive, round table conversations
with the fans to explore solutions which
meet the needs of all parties. They are
intent on finding safe ways of satisfying
customer demand.
The Scottish approach on the other
hand appears to centre on the implementation
of punitive measures in the hope
the topic will disappear from the agenda:
a young Motherwell fan has recently been
jailed for five months for letting off a
smoke bomb inside Fir Park.
There are clearly safety concerns where
pyro is involved and many people want
nothing to do with it. However, at a time
when clubs are trying to get as many
fans through the turnstiles as possible,
no avenue should be left unexplored. The
current trend of young lads sneaking in
uncontrolled pyro and discharging them
in crowded areas is the biggest risk. Surely
our clubs are able to implement controls
to allow the aspiring ultras to have their
fun while safeguarding other spectators?
Other European countries
The argument that Scandinavian fans enjoy
much greater freedoms and a more enjoyable
day out as a result is pretty compelling,
but what of other European countries? Is
Scandinavia particularly progressive?
The table below shows you how fans in
seven other Western European countries
fare compared to Scotland. The reality
reinforces all of our negative perceptions.
We certainly are being treated differently
to our European peers. In footballing
terms, we are being criminalised.
Call to Arms
The silent majority need to make their
voices heard. The authorities need to be
made aware that the continued pursuit
of the family-friendly agenda to the
exclusion of all else needs to stop. The
hard working punters who hand over
their cash at the turnstiles and want to
stand, have a few beers and maybe even
take part in some organised pyro, have
as much right to be accommodated as
families. There is no justification for us to
be treated so badly in comparison with
our European counterparts.
I have two young daughters who I take
to Pittodrie on occasion. They barely
watch the game but they are enthralled
by the sensory experience: the buzz of the
crowd, the smell of the burgers, Angus
the Bull firing some Fruit of the Loom
t-shirts into the crowd.
I also attend games with a group of
mates. We have a few pints before and
after the game, sing a few songs, dish out
some good-natured abuse to opposition
fans and let off some steam. There is no
reason why our game can’t cater for both
of these scenarios. l
160 | nutmeg | September 2016

Tales from the memory bank
THE HEARTBREAKER:
THE STORY OF
AN UNFULFILLED
NORWEGIAN GENIUS
‘The Garrincha of the Nordics’
was regarded as the most
scintillating player of his
generation in his home
country and for a brief period
wowed fans in Scotland. But
few people outside his home
country and the Scottish club
he graced are likely to know
much about him
By Nils Henrik Smith
He was the most mesmerising player
his compatriots had ever seen. He made
his international debut aged 17 and ran
rings around World Cup finalists. He led
his hometown club to consecutive league
titles and earned 25 full caps before he
was old enough to vote. His ability was
acknowledged by the most successful
British manager of all time. He had a
horse race named after him. And he died,
aged 44, still wearing his football boots
and old national team shirt. His nickname
was ‘The Garrincha of the Nordics’, but
few football fans outside of his home
country and the Scottish club he graced
are likely to have heard of him. This is the
story of Roald ‘Kniksen’ Jensen.
Brash and fiercely independent, Bergen
ticks all the traditional second-city
boxes. Once a member of the Hanseatic
League, the northern European trading
block formed in the 13th century by the
region’s most important merchant towns,
the ‘city between the seven mountains’
was for centuries Norway’s main gateway
to the world, taking no small amount
of pride in its cosmopolitan, quasi-
162 | nutmeg | September 2016

separatist outlook, enshrined in the
popular song and slogan “I’m not from
from Norway, I’m from Bergen!” This
peculiar local identity, of course, is also
frequently reflected in the mirror of
football. Bergen’s undisputed powerhouse
is Brann, which translates as Fire, and
rarely can a football club have been
more appropriately named. Famous for
the passion of its fans and the perpetual
volatility of its boardroom, the club has
more often than not struggled to live
up to its undoubted potential, which –
paradoxically, perhaps – accounts for a
great deal of its popularity. Inspiring blind
faith and blind fury in equal measure,
this is an institution both defined by and
defining of the city it calls home.
Born in Bergen in 1943, Roald Jensen
grew up in an austere post-war Marshallplanned,
sugar-rationed society, with
limited scope for individual selfexpression.
Nonetheless, he developed
into the ultimate Kjuagutt – local slang
for the archetypal street-smart, irreverent,
flamboyant kid, essentially a
Scandinavian, social-democratic version
of the Argentinian cult of the Pibe (if
such a concept is imaginable). At the age
of four, he was given his first football
by his father, and there was no turning
back. Honing his skills by spending
untold hours doing keepy-uppies and
smashing the ball against the wall of his
childhood home, he soon made a name
HE MADE HIS INTERNATIONAL
DEBUT AGED 17 AND RAN
RINGS AROUND WORLD CUP
FINALISTS.
for himself. His first club – formed with
friends with whom he’d play in Bergen’s
narrow alleyways – was called Dynamo
in honour of the Muscovite idols who had
bewildered British crowds during the
Russian club’s famous tour of 1945. The
Bergen version routinely won games by
twenty-plus goal margins, with the tiny,
frail dribbling wizard either scoring or
making most of them. He quickly became
known as ‘Kniksen’, after the verb knikse,
to do tricks with the ball.
Eventually, he joined Brann’s youth
set-up alongside several of his Dynamo
pals. He was ten. Younger than most
and smaller than all of his teammates,
he nonetheless continued to dominate
games, despite opponents often deploying
brutal tactics to stifle him. In 1959
he was the star of the junior side that
reached its second consecutive Norwegian
Youth Cup Final. The game was played at
Brann Stadion, and a 10,000-plus crowd
turned up to watch the boy wonder who,
according to contemporary press reports,
won the semi-final “on his own”. (He
later said he could never accept such
praise as it was also “an implicit criticism”
of his teammates.) Brann retained the
trophy, and a few weeks later, as Kniksen
turned out at home for Norway’s juniors,
14,000 Bergeners showed up to worship
their new idol. To put those figures into
context, the entire population of Bergen
at the time was approximately 115,000.
This was Kniksen-mania.
It was evident, then, that young Jensen
had to be accommodated into the firstteam
without delay. Appropriately, it
was a coach known as Saint Peter who
opened the Pearly Gates. Upon arrival in
Bergen in 1960, the Hungarian Tivadae
Szentpetery opted to introduce a Magical
Magyaresque formation, with the centreforward
and wingers withdrawn and the
nominal inside-forwards – Kniksen on
the right and his great friend Rolf Birger
Pedersen on the left – playing alongside
September 2016 | nutmeg | 163

Tales from the memory bank
The Heartbreaker: The story of an unfulfilled Norwegian genius
each other up front. Although Szentpetery
failed – mainly because he had no
common language with the players – his
thinking was innovative by Norwegian
standards, and helped lay the foundations
for future success. Meanwhile, Kniksen
impressed enough to be called up for
senior national duty after only a few
months in the first team. His call-up was
controversial, both because of his youth
and because of the fact that one of the
three men on the selection committee
was also a Brann director. The national
coach, an Austrian disciplinarian called
Willy Kment, stated that “Jensen is merely
a child”. Still, he had no qualms about
putting the child in his side. Kniksen
made his debut against Austria, scored
his maiden international goal against
Finland, and then in September 1960 won
the collective heart of the nation with a
masterful performance against eternal
arch-enemies Sweden. Some 36,000
spectators in Oslo saw the youngster
humiliate a side that had been World Cup
finalists on home ground only two years
previously. “Kniksen drew more applause
than the National Theatre gets through
an entire season,” claimed one excited
scribe; meanwhile, Dagens Nyheter,
Sweden’s largest newspaper, anointed
him “Norway’s new King!” .
In the spring of 1961, an extraordinary
story appeared in the now-defunct
Bergen broadsheet Morgenposten. The
paper revealed that Roald Jensen had
signed a contract with Real Madrid. There
was one catch, however: the ‘news’ was
reported on April Fool’s Day, and the ‘Real
Madrid manager’ pictured and quoted
in the paper was in fact László Papp,
the Hungarian triple Olympic boxing
champion. Still, the fact that the story
was deemed plausible enough to publish
as a joke spoke volumes about the esteem
in which the teenager was held. And
more was yet to come.
Because of a change in the league
format, the 1961/62 season was a 16-team,
18-month marathon affair, and during
this period Jensen, Pedersen and Roald
Paulsen developed into one of the most
potent attacking forces the nation had
ever seen. Combined, the trio scored
a stunning 75 goals, powering Brann
towards their first title, which was
eventually secured with an away win over
Rosenborg that also saw the Trondheim
club relegated. The triumph was marred
by an incident in which a frustrated
home supporter attacked Kniksen with
an umbrella, knocking him out cold. Still,
it was a remarkable achievement and the
party, predictably, went on for days. For
Jensen, though, the most important event
of the season had arguably occurred a
few months previously, when Heart of
Midlothian arrived in Bergen to play an
exhibition match. The Scottish professionals
defeated their amateur Norwegian
counterparts 4-0, but Kniksen’s performance
left a lasting impression. “From
that moment,” he later claimed, “I knew
AMONG THE MANY
IMPRESSED BY HIS
SKILL WAS A BATTLING
DUNFERMLINE CENTRE-
FORWARD OF THE DAY. “OUR
TACTICS [WHEN FACING
HEARTS] WERE BASICALLY
‘STOP SUPER-JENSEN’,”
SAID SIR ALEX FERGUSON,
MANY YEARS LATER.
164 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Nils Henrik Smith
I could go to Edinburgh anytime I wanted
to.” (Later, Norway’s sensational 4-3 defeat
of a Scotland side featuring Kniksen’s
great hero Denis Law merely confirmed
the instincts of the Hearts directors.)
Having already rejected an offer from an
unnamed Italian club, Kniksen decided
to stay put for the time being, and Brann
won the now-restructured league again
in 1963. The following season, however,
the double champions suffered a barely
comprehensible relegation, and the team’s
undisputed superstar began to realise his
future lay abroad. Even so, the decision
to move was not one to be made lightly,
for, trapped by its self-defeating amateur
ethos, the Norwegian FA still forbade professionals
from representing the national
team. As it happened, in 1965 Norway
enjoyed one of their best seasons since the
war, only missing out on qualification for
the upcoming World Cup in England after
a narrow home defeat to France. If their
best player had been available, who knows
what might have happened?
Kniksen arrived at Tynecastle in January
1965, midway through what would
eventually prove to be the most dramatic
season in his new club’s history. He was
the first foreigner to wear the maroon
shirt, and managerial legend Tommy
Walker was not exactly stingy with his
praise: “Jensen is the greatest talent [to join
Hearts] in ages”. The 22-year-old made his
debut against Dunfermline and earned
rave reviews. “Jensen’s five-star show!”
roared the headline in the Edinburgh
Evening News. Norwegian footballers
had excelled abroad before – Asbjørn
Halvorsen captained Hamburg to German
titles in the 1920s and Per Bredesen won
the Scudetto with Milan in 1957 – but
Kniksen was the first to play professionally
in Great Britain, which was a source of
enormous pride to the most Anglophile
of all nations (the distinction between
England and Scotland counted for little).
The celebrity magazine Aktuell,
predictably, published a photo of the
smiling young star in full Highlander regalia,
and his every move was reported by
the adoring Norwegian press. Meanwhile,
his performances continued ŧo impress
Scottish scribes. “Jensen keeps Hearts
in title race” reported Ian Rennie after a
3-1 defeat of Third Lanark. On January
17, Hearts ascended to the summit of the
table by beating Celtic 2-1: “Jensen saves
the day” said the Sunday Evening Post,
and went on: “The new boy who stole
the show was Roald Jensen, Hearts’ new
import from Norway. He was the man
who took the steam out of Celtic. Who
tamed the ball. Who never made a move
that didn’t have intelligence behind it.”
For Kniksen, who despite his immense
popularity had never felt accepted as a
team player by the sports press in his
homeland, this was vindication.
Alas the season was to end in heartbreak
for Hearts. Famously, on the final day
of the campaign Hearts lost 2-0 to
Kilmarnock at Tynecastle, conceding
the title to the visitors on goal average.
Their luckless Norwegian inside-right, so
decisive in earlier games, contrived to hit
the post not once but twice. Still, despite
this cruel set-back, Kniksen was now
recognised as a star in his new homeland.
Among the many impressed by his
skill was a battling Dunfermline centreforward
of the day. “Our tactics [when
facing Hearts] were basically ‘stop
Super-Jensen’,” said Sir Alex Ferguson,
many years later. However, although he
continued to dazzle in flashes, Kniksen’s
subsequent seasons at Tynecastle were
marred by injuries and managerial
conflict. After 15 years in charge, Tommy
Walker was relieved of his duties in 1966,
and his replacement, John Harvey, was
less than impressed by his flamboyant,
yet fragile winger. “I guess he just didn’t
like me,” he later said, whilst maintaining
that he had “been treated very unfairly.”
Strangely for such a firm fans’ favourite,
September 2016 | nutmeg | 165

Tales from the memory bank
The Heartbreaker: The story of an unfulfilled Norwegian genius
he made almost as many reserve- and
B-team performances combined as he did
for the first team during his six-and-a-half
years in Scotland. (As testimony to his
popularity, more than 30,000 fans would
sometimes turn up to watch reserve games
in which he was playing.) Being routinely
kicked pillar-to-post did not help, and
– being a Bergener and thus not lacking
temper – he would on occasion retaliate,
which led to disciplinary problems.
When fit and on song, he could still
create moments of magic. Many older
Hearts fans regard his goal against Partick
Thistle as the finest in club history.
Receiving the ball on the left wing, he
bamboozled five defenders and the
goalkeeper before striking home. That
year, he was in fine fettle, scoring nine
goals in 22 games, leading the team
on a glorious cup run and scoring the
decisive penalty in the semi-final against
Morton. In trademark fashion, however,
Hearts surprisingly lost the final to the
team against whom Kniksen had made
his Scottish league debut three years
previously: Dunfermline. Around this
time, Feyenoord allegedly wanted to sign
him, but he politely declined their offer as
he felt he still had something to prove in
Scotland. Two years later, the Dutch club
won the European Cup.
Ankles swollen, tendons aching,
Super-Jensen – like many another gifted
maverick of his era – went into relatively
early decline. In 1969, as the ban on
professionals was belatedly abolished,
he returned to Norwegian national team,
but despite a wonderfully composed
performance in his comeback against
Mexico, ultimately he could not dazzle as
he did in his early-Sixties heyday.
Eventually, he left Hearts and rejoined
his beloved Brann – as he had always
said he would – inspiring them to win
the cup in 1972. But he retired from the
game the following year, settling for a
quiet life in Bergen – fishing, tending to
his cabin, spending time with his wife
and children. He remained a staunch
critic of the way the game was run in his
homeland, once commenting that “We
will not have professional football in
Norway until they get it on the moon!”
Professional football did eventually come,
though not, sadly, in Kniksen’s lifetime.
On October 6, 1987, while playing in
a veteran’s game at Brann Stadion, he
collapsed and died from an undetected
heart defect, aged only 44. Tragically yet
somehow appropriately, he departed this
world wearing his old Norway shirt, the
one he should have worn so many more
times had it not been for the Norwegian
FA’s short-sightedness.
Thousands turned out for his funeral. In
memoriam, Brann commissioned a statue
by Per Ung, Norway’s finest sculptor,
which stands outside Brann Stadion.
Norway’s annual Player Of The Year
Award was named for him, but bizarrely
and dismayingly this honour was revoked
in 2013. Thieves broke into his wife Eva’s
home and stole most of the medals and
mementos from his career – including
his Golden Watch, the traditional gift
presented to all Norwegian players who
reach the milestone of 25 caps, and which
he remains the youngest man to have
received. His son Sondre, who briefly
turned out for Brann in the early Nineties,
said he was “the perfect father”. “He just
wanted to be kind and help people. Often
those who were not like everyone else. He
just wanted to be an ordinary guy. And he
was.” Perhaps that’s as fitting an epitaph
as any. An ordinary guy who wasn’t
ordinary at all. Roald Jensen may not
have enjoyed the success and wealth his
talent merited, but as he no doubt would
have agreed, talent, somehow, is its own
reward. Nearly three decades have passed
since his untimely death. However, they
still remember and adore him in two
great cities either side of the North Sea. l
166 | nutmeg | September 2016

THE GENIUS OF DAVIE
COOPER: EXHIBIT A
No-one could question his
supreme talent. But is Cooper
Scottish football’s last genius?
One moment in particular makes
it hard to argue otherwise.
By Rob Smyth
Video killed more than just the radio
star. Blanket coverage, streaming and
YouTube have done permanent damage
to the mythology of football. Old folk will
have no need to tell their grandkids about
Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi; their
entire careers will be instantly available in
High Definition.
Reality rarely matches up to the fertility
of the imagination however, and there is
something magical about a great moment
that is not easily accessible on video. In
1977, Rivelino played an 80-yard pass
against England that is seared into Kevin
Keegan’s memory. “I was about three
yards away from Rivelino and I felt the
wind as the ball passed me at shoulder
height,” said Keegan. “The astonishing
thing is that it stayed at the same height
all the way. I watched wide-eyed as it flew
on and on; that’s one of the rare times
when I’ve felt outclassed.” How could that
possibly be as good on screen as it is in
the mind’s eye?
Davie Cooper’s legendary solo effort
for Rangers and Celtic in 1979 – voted
Rangers’ greatest ever goal in a fans’ poll
– has retained a similar mythical quality
despite being all over YouTube. There are
two reasons for that. The shaky, grainy
footage, taken from an unusual angle
behind the goal with a hand-held camera,
gives it a bootleg quality. And not even
Walter Mitty could have imagined a goal
of such unique brilliance. It is Exhibit
A in the case for Cooper being Scottish
football’s last genius.
“He was a Brazilian trapped in a
Scotsman’s body,” said Ray Wilkins,
who played with Cooper at Rangers. It’s
a lovely quote but not entirely correct:
while Cooper had the balance and skill
of a Brazilian, he had a very Scottish
chutzpah. He was a modest man, who
sometimes seemed almost embarrassed
by his talent, but he became a swaggering
superhero when he put on his costume of
a Clydebank, Rangers or Motherwell kit.
The same was not necessarily true of
the Scotland shirt. Cooper won only 22
caps, a frustratingly low total, and never
started a World Cup match. But if he did
not leave an impression on the world
game, he certainly did so on one of the
world greats. In 1984, Rangers played a
mid-season friendly – called the KLM
Challenge Cup – against a Feyenoord side
that included Johan Cruyff and Ruud
Gullit. “Davie Cooper,” said Gullit years
later, “was one of the best football players
I have ever seen.” He included him in his
September 2016 | nutmeg | 167

Tales from the memory bank
The genius of Davie Cooper: Exhibit A
all-time XI of those he had played with
and against. Ronaldinho and Zinedine
Zidane were on the bench.
Although Cooper was inconsistent, his
boyish enthusiasm for the game was
such that his genius could assert itself
in any setting – from the Scottish Cup
final to the KLM Challenge Cup or even
the Drybrough Cup final, which Cooper
illuminated with his goal against Celtic in
1979.
The Drybrough Cup was played
between 1971-74 and then for the last
time in 1979 and 1980. It was generally
held as a warm-up to the new season,
and involved the four highest-scoring
teams from Division 1 as well as the same
four from Division 2. It was not just the
qualification criteria that was designed
to promote attacking football: the SFA
changed the rules in an attempt to create
more space in midfield. For a couple of
years, in the League Cup and Drybrough
Cup, players could only be offside if they
were past the line of the 18-yard box.
That initiative had died by the time the
competition was revived in 1979. Rangers
reached the final for the only time in the
Drybrough Cup’s short history, where
they would meet Celtic. They tore into
Celtic from the start, with the 18-year-old
John MacDonald giving them the lead
after a one-two with Cooper. It was all
too much for MacDonald. “The enormity
of what I’d just achieved hit me full on,”
he said. “I ran to the Rangers End to
celebrate and ended up throwing up all
over the place. By the time the rest of the
lads came over to congratulate me I was
on my hands and knees being as sick as
a dog.”
MacDonald’s unusual contribution
would be overshadowed, as would Sandy
Jardine’s glorious second, when he ran
the length of the field before battering the
ball past Peter Latchford. “I scored one of
my best goals that day,” said Jardine, “and
it hardly got a mention.”
That was because of an even better solo
goal with 12 minutes remaining. Cooper
received a pass from the wing inside the
Celtic area, facing away from goal and
with Roddie MacDonald attached to his
back. He controlled it on his chest and
volleyed it up in the air, allowing it to
bounce as he jockeyed for position with
MacDonald. When it did so he flipped it
infield away from MacDonald, at which
point Murdo MacLeod and Tom McAdam
converged. Cooper lobbed the ball first
time away from both and towards goal. As
the ball dropped again onto his left foot,
with Alan Sneddon haring across to cover,
Cooper stretched his left leg to calmly
cushion a volley over Sneddon’s head.
That put him clear on Latchford, and
after chesting the ball down he tucked it
precisely into the net.
In just seven touches – chest, flick, flick,
flick, flick, chest, finish - Cooper beat
four players and the goalkeeper. It’s hard
enough doing that when the ball is rolling
perfectly along the floor, never mind
when it’s in the air. “It was a goal born of
utter self-belief and complete cheek,” said
the great Celtic defender Danny McGrain,
who was one of the few on the pitch not
to be left behind as Cooper scored. “The
moment seems to last for ever. You could
be ultra-critical and say that if you beat
that many defenders in their penalty area
they are the ones who are ultimately at
fault. But it was as if they were transfixed
as the ball was lobbed over one head after
another in a surreal sequence of events.
I kept think to myself, ‘He’ll get him’ or
‘He’ll surely get him this time’ or ‘We
must get it out of the box this time’. It
never happened.”
Celtic pulled a late goal back but
Rangers were emphatic 3-1 winners. “We
were so much on top that we could have
netted six and that score will still have
flattered Celtic,” said Cooper. “Obviously
I was pleased with the goal I scored, too,
because you don’t score goals like that
very often. More’s the pity!”
168 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Rob Smyth
Later, the former Scotland manager
Andy Roxburgh produced a video of
Cooper’s highlights with a soundtrack of
It’s A Kind of Magic by Queen. “Football
is not about robots or boring tactics,” he
said. “It’s about excitement, emotion and
individual flair and imagination as shown
by Davie Cooper."
The goal demonstrated all those qualities.
He was, as the former Hearts striker
John Robertson put it, “one of the original
tanner ba’ players”, and on this day he
turned Hampden Park into the school
playground. For a man who once said he
supported only two teams – “Rangers,
and whoever is playing Celtic” – this goal
was the ultimate.
When someone has such rare talent
as Cooper, and especially when they
die so young, it is very difficult not to
romanticise their career. But it would be
wrong to say Cooper’s was one happy
story. He had some lost years at Rangers
in the early 1980s, when he was often left
out by John Greig, and the only time he
was a Scotland regular was in a brief spell
in 1984-85.
Unusually for a player of his type,
Cooper’s best years were in his thirties.
He was superb for Rangers under Graeme
Souness, something that Walter Smith
attributes to being alongside better players;
then, when he went to Motherwell at
33 because he wanted regular first-team
football, he had such a profound influence
in a midfield role that there is a
stand named in his honour at Fir Park.
“It wasn’t until he went to Motherwell
that I realised he wasn’t a winger,” said
his former Rangers team-mate Gordon
Smith. “Just because he was skilful and
couldn’t tackle, he was put out on the
wing. But in any other European country,
he would have been a midfield playmaker
– as he was at Motherwell – and I think he
would have been an even greater player
for Rangers there.”
Gullit wishes that Cooper had tried his
luck in Europe. “He had incredible skill
and a command of the ball. There was
something about his play that made him
stand out. When I saw him play I was
flabbergasted. I remember thinking to
myself, ‘Who is this guy?’ I fell completely
in love with his play. It surprised me a
lot he didn’t become a big international
name. It’s incredible that a player with his
skills did not make it to the international
top flight. I don’t know if it was because
he stayed in Scotland but he had the
talent to be one of the greats. He was a
unique player, not comparable to any
other. No, Davie Cooper was one of a
kind.”
Gullit still talks about Cooper now,
often bringing him into a conversation
without prompting. If you asked him
what cars they used in The Italian Job,
he’d probably say “Davie Coopers”.
On the face of it, Cooper did not have
much going for him as a player. He was
short and slight, an obvious target at
a time when GBH was a yellow-card
offence at worst. He had no real pace and
no right foot. He could be inconsistent.
But he had a left-foot that was Harvard
educated, sleight of hip that allowed him
to beat defenders without touching the
ball, a full range of passes and crosses
– and, as he showed in the Drybrough
Cup, a football IQ in the high 160s. “He
was the quickest thinker I’ve ever seen,”
said Tommy McLean, who played with
Cooper at Rangers and managed him at
Motherwell.
Although Cooper had some of his best
years at Motherwell, he will always be associated
with Rangers. Cooper was a fan
on the pitch, whose simple comment – “I
played for the club I loved” – has become
his epitaph. At his funeral in 1995, Walter
Smith delivered a eulogy. “God gave Davie
Cooper a talent,” he said. “He would not
be disappointed with how it was used.”
Especially not on one magical day at
Hampden in 1979. l
September 2016 | nutmeg | 169

Tales from the memory bank
OUR NATIONAL DEBT
TO NASKO SIRAKOV
Euro 92 is remembered as the
first European Championship
finals in which Scotland
participated. Perhaps less well
remembered is the agonising
nature of our qualification.
By Andrew Galloway
Nasko Sirakov is now 54 years old.
He enjoyed an 18-year playing career
flitting between clubs in Spain, France
and his native Bulgaria. He won 78 full
international caps, scoring 24 goals. The
name may not register straight away.
None of Sirakov’s international goals were
scored against Scotland. But 25 years ago
one of them did our national team one
of the biggest favours it has ever received
from a player in an opposition team.
On the evening of Wednesday,
November 20, 1991, Scotland’s players,
coaches and national officials, along with
thousands of fans, were on tenterhooks,
awaiting the result of the final fixture
in Group 2 of qualifying for Euro 92.
Heavyweights such as Italy, Spain and
Portugal had already been eliminated.
Scotland were still in a position to make
it to the finals in Sweden the following
summer. Having completed their eight
fixtures, they could only wait and watch
as Bulgaria and Romania met in the Vasili
Levski Stadium in Sofia. Anything other
than a two-goal win for the visitors and
Scotland, for the first time ever, would be
in a European Championship finals, one
of only eight teams involved.
At the interval, Romania led 1-0. One
more goal for the men in yellow would end
the dreams of a nation’s football fans. This
is the story of how it came to that evening
of destiny – and what happened next.
Five games into the group stages it was
so far, so good. But as season 1991/92
dawned, Scotland were under no illusions
about the task ahead.
In September 1990, three months after
the World Cup in Italy, Andy Roxburgh’s
men started their Euro 92 qualifying campaign
with home games against Romania
and Switzerland, the two favourites for
qualification. Both games had to be won.
They were, each by a 2-1 scoreline, and
the best possible start had been made.
The halfway stage of the campaign was
reached with back-to-back 1-1 draws
against Bulgaria, home and away, before
a 2-0 victory away to San Marino, who
were making their debut in the qualifying
rounds for a major tournament.
The hard bit was about to arrive early
in the new domestic season: a trip to
Switzerland followed a month later
by a visit to Romania. The Swiss side’s
Hampden defeat was the only reverse they
had suffered in a group they topped after
beating San Marino 7-0, albeit they had
170 | nutmeg | September 2016

played a game more than Scotland. Defeat
in the Wankdorf Stadium in Berne would
leave Scotland three points adrift and, even
with a game in hand, qualification would
be difficult – although Switzerland’s final
match was away to Romania.
By half time, the task for Scotland
was as steep as the Swiss Alps. After 30
minutes Stephane Chapuisat, who had
recently signed for Borussia Dortmund,
scored the opener for the hosts. Eight
minutes later Servette midfielder Heinz
Hermann increased the deficit to 2-0.
One hundred and twenty seconds after
the restart the fightback began when
Gordon Durie headed home from Stewart
McKimmie’s cross. Thirty five minutes
of angst ensued until the equalising goal
arrived seven minutes from full time.
Swiss keeper Marco Pascolo was unable to
smother Durie’s low drive from 15-yards
out; following up was Ally McCoist,
whose customary lethal touch in front of
goal earned a vital point.
Five weeks later came the trip to
Bucharest. Romania were five points
behind Switzerland and, with three
games to play, could ill afford even to draw
any of them if they were to qualify. In
contrast, Scotland travelled knowing that
another draw away from home would in
all probability be enough to get them just
about over the line. That would put them
level them on points with Switzerland,
who had a better goal difference but
had still to visit Romania. In contrast,
Scotland’s final match was at home to San
Marino, who were without a point and
had lost 29 goals in their seven games.
But Durie, having sparked the comeback
in Berne, suffered a reversal of fortune in
the cruellest way in the Steaua Stadium.
The game was goalless with 15 minutes remaining
when Romania sent a free kick to
Scotland’s back post from the right wing.
Durie’s attempt to clear was made with his
hand and spotted by the German referee,
who immediately awarded a penalty. The
visitors’ hopes now rested with goalkeeper
Andy Goram, newly-signed by champions
Rangers from Hibernian. Facing him: legendary
Romanian striker Gheorghe Hagi.
Goram guessed the right way, but Hagi’s
kick was too powerful. It was the only goal
of the match.
In a roundabout way, the defeat was a
blessing in disguise for Scotland. With their
chances of qualification still alive, it meant
Romania had to be positive when they
hosted Switzerland while Roxburgh’s team
faced San Marino at Hampden. Victory in
Glasgow was surely a formality, and hopes
would be pinned on Romania doing to the
Swiss what they had done to Scotland. On
the other hand, a Romanian victory would
mean that they could still beat Scotland
to top spot in the group when they visited
Bulgaria for their final game.
Goals by Paul McStay and Richard
Gough within the first half hour removed
any doubt about the outcome against
San Marino, and with Durie and McCoist
adding further goals, attention switched
to Bucharest, where the action was still
goalless. Unless Scotland could run in an
avalanche of further goals, a draw between
Romania and Switzerland would not
suffice, as the Swiss had a better goal difference.
A goal for the home side had to come.
After 69 minutes came the news
that the Tartan Army were desperate
for. Dorin Mateut scored for Romania
and, if Switzerland were unable to find
an answer, they were out of the race.
Only Romania would stand between
Scotland and a place at Euro 92. The best
part of 25 nervous minutes later, with
Scotland having coasted to a 4-0 victory
at Hampden, the scenario was a reality.
Switzerland, who started the evening at
the top of the group, were gone. However
another threat remained.
Romania were two points and one goal’s
difference worse off than Scotland when
they travelled to Sofia to face a Bulgaria
side who had only their pride at stake. A
September 2016 | nutmeg | 171

Tales from the memory bank
Our national debt to Nasko Sirakov
1-0 win would not be enough for Romania
to take over at the summit as Scotland
would still qualify on goals scored. If
Romania won 2-1, the sides would have
identical records; any other victory by one
goal would give Romania the advantage
on goals scored. They would also qualify
with a win by more than one goal, but a
draw or defeat would see them fall. And
all Scotland could do was watch. What
did offer optimism was that Bulgaria, on
matchday two in the group, had won 3-0
in Romania. The consequences of that
result may not yet have been complete.
Eighteen minutes into the match,
Romania were awarded a penalty, but
Hagi could not repeat the spot-kick
accuracy he showed in the Scotland game
and missed. Just after the half hour mark,
an Adrian Popescu goal meant that while
Scotland still topped the group, their
position hung by a thread. If the visitors
scored again, Bulgaria would need to
score twice to be able to help Scotland. As
the second half began, Roxburgh and his
colleagues were rooting for the only team
they had been unable to defeat, home or
away, in the group. There was a full card
of Scottish Premier Division fixtures that
night, but every fan would have had one
eye on events in Sofia. And 10 minutes
later their support in spirit was rewarded
as Nasko Sirakov drew Bulgaria level.
Despite incessant pressure from
Romania, it remained 1-1. Scotland’s
Group 2 campaign had been a rollercoaster,
starting off in the best possible
fashion, hitting a hitch by failing to win
against Bulgaria, taking a priceless point
in Switzerland before defeat in Romania
which left things up in the air.
But we were there.
Rangers clinched their fourth consecutive
league title with two games to spare,
and then won the Scottish Cup. Dundee
were First Division champions while
Dumbarton won the Second Division.
None of that was quite by the by, but
THERE WAS A FULL CARD OF
SCOTTISH PREMIER DIVISION
FIXTURES THAT NIGHT, BUT
EVERY FAN WOULD HAVE HAD
ONE EYE ON EVENTS IN SOFIA.
for the months which followed that
nerve-shredding evening where Bulgaria
did it for Scotland, ‘Euro’ and ‘92’ were
the buzzwords of the country. Having not
qualified for the tournament in its 32-year
history, the wait was over, and while some
giants of international football would sit
at home watching, we were part of the
festival in Sweden.
Among the teams Scotland could
face were reigning world champions
Germany (albeit they won Italia 90 as
West Germany) and the Netherlands, who
were defending their European title. One
of those in our group would have been a
tough task. Both would have meant a serious
battle to reach the knock-out stages.
When the draw took place, it was the
latter scenario which was handed down,
with the CIS (the Russia-dominated rump
of the disintegrated Soviet Union) completing
the group line-up. To qualify for
the semi-finals, Scotland were required
to see off either the holders of football’s
greatest prize, or the great Dutch side still
containing the likes of Ruud Gullit, Marco
Van Basten and Frank Rijkaard. Or both.
It was easy if you said it fast enough.
Four members of the double-winning
Rangers side were in the Scotland squad:
Andy Goram, Stuart McCall, Ally McCoist
and Richard Gough. By the time the finals
kicked off, Dave McPherson would be
172 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Andrew Galloway
added to the Ibrox legion after completing
a transfer from Hearts. After the Gers,
the best-represented club in the pool
was not Celtic, but Dundee United, who
also had four representatives in Maurice
Malpas, Jim McInally, Dave Bowman and
Duncan Ferguson. Three Celtic players did
make the cut: Paul McStay, Tom Boyd and
Derek Whyte. Indeed, of the 20 players
taken to Sweden by Andy Roxburgh,
only five played their club football
outside Scotland, all of them in England.
Interestingly, the players were numbered
in descending order based on the number
of full international caps won, with
the exception of the goalkeepers, who
retained numbers one and 12.
In preparing for the tournament, the
team was unbeaten. The two home
fixtures were won 1-0 against Northern
Ireland (scorer McCoist) and drawn 1-1
with Finland (McStay getting the goal).
With the championship weeks away,
Roxburgh took his players across the
Atlantic to test them in sunnier climes.
This was a successful exercise, with the
USA beaten 1-0 in Denver courtesy of a
Pat Nevin goal, and then Canada defeated
3-1 in Toronto with a McCoist goal and
a Gary McAllister double. The final
friendly was drawn 0-0 in Norway, nine
days before Scotland’s opening match in
Gothenburg, against the Netherlands.
Van Basten, Gullit and Rijkaard, members
of the AC Milan team who won the
1991/92 Serie A title with an eight-point
cushion, all played for the Netherlands.
Joining them in the starting XI were the
likes of defender Ronald Koeman, deadly
from set-pieces, and up-and-coming Ajax
striker Dennis Bergkamp. To counter the
Dutch threat, Gough and MacPherson
were handed the joint duty of patrolling
Van Basten’s beat. They were joined in
guarding keeper Goram by full backs
Stewart McKimmie and Maurice Malpas,
while Gordon Durie teamed up McStay,
McCall and McAllister in midfield.
McCoist, along with Brian McClair, was
tasked with finding a goal to stun Europe.
As it transpired, Scotland could, very
easily, have done just that. Not only
were they containing the side who still
possessed the European Championship
trophy they won four years ago – they
were outplaying them. Of all the players
who could have gone closest to opening
the scoring, it was MacPherson, whose left
foot shot from a McStay assist narrowly
missed the target. Meanwhile, Goram’s
only first half save was a relatively
straightforward one from a Rijkaard effort.
The second half saw more of the same.
A flurry of Scottish chances were created,
falling most notably to McStay, Gough
and substitute Kevin Gallacher, who had
replaced McCoist upfront. None of them
were able to hit the target.
When that happens, the outcome is
predictable, and it duly arrived in the
77th minute. Gullit’s cross from the
right was headed back across goal by
Van Basten and flicked on by Rijkaard.
The loose ball could have fallen for either
Malpas or Gough, but it instead it came to
Bergkamp. He guided the ball past Goram
having got between the two defenders
and the Netherlands had the lead.
Ferguson was thrown on for McClair,
but it was to no avail. One moment of
slackness had cost Scotland in a match
in which they had looked the better side
for long spells. Gough’s defensive efforts
came in for particular salutation, as did
the performances of McCall and McStay
in midfield. As Roxburgh put it, it felt like
being involved in a smash and grab. To
make matters worse, Germany and the
CIS drew the other match in the group
later in the evening. That had looked like
providing a shock until Thomas Hassler
rescued a point for the Germans in the last
minute. Scotland were bottom of the section
on their own, but if they could bring
the world champions back down to earth
after their great escape, they would be
back in it. By contrast, and by consequence
September 2016 | nutmeg | 173

Tales from the memory bank
Our national debt to Nasko Sirakov
of Germany and the CIS’ draw, a second
defeat would eliminate them.
Both they and Germany had only three
days to recover from the exertions of their
first matchday, with Scotland also having
to travel the best part of 200 miles to
Norrkoping from Gothenburg, where they
had faced the Netherlands. So confident
was Roxburgh that he sent out exactly the
same starting XI. With the threat of an exit
hanging over them, Scotland had to remain
positive, and just as they did against the
Dutch, they impressed. The problem was
that they could not find the net.
Within minutes of the start,
MacPherson headed over from
McAllister’s cross while a Gough header
looked destined for the net only for
German keeper Bodo Illgner to get a fist
to it and turn it over. McAllister had two
further chances, but saw the first blocked
by the keeper while the second was
narrowly wide. Having already seen how
missed opportunities could be punished
against the Netherlands, there was an
inevitable feeling of déjà vu.
It duly happened on 29 minutes.
Matthias Sammer and Jurgen Klinsmann,
both introduced to the starting line-up
by Germany after the CIS draw, combined
for the latter to hold off Gough’s challenge
inside the area. His touch back was
driven into the net by Karl-Heinz Riedle
with Goram not even moving. For all
Scotland’s early pressure, a bitter blow
had been struck.
And two minutes into the second half
any hopes of progressing in the tournament
ended in a moment that summed
up Scotland’s luck: Stefan Effenberg’s
cross from the right took a huge deflection
off Malpas and, with Goram losing
his footing, bent into the net.
Scotland did not lose heart, and in fact
came close to scoring through defenders
Gough and McKimmie. But it was all
over bar 90 minutes against the CIS with
only pride at stake for Scotland. It was
an emotional end to the afternoon, with
Roxburgh ordering some of his players
back out from the dressing room to applaud
the supporters.
After three days to reflect, it was on to
the final match, which may have been
meaningless to Scotland, but not to the
CIS. As a result of their goalless draw with
the Netherlands following Scotland’s
loss to Germany, they needed a result to
progress to knock-out stage. With all the
pressure on the opposition, Roxburgh
took the chance to experiment, resting
Malpas and Durie in favour of giving Boyd
and Gallacher a chance from the start.
The new-look side took all of six
minutes to make the impression they
may have felt they should have done
against the Netherlands and Germany.
McAllister’s corner was headed down by
McPherson and fell to McStay 20 yards
from goal. After the Celtic midfielder
drove in a low shot, it hit the post, then
the back of keeper Dmitri Kharine,
and into the net. It may have carried an
element of luck, but nobody could argue
that we were due some of that.
Within 10 minutes the disappointment
of the previous two matchdays was
quickly being forgotten. Despite scoring
many goals for Celtic and Manchester
United, McClair had waited 26 caps for
his first Scotland goal. That drought was
ended by a deflected finish from the edge
of the area after McCoist set him up.
The CIS put in a power of effort to
try to rescue their hopes, but with six
minutes remaining came the icing on
Scotland’s cake. Nevin, not long on the
field in place of Gallacher, ran Rangers
defender Oleg Kuznetsov ragged on the
left wing before being fouled in the area.
McAllister stepped up to do what needed
doing and, as TV commentator Gerry
McNee observed, three Macs had got on
the scoresheet to send Scotland home with
some pride. It was also a result appreciated
by Germany, who were beaten 3-1 by the
174 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Andrew Galloway
Netherlands in Gothenburg in the other
game. As a result of the CIS’ sound defeat,
the world champions were through to the
semi-finals by the skin of their teeth.
There were more emotional celebrations
at the end of a tournament which
ultimately came up short in terms of progress,
but not in terms of how Scotland had
acquitted themselves. If luck had come
their way in the first two group games,
things could have worked out differently
and either the reigning European or world
champions would have been eliminated
in our favour. The finale was back home
at Glasgow Airport, with over 1,000 fans
waiting to greet the team home. After all,
they had fared better at the finals than the
likes of Italy, Spain or Portugal had.
Of course, there is really only one team
deserving of the last word in any remembrance
of Euro 92. Denmark were due
to sit at home watching the finals after
finishing second in their qualifying group
behind the former Yugoslavia. When
the Yugoslavs were forced to withdraw
because of the conflict in their home
nation, the Danes took their place. Having
finished top of Group 1, they defeated the
Netherlands on penalties in the semifinal,
leading them to the final against
Germany in Stockholm. John Jensen and
Kim Vilfort got the goals to ensure an
historic 2-0 win for the team that wasn’t
supposed to be there. l
EURO 1992 QUALIFYING RESULTS
12 September 1990
SCOTLAND 2
Robertson 37’
McCoist 76’
Romania 1
Cămătaru 13’
17 October 1990
SCOTLAND 2
Robertson 34’ (pen.)
McAllister 53’
Switzerland 1
Knup 65’ (pen.)
27 March 1991
SCOTLAND 1
Collins 83’
Bulgaria 1
Kostadinov 89’
1 May 1991
San Marino 0
SCOTLAND 2
Strachan 63’ (pen.)
Durie 67’
11 September 1991
Switzerland 2
Chapuisat 30’
Hermann 38’
SCOTLAND 2
Durie 47’
McCoist 83’
16 October 1991
Romania 1
Hagi 75’ (pen.)
SCOTLAND 0
QUALIFYING GROUP 2 TABLE
13 November 1991
SCOTLAND 4
McStay 10’, Gough 31’, Durie
38’, McCoist 62’
San Marino 0
Pld W D L GF GA GD Pts
SCOTLAND 8 4 3 1 14 7 +7 11
Switzerland 8 4 2 2 19 7 +12 10
Romania 8 4 2 2 13 7 +6 10
Bulgaria 8 3 3 2 15 8 +7 9
San Marino 8 0 0 8 1 33 −32 0
EURO 1992 FINALS RESULTS & SQUAD
12 June 1992
Netherlands 1
Bergkamp 75’
SCOTLAND 0
15 June 1992
SCOTLAND 0
Germany 2
Riedle29’, Effenberg 47’
18 June 1992
SCOTLAND 3
McStay 7’, McClair 16’,
McAllister 84’ (pen.)
CIS 0
1 Andy Goram, Rangers
2 Richard Gough
(Captain) Rangers
3 Paul McStay, Celtic
4 Maurice Malpas
Dundee United
5 Ally McCoist, Rangers
6 Brian McClair
GROUP 2 TABLE
Manchester United
7 Gordon Durie
Tottenham Hotspur
8 David McPherson
Hearts
9 Stewart McKimmie
Aberdeen
10 Stuart McCall
Rangers
11 Gary McAllister
Leeds United
12 Henry Smith, Hearts
13 Pat Nevin, Everton
14 Kevin Gallacher
Coventry City
15 Tom Boyd, Celtic
16 Jim McInally
Dundee United
17 Derek Whyte,Celtic
18 Dave Bowman
Dundee United
19 Alan McLaren
Hearts
20 Duncan Ferguson,
Dundee United
Pld W D L GF GA GD Pts
Netherlands 3 2 1 0 4 1 +3 5
Germany 3 1 1 1 4 4 0 3
SCOTLAND 3 1 0 2 3 3 0 2
CIS 3 0 2 1 1 4 –3 2
September 2016 | nutmeg | 175

The Back Four: Tactics
The history makers
It was under John Robertson that Inverness Caledonian Thistle made
history by becoming the first club from the Highlands to be promoted
to the SPL. However there are strong claims for the side managed
by his predecessor, Steve Paterson, to be regarded as the club’s
best-ever team. John Maxwell analyses the players, the tactics, the
formations and the performances of both squads
Strategy in football has a curious way of
setting its own trends. By its very nature,
one manager’s plan will likely be successful
only for a finite period, either before
circumstances change or an opponent
works out a successful counter to it.
Football is rich with such instances at all
levels, none more so than in Scotland over
the last 20 years.
Leading examples are found with
the Old Firm. Dick Advocaat’s arrival
in Scotland in 1998 brought a return to
an orthodox 4-4-2 for Rangers, after
a handful of years when Walter Smith
preferred to use three centre-backs at the
twilight of the nine-in-a-row era, before
being usurped by Wim Jansen’s Celtic.
Advocaat’s strategy was an immediate
success, with an emphasis on his Dutch
full-backs Fernando Ricksen and Arthur
Numan bringing the ball out of defence
and providing quality in the final third.
Rangers’ progress was hampered two
years later when Martin O’Neill arrived
at Celtic and bettered his rival. Celtic’s
3-5-2 was based on three dominating
centre-backs, attacking wing-backs and
a couple of dogged central midfielders to
give Lubomir Moravcik the freedom to
link with the forwards. O’Neill’s strategy
trumped Advocaat’s, highlighted by the
6-2 win in the first derby of the season.
Rangers got some form of revenge in a 5-1
win at Ibrox in November of that season,
but Celtic won four of the five derbies and
went six months unbeaten on the way to
a domestic treble.
O’Neill was eventually tested by
Advocaat’s successor Alex McLeish, who
preferred a 4-3-3. When the sides met,
Rangers’ mobile forwards left Celtic’s back
three having to mark man-for-man, or rely
on the wing-backs to pick up the wingers,
leaving fewer numbers elsewhere; Celtic
no longer had numerical advantage in defence
nor midfield. Thus Rangers generally
had the upper hand in matches between
them in McLeish’s first 18 months, before
Celtic’s strategy had to evolve further. The
cause and effect of the use of different
strategies and systems can be seen quite
clearly from those four years in Glasgow.
One does not need to focus just on the
Old Firm to find richness in the detail
of different strategies used in Scotland,
of course. Celtic made using three at
the back seem like an easy thing to
practise, but another club used their
own interpretation of 3-5-2 and were
fascinating to watch in the half-season
it was used. Steve Paterson’s Inverness
Caledonian Thistle infamously beat Celtic
on their own turf in what was one of the
biggest cup upsets in decades shortly
before O’Neill’s reign, but it wasn’t until
a couple of years later that Caley Thistle
really began to show their potential in
176 | nutmeg | September 2016

league competition. In 2002/3, Paterson’s
side finished fourth in the ten-team SFL
First Division, 16 points behind champions
Falkirk, but were in first place until
the beginning of 2003, when a string of
losses dropped them down to a position
they couldn’t recover from. Inverness
won the title the following season under
John Robertson’s stewardship, but it was
Paterson’s attack-minded side, typically
put out in an enterprising, asymmetric
3-5-2 system, that first caught the eye and
the admiration of the club’s followers.
There was something fixating about the
balance of that particular team, which
blended creativity, power and athleticism.
The side had a strong central column, best
personified by captain Bobby Mann, a
burly sweeper who could turn slow possession
to a quick change in direction and
pace in an instant. Mann was 28 years old
at the time and captained the side from a
pivotal role, with either Stuart McCaffrey
or Grant Munro – both in their early
twenties – on one side of him and Stuart
Golabek - who was a year younger – on
the other. The back three were a relatively
mobile but fundamentally strong unit.
Yet the relative lack of experience at the
time, by the standards of a potentially
title-winning team, probably accounted
for the amount of goals conceded as much
as the team’s attacking bias did. Caley
Thistle finished the league campaign
with 74 goals scored, the second-most
behind champions Falkirk, but their 45
goals conceded ended up being considerably
more than St Johnstone, Clyde and
Falkirk who all finished above them.
The team was also well defined by
the starkly contrasting styles of their
wing-backs. Ross Tokely was 23 years old
at the time but already had the experience
of playing through the lower leagues
(eventually to the top flight), in six years
with the club. At 6’3”, with broad, high
shoulders and a swimmer’s Y-shape
build, Tokely would seem at first glance
to suit a centre-back role more than a
position that is typically suited to tricky,
pacey players with skill to match endurance.
What Tokely sometimes missed in
technique he made up for by his sheer
athleticism, which allowed him to often
dominate a flank on his own. Tokely is
more recently known for being a lumbering
defender who could power through
almost any opposition, but whose lack of
pace occasionally showed a clumsiness
that betrayed his anticipation. However,
he should be better remembered for the
marauding runs that he often made from
a deep wing-back position at the beginning
of the century, and the deceptively
quick top speed that he had.
Talking to The Pele Podcast about the
players that fitted within Steve Paterson’s
3-5-2 system, Bobby Mann was complimentary
toward his former team-mate.
“Ross would say himself that he became a
better player the older and more wise he
became,” Mann says. “Ross didn’t set up
as many goals as Barry Robson did, but
we didn’t concede as many goals coming
down Ross’s side. Ross was obviously not
as skilful as Barry, but he won a lot of
headers at the back post, we got a lot of
second balls and knockdowns from that
and we scored a fair amount of goals as
a result”. Tokely only scored five goals
during the 2002-03 season, but the threat
of arriving late to get on to a cross beyond
the back post was a big asset to the team.
Tokely couldn’t have been much
more different in style to Barry Robson.
Whereas Tokely would look to dominate
the opposition by his physical power,
Robson was arguably the most technically
gifted player in the team and was the
chief creator of chances. A cantankerous
character who recently retired from
first team football at Aberdeen – with
the ignominy of being the player who
has collected the most red cards in the
top flight in the post-SPL era – he knew
how to look after himself on the football
pitch like the rest of his Inverness team.
September 2016 | nutmeg | 177

The Back Four: Tactics
The history makers
Perhaps an attitude held him back in his
early years, but he developed into a player
who would play in the Champions League
and for his country. “Everybody knew he
had lots of ability and talent,” Mann reminisces.
“It was just getting the best out of
him at the best time. Probably to this day,
Barry is the best crosser of the ball I have
had the privilege to play beside”.
Robson’s quality of his deliveries was
important in a side that included the
veteran striker Paul Ritchie, who scored
21 goals in all competitions that season,
including four league hat-tricks. Whereas
Dennis Wyness did most of the running
for the strike partnership and caused such
a nuisance with his cunning one-touch
play and ability to score in a multitude of
ways, Ritchie’s position in the team was
as more of a penalty-box striker and he
took up a more central position, allowing
the ball to stick to bring Wyness and
others into the game.
Paterson didn’t immediately settle on
the favoured 3-5-2, instead starting the
season with a 4-4-2 shape that had Tokely
and Golabek as the full-backs and Christie
playing as a deep forward, behind
Wyness. A resounding 4-0 win away at
Love Street in late August showed a hint
of what was to come, against a St Mirren
side that included household names
Paterson’s 3-5-2 made
its debut in a 3-1 win over
Queen of the South, in a
fixture notable for veteran
Doonhamers goalkeeper Andy
Goram going off with an injury
after 30 minutes
such as Sergei Baltacha, Hugh Murray
and Junior Mendes. Robson helped blitz
the opposition into a three-goal deficit
with barely a quarter of the match gone,
Robson’s second goal was a particular delight:
he pounced on to a loose ball from
Christie to be left one-on-one against the
St Mirren defence, where his dribbling
left his marker falling unbalanced on to
the ground before his shot from 16 yards
found the bottom corner of the goal. It
was a convincing win but Paterson’s
post-match emphasis was on the team
keeping a clean sheet, telling the press
that goalkeeper Mark Brown was too good
for the division he was in.
For most of his time at Inverness,
Paterson used 4-4-2 and geared his strategy
toward stretching teams with width.
However, a knee operation for David
Bagan left Paterson without a specialist
winger for the beginning of the 2002/03
season. With Charlie Christie picking up
a calf injury during the St Mirren match,
the circumstances suited a change to
picking two strikers but keeping three
central midfielders. The 3-5-2 fell just fell
into place.
“It takes a wee bit of time but the
change in system was about trying to
get the best out of all of the players that
Steve had at his disposal,” Mann says of
his former manager’s decision to alter
his strategy. “He was very good at fitting
players into systems and trying to get
the best out of everybody,” he continues,
citing how Paterson harvested Mann’s
own potential.
“I played as the spare man most of the
time, so it gave me a lot of time to sweep
things up and read the game more than
the other two defenders, and get on the
ball from the back. It was always part of
my game to do that, but at Inverness it
was a big park. Steve always wanted to
play with wide players, so we were looking
to stretch teams. It was important to
be able to switch the play quickly and hit
teams on the break.” Few in the division
178 | nutmeg | September 2016

By John Maxwell
were as good at doing so and it seemed
that the whole team set-up played to the
captain’s strengths.
Paterson’s 3-5-2 made its debut in the
next league match, a 3-1 win over Queen
of the South, in a fixture notable for veteran
Doonhamers goalkeeper Andy Goram
going off with an injury after 30 minutes.
This was followed by a thumping 5-0 win
against Arbroath, of which the Highland
News declared the performance to be “as
professional a 90 minutes as you could
wish to see in Division One”. Robson
was once again the chief creator through
set-pieces and open play, but Paterson
insisted on praising the team for defending
solidly and working harder for each
other than ever before.
As was typical with Paterson’s
management, a winning team brought a
settled line-up, which, from September
to December, resembled close to the
following on a week-by-week basis: Mark
Brown; Grant Munro, Robert Mann, Stuart
Golabek; Ross Tokely, Russell Duncan,
Richard Hard, Roy McBain, Barry Robson;
Dennis Wyness, Paul Ritchie.
A surprise 0-3 defeat to Alan
Kernaghan’s Clyde was blamed by the
Highland News on “a lack of bite, slack
passing and haphazard defending”.
Tokely’s absence through injury meant
that ICT could only field four of five substitutes
allowed, with youngster Tony Low
taking his place. Low was praised for his
efforts but it was simply a match where
things just didn’t go Caley Thistle’s way
and where Clyde had taken their chances,
with Colin Nish scoring a double. Indeed,
Paterson wasn’t despondent. “We came
into this match after a terrific run, paying
the best football I’ve seen from my side in
all the time I’ve been with the club,” the
manager considered.
Paterson kept faith with the same team,
which beat Ayr United 2-0 in their next
match, thanks to a goal each from Ritchie
Roy McBain deftly counter-balanced
Barry Robson’s attacking instincts,
while Ross Tokely could hold a flank on
his own.
Robson
Golabek
Ritchie
McBain
Hart
Mann
Brown
Duncan
Wyness
Munro
Tokely
and Wyness. Ritchie’s partnership with
Wyness improved with every game and
their ability to link was best highlighted
by the opening goal of their next game,
a 6-0 thrashing of Alloa Athletic in, the
second of what would be an eight-match
winning streak that took Caley Thistle to
the top of the league (a run that extended
to 12 matches unbeaten). Wyness had
pulled out to the right flank to send in
a cross that was headed clear, only for
central midfielders Roy McBain and
Russell Duncan to recycle the ball before
starting the move again through Mann at
the back. Mann saw space ahead of him to
push forward with the ball 20 yards until
he was on the fringe of the final third,
then stroked a cute pass into Ritchie’s feet
as the forward backed into his defender.
September 2016 | nutmeg | 179

The Back Four: Tactics
The history makers
Ritchie’s first touch took the ball to
his right slightly, but his second touch
allowed him to get the ball from out of his
feet, to allow him to drag on to his right
foot, feint a shot and strike the ball low
into the far corner. It was a noteworthy
goal due to the individual brilliance in
finishing the move, but it involved some
of the best aspects of Caley Thistle’s
performance during the autumn season,
from Wyness’s work outside the box, to
the functional, if not spectacular nature
of the centre of midfield, to Mann’s ability
to dictate play from the back.
The third goal happened largely due to
a typical surge forward from midfield by
Richard Hart, who at the time wore the
number 9 shirt but his position on the
pitch was the third central midfielder,
with more responsibility than the others
to attack the penalty area. Hart was 24
years old at the time and was in his first
season at Caley Thistle, having previously
played for Ross County and Brora
Rangers. Club legend Charlie Christie
was in the twilight of his career, playing
in rotation in his last full season due to
Hart’s form, so with McBain and Duncan
settling well into the line-up as understated
players, who worked hard at winning
the ball back and moving it on without
fuss, it was important for Paterson to find
the correct balance to give the midfield
some thrust. Hart was the right player
in the right place in that regard and his
£5,000 transfer fee for him was justified.
Hart’s attacking instincts were countered
by Duncan and McBain curbing theirs;
22-year-old Duncan would eventually
specialise in a holding midfield position,
while left-footed McBain would often
pull out to the flank, to cover for Robson’s
tendency to drift infield in the final third.
The three midfielders complemented one
another remarkably well.
The best goal of the game was finished
by Ritchie again, in a match where both
he and Wyness scored hat-tricks. It was
the fourth goal scored, where Robson
drifted over to the right flank, carried the
ball forward and took two Alloa defenders
out of the play with a thoughtfullyweighted
reverse pass into Ritchie’s path,
after the forward had bent his run from
left to the right side of the penalty area.
Ritchie’s touch took him outside the
box, but he somehow contorted his body
to rifle a shot into the top corner of the
opposite side of goal in an extraordinary
show of marksmanship.
The 6-0 win over Alloa was a recordbreaking
win for the First Division at
the time and Caley Thistle’s position at
the top of the second tier was the club’s
best to that point. It was followed by a
2-1 win at home to St Johnstone at the
end of October, after which the Highland
News exclaimed: “Don’t be fooled by the
scoreline, because the difference in class
was there for all to see, with St Johnstone
never looking likely winners”. Hart
scored the winning goal with a spectacular
thumping shot and the midfielder
explained it modestly: “I glanced up and
saw Alan Main had covered his angles, so
I thought the only way I could beat him
was to blast it, and I was delighted to see
it hit the back of the net”.
Caley Thistle won 2-0 in Dingwall, with
Robson dribbling beyond two players and
scoring from 25 yards past Tony Bullock
within 40 seconds of kick-off. Ross
The 6-0 win over Alloa was
a record-breaking win for the
First Division at the time and
Caley Thistle’s position at the
top of the second tier was the
club’s best to that point.
180 | nutmeg | September 2016

By John Maxwell
County manager Neale Cooper resigned
on Monday after the game, having failed
to build on his 15-match unbeaten run
from the end of the previous season. The
Highland Derby victory was followed by
a 5-3 win over Queen of the South; then
2-1 and 1-0 wins over Arbroath and Clyde
respectively took Caley Thistle to the top of
the league by the beginning of December.
Given the success that Paterson had
with Inverness, taking them through the
divisions, the famous cup win at Celtic,
having his team challenging and leading
the division with a series of convincing
performances, it wasn’t a surprise to see
the manager linked with clubs in the
top flight. Dundee United were turned
down in November, but Ebbe Skovhdal’s
departure from Pittodrie gave Paterson a
job opportunity that he couldn’t refuse.
Paterson tried to play down speculation
in the press, but ominously told the
Highland News a week before taking the
job that “you would have to listen to any
opportunity that would better yourself”.
Until that point, Paterson seemed
content in Inverness, but perhaps the club’s
circumstances played a part in his move. By
the week ending 2 November 2002, after
the win against St Johnstone, it was clear
that Caley Thistle were not going to be able
to gain promotion to the SPL even if they
won the league. At that time the criteria
for inclusion demanded a 10,000 all-seater
stadium, something which the club simply
did not have the funds for. Paterson reacted
to the situation with dignity, claiming that
he and his players knew all along what the
circumstances were, and that he hoped to
be able to take the same team to promotion
in the near future when the club was ready.
The SPL’s rules were later relaxed, but
perhaps the glass ceiling that Caley Thistle
hit at the time had a bearing on Paterson’s
immediate future.
There was speculation that Paterson
and his assistant Duncan Shearer would
commit to the club for the long term, but
they joined Aberdeen on 11 December
2002. John Robertson and his assistant
Donald Park left their posts at Livingston to
replace Paterson and Duncan in Inverness.
A couple of draws and then a 4-1 win
over St Mirren saw Caley Thistle go into
the new year as league leaders, but 2003
didn’t start well for the new management
team. Robertson didn’t want to disrupt
the winning formula too much, but one
loss in the league turned into four on the
bounce, which by the end of February saw
the Caley Jags ten points behind Falkirk. It
was a sticky patch that the team never recovered
from, despite thumping Hamilton
Academical 6-1 in the Scottish Cup in
between league losses. The most chastening
result was a 5-1 loss at home to Ross
County, which is still a record scoreline for
the Highland Derby since both clubs were
admitted to the Scottish Football League
in 1994. More significant to Caley Thistle’s
season however was a second defeat to
Falkirk a fortnight earlier.
The 4-3 defeat at home to Falkirk was
notable for both teams lining up in 3-5-2
formations. While the majority of the
division was comfortable with 4-4-2,
so each team enjoyed success from
being able to have superior numbers in
midfield, while still being able to field a
clutch of regular goalscorers. Against each
other, Falkirk generally had the upper
hand through the season. It is difficult
to pinpoint a defining reason why that
was the case, because Caley Thistle gave
as good as they got, but a recurring
theme was Colin Samuel being quicker
than anyone else on the pitch, which
turned the Caley Thistle defenders and
prompted errors that otherwise might
not have occurred. Owen Coyle also made
a difference, scoring a hat-trick in this
match despite starting as an advanced
midfielder, rather than as the penalty-box
striker he was better known as.
Robertson’s approach to drilling the
team was more cautious and that began
September 2016 | nutmeg | 181

The Back Four: Tactics
The history makers
to show by this match, despite what the
scoreline suggests. Under Paterson, the
team had more licence to express itself,
perhaps at the expense of more goals conceded.
Robertson wanted the team to give
less territory away, on the premise that the
attacking talent could look after itself.
“We probably didn’t play with as much
freedom as we used to, we were maybe
more tactical and a little bit more difficult
to beat,” Mann says when comparing the
two managers’ approaches. “No disrespect
to Steve, he would give us tactics but it
wasn’t the same detail that John gave.”
“Everyone knew where they stood with
John, it was drummed into us”.
The significance of the fixture with
Falkirk was not lost on either team and
neither side wanted to give a yard of
territory to the opposition. The ball was in
the air a lot as a result. Three of the seven
goals scored on the day arrived as a result
of diagonal balls from the back, over the
opposition line of defence.
Caley Thistle found themselves with a
two-goal lead inside half an hour, firstly
from an aerial pass out of defence to the
strikers, who linked up before Robson
swivelled to shoot; and secondly after
a long pass was miscontrolled by John
Hughes, whose studs allowed the ball to
squirm through to Wyness. A Coyle header
from a looping cross brought to the score to
2-1 almost immediately after. Hughes then
launched a long ball over the Caley Thistle
defence, where the bounce stood up for
Golabek to head back to Brown in goals,
only for Samuel to anticipate the move and
intercept for the equaliser.
Caley Thistle were on top by the hour
mark with Wyness assisting Ritchie, but
the one real piece of ingenuity in the
match came from the spritely 20-year
old Mark Kerr, who weighted a through
ball behind Stuart McCaffrey (by then
playing regularly instead of Munro) for
Samuel, whose fleet-footedness allowed
him to escape the back three and cross
for an onrushing Coyle. That shifted the
momentum to Falkirk’s advantage; Coyle’s
left-footed volley four minutes from
full-time gave the visitors a win and a
commanding position in the league table.
With a string of losses in the league
and a grip on the title slipping away,
Robertson moved the team to a 4-4-2
system in March. Paterson’s 3-5-2 fitted
the squad well earlier in the season, but
David Bagan’s return from a long-term
injury gave Robertson a more natural fit
for an alternative approach, with Tokely
and Golabek comfortable in the full-back
positions and Bagan bringing width high
up the pitch. Steven Hislop’s arrival from
Ross County at the end of January marked
the advent of Scottish football’s first
winter transfer window, and he provided
competition for Ritchie as the goalscoring
target man. All three of Wyness, Ritchie
and Hislop ended the season on roughly a
goal every other game.
The transition to Robertson’s strategy
began to work. Caley Thistle went
from losing four in a row in January
to picking up 13 of 15 points in March,
which gave the team an outside chance
to overtake St Johnstone and catch up on
Falkirk. However, the fourth away trip
in a row – and third midweek fixture in
three weeks – saw the Caley Jags falter
massively at Clyde. In this instance,
Robertson elected to play McCaffrey at
right-back and Tokely in front of him, to
add further steel into the team with two
banks of four. However, Clyde still blew
the visitors away with three goals in the
first 16 minutes, two of those coming
from errors by each full-back, and the
other coming from a 30-yard blast in off
the post by Andy Millen. The loss away to
Clyde sparked a sequence of erratic form,
with four losses in six matches, including
another midweek reverse to Clyde.
It left Caley Thistle stuck in fourth place,
with a visit to a packed Brockville against
the confirmed champions Falkirk for the
182 | nutmeg | September 2016

By John Maxwell
Paterson’s side was dynamic,
with a playmaking sweeper
and lots of thrust and
creativity in support of the
forwards
hosts’ title party. Without any particular
element of importance to the fixture, the
ball spent a lot less time in the air than in
Falkirk’s 4-3 win in Inverness earlier in
the year. With vibrant mid-May weather
and a party atmosphere among the home
support, it made an entertaining spectacle.
One striking theme from footage of the
match was just how composed and influential
Mark Kerr looked, despite being
the youngest player on the park. Stuart
Taylor scored a couple for Falkirk, but the
game is best remembered for a couple of
free-kicks by Mann, both of which were
equalisers before Christie closed the scoring.
The first of Mann’s free-kicks was in
a central area 22 yards out and was aimed
to the inside of Allan Ferguson’s left-hand
post, but deflected off the wall considerably
to end up in the other side of the goal.
There was no such luck in Mann’s second:
the centre-back ushered Hart away from
the dead ball before nonchalantly stroking
the ball over the wall from a minimal
run-up. There was so much top and side
spin over the wall that the shot almost
bounced the line, into the far-right corner
of Ferguson’s goal. There have been few
free-kicks scored as expertly as that in
Scotland’s lower leagues since.
It was a good note to end the campaign,
then, but the season was one of missed
potential. Perhaps if Steve Paterson
had stayed to the end of the season, the
unbeaten run from October to December
might have carried on through the new
year. It is difficult to believe that Caley
Thistle would have lost so many league
matches in succession had Paterson and
his assistant remained at the club. The
club lost four in a row in December 2001,
but Paterson’s squad had a year’s more
experience, and, more importantly, a
system that seemed to suit every player in
the team. Whether it was the transition in
training methods, change in personality of
leadership, increased tactical detail or the
integration of different players, the subtle
differences to the team after Paterson’s
departure had an effect that resulted in
Caley Thistle falling down the table.
However, they won the First Division
the following season. Robertson used
his recent connection with Livingston to
effect, bringing back Barry Wilson to the
club and, crucially, tempted Davie Bingham
north. Whereas Paterson generally
relied on the same XI from week to week,
Robertson had a lot of depth and competition
through his squad. Robertson stayed
away from Paterson’s attack-minded
3-5-2, preferring to use Wilson and Bingham
on the sides of a 4-3-3, which would
allow the team to defend with a unit of
seven yet also cut teams open with flair
and pace. Robertson’s title winning side
made history, being the first club from
the Highlands to win promotion to SPL,
but hindsight possibly frames Paterson’s
team from the previous season in a more
romantic aperture. Paterson’s side was
dynamic, with a playmaking sweeper and
lots of thrust and creativity in support
of the forwards. Players complemented
and played for one another. It is a moot
point, because the potential was extracted
for only a handful of months, but maybe
the side that played between August and
December 2002 should be viewed as
among the club’s best ever. l
Special thanks to Neil Sargent at STV for
arranging access to archive footage.
September 2016 | nutmeg | 183

The Back Four: Stats
Three years of Scottish
Premiership penalties: the facts,
the figures and the one area of
the goal no keeper made a save
Thom Watt has analysed every
spot kick from three top flight
seasons. The results, outlined
here contain some intriguing
insights.
The penalty kick. A free shot at goal from
12 yards out. The very definition of a game
changer. Fans cheer their award almost
as much as they would a goal, and players
celebrate them when they benefit from an
award.
When it comes to record keeping,
they’re one of the most interesting
statistics you can look at. It’s a repeatable
action, frequently involving the same
players, with only a finite number of
resolutions. And yet, they’re rarely looked
at in any great depth.
We are addressing this. After looking
at three years of penalties from the
Scottish Premiership, we’ve gathered all
sorts of information on the players, teams
and referees involved in kicks from the
penalty mark. There are 178 penalties
covered, featuring every penalty from
the Premiership years from 2013/14 to
2015/16. We’ve learned a lot about the art
of the spot kick.
Infographic by Colin Heggie
184 | nutmeg | September 2016
GOALS AND MISSES
This seems like a very good place to start.
How often are penalties scored and how
often are they missed?
Of the 178 penalties, 36 didn’t result in
a goal, with 31 saved, and five wide of the
target. Only one player, St Johnstone’s
Steven Maclean, has put two wide of
target, in November and December 2015
against Hearts and Dundee United. 79.8%
of penalties are scored, or just under
four out of every five. Two goalkeepers
have saved four penalties in the Scottish
Premiership, Paul Gallagher and Jamie
MacDonald. Gallacher’s record is especially
impressive, given he’s faced eight
penalties in total and saved half of them.
Paul Gallacher – 4 from 8 (50% saved)
Jamie MacDonald – 4 from 12 (33%)
Owain Fon Williams – 3 from 6. (50%)
Michael McGovern – 3 from 10 (30%)
TEAM AWARDS
One for the conspiracy theorists here:
which team gets the most and the least
amount of penalties, and who concedes
the most?
Of course, there are numerous reasons
for a team getting more penalties than
others. Teams with quick, direct players
tend to win more, as do teams who attack
more than they defend; spending more
time in the opposition box is bound to
draw fouls.

178
Conversion rate
Premiership
penalties
2013/14
to 2015/16
Bottom-left
84%
Bottom-right
72%
Referee awards
Willie Collum
Steven McLean
John Beaton
Best penalty taker
Adam
Rooney
11
from eleven
100%
Craig Thomson
Bobby Madden
Kevin Clancy
Brian Colvin
Just under
four out of
every five
penalties
are scored
Top goalkeepers
Paul Gallacher
Jamie MacDonald
Owain Fôn Williams
Michael McGovern
50%
50%
30%
33%
September 2016 | nutmeg | 185

The Back Four: Stats
Scottish Premiership penalties
Aberdeen – 22 pens, 19 scored (86% conversion)
Celtic – 23 pens, 19 scored (83%)
Dundee – 9 pens, 7 scored (78%
Dundee Utd – 17 pens, 15 scored (88%)
Hamilton – 9 pens, 7 scored (78%)
Hearts – 17 pens, 13 scored (76%)
Hibernian – 2 pens, 2 scored (100%)
ICT – 14 pens, 11 scored (79%)
Kilmarnock – 10 pens, 7 scored (70%)
Motherwell – 10 pens, 8 scored (80%)
Partick Thistle – 6 pens, 5 scored (83%)
Ross County – 11 pens, 8 scored (73%)
St Johnstone – 17 pens, 11 scored (65%)
St Mirren – 11 pens, 10 scored (91%)
St Mirren, Dundee United and
Aberdeen have been the most deadly from
the spot, while St Johnstone have been by
far and away the most profligate.
BEST PLACE TO PUT A PENALTY?
For this we’ve roughly divided the goal
into six areas, as the shooter looks at it:
bottom-left, top-left, bottom-centre, topcentre,
bottom-right and top-right.
It stands to reason that the top-right part
of the goal would be the best place to put
a penalty. Not only are the top corners the
furthest from the goalkeeper’s grasp, the
top-right corner means that a goalkeeper
would have to lead with his left hand,
and as most people are right handed,
that’s harder to do. In the three years we
studied, no goalkeeper saved a penalty in
the top-right of the goal in the Scottish
Premiership , and only one has saved in
the top-left, Ross County’s Michael Fraser
from Aberdeen’s Scott Vernon.
However, it’s difficult to place the ball
into the top corners. It’s a far safer bet to
pick a low drive into the bottom corners.
Does one side have greater success rate
than the other?
Interestingly, there have been exactly
64 penalties put in the bottom-left and
bottom-right corners of the goal.
Penalties put in the bottom-right have a
72% conversion rate, while those in the
bottom-left have a significantly better
conversion rate of 84%. Why? Perhaps it is
that a right foot penalty taker would find
the bottom-left corner the more natural,
or generate the most power striking across
their body? The numbers aren’t quite high
enough to suggest a definite answer, but
that would be a solid hypothesis.
If a penalty has to be kept low, players
are as well hitting the ball firm and hard,
straight down the middle. 24 penalties
have been hit in this manner, with only
three being saved (87% scored). In theory,
players are as well going for power as they
are for placement.
GOALKEEPER MOVEMENTS
For a goalkeeper, there are a number of
ways to approach facing a penalty. Some
may rely on instinct and reading the body
language of a forward, while the more
prepared may have done their homework
on where a particular player is most likely
The goalkeeper’s secrets
By Paul Gallacher
I’ve been fortunate to have saved
a few penalties during my career
and would like to be able to give
you a magic formula for saving penalties.
But that’s not the case. There are plenty of
theories and methods but to just make the
save by any means is all that matters.
Goalkeepers use many methods to try to
gain an advantage when facing penalties.
1. Video analysis: you can now find most
information on player’s penalties on the
internet.
2. Player’s body shape as they strike the ball:
closed or open body shape can sometimes
give a clue as to the area they may hit towards.
3. The time the penalty is awarded or the
score at the time: these factors might play on
the taker’s mind and add to the pressure.
4. Ex-team mate: the taker could be an
ex-teammate or someone you know well, so
you’ve seen him take penalties in the past.
5. Simply guess work: just pick side and dive.
186 | nutmeg | September 2016

By Thom Watt
to put his spot-kick. Some may simply opt
to choose a direction to dive and hope for
the best.
As you might expect, there’s very little
difference in the direction goalkeepers have
moved, as there have been 87 occasions
upon which a goalkeeper has chosen to go
left, and 87 occasions when a goalkeeper
has chosen to go right, with four instances
of the goalkeeper staying still in the middle
of the goal. Interestingly, two of those four
instances resulted in a save.
On 72 occasions (40%) goalkeepers
chose to move in the correct direction
after a penalty was taken, suggesting that
forwards are reasonably good at fooling
goalkeepers into going the wrong way.
Some, such as Radoslaw Cierzniak,
go the same way almost every time. The
Polish goalkeeper faced 11 league penalties
during his time at Dundee United, and
went to his right on all but one occasion.
REFEREE AWARDS
Are there some referees who are more
willing to award penalties than others?
For starters, let’s take a look at which
referees have given the most penalties as
an absolute number.
Willie Collum – 32
Steven McLean – 20
John Beaton – 17
Craig Thomson - 16
Bobby Madden – 16
Kevin Clancy – 13
Brian Colvin – 13
As we can see, Willie Collum has given
significantly more penalties than any of
the other referees in Scotland, but does
that necessarily mean he’s quicker in
pointing to the spot? Collum is one of the
senior officials in the top flight, and tends
to get more games. Could that account for
the higher figure? We’ll have to dig down
a little deeper.
Here we’ve taken those absolute figures
for penalties, and divided them by the
number of games each official has taken
charge of. On average, how many games
does it take for a referee to award a
penalty in the top flight?
Brian Colvin – 2.38 games
Willie Collum – 2.44 games
Don Robertson – 3.00 games
Steven McLean – 3.70 games
John Beaton – 3.35 games
Bobby Madden – 4.31 games
Craig Thomson – 4.75 games
HOME OR AWAY?
It would stand to reason that referees are
slightly influenced by a home crowd when
making split decisions. Who wouldn’t
be slightly intimidated by thousands of
supporters angrily suggesting their team
should be awarded a spot-kick? Is there
any truth in this hypothesis?
It would appear so. Home teams have
received 57% of the penalty awards in the
Scottish Premiership, in comparison to
just 43% of those for the travelling side.
Perhaps that’s down to home sides being
more attacking, or less conservative?
Regardless, home teams receive more penalties,
but there appears to be no difference
in the likelihood of scoring; 79% of home
penalties have been converted, while 80%
of away penalties are converted.
BEST PENALTY TAKERS?
Finally, who have been the best penalty
takers of the Premiership era? It’s a very
specific skill, and while the attacking
players are expected to score, there are
some who clearly practice their spotkicks
more than others. It’s often the
difference between taking full points.
Adam Rooney – 11 from 11 (100%)
Kris Commons – 9 from 10 (90%)
Greg Tansey – 7 from 7 (100%)
Nadir Ciftci – 6 from 7 (86%)
Kenny McLean – 7 from 7 (100%)
Leigh Griffiths – 6 from 8 (75%)
Billy McKay – 6 from 8 (75%)
Liam Craig – 5 from 5 (100%)
Brian Graham – 5 from 5 (100%)
John Sutton – 5 from 5 (100%)
Jamie Hamill – 4 from 5 (80%) l
September 2016 | nutmeg | 187

The Back Four: Strips
Top marks
The real low point of Euro 2016? That Spanish away kit.
Are we about to see our club sides sporting tops that look
like someone has vomited all over them?
By John Penman
Sitting in a pleasant little cafe in the
centre of Bordeaux enjoying a light lunch
before that night’s game in Euro 2016, my
peace was shattered when a supporter
came in wearing the Spanish Euro away
top. There was a collective gasp from the
fashion-savvy French and the checkerboard-clad
Croats at this abomination,
which was made even worse by the fact it
was draped round a 50-something with a
spreading middle.
You’ve probably banished the white
top with red and yellow triangles from
your memory. What were adidas and
Spain thinking? Did someone drop a pot
of paint and was then too embarrassed
to admit it? Were they sick? Literally?
Whatever the reason, they got it badly
wrong with a design that was supposed
to be a representation of the Spanish
mainland and associated islands. Think of
the Scotland top from the 90s that looked
like the wearer had been bitten and blood
was seeping through the shirt. You get the
concept but the execution leaves a lot to
be desired. Bad enough on the pitch, the
Spanish top is positively offensive on a fan.
As Alan Hansen might have said: “You
win nothing with crap kits.” And so it
was that a few hours later, the reigning
European champions threw away the
chance to top their group with a supine
loss to Croatia which condemned them
to more difficult route to progress further
in the tournament. A few days later, the
Spaniards were denied any hopes of a
third Euro title on the trot, vanquished by
a stylish Italian side clad in classy Puma
blue. There’s a moral here.
The good news is that no one has copied
the Spanish approach for this season.
World Cups or European Championships
are often used as the benchmark for the
following season’s club kits and while
that’s partly true this year, thankfully
Spain’s unique approach hasn’t carried
into club football.
These days it’s rare for clubs to stay with
a design for more than a year which means
the demand for new, innovative designs is
increasing. Does that push manufacturers
into making dodgy decisions or carrying
out minor tinkering which can result
in even worse designs? Some changes
are easy. Leicester City, for example, will
sport gold inserts in their Puma strip this
year – but did you know this is apparently
reserved only for the champions?
If you want evidence that designers are
running out of ideas, look at the similarity
between Borussia Dortmund’s Puma
home top and Juventus’ adidas one. Of
course, the big manufacturers often come
up with a template that’s slightly adapted
to accommodate a club’s demands
but you have to examine the Juve and
Dortmund tops very closely to detect any
difference in design.
While the likes of New Balance, Joma,
Under Armour, Macron and Warrior
have made significant inroads into major
European leagues, they are largely absent
from international football. The Euros
188 | nutmeg | September 2016

are still mainly a bun fight between the
traditional players because so much is at
stake. When they are priced at €85, it is
easy to see how valuable the market is for
national tops. But the real money is still in
club football.
Some similar designs are leaking into
the club shirts you’ll see throughout the
2016/17 season. Manchester City have
a light blue version of England’s Nike
kit. Manchester United, again backed by
adidas, continue with the cheap t-shirt
theme both home and away, Chelsea take
St Etienne: a rare beauty by Le Coq Sportif
Spain’s Euro 2016 changed strip: what
were adidas thinking?
boring to a new level and New Balance
seem to have forgotten what to do with
the neckline on Celtic’s new kit.
But across Europe, there are a few
gems. St Etienne sport a stunning
shade of green with red, white and blue
piping, a rare beauty by Le Coq Sportif.
Barcelona’s simple but effective return
to stripes is a homage to their incredibly
successful 1992 side that won the
European Cup for the first time (albeit
with a horrendous change kit). Inter and
Milan stop messing about and have glorious,
traditional kits this season.
In the UK, though, you have to look
beyond the top leagues to find anything
different and classy. Millwall may be
stuck in League One but their style is
Premier League. They have reverted to a
blue and white stripe top by Errea with
a very classy looking gold collar insert.
Meanwhile in the Scottish Premiership,
there isn’t much to get excited about.
If you want a British equivalent of that
Spain away kit, look no further than
newly promoted Middlesbrough. They are
wearing the identikit strips adidas produce
for lower league teams, the Regista
16 jersey featuring a swooping stripe. It
generally works but not with red and
white and if you’ve a bit of middle-aged
spread, forget it.
And avert your gaze from Girondins
de Bordeaux’s third kit which looks like
someone has put their holiday snaps on
a blue shirt, a terrible contrast with the
beauty of their new stadium which is one
of Europe’s finest.
The best kit of this coming season?
Well, as I have said, both Milan clubs are
looking good but the winner is easy for
me: Real Madrid. Classy, simple with a
neat collar. It’s the same design as the
new Bayern top but in white, it looks
fabulous and it’s worthy of a Champions
League winner. Well done adidas. But that
doesn’t mean we forgive you for Spain. l
September 2016 | nutmeg | 189

The Back Four: Poetry
Commemoration
By Stephen Watt
Legend: Noun. A historical narrative
featuring plausible but extraordinary events.
Taken: Verb. Removed from a particular place.
The respected minute’s silence.
Black armbands. Bowed heads.
Television programmes
present their prime.
Jittery film
transmits perms, nutmegs, goals,
toothless grins, celebrations, ball control –
hearts and soul
captured inside sixty seconds.
The best of how we remember them.
Stadium fences become memorials,
shrines of scarves, obituary editorials
by fans scribbled on card,
and flowers of all colours –
the only time some husbands, sons, fathers
have cried so hard, or invested in a bouquet.
Women are stronger
and know how to pray.
Statues rise.
Terraces are baptised, given names
and supporters of the beautiful game
keep them alive
with stories, memories,
and jerseys with retired numbers.
190 | nutmeg | September 2016

Cup Final Day
By Stephen Watt
I
F
P
U
A
N
C
L
Not in my
lifetime,
he promised us.
On his anniversary, I donned
his alleged lucky hat, mum noosed
by his anti-springtime scarf, doomed
before the game could even start.
Fans arrived in droves, bedecked in one colour,
wolfing the perfect iced crests of bakeries’ cakes
between songs sung as poorly as the caterwauling
bagpipes. Plainly true, it was still greater than sitting
on a deflating couch watching mid-day Bond films.
And as the winning goal hit the net, a confetti cannon
exploded inside, pride, something that he primed me
for but I had never encountered. The tingle of a trophy
being engraved with our name, players wiping hands
on filthy shorts as the heavens rain
while strangers hug, dance,
forget we are not acquainted,
reaching for cameras
to snatch
memories
for scrapbooks,
just incase
this never happens again.
The paparazzi want our faces in their papers
and I want him to know we did it during my lifetime;
that the superstition works – and so do the prayers.
D
A
Y
C
U
P
F
I
N
A
L
D
A
Y
September 2016 | nutmeg | 191

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192 | nutmeg | September 2016

Contributors
Paul Brown is a freelance writer
working mainly for the Daily Star,
Sunday Express, Blizzard and
Squawka. Can be found in a London
press box, or at @pbsportswriter.
Half Finnish and proud of it.
Chris Collins: Football obsessive
working in Justice Department
at Scottish Government. Career
highlight remains a hat trick from
right back on a rainy night in
Renfrew, aged 13. @chriscoll10
Stuart Cosgrove is a writer and
broadcaster. He is the author of
Detroit 67 and Young Soul Rebels
and co-hosts BBC Scotland’s Off
the Ball with Tam Cowan.
Paul Forsyth is a sports feature
writer with The Times. He has
covered some of the game’s biggest
events, from the Champions
League to the World Cup.
Neil Forsyth is the author of seven
books and writes for television in
the UK and America. He lives in
West Sussex and has a dog named
Ivan Golac.
Craig Fowler is a freelance
writer who works mainly for The
Scotsman as the de facto online
sports editor. He is also the cofounder
of The Terrace Scottish
Football Podcast.
Andrew Galloway, from
Dumbarton, is a freelance writer
with nearly 15 years’ experience
of covering Scottish football for
published outlets. @AGallowaySport
Daniel Gray is the author of Stramash
and Hatters, Railwaymen and
Knitters. His next book, Saturday,
3pm: Fifty Eternal Delights of Modern
Football is published by Bloomsbury
in October. @d_gray_writer
Simon Hart has reported on
European football for more than a
decade for UEFA.com, and worked
for the Independent newspapers
from 2010-16. Born in Liverpool,
he is a lifelong Evertonian. Here
We Go, his first book, is published
Published by deCoubertin Books
(£18.9) @simon22ph
Gerry Hassan is a writer and
commentator and author of
numerous books including
Caledonian Dreaming and
Independence of the Scottish
Mind, as well as the forthcoming
Scotland the Bold. His website is:
www.gerryhassan.com
Colin Heggie is usually found in
front of a computer in north-east
Scotland as a graphic designer, or
behind a camera anywhere as
a photographer.
www.seafieldstreet.co.uk
Hugh MacDonald is a former
chief sub-editor, literary editor
and chief sports writer for The
Herald. He now witters for hire
@redblaes
Paul Macdonald is a writer who
specialises in Scottish, English
and Spanish football, and is also
Managing Editor of sports websites
such as Voetbalzone, Spox and
Sporting News for Perform Media.
@PaulMacdSport
Christopher Marshall writes
about politics and policing
matters for The Scotsman, where
he is currently Home Affairs
Correspondent. @chris_scotsman
John A Maxwell is a private client
lawyer based in the Highlands.
He has previously worked on
rosscountytactics.com and is coeditor
of Tell Him He’s Pelé.
@john_a_maxwell
Duncan McCoshan is a cartoonist /
writer/screenwriter who, under the
nom de plume Knife, is half of the
team behind Private Eye’s It’s Grim
Up North London. @knife6161
Alan McCredie is a photographer
and filmmaker. He has two books
to his name; 100 Hundred Weeks
of Scotland and This Is Scotland
(with Daniel Gray.) Originally from
Perth, but now living in Edinburgh
he spends most of his free time
worrying about how to convince
his 5 year-old-son Joe to support
the mighty St Johnstone instead of
lowly Hibernian. @alanmccredie
w: www.alanmc.co.uk
Alastair McKay is a freelance
journalist who writes for the
London Evening Standard and
Uncut. He lives in London and is a
West Ham season ticket holder.
He has previously worked for
The Scotsman, Scotland and
Sunday, and Cut magazine.
His blog is alternativestovalium.
blogspot.co.uk. @AHMcKay
Alasdair McKillop co-founded
the Rangers Standard in 2012
and has co-edited two books
about Rangers. He contributes
regularly to the Scottish Review
and Scottish Review of Books.
@AGMcKillop
Heather McInlay is a longresident
in Glasgow, though her
passion for Charlton Athletic dates
from a London childhood and the
unfashionable football days of
the 70s/80s. Writes with gentle
humour about football’s characters
and other stories. @hjmckinlay.
Colin McPherson is a photographer
and football fan who also writes
about the game and contributes to
When Saturday Comes magazine.
He is a member of the Document
Scotland collective.
@germanocean
Euan McTear is a football
journalist and the author of ‘Eibar
the Brave’. His primary focus is
Spanish football, while he’s often
found despairing at Saint Mirren
Park on Saturdays. @emctear
Kathleen Oakley is a Glasgowbased
graphic designer, illustrator
and Ross County fan. Once drew a
fox for a school project with ‘this is
the best I could do’ written in tiny,
tiny handwriting incorporated in a
bush. Twitter: @kathoakley
Instagram: @kathoak
Alan Pattullo has been a sports
writer at The Scotsman since
1998, reporting on World Cup
finals, Wimbledon and Claudio
Caniggia’s debut for Dundee. He is
the author of In Search of Duncan
Ferguson and once edited a
Dundee fanzine, It’s Half Past Four
And We’re 2-0 Down.
September 2016 | nutmeg | 193

Contributors
John Penman is a Partick Thistle
fan with an unhealthy interest
in football strips which may well
feature in many of his Twitter
ramblings. @Gadgeagoogoo
Adrian Searle is publisher, design
consultant and author. He plays
right back for Scotland Writers FC.
@designandbooks
Nils Henrik Smith is a Norwegian
novelist and freelance writer.
He’s a regular contributor to
Josimar, Norway’s leading football
magazine. @NilsHenrikSmith
Rob Smyth is a freelance writer
based in Hertfordshire. He is
co-author of Danish Dynamite and
is writing a book about the rivalry
between Arsenal and Manchester
United.
Martin Stone is behind the
eponymous www.unmodernman.
net blog. He writes on all things
fitba, music & terrace culture. An
avid Aberdeen fan, he can be found
in Pittodrie’s Section Y or
@stonefish100 on Twitter.
Chris Tait is recognised as a sports
writer at The Herald, though he
insists it was a case of mistaken
identity. Has since emigrated to
www.taitofthenation.wordpress.
com to catalogue his experiences
travelling in the US.
Ian Thomson: Journalist. Author.
Scholar of American fitba’s
tartan-tinged history. Champion
of Stateside Scots. Following the
path taken by Aberdeen F.C. to
Washington D.C.
@SoccerObserver
Michael Tierney is a multi-award
winning journalist and writer, from
Glasgow. His book, The First Game
With My Father (Random House/
Doubleday), was first published in
2014. He currently lives in Qatar.
Mark Waters is a Graphic Designer
based in Glasgow and is founder of
the online magazine Glasgow City
Arts. They also say he could have
been a professional dancer if he
had the training. To see more of his
work visit -
www.markwatersdesigns.com
Stephen Watt is an awardwinning
poet and performer from
Dumbarton whose collections
include Spit (Bonacia Ltd - 2012)
and Optograms (Wild Word Press -
2016) @StephenWattSpit
Thom Watt generally writes about
stats, facts and figures in Scottish
football. He’s been featured in The
Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and
The Scotsman, but you can find
him regularly on the STV website.
Jonathan Wilson is the editor of
The Blizzard and the author of
Inverting the Pyramid. His latest
book, Angels with Dirty Faces: the
Footballing History of Argentina
came out in August. @jonawils.
Richard Winton is a senior digital
journalist with the BBC Sport
website. Exiled in England since
leaving The Herald. Used to have
“potential”. Dundee United fan.
@richardwinton
Interested in contributing?
Mail ideas to:
info@nutmegmagazine.co.uk
Editor: Ally Palmer
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Watson
Publisher: Palmer Watson
www.palmerwatson.com
Editorial team:
Alan Pattullo, Terry Watson,
Stuart Cosgrove, Daniel Gray,
John Maxwell, Richard Winton,
Duncan McKay.
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194 | nutmeg | September 2016

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