Former general secretary of the Asian Football Federation, Alex Soosay, hired Andy Roxburgh to deliver some big goals.

Speaking in 2015, the Malaysian administrator acknowledged that Asia’s dream was to win a World Cup. “It’s why we brought Andy in,” he said.

Now 82, Roxburgh’s commitment to excellence burns as strongly now as it did when he managed Scotland at Italia 90, the last time the national team won a game at the World Cup finals.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino bills the tournament in America, Canada and Mexico as the biggest and most inclusive ever and, for the first time, an expanded lineup will accommodate nine teams from Asia. For many, Hajime Moriyasu’s Japan are World Cup dark horses.

Despite beating Germany and Spain in Qatar, the Japanese eventually lost to Croatia on penalties. While the Samurai Blue have never progressed beyond the last 16, football chief Tsuneyasu Miyamoto has set the team the bold target of a run to this year’s final. The ultimate goal is to win the World Cup by 2050 and Roxburgh believes Japan are not the only Asian nation capable of raising eyebrows.

“There are grounds for optimism because of what happened in the last World Cup,” he says. “We had so many big results there when you think of Japan beating Germany and Spain and so on.

“Saudi beat the eventual winners Argentina in the opening game and that was unbelievable. We have nine teams going this time and I have been working with Japan. Since 2001, I have been going at least every two years and so I am very friendly with Hajimi the coach.”

A resident of Switzerland, the former SFA technical director and manager travels to the AFC HQ in Kuala Lumpur five times a year. He also visits nations like Japan, South Korea and Australia to pass on his coaching education know-how.

“The whole coaching setup in Japan is one I have been heavily involved in for nearly 25 years. So I have had the pleasure of watching them develop and they learn and they learn fast.

“Their aim is to win the World Cup by 2050 and a number of people, including Ange Postecoglou, think they will make it before that. I don’t want to put pressure on them here, but they are certainly developing very well.

“They remind me of Spain. I was very close with Spain around the new millennium when I watched all the youth teams develop. You could see it coming in Spain and the Japanese have an element of that about them.

“One of the big things about Japan is that nearly all of their players play in Europe. In some cases, like Saudi, none of their players play in Europe. So there will be good players but a lot of them don’t play regularly in the first team because there are now so many foreign players in the Saudi league.”

Order your Nutmeg World Cup Issue NOW

The participation of one Asian nation has been complicated by the ravages of war. Relations between the United States and Iran are such that the Islamic Republic was forced to decamp their training base to Tijuana in Mexico. Iran are scheduled to play two games in Los Angeles and another in Seattle, and the team and officials will fly into the cities immediately before the games and return to their Mexican base camp after the final whistle.

“Iran’s situation is another story altogether,” says Roxburgh. “They have good players and they always have done because Carlos Queiroz, Alex Ferguson’s old assistant, was managing them for years and did a great job with them. But, at the moment, we don’t know what’s going to happen there. No one does.”

Of the other Asian teams competing, Roxburgh offers a cautiously optimistic assessment. The usual big hitters such as Australia and South Korea are known packages, others less so.

“Uzbekistan are going to be there along with Jordan and in the Asian context both have done really well. Whether they can handle the World Cup stage, time will tell.

“Qatar have also done well in Asia but the minute they played in the the World Cup the stress of being the home nation seemed to overwhelm them. So whether they can do anything I don’t know because it’s a small country and they don’t have the depth of squad.

“But Uzbekistan are interesting because they have been outstanding at youth level in recent years, even in a world context.”

Share

Like this high quality of writing? You’ll get much more of it in Nutmeg Magazine’s World Cup edition. Order your copy by clicking on the cover below.

Special offer for Nutmeg FC readers

To celebrate reaching our 40th print issue we’re offering a £40 deal for Father’s Day.

For £40 (+ P&P*), the important father figure in your life will receive the next four quarterly issues of our beautiful, 196-page print magazine AND full access to Nutmeg FC, our digital companion.

The offer will begin with Issue 40 of the magazine, sent in time for Father’s Day with a gift card. Issues 41 (September), 42 (December) and 43 (March 2027) will follow.

Give the gift of Nutmeg

Please order by Wednesday 17 June to guarantee delivery by Father’s Day.

If you would rather Issue 40 was sent to you to hand over, then leave a message in the ‘order notes’ field and include your own address.

This offer is only available in the UK.

– – – – – – – – –

*Postage & Packing is £2.50 per issue.

**Please include an email address you would like Nutmeg FC digital content sent to in the ‘order notes’.

Father's Day solution here

Introducing the Nutmeg Academy

Nutmeg is looking for the next great voice in Scottish football content – and we’ve built a unique training and development programme to give our new signing the best possible start.

• A paid, season-long apprenticeship covering print, digital and broadcast football media

• Learn alongside the best in the game – tailored, high-value work experience spots

• Produce content for each edition of Nutmeg magazine plus on Nutmeg FC, our online platform

• Develop and launch your own channel with the help of the Nutmeg team – a pitch for your new, independent channel (a magazine, a blog, a YouTube show, podcast or website) will be your application to the Nutmeg Academy

This is a fantastic opportunity to start your career in football media, whether you are coming out of school, further education or looking for a change in direction.

JOIN THE TEAM

You will be a part of the editorial team at Nutmeg, producing the best Scottish football magazine on the market and writing for Nutmeg FC, our growing digital brand.

You’ll also be connected with the best in sports media for high-value work experience spots – witness a day in the life of sportswriters, broadcasters, club media and independent content creators, and develop your own network of professional connections.

Finally, we will work with you to make your own channel a reality – that could be a website, a magazine, subscription media, a YouTube channel… we have the whole of season 2026-27 to get your independent vision ready for launch.

THE SEASON

You’ll report for pre-season training in July 2026, and by the end of May 2027 you’ll be a free agent with a wealth of top-flight experience behind you.

You’ll be a valued team member for the duration of your time in the Nutmeg Academy – full details, including pay, will be discussed during our selection process.

PLAYER PROFILE

There are no barriers to entry in terms of academic or professional qualifications, nor in terms of age. We are looking for a new voice in football media, with a bold, unique vision. But your role in the Nutmeg Academy has to be your focus for your time with us, so if you are still involved in full-time education, or if you are employed elsewhere on a full-time basis, this is not for you.

This is a flexible opportunity. We’d love to see you in person as much as possible, but if the best applicant has other priorities in her or his life, we’re happy to help you achieve your goals without disrupting these – that includes remote working and flexible workdays.

THE APPLICATION PROCESS

We’re looking for between 500 and 1000 words in total, describing you and your vision for a new football channel – that could be a magazine, a blog, a YouTube show, a podcast, a website or something really cool that we don’t even know about.

If you want to include a media attachment to illustrate your project, please do, but our selection will be driven by the strength of the idea and the individual – if you don’t have access to the equipment you need to do your thing, that will not hold you back. Just tell us about it.

THE DATES

Applications are open now. Please send yours to academy@nutmegmagazine.co.uk before the closing date of July 1, 2026.

By Stephen McGowan

“Ultimately, life is about memories,” says Scottish FA president Mike Mulraney. “It’s about winding the clock back to the day you watched Kenny McLean score that goal against Denmark to take us to the World Cup.

“In ten years from now, maybe 15 or 20 or more, people will still remember that night when they came here to Hampden with their friends and their families in November.

“They won’t remember what they did the night before and they won’t remember the night after, but they will absolutely remember that night.”

In 2023, the UK Government staged a Westminster reception to mark the SFA’s 150^th anniversary. When the speeches were done, the former chairman of Alloa was asked how he would like his time on Hampden’s sixth floor to be remembered in future and offered a one-word response. “Facilities.”

Pitching In was launched as an SFA campaign to raise £50million to invest in the game’s infrastructure by 2030. Thanks to Steve Clarke and his team reaching three of the last four major tournaments, the bar has now been raised to £100m.

Proceeds of the penalty shootout in Serbia in 2020 have been used to upgrade or replace changing rooms. Cash generated by qualification for Euro 2024 has been utilised to improve 3G pitches in areas of most need. Now the £9.5m coming from FIFA for reaching the World Cup finals can build new facilities for the Scotland internationals of the future.

Mulraney is hellbent on fixing the roof while the sun is shining because football’s natural cycle offers no guarantee of Scotland reaching World Cups in the future. Players like Andrew Robertson, Grant Hanley, Kenny McLean and John McGinn are aging and edging towards the end of their international careers.

A dearth of young Scots playing first-team football in the SPFL Premiership, meanwhile, hampers efforts by Clarke to bring through a new generation and, while improved facilities offer no guarantee of a quick solution, this much can be said with relative certainty. Without them, the task of improving the number of young Scottish footballers playing first-team football becomes impossible.

“We have made a difference by assisting 193 projects via the Pitching In initiative,” adds Mulraney. “And it’s growing.

“We are going to do more and we are going to do more and once we have done more, we will look at doing more again. It is never going to be enough because we need hundreds of millions.

“But we have already reached our Pitching In funding target of £50m by the end of 2030 and people told me that was impossible. At the SFA AGM I announced that, not only was that not impossible, but we have already blown through it in 2026 and the target has now been re-set to £100m.

“We want to see £100m invested into facilities across Scotland. New pitches, all-weather pitches, into changing rooms so that girls can feel safe.

“We have become the number-one sport in Scotland for women and girls for the first time ever this year. And we are going to build on that. And we can only build on it if we build places for them to play.”

The rest of this article is for paid subscribers only. Click here to support the best football writing in Scotland, plus you can order Nutmeg Magazine’s World Cup edition by clicking on the cover below.

The need for top-class facilities has not only been felt on home soil. Clarke and assistant Steven Naismith have made multiple trips to the United States to make sure that the World Cup base camps offer the players the best possible opportunity of making history by qualifying for the knock-out stages for the first time.

From the Florida Blue Training Centre in Fort Lauderdale to Charlotte FC’s 52,000-square-foot Atrium Health Performance Park, the governing body aim to give every player from Andrew Robertson and John McGinn to a seven-year-old in Kirkwall a chance to play the game within facilities bought and paid for by the World Cup dividend.

“We have left nothing to chance with the World Cup preparations,” says Mulraney, “but there is always something that catches you out.

“From testing the mattresses in the hotel rooms for the players to sleep on to figuring out what food we will take across for them to eat to how we are going to look after everyone going as best as we can. There are always limitations to what we can do as a national association, but we have tried to cover every base.

“That has put an enormous workload on the team upstairs. But we believe we have given it our best shot. There is nothing that we think we could have done that we did not have a real go at.”

The SFA is on the cusp of raking in over £9m to cover the World Cup overheads, but the Tartan Army must find their own way to pay for the eyewatering cost of a trip to America.

The morning after the 4-2 win over Denmark, supporters began plotting ways to make it to the United States, Canada or Mexico. Their enthusiasm waned slightly when they discovered the price of tickets, travel and accommodation.

Reports put the cost of the trip at an estimated £7500 per fan. While Providence, Rhode Island will witness the greatest influx of Scots on North American soil since the Darien Project, it’s difficult to predict precisely how many will journey over the Atlantic in the coming weeks.

“Our American friends have asked us how many will make the journey,” ponders Mulraney. “We can’t even make an estimate.

“We estimated that 50,000 might go to Germany and wondered if that might be ambitious. In the event, 200,000 went.

“So who knows? This is different because it’s a lot further away and one wonderful thing about it is that we will have fans who will already be in America or Canada. Maybe expat or second-generation Scots embedded in these nations who still feel in their heart and their soul that they are Scottish.

“They will be coming out and wishing us well, so for me I think it’s very difficult to put a figure on how many people might support Scotland in a World Cup in America.”

Even those unable to make the journey feel the anticipation building. Buy groceries at Marks and Spencer’s and they’ll thrust Scotland football stickers into your hand. Pub landlords are gearing up for late licensing hours to facilitate the 2am kick-off time for the opening game against Haiti and 11pm starts for the matches against Morocco and Brazil.

“It gives us a little bit of goodwill and critically it gives the nation a lift. I believe that everything becomes a lot harder when we don’t make it. It was the first thing I said to Stephen when we spoke about him becoming our manager.”

People are so used to hearing Clarke referred to as “Steve” that it takes a second to work out who Mulraney actually means when he speaks of “Stephen”.

“I said to Stephen, ‘Qualify for tournaments, that’s what I need you to do. I need you to qualify for tournaments.’

“The benefit of that to the Scottish Football Association and to every man, woman and child that pays attention to what’s happening, regardless of whether they come watch a game, watch it on telly or just read about it in the media, is self-evident. When Scotland qualify for tournaments, everybody feels a little bit better.”

How long the goodwill holds is contingent on results. People already speak of the first game against Haiti in terms of a cup final. Precedent shows that three points and a goal difference of minus one should be enough to secure a place in the last 32 as a best third-place finisher. Anything less than three points and the SFA’s ability to maximise and prolong the World Cup dividend will be tested to the full.

Every World Cup or Olympic Games leaves a legacy behind in terms of the memories it creates. The Barcelona Olympics transformed the city from an industrial, inward-facing municipality to a major international tourist attraction. London 2012 focused regeneration on projects like the stadium, which now houses West Ham United. While legacy is usually measured in terms of the impact an event has on host countries, Mulraney wants the upcoming World Cup to instigate positive spin-offs for Scottish football, while accepting that will only happen if the SFA maintain some forward momentum.

“I’ve been listening to people talking all my life about the legacies created by sporting events. Legacies are only legacies if you continue to ride the horse. If you understand that a snapshot in time only has value if you know how to use it to make an impact on a nation.

“So I think there will be a legacy as long as the SFA grasp the opportunity presented by this World Cup to keep driving forward.

“Ultimately, a legacy is about what you do next. Not what you did last.”

Leave a comment

Mike Mulraney grew up in an era when world-class Scotland players made qualification for World Cup finals look easy. Seven years on Hampden’s sixth floor has schooled the current president of the SFA on just how difficult it can be.

“I still remember coming here when Kenny Dalglish scored against Spain,” he says, winding the clock back to November 1984 and the night when Scotland’s greatest player claimed the last of his 30 international goals in a World Cup qualifier.

Between 1974 and 1998 the national team qualified for six out of seven World Cups. When Dalglish thumped a thundering left-foot strike into the postage-stamp corner of the old wooden goalposts Mulraney was a teenager from Alloa, blithely making the same assumptions as everyone else.

“I thought that was what supporting Scotland would be like all the time,” he says with a shake of the head. “In time I learned that it was a little bit more challenging than that.”

A wealthy self-made man with extensive business interests, the former chairman of Alloa Athletic officially succeeded Rod Petrie as the 54th president of the SFA in the summer of 2023. Petrie’s long-standing health issues rendered Mulraney the de factor president long before that and, in 2019, he led the process which ended with the appointment of Steve Clarke.

Clarke was handed the job of taking Scotland back to a major international tournament for the first time since since France 1998 and, in November 2020, he delivered on his remit. Leading Scotland to a Euro finals delayed by the impact of a worldwide pandemic, the timing could scarcely have been better. Facing a projected loss of £4.5million, the SFA had recently made 18 members of staff redundant. Their turnover had dropped to £27.7m — a 26.9% decrease on the 2019 figure.

“That was a challenging time,” admits Mulraney. “And it was a situation of its time as well.

“I certainly would never knock what previous presidents did or what their objectives might have been. But I made no bones about the fact that I was going to drive the economic model of the Scottish Football Association.

“We look at other sports around us and they are struggling a little bit. We determined that without funding nothing would work. So the whole team got on board, some new people came in and we have driven that model relentlessly.

“That has allowed other successes to come as well. We are very clear in our view that only by driving the financial model can we do all the other good things that need to happen to enhance the game. So the SFA is in a significantly different place.”

The importance of qualifying for major international tournaments can’t be overstated. Under Clarke, Scotland’s national team have now qualified for three of the last four major finals and, at the recent AGM, Mulraney announced a record turnover in excess of £80m. Trebling the turnover of six years ago, next year’s figure will be higher still once the proceeds of participation in the World Cup finals are factored in.

Payments for preparation support and group-stage participation mean the SFA will rake in around £9.3m from FIFA this summer. Chair of FIFA’s Finance Committee, Mulraney played an active role in the decision to increase prize money to nations by 15% at the recent annual congress in Vancouver, but takes the view that the payments matter less than the physical and mental benefits to the nation at large.

“We can put an enumerative value on reaching the World Cup and it’s not irrelevant,” he admits. “But it’s secondary to the real impact and the real impact is the emotional dividend and the dividend a successful qualification campaign brings us.”

Order your Nutmeg World Cup Issue NOW

Reports of an SFA windfall of £10m overlook the cost of going to a World Cup. While players earn no salary for playing for Scotland, the player bonus pool will gobble up a third of the cash. Another third will go towards travel and accommodation and the costs are substantial.

Premier League footballers expect Premier League standards. The pool of management, staff and players flew to Fort Lauderdale for a warm-weather training camp at the Florida Blue Training Centre. From there, they fly to New Jersey for a friendly game against Bolivia on Saturday. After that comes a settling-in period in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Queen City is equidistant between Boston and Miami, while the impressive Atrium Health Performance Park is home to Major League Soccer’s Charlotte FC and the Charlotte Academy. The 52,000-square-foot establishment houses approximately 200 employees and coaches, as well as players, and offers the best of facilities.

After that, the Scots fly to Foxborough to prepare for their opening game against Haiti, return to Charlotte for four days, fly back to Boston for the Morocco match, return to Charlotte then decamp to Miami to get ready for their final group game against Brazil. The nine flights already scheduled could increase in number if Scotland find a way through the group.

“Travel alone is massive,” says Mulraney. “I am glad for a number of reasons that we got the east coast. I’m glad from the point of view of travelling time for our fans, for us from a cost point of view.

“But even then, the basic fundamental costs of going to a World Cup are enormous. We have not been at one of these tournaments for a very long time. There is no one on the sixth floor of Hampden who has experienced a World Cup before.

“Going to Germany for the Euros was fantastic and the costs and the structures we had to put in place for that were significant. But this is a whole new learning curve. Not only are we having to learn about the totally different responsibilities and logistical challenges of a World Cup, we are also having to learn about the cost implications which are, quite frankly, formidable.”

The SFA find themselves in the strongest financial position in their history and the president is the first to acknowledge the interest that breeds. On top of a kit deal with Adidas, Barclays recently agreed to pay £2m a year for naming rights to Hampden and Scottish Cup sponsors Scottish Gas provide strong support at grassroots level. HALO are the association’s official technology partner, while Specsavers, JD Sports, Spar Scotland, M&S Food, Network Rail, Tennents and Matchworn Shirts are all keen to be part of the journey.

“Success brings success. We announced in 2024 that we had turned over £78m because of the Euros and at that time that was the highest turnover the Scottish FA had ever made by miles,” explains Mulraney.

“That was exceptional. Yet this year — without the benefit of an international competition — we beat that figure and made it to £80m. People thought that was impossible when we were turning over £27m four or five years ago. But that’s down to our national teams winning games. Our women’s team is doing well, but the particular revenue benefit comes from the men’s team reaching tournaments.

“That builds the whole model. People want to be associated with us because they believe we are successful. Not only on the pitch, but also off it where we are making a difference to people’s lives.

“We are making a difference through our after-school clubs; our sponsorship agreement with Scottish Gas means that 7000 kids are being fed during the school holidays. We have a relationship with Barclays as well and so many other commercial partners.

“These relationships run deep and they are making a difference to people’s lives.”

Like this high quality of writing? You’ll get much more of it in Nutmeg Magazine’s World Cup edition. Order your copy by clicking on the cover below.

Share

Modena is one of those captivating cities where you are never more than two streets away from bustle or silence.

A town with a reputation for noise - whether that be Enzo Ferrari’s supercars or Luciano Pavarotti’s unmistakable vocals - it also holds an appreciation for the serene.

Locals pounding the pavement of Via Emilio - the perpetually busy road dissecting the city centre - use their ears as much as anything to navigate. Noise leads them south through the Piazza Grande, the mercato and bars bursting with aperitivo patrons.

Just as enticing though is a turn to the north, where Modenese trickle out of the main artery and through its side streets in search of tranquility.

It is in one of these quiet places, off the beaten path, that Destination Calcio is greeted by one of the town’s adopted residents.

Josh Doig steps out of his front gates with a big grin and a muted Prada T-shirt and shorts. The wardrobe is one of a number of areas subtly influenced since embarking on his Italian odyssey.

He has called Modena home since joining Serie A side Sassuolo in 2024. It is now four years since he left Scotland for the boot, following his initial move from Hibs to Hellas Verona. But it is here in Emilia-Romagna where he has truly found his feet.

“It’s the place I’ve probably felt most at home,” he tells Destination Calcio. “I feel like in Verona I was a wee bit up in the air, like it was still all new to me.

“In Modena, being here two-and-a-half years now, I do feel I’m just chilled. I’ve got my routine that I’m in and I’m just relaxed. I just feel very settled here.”

That sense of home is evident as he shows us around his favourite parts of the city. This is Doig’s Modena and, for the next couple of hours, we’re just living in it.

Doig pulls off a solid impression of a local guide - the thick Leith accent that’s never left him the only giveaway that it’s not his day job.

There are nods to some of his favourite restaurants and coffee spots, as well as chats about two of the city’s most famous sons - Pavarotti and Ferrari.

There’s an introduction to the wonky Torre della Ghirlandina - ‘Our very own leaning tower of Pisa’, Doig jokes about the only part of the city that forces the 6ft 2in defender to crane his neck upwards.

All the knowledge of his surroundings is brilliantly unanticipated. Even more so is the source of it.

“It’s more my granny and people like that who know more about it, because when they come they’ll look into everything,” he says as we walk through a bustling Piazza Grande.

“There’s so many small things that I didn’t know. Down that street is the home of Panini stickers. That’s where the original shop came from. It’s literally around the corner. My granny told me that. I’m like, ‘where’s that come from?’

“They’re actually shooting a series about the Panini family. So this whole square was blocked off a few months ago. It was all the old cars put up and it was cool. There’s always films or series getting shot in the square. A few times a month you’ll come here and it’ll just all be cordoned off.”

It’s not the only piazza in the city that looks spectacular as we stroll around in the Italian sunshine.

Another square houses his favourite go-to for food. Osteria di Modena Rossi boasts a front-row seat to the comings and goings through the city’s Piazza Roma, as well as some of the best gramigna in Emilia Romagna, according to our pasta connoisseur.

For the greatest culinary experience though, Doig recommends a trip to Maranello, the home of Ferrari, and the famed Ristorante Montana.

“Every time you go the food is just unbelievable,” says the 24-year-old. “It’s just so cool as well. They’ve got all the Ferrari parts, wheels, on the walls, everyone who’s ever been famous has been there.

“Ronaldo’s strip is there, Haaland’s strip. If someone famous goes they get them to sign a bit of the tablecloth and then they’ll put that up on the wall.

“One of the coolest ones at the top belongs to the main Disney animator. He drew a few pictures and he signed it.”

It’s one of a few locations that forces Doig to get into his car. The 25-minute journey to the training ground is another - his Porsche 911 befitting of a player who is officially the fastest at Sassuolo.

While leaving team-mates in his dust at the Mapei Football Centre, however, it is the same group that helps him enjoy the slower pace of Italian life when time allows - whether that be lunches, gigs or 18 holes at the Modena Golf and Country Club.

“Out of every team I’ve played for, it’s probably one of the closest groups I’ve had in football,” says Doig, who names Tarik Muharemovic, Kristian Thorstvedt, Cristian Volpato and Armand Lauriente among his closest companions.

“We’ve got a really good group of boys that all stay close. So we all do stuff together, we’re all out, the girlfriends are all so close as well.

“Last week we were at Tame Impala together in Bologna which was brilliant. Thorstvedt stays a bit outside, he’s got a big back garden with a pool and with it getting close to the summertime, we’re kind of nudging him, ‘Right, come on it’s got to be a garden party at some point’.”

For now, we settle for a different type of garden and a stop for coffee at Juta all’Orto in the picturesque Parco Giardino Ducale Estense.

First introduced to the spot by his girlfriend Freja, it’s one example of how there is still a strong Scottish influence shaping his life abroad.

His country’s influence is also infiltrating calcio at large, Doig part of Serie A’s burgeoning brigade of Scots. Kieran Bowie’s move to Hellas Verona in January brought the total of Scotsmen in Italy to eight across the top two divisions.

While catching up outside of facing each other is tough, there are plenty of notes to swap with compatriots on their experiences around the country - whether that’s the incredible atmosphere at Atalanta’s New Balance Arena or tips on the impossible job of containing Napoli and Scotland standard-bearer Scott McTominay.

“Scott is an absolute hero there now, they absolutely worship him,’ says Doig. “It’s just good to see a Scottish guy doing that, referred to as one of the best players in Serie A at the moment. He probably is, to be fair.

“I remember the first game of the season against Napoli, and Scott started left wing - at one point he ran in behind me on the opposite side. He’s got that free-roam role to do what he wants, and it’s working for him because he’s been brilliant.

“He’s just everywhere, it’s his work rate. That’s one of the best aspects of his game. He just does not stop, runs the whole game. It’s the same with Billy (Gilmour), I think it’s a Scottish thing.”

The ‘Scottish things’ in Italy aren’t confined solely to the pitch.

Flecks of home have coloured experiences throughout his time in Modena, whether that’s the Hibs top that hangs in the Griffin Bar on the corner of the popular Via dei Gallucci, or the regular visits from Dad Tommy and Mum Lynda.

There is one thing, though, that he hasn’t been able to transport.

“I was home a few weeks ago and I promised myself I was going to get a chippy,” he laughs.

“I got a fish supper and a fried pizza. Unbelievable. After a game at Hibs it was always Domino’s (pizza), junk food. But here you get all the meats, there’s sushi and there is pizza but it’s quality pizza. I do miss after a game when you can eat anything.

“I was always a battered sausage supper or a fried pizza. That reminds me of being a kid in high school. So bad for you though, I don’t know how I survived.”

As we make our way back there’s time to reflect on another survival story, and coping with the immense pressure that came with the move to Italy.

Doig was only 20 when he uprooted and immersed himself into a new culture and language. A memorable start to life in Verona and a first goal helped settle the nerves and set the tone.

“It was my first start, it was against Sampdoria at home, and all my family were in the stands - it was my dad’s birthday,” he recalls.

“I remember I was so nervous. And then the ball just fell to me, open goal, right foot. I was like, ‘God!’

“After that, I got home, had just moved into a new apartment. I said to myself, ‘Wow, this is cool’.

“That’s probably one of the better feelings I’ve had in football. That’s probably been my best moment in Italy.”

One way or another, Doig envisages more moments to savour in his adopted home.

As we turn past a statue of Pavarotti and back into the quiet, the city’s draw no longer needs to be bellowed.

“Honestly, I love it. I try not to look too far ahead, but I do absolutely love it,” he reflects.

“I said that when I retire, it’s probably a place I’ll look at and have a wee house here because it’s stunning. It’s just so chilled.”

Modena’s symphony has captured another heart.

First published at Destination Calcio. Make it your home for Italian football.

In the shade bestowed by the Spar minimart on Greenhill Road, a busker thrashed out When the Saints Go Marching In with startling vigour. “Jeezo,” said one crooked-backed Partick Thistle pensioner to another, “the boy must be on Viagra.” Outside the stadium, a pair of teenage lads at the other end of their supporting odyssey greeted each other. “Alright, Jack,” said one, “what do you reckon tonight, then?” “I’m shiteing it, mate”, replied Jack with a veteran’s weariness.

A 1-1 first-leg draw at Firhill had scattered doubt and left supporters in both colours none the wiser. Many Buddies felt their team had relegation on its breath. Thistle’s Championship play-off record, meanwhile, left Jags fans trembling. All spectators could do was hope and sing, and at the latter they excelled. From half an hour before kick-off, Thistle choruses spilled over stadium walls like the joyous sounds that escape from a schoolyard at playtime. For their part, St Mirren fans greeted the players with a banner that ran almost the length of the touchline and from behind the goal frenetically waved white flags. It looked as if they were surrendering a thousand times over but they sounded as though they were ready to go to war for their team, their town. Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street bellowed from the Tannoy speakers and the occasion felt now like some berserk civic celebration.

Early on and for much of the first half, it all seemed too much for St Mirren, the overwhelmed kid at his own party sent doolally by gluttonous Skittle consumption. Perilously close to goal, Tony Watt purloined the ball from Alex Gogić, the opening act of a brotherly tussle that would last all evening. From Watt’s scruffy pass, Aidan Fitzpatrick blurted out a shot that crawled wide.

After half an hour, Thistle colleague Robbie Crawford concocted a chance for himself with a segment of astute play. Home goalkeeper Ross Sinclair clumsily saved his shot as if trying to shake a wasp from his midriff. Sinclair was not alone in his bungling; a contagion of buffoonery ravaged St Mirren. Over the course of the first half, nearly all of his teammates passed straight to the opposition or out of play. Sometimes it seemed as if they were blinded by the sun or overcome by an urge to pick out friends and family in the stands, pantomime dames flinging Wagon Wheels out into the audience. “Have youse never fucking met?” howled a man close to me.

Order your Nutmeg World Cup Issue NOW

The sun lowered, lengthening shadows so that players’ legs became stilts, yet more slapstick sprinkled into the broth. At long last, St Mirren assembled an attack, their muzzle temporarily removed, culminating in Mikael Mandron slapping a shot wide. It was something, but still home boos gushed from the main stand when the referee peeped for half-time.

In a fixture of such magnitude the home side’s habitual incompetence surely couldn’t last, and so it proved. Not long after the interval, forward Jake Young jiggled through a pair of opponents and seemed to warp the ball towards goal. Josh Clarke pawed his shot over with the determination of a child leaping to free a conker from a tree. Responding, Jags forward Alex Samuel — an unyielding, sparky presence throughout, though often guilty of writhing like a Christmas cracker fortune telling fish — connived a thunderous shot of his own. Sinclair saved mightily, his first-half jitters now vanquished. Indeed, across the pitch home players found a rhythm of sorts and discernible resolution, harrying and blocking where before they had shrugged and ducked, debtors hiding behind the sofa at the doorbell’s ring.

It was, still, harsh on Thistle when the moment which made a town leap happened. With 25 minutes to go, set fair 30 yards from goal substitute Mark O’Hara hovered a free-kick towards the back post. Elongating himself as if trying to retrieve a ball stuck under a parked car, captain Marcus Fraser volleyed almost from the byline. The ball bashed the underside of the crossbar and collapsed into the net like a cudgelled piñata, unleashing bedlam across three stands. In the fourth, Thistle minds were united in a jaded thought: here we go again.

For the final quarter of the game, the visitors prodded forwards but found a St Mirren side now doughtily resolute. Gogić was unbreakable, hindering Thistle enterprise and blockading Sinclair’s goal. Where on occasion in the first half he wore the expression of a head chef ready to ladle hot soup over a hapless pot washer, now he was composure itself. In front of him, Fraser soothed and ran the ball away from peril. On those rare occasions when the Jags breached the citadel, Sinclair’s handling was masterful. With 15 minutes to go, Thistle’s Logan Chalmers dispatched goalwards a venomous free-kick from the ‘D’ on the area’s edge. As he struck the ball it made the noise of a bank vault slamming shut, yet the goalkeeper snuffed the danger.

With the game’s end near, a multi-player scrap detonated close to the rowdy North Bank corner. Referee Nick Walsh waved his yellow card defiantly, as if conducting an orchestra. Deep into injury time, Thistle won another free-kick 20 yards from goal after Watt was sandwiched by two fouls at once. Kyle Turner hit the Buddies’ steadfast wall and Walsh blew for full-time. Six thousand Buddies roared and hugged and breathed at last. Summer had arrived.

Like this high quality of writing? You’ll get much more of it in the latest Nutmeg Magazine — our World Cup edition. Order your copy by clicking on the cover below.

Share

Brian Graham’s memorable one-liner in the final episode of an exceptional new four-part documentary on Partick Thistle is delivered with the timing and accuracy which the veteran striker usually reserves for the penalty box.

Graham’s zinger was directed towards a relieved documentary crew huddled on the touchline after Thistle dramatically managed to secure their spot in the 2024-25 playoffs on the last day of the season. “Brian was 100% right,” laughs director of STV’s One Team in Glasgow, Sam Neave. “My view was that playoffs and relegation are good for drama. Anything in the middle, not good. So, I had been absolutely shitting myself!”

Ironically, Graham’s finest hour would arrive shortly after his immortal punchline, when his two goals — his 99th and 100th for the Maryhill club — edged them past Ayr United at Somerset Park in the second leg of their playoff quarter-final. Their eventual loss to Livingston in the semi bookended a turbulent campaign, in which Graham (nowadays playing at Premiership Falkirk) and current manager Mark Wilson took over in February 2025 and not only resurrected their playoff ambitions but saved the documentary.

One Team in Glasgow charts the highs and lows of season 2024-25 in expert fashion. This is no PR puff piece, no sanitised All or Nothing bore-fest. It is a serious slab of storytelling directed by multi-Emmy nominee Neave (The Jinx) and exec produced by Academy Award winner Charles B Wessler (Green Book). But even the best storytellers need drama, and if Thistle had failed to winkle their way into the playoffs at the last moment, then a year-long project would have fizzled out.

“To me, we could always make something out of them not winning because winning has not been the story of this club, but we were given a few golden nuggets at the end,” says Neave. “We were also given the incredible storyline of Kris Doolan and [assistant] Paul McDonald ending up being replaced by Brian and Mark Wilson. It fell into our laps.”

Graham is the central character in this access-all-areas documentary. His story is told on the pitch, through numerous net-bulging contributions, and off it, when cameras visit his home streets of Barmulloch. He is also the key figure in incredible dressing-room footage when he scraps with under-performing teammates and drives the side forward through sheer force of will.

When director Neave cut together a small amount of early footage to give the players an idea of the project — though he stresses that the club had zero editorial control — goalkeeping coach Kenny Arthur joked that “It’s the Brian Graham show!”. It’s not — there’s much more to it than that, but from the moment he wanders on screen with his matinee-idol looks and unstoppable mentality, Graham is box office.

Neave adds: “Right away, Brian understood the potential of it. He’s a very rational, long-term strategic thinker — and it doesn’t hurt that he’s good-looking and charismatic and comes across well on camera. It’s not that he doesn’t have media training, it’s that he doesn’t give a shit. He wears his heart on his sleeve, and is genuinely passionate and annoyed when they don’t do well.”

Order your Nutmeg World Cup Issue NOW

So how did an Academy Award-winning producer and an Emmy-nominated director end up making a documentary about Partick Thistle? The story begins with Donald McClymont, a successful Scottish businessman and Thistle director since 2023, who is based in Palm Springs, California. McClymont put in a call to Wessler — whose credits include Green Book, There’s Something About Mary and Dumb and Dumber — with the offer of a Welcome to Wrexham-style access-all-areas documentary on the Maryhill club.

An intrigued Wessler started looking for a director with football chops and alighted upon Neave, who had just concluded work on The Jinx Part Two, the follow-up to the ground-breaking 2015 documentary which led to the murder conviction of Robert Durst. Neave’s family moved around a lot when he was young and he spent three years in Edinburgh. When Wessler quizzed him on his football knowledge — suggesting that he may not have heard of the Maryhill Magyars, Neave responded by telling him the Billy Connolly joke about Partick Thistle: “Most Englishmen think they are called Partick Thistle nil.” At that moment, Wessler knew he had found his man.

Neave then immediately jumped on a flight to Scotland, to take in Thistle’s playoff tie against Airdrie in May 2024. They won — before losing to Raith Rovers in the semi-final — and Neave saw enough to fire his imagination. “I immediately locked into this idea of who the fans were and what this team means in this city,” he says. “I knew Rangers and Celtic were the dominant forces, but I didn’t know no one else had won the fucking league since 1985! And I didn’t know quite the extent of the rivalry and the way that they overshadow everything. Partick Thistle exists very much in the context of Glasgow — and of not being Rangers or Celtic. And they’ve been around 150 years — they’re not a flash in the pan, they’ve done things in their history, but generally speaking, they don’t win much. So, the question becomes: ‘Why are you here?’.”

The series avoids the lazy stereotyping of a club frequently cast as a refuge for West End bohemians and local students. There is colour aplenty — their famous mascot Kingsley wrestling punters to the ground in the hospitality suite — but a noticeable absence of couth. This portrait of a community features a boy who volunteers to pick up rubbish from the stand after his school day, and when asked if he has ever met star striker Graham, replies: “Yeah, I look after his dog.”

Neave says: “When you look at All or Nothing, it’s not like you’re getting into the penthouse of dressing rooms, with Pep moving the magnets. We knew early on, this was never going to be about football tactics. Nobody gives a shit about that. It had to be about the personalities and emotions, and then mirroring that with the fans. When they’re in alignment, and when they’re not in alignment, that’s really the heart of the story. That’s the engine. It’s about community, a locus of a community where people can get together and express their emotions on the weekend. Even when I spoke to the players, I explained that this was not a piss-take, not a gotcha, not sensationalist. It’s also not nerdy football. It should be full of life.”

All four episodes of One Team in Glasgow are available now on the STV Player.

Like this high quality of writing? You’ll get much more of it in the latest Nutmeg Magazine — our World Cup edition. Order your copy by clicking on the cover below.

Share

These two teams last met in this most celebrated of settings in 2007, in the final days of a different kind of premiership, as Tony Blair lost support of the board and was replaced by his assistant manager Gordon Brown for the rest of the season.

In Glasgow’s May sunshine, Neil Lennon was, perhaps for the first time, perhaps not, in lock-step with the finest footballing prime minister the game has ever known.

Lennon was about to play his final match as a Celtic player, putting a bow on six and a half years spent as a unique force in the middle of football pitches across Scotland and Europe. This season had begun with the departure from Celtic of Stiliyan Petrov. At its midpoint, Alan Thompson left the club. Bobo Balde, while still technically on the payroll, appeared in glimpses so fleeting it was a prize to see him at all, like Hitchcock popping up in his own films, crossing the street in the background of a scene.

At Celtic Park, the Blairites were these cornerstones of the Martin O’Neill era. The Brownites were the players brought in or promoted by Gordon Strachan, now at the end of his second season in charge. They had wrapped the league before the bluebells were out and taken Milan to extra time in the last 16 of the Champions League, a tournament the Rossoneri had won in Athens, three days earlier.

For Dunfermline, a different kind of change was afoot. They had just been relegated from the Premier League after a late-season power surge spluttered at the last. Four successive wins had given Stephen Kenny’s team hope of a seemingly impossible escape. They were one up in Inverness on the penultimate matchday, a fifth win in their grasp, but lost two goals in the final 13 minutes, along with all hope.

THE BUILD-UP

Stephen Kenny had been drafted in to save Dunfermline’s bacon in November, but it had taken until the spring for them to put up a fight under their Irish manager. They did so behind some new recruits: the on-loan wingers Jim O’Brien and Adam Hammill; Tam McManus, picked up from Falkirk and the matchwinner in two of those four wins; and Stephen Glass, unwanted by Hibs for the second half of the campaign.

But the island of misfit toys over which Kenny had reigned had to go back in the box for the end-of-season showpiece. Glass and McManus were both cup-tied. O’Brien was on loan from Celtic, who ignored a request from their opponent to waive a clause keeping him from facing his employer. Add to that the suspension of Gary Mason, a keystone midfielder, and Kenny was without four nailed-on starters.

Celtic had trotted to the title and lost their focus in the lap-of-honour run-in after the flag had been secured. Shunsuke Nakamura had wrapped up all three Player of the Year votes: from the players, the writers and the league.

The players left the Hampden tunnel to Blur’s Song 2, a sad indictment of the power-pop genre in the decade since that number was first released, but also of the imagination of whoever stood behind the wheels of steel at the national stadium on this cheerful afternoon. In 2007 Song 2, for all its many charms, was too old to feel of its moment but too young to generate a kick of punky nostalgia in the crowd. I may be reading too much into this, but as Paul Hartley and Scott Wilson and the rest of them walked out into the sunshine, their shoulders seemed to drop a little, as if to say: “Not this tired old shite again. What next? Ready to Go by Republica?”

Celtic are in the hoops, by Nike, with the Carling logo on black ruining it for everyone. Dunfermline’s away kit is pretty cool, all black with white piping, brought to you by the Purvis Group, for all of Fife’s construction and logistical needs. Our referee will be Kenny Clark. Let’s go.

THE FIRST HALF

3.31
Here’s Jim McIntyre, who won the Scottish Cup in 1997 with Kilmarnock. He’s made a a decent career of moments just like this — he wins a tough ball against a big centre-back, holds it up and then rolls it into his smaller, faster pal. This time that’s Mark Burchill and he’s suddenly 12 yards from goal, six yards wide to its left. He has a clear shot but rolls it well wide of the far stick. I’m not sure he’ll get a better look at goal all afternoon.

“Stephen Kenny knows that’s an opportunity lost,” says Ian Crocker on commentary as the picture cuts to the Dunfermline manager in a charcoal suit with a white shirt and violet tie.

“Fuck off!” he exclaims, spinning round and flailing an arm, which is a perfect summation of how you would feel in that moment if you were the manager of Dunfermline.

I’m sorry to get in the way of the flow, but I want to let you know I also write a Substack called because I really love baseball and it’s full of great stories that I want to share with you (along with sick movie references). It’s totally free, all the time, and I don’t write it that often, so you don’t get spammed by emails. Give it a try. OK, back to the show.

6.41
Crocker says that Hartley was sent off when Hearts won the cup the previous year. I was at that game, paid to write about it by a national newspaper of some repute, and I have no memory of this. I pause the video and put my phone to work. It turns out he got a second yellow in the last minute of extra time. Nurse, my pills, please.

By the way, poor old Crocker is again all alone in the commentary box. This is 2007, friends. Can’t we throw a few clams to a charming former pro to mix things up a little?

12.07
Dunfermline have started with a lot of gusto, haranguing the Celtic midfield and committing a good few fouls. Celtic beat the press for the first time here, it goes Nakamura to Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink to Kenny Miller and the Scotland striker scampers in behind the defence. However, his touch is a little heavy and out comes Dorus de Vries to smother.

16.00
It’s Gordon Strachan! He is sitting on the Hampden steps with an A4 pad, hidden from all the other people, just as he likes it. He has a grey suit, white shirt and a tie in club colours. His wee face is pinched as he squints into the sun and I just hope he has got a decent sunscreen on.

17.55
Sol Bamba v Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink (J-VoH? Sure, why not?). Big man v big man. Round one to Bamba, all legs and chaos. J-VoH moves toward a long ball on the left, but Bamba accelerates, gets there first and takes the bump from the big Dutchie, winning a free-kick and my admiration.

26.18
Burchill goes right through the back of Lennon, which is inadvisable on more than one level. Lennon turns around to see the culprit and decides that this type of entanglement is beneath him. Burchill appeals to Kenny Clark’s better nature and wins, but that should have been a yellow.

30.03
Celtic’s first attempt on goal comes after half an hour. Miller spins his man on the right and sends a curling cross around Bamba, giving J-VoH a free diving header just left of the centre of the goal. He diverts the ball wide of the back post. Gigantic chance.

31.40
Aiden McGeady with the classic winger’s yellow card. He misses his touch, allowing Greg Shields to rob him, and then chases after the ball like an under-exercised spaniel, eventually piling into Shields late. Great stuff.

34.36
Burchill eventually earns his yellow with a clear foul on Jean-Joël Perrier-Doumbé, the French full-back on loan from Rennes. Burchill somehow blames the defender for his caution, testing Perrier-Doumbé’s understanding of the local dialect as he retreats to face the free-kick. “Aye, you, arsehole! Ya fucking prick!” They didn’t have Duolingo in 2007, but if they did, it would not have helped him here.

The rest of this article is for paid subscribers. Been waiting for the right moment to support the best football writing in Scotland?

40.25
Strachan has not moved from the steps, but he has put the pad down and his arms are folded. He is not smiling. Do not approach this man.

THE SECOND HALF

50.51
Aiden McGeady! When he was on, he was some boy. J-VoH holds it up and rolls it back to the jitter-bug winger. He stop-starts past Darren Young, then bursts past Bamba to the line and gets out the pitching wedge, dropping a cross onto the penalty spot. As it comes down, Miller is steaming on to it, but at the last he stumbles awkwardly and as he makes a weak connection he goes down holding the back of his leg. Straight away it’s clear he has hurt himself, but I bet he doesn’t go off straight away.

53.11
Scott Wilson punts a long free-kick from 20 yards inside his own half. Stephen McManus meets it with his head 25 yards from his own goal. His header then travels all the way back to the Dunfermline goalkeeper, De Vries. This same year, Floyd Mayweather broke Ricky Hatton’s heart over 10 rounds in Vegas, but not once did The Hitman take a shot to the head like this.

55.07
Excellent booking for Steven Pressley, who is bidding to become the first player to win this trophy with three different clubs. Adam Hammill, the trickster on loan from Liverpool and just off an appearance for England Under-19s, pops the ball over Lennon at halfway and speeds forward. Elvis makes a quick decision and just runs across his path, limiting his exposure at yellow. You hate/love to see it.

55.22
Miller off because hamstrings don’t heal through force of will. Craig Beattie on.

61.17
Lee Naylor almost emerges as a Hampden hero. He moves in from the left, pings it into J-VoH. He pins Wilson and rolls it back to Naylor, but it’s on his right foot now and that useless swinger can only pop it straight at De Vries, partly because of the pressure applied by Bamba, who has read the play as it developed and moved across to match Naylor’s run.

63.15
Beattie is about to get his head to a long ball… when Bamba vaults him in mid-air, taking the ball and knocking his man to the floor, landing with his vanquished foe at his feet, like Shaq shame-dunking on an NBA rookie.

65.40
And that’s it for Neil Lennon’s Celtic career. He has barely put a foot wrong, but Strachan decides that Gary Caldwell is a better bet to control the midfield for whatever remains of this increasingly interesting cup final. Lennon is straight down the tunnel. As he hits the dressing room, kicking a bin no doubt, he hears the Celtic fans in the majority at Hampden sing his name. Come on Neil, don’t go out in the huff.

70.28
I don’t mean to go on about him, but Bamba just shut down J-VoH at the near post as a Perrier-Doumbé cross came over with his name on it. Must have been some size of football. Sorry.

76.26
Nakamura gives Hammill the business on the right. The Celtic man throws a body swerve and a quick change of feet that take four yards from his opposite winger. Nakamura’s cross to the back post looks perfect for J-VoH until… Bamba gets there first.

77.21
Lennon is back on the bench. I wouldn’t say he’s happy. But he’s integrating back into polite society.

84.05
Jean-Joël Perrier-Doumbé writes his own… maybe not chapter… footnote (?) in the history of this grand old competition. This is only his fifth appearance for Celtic. He was loaned at the start of the season but played only once the title was already secured and Mark Wilson was injured. Has he ever made a run like this one?
He starts the move on the right, playing a one-two with Nakamura, who finds him with an improvised flick over two pairs of Dunfermline legs. Perrier-Doumbé feeds Beattie on the right and continues his diagonal run into the box, so when Beattie’s low cross is deflected by Wilson’s outstretched leg, he can slide in and divert it beyond De Vries and into the far corner of the goal. It is — finally — enough to get Strachan off the Hampden steps. “Yesss!” shouts the manager, pumping a clenched fist.

90.00
Nakamura keeps possession for virtually all of the 10 minutes, including stoppages, which remain. Everybody knows this is over. The whistle goes and Lennon, fully cooled down, embraces Strachan. What a relief. He takes the Scottish Cup from the hands of Alex Salmond, elected as First Minister of Scotland 10 days earlier, to the sound of Fiesta by The Pogues. That’s more like it.

THE AFTERMATH

For Dunfermline, the First Division and the UEFA Cup, two competitions since rebranded. In terms of league play, all you need to know is that, at the time of writing, they are yet to return to the top division — although that could change before the summer comes.

A dismal start to their first season in the second tier was coupled with a sorry defeat by BK Hacken in the qualifying round of the UEFA Cup and Stephen Kenny was gone by December, replaced by his centre-forward, Jim McIntyre.

Celtic continued to evolve under Strachan. Scott Brown and Scott McDonald led the summer signings; Brown would become the emblem of the club’s success over the next decade, while McDonald’s goals led Celtic to a third successive title under Strachan, sealed the week after they lost an all-round champion in Tommy Burns.

This was the end of Tennent’s sponsorship of the Scottish Cup, in place since 1990. Its last Man of the Match Award went to the peerless Sol Bamba, who remained in Fife for a season in the First Division before moving to Hibs and Leicester, Trabzonspor, Palermo and Leeds. At Cardiff City he was a stalwart in the team that made it to the Premier League, where he regularly went up against the best forwards in that division and left them knowing his name. In 2021 he was diagnosed with cancer, but came back to play for Cardiff and then Middlesbrough, for whom he scored the winning penalty in a famous FA Cup win over Manchester United in 2022. He died two years later, falling ill after a game as manager of Adanaspor in Turkey. His widow said in a statement that Bamba had been fighting the disease during his final years as a player and manager.

He left a mark at each of his clubs and is fondly remembered in Dunfermline. If things had gone just a little bit differently on this May day in 2007, his legacy at East End Park would be truly indelible. The Bamba Final — say those words and we’d all know what you meant.

Instead, this is the Perrier-Doumbé Final. The French full-back was signed by Celtic after his day in the sun, but a torn Achilles sustained against Milan early the following season all but ended his career in Scotland and beyond. Here at least, he is a footballer who exists only in one game and really only in one moment. It just happens to be the moment we all dreamed of when we first kicked a ball with our friends in the park.

Leave a comment

By Euan McTear

Uruguay was still pinching itself. Almost a year on from pulling off one of the greatest shocks in World Cup history when they defeated Brazil at the Maracanã to claim the 1950 title, the 45,000 fans at Montevideo’s Estadio Centenario were still rubbing their eyes in disbelief.

Yet this was not a dream. Uruguay had lifted the trophy for a second time, joining Italy as two-time winners. Spool forward to June 19, 1951, and to the stadium where Los Charrúas had won the inaugural World Cup in 1930, and the country was paying homage to the man who had sown the seeds of this success. His name? John Harley, a railway worker from Scotland.

When Harley was born in Glasgow on May 5, 1886, nobody could have imagined that he would shape the style of Uruguayan football in such a way that the South American nation would go on to claim double World Cup success. Back in 1886, nobody even knew what a World Cup was. Like many Glaswegians entering the workforce at the turn of the century, Harley made his living on the railways, working as an engineer in Springburn, which was a global hub of locomotive production at the time.

At the age of 20, he would swap northern Glasgow for South America, taking his talents, and his football boots, to Argentina, where he worked as a draughtsman on the new railway lines being constructed along the Río de la Plata.

After initially working for the Bahía Blanca Railway and then for the North Western Railway, Harley made his way to the capital city, where he joined up with the Buenos Aires Western Railway and, more significantly, with the company’s football club Ferrocarril Oeste. As this was back in the era of amateurism, it was not uncommon for workers to play for their employers’ team on a part-time basis. Ferrocarril Oeste were one of the better railway sides; they played in the amateur second division when Harley arrived and were promoted to the first division in 1912. By then, the Glaswegian would be long gone, having been headhunted by a rival from across the Uruguayan border.

In October of 1908, Ferrocarril Oeste played two matches — one home and one away — against Central Uruguay Railway Cricket Club, which would cease to be such a mouthful when it was renamed as Peñarol in 1913, thence going on to become one of the most successful clubs in the continent. The Uruguayans won both of the friendly matches, defeating their Argentine counterparts 4-0 and 1-0, but the standout player was not wearing the black and gold of Peñarol. According to the Uruguayan newspaper La Tribuna Popular, “John Harley was, without doubt, the best player on the field”.

As a result of Harley’s performance, Peñarol player and future coach of the team José Piendibene urged the club’s hierarchy to sign the Scotsman. They duly did, offering him a job with the Central Uruguay Railway. Harley was initially hesitant, but he was persuaded to give Montevideo a try for at least a few months. He never looked back.

Nicknamed ‘Juan’, Harley settled into his new surroundings with ease and was the club’s captain before long, demonstrating leadership and sportsmanship (even once deliberately passing a penalty wide of the goal because he felt it had been incorrectly awarded). In his role as captain, Harley would little by little evolve the playing style of his club and, ultimately, of his adopted country — for whom he became player-manager, representing Uruguay in internationals from 1909 to 1916.

“He was not physically imposing, but he had complete tactical expression,” Peñarol historian Luciano Álvarez wrote of him. “He was a short player and was a little bow-legged, but he had the ability to stop rival forwards without having to move much at all, after which he would simply pass the ball to his best-positioned teammate.”

That may sound routine for modern-day football fans, but at the beginning of the 20th century it was not at all normal for players to play a short pass. As Jonathan Wilson explained in his article Glasgow, 1872: The Birth of Tiki-Taka (in Nutmeg Issue 1), the early English approach to the game was either chasing long balls or making a beeline for goal and dribbling until tackled. Having been taught the sport by British immigrants, the majority of whom were English, Uruguayans had adopted this same approach, but the former Springburn railway worker began to alter that and, according to his Peñarol teammate Juan Pena, “was the man who taught us to bring the ball down and to link our play together”.

He consigned long aimless kicking and chasing to the tactical dustbin, and taught his colleagues to work as a team and to pass the ball from one player to another. It was something the Uruguayans were more than happy to do as they were not nearly as obsessed with the agricultural muscularity of the sport as the English immigrants who had introduced them to it. “Uruguay’s style of play — full of short passes and movement, invention and wizardry — was immediately seen as being much more attractive than the muscular style of the day,” the BBC’s South American football expert Tim Vickery wrote of a mode that pleased the Uruguayan participants as much as it did the spectators.

As well as introducing the novel concept of the short pass, Harley altered Uruguay’s tactical shape, particularly with his reinventing of the centre-half position — known locally as the centrojás. He was the one who made it the important and revered role that it would go on to become in Uruguayan football.

Order your Nutmeg World Cup Issue NOW

He imported the Scottish 2-3-5 system of the time, but his formation contained some basic revisions in order to reflect the increased desire to pass the ball. The Harley 2-3-5 included one of the earliest variations of the ‘false nine’, with one of the centre-forwards — which would be the indefatigable Piendibene in the case of Peñarol — dropping deeper in order to link up with the midfield, rather than permanently hanging around the penalty area in anticipation of a long ball. The centre-half — who would take up the central position of the midfield three — would play a similarly fluid role, not dissimilar to that of a point guard in basketball. Harley, who made the position his own, would be the link between defence and attack and between left and right, always available and always finding a pass, bestriding the pitch like an early 20th-century Xavi. Many legendary Uruguayan players would follow in the Glaswegian’s footsteps, but he was the true centre-half pioneer.

“Harley became the national side’s first centre-half and brought Scottish erudition to the passing game,” Álvarez has said of Harley, summing up in one sentence the two main evolutions he imported to the Río de la Plata.

By helping Peñarol secure the 1911 Uruguayan league title, Harley’s modifications delivered some initial success, but the real impact of his remoulding of the Uruguayan mindset would not fully bear fruit until after his retirement. When Harley hung up his international boots in 1916, just around the time of the inaugural Copa América tournament — or South American Football Championship as it was labelled at the time — he ceded his centre-half position to Juan Delgado, who was “the first heir to Harley”, as Álvarez wrote in his history of Peñarol, the club Delgado would transfer to in 1916.

Even before the continental tournament, Delgado had already worked with the man three years his elder during Harley’s time with the national team, playing one match each at centre-half in a two-game series against Brazil that same summer of 1916. They played alongside each other on some occasions, with Delgado learning from the Glaswegian up close as the left-sided or right-sided midfielder alongside the national team’s adopted Scottish centre-half. In Harley’s absence, Delgado took over the reins and would start in the centre of the pitch in each of Uruguay’s three matches on their way to winning the first ever Copa América, a success that hinted at what was to come.

Further Copa América glory came in 1917, 1920 and 1923, before the nation tasted intercontinental success at the 1924 Olympic Games. In that year, Uruguay became the first South American side to play a major tournament in Europe, as they made the voyage across the Atlantic to compete in Paris, with José Vidal having inherited the centre-half position by that stage in the national team. It was “chess with a ball” as renowned Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano described it. Or as future L’Equipe editor Gabriel Hanot recalled, “they displayed virtuosity in receiving the ball, in controlling it and in using it wonderfully”. Harley’s methods were still in use and still proving successful.

It should be noted, however, that Uruguay maintained a certain physicality throughout this time of transition. This would prove important when it came to defending their Olympic gold in 1928 against neighbours Argentina and in defeating the same cross-border rivals in the World Cup final of 1930.

Argentina were similarly beginning to apply skill and passing to their football, but Uruguay had retained their inherent fighting spirit of Garra Charrúa — which refers to the ferocity of the native Charrúa Indians — and with that combination they were able to out-pass and out-muscle their Argentinian counterparts in the 1928 and 1930 finals to savour a pair of sherbet-sweet triumphs.

Harley may never have been the strongest of players, but his Uruguayan disciples were able to find the balance between aggression and subtlety, one which players such as Luis Suárez, Edinson Cavani and Diego Godín are still perfecting in the modern era and one which experts are adamant contributed to Uruguay’s maiden World Cup success. As Jed Davies explains in his book Coaching the Tiki-Taka Style of Play, “when Uruguay dominated the world of football under Alberto Suppici in the 1930s, they did so by being aggressive in defence, but also by championing technique with the ball and relying on a quick short passing game.”

Although global football as a whole had evolved tactically by the time the 1950 World Cup came around, Harley’s legacy continued to have an impact at that tournament in Brazil. The point guard-esque centre-half was still the most important Uruguayan on the pitch, with captain Obdulio Varela the man to have taken over from Lorenzo Fernández, who had inherited the position from Álvaro Gestido, who had done so from Vidal, who was the successor to the first Harley heir Delgado.

There had been a similar progression taking place in the dugout, with the 1950 coach Juan López Fontana having learned from Suppici, who in turn had played against Harley for Nacional over the years before implementing many of his old foe’s teachings in 1930. Harley influenced some players more directly, having spent time as coach of his beloved Peñarol in 1942.

“The influence Harley had on our methods was decisive in terms of radically changing the technical and tactical approach to Uruguayan football,” explained César L Gallardo, who will go down in history as the commentator who gave voice to the narration of Uruguay’s famous 2-1 win over Brazil in the 1950 World Cup’s final match. “So whenever someone speaks about the Uruguayan tactical school,” he continues, “we should remember the inescapable influence of Harley and we should remind ourselves that he was the man who brought the short pass to Uruguayan football, something which carried us to top of the sporting world.”

That is exactly the gratitude the nation aimed to display by honouring Harley during that June 1951 Rampla Juniors match at the Estadio Centenario. As well as being presented with a gold medal that afternoon, a book containing the signatures of more than 5,000 sportspeople was gifted to the railway worker who shaped the Uruguayan football played during the first half of the 20th century.

Walk through the Montevideo British Cemetery today and you’d struggle to notice the grave of the Scot who went on to become the catalyst for Uruguayan football’s glory years. Look at the highlights reel of Uruguay’s two World Cup wins, on the other hand, and Harley’s legacy jumps off the screen.

Like this high quality of writing? You’ll get much more of it in the latest Nutmeg Magazine — our World Cup edition. Order your copy by clicking on the cover below.

Share

In any list of iconic Eiffel Tower moments captured on film, the Tartan Army serenading Jimmy Hill as a god surely has to be up there with Roger Moore’s James Bond scrambling up the stairs in A View to a Kill in pursuit of villain May Day who then parachutes to safety.

If anything, inviting Hill, the quintessential English football pundit of Dave Narey “toe-poke” lore, into a studio filled with well-oiled Scots just two days out from the 1998 World Cup opener against Brazil was probably the more dangerous stunt of the two.

Hill’s booking, to appear alongside Scots actors Richard Wilson and Ewan McGregor and TV’s Ulrika Jonsson, however, would prove to be a masterstroke as he took his place on the sofa on the first floor of the tower alongside hosts Ally McCoist and Fred MacAulay for this special edition of their eponymous chat show.

“Before we started filming, the Tartan Army had been singing that old shanty song about Jimmy that was popular at the time,” recalls MacAulay. “But Jimmy was the main man for football on TV at that time and a great guest for us to get. I mentioned that to the audience. And so, when Jimmy came in for his slot, they changed the words to, ‘We love Jimmy Hill, he’s a god, he’s a god’ while bowing down to him. That was brilliant.”

McCoist, not selected for the World Cup squad, was coming towards the end of his playing days and testing the waters of his subsequently fruitful punditry career when he was brought together with comedian MacAulay by BBC producer Esme Frain, who spotted their potential as a presenting double act.

The first series was filmed in diverse locations all around Scotland — Kylie Minogue joined Leslie Grantham and Craig Brown at the Vikingar Centre in Largs, while John Parrot was a guest at Melrose Rugby Club — but filming the World Cup special in Paris took things, literally, to a new level.

“Scotland had qualified for the World Cup and we were sitting in the office when assistant producer John MacLaverty said, ‘Why don’t we take the show to Paris?’” says Frain. “I did a recce and told them that I had found the perfect venue — the first floor of the Eiffel Tower. The technical director’s jaw dropped because they had never cabled anywhere quite as high as that before. And I’m not sure if anyone had ever filmed a TV show there before so it was very much new territory.

Order your Nutmeg World Cup Issue NOW

“But we filmed it two nights before the opening game and then edited it the next day before broadcasting it the night before the Brazil game. And it got huge viewing figures — a 64% share of the audience.”

McGregor was a huge star at that time off the back of Trainspotting’s runaway success but didn’t take much persuading to get involved. “We got Ewan on the promise of a couple of tickets to the opening game,” adds Frain. “I remember booking Ewan and his family on the Eurostar and they all came over.”

The other guests were just as game. Jonsson batted back MacAulay’s gag that she was an honorary Scot as she could down a pint in 15 seconds — “12” she corrected — while One Foot in the Grave’s Wilson dubbed the hosts’ acting in a series of pre-recorded sketches around Paris “A load of shite.” McCoist, his hair bleached peroxide blonde, and MacAulay looked the part in matching Scotland home tops and kilts.

Once filming was finished, the Parisian after-party, unsurprisingly, was a raucous and drawn-out affair. “The ball got burst, as they say,” adds MacAulay. “It went on late into the night on the Monday and then Ally and I sat down with a couple of pals for a glass of lunch the next day. Richard Wilson said he would come and join us for one. He was still there at about half past four in the morning.

“Then there was the big party at the Buddha Bar. Rory Bremner was there, Alistair McGowan and a few others. At one point Ally, me and the three McGregors — Ewan, his brother and his dad — were all up on stage singing Flower of Scotland. I think Ewan’s been sober pretty much from around that time although the same can’t be said for Ally or me.”

The dynamic duo will be reunited this Friday, not in Boston ahead of Scotland’s long-awaited World Cup return, but closer to home in Glasgow for McCoist and MacAulay Live, the first time they’ll have been on stage together for 27 years.

The two-and-a-half-hour show won’t be broadcast on television so only those at the Armadillo will see the pair interviewing Gregory’s Girl icons John Gordon Sinclair and Clare Grogan, former Scotland manager Gordon Strachan, current rugby head coach Gregor Townsend, actor Dougray Scott and Still Game’s Greg Hemphill, while musical entertainment comes from Nathan Evans.

“Friday is the launch of the World Cup as far as we’re concerned,” confirms MacAulay. “A few folk like Ewan McGregor and Chris Hoy genuinely couldn’t make it due to other commitments but everyone else we asked was immediately up for it. So, we’re dead chuffed about that.

“We’ve been reminding people that it’s not going to be on TV, it’s not getting recorded, so you’ve got to be there in the flesh if you want to see it. And I reckon it’s going to be brilliant. It’s a real mixture of guests but all of them will be up for a laugh and that’s the main thing.”

Tickets are available HERE for McCoist and MacAulay Live — World Cup Special, SEC Armadillo, Glasgow, this Friday from 6.30pm.

For the highest quality of Scottish football writing, order the latest Nutmeg Magazine — our World Cup edition — by clicking on the cover below.

Share

The 44-year-old captained City for seven years and scored 264 goals, making her the club’s (and the SWPL’s) highest-ever goalscorer. In the 2022/23 season, her debut year as head coach at Glasgow, she became the first female manager ever to win an SWPL title. She and her backroom team have built a formidable squad that is currently sitting third in the table.

Nutmeg caught up with Ross to talk about her career, her methods and what it takes to build the next generation of Glasgow City legends.

Tell me about your career up until you joined Glasgow City?

I probably never got involved in girls’ football until I was 16. I played for my local club, which at that point was Falkirk girls. Played one season there, quite successfully, scoring loads of goals. Then I got picked up by another local team, Stirling Albion, and that’s when I came into the senior women’s game, and I played there for about 10 years. It was Stirling Albion, Newburgh, Dundee — it was all the one club just changing their name. Then I got picked up at the national team. I must have been 24 or 25 at that point. I decided that if I wanted to retain my place within the national team, I had to play at a higher level.

Glasgow City had been trying to sign me for a few years. So, this is where I ended up. I played 14 years as a player here, before stepping into coaching.

How did you come to join City?

Peter Caulfield was the manager, and I’d get the phone call in the summer, “How about joining City?” And I’d try and avoid it. I felt at that time it was a huge commitment. But when the national team came along, I actually contacted Peter and he jumped at the chance to sign me, and the rest is history.

What was it about City that made you think you’d be a better player there?

They had good players. It was always tough playing against them. They started to challenge for trophies, so that’s where I wanted to be. I wanted to become better. There was no better place to be than somewhere where there were national team players playing, and I was going to have to fight for my place every week.

I just fell in love with the place and how competitive it was.

You were captain and now you’re manager. How did you transition?

Regardless of whether I was captain or not, I was always vocal in the pitch, always organising, and people were always telling me that I was destined to coach.

I was a student of the game. I would be analysing things as I was watching. I was always interested in the tactical side of the game. I was involved in coaching through my day job as well, albeit at a lower level, but it’s always something that I’ve done. The opportunity to stay here and be at a club that I loved and was really invested in was just a dream come true.

Do you miss anything about being a player?

Just not having the opportunity to be the one that goes and grabs the game by the scruff of the neck. It’s more my job now to motivate others to go and be that player that does that.

What’s the first thing that speaks to you about a player?

First and foremost, we ask — what types of players do we need? What type of football do we want to play? And try and match that up in a positional framework.

I’ve got then a team of people that are scouring the world for players that fit the profile. Once we find that shortlist, I start to look at those players, and we do a bit more investigating in terms of personality, what type of person they are, what they would bring to the team. We maybe find out that their personality doesn’t fit what we’re looking for. Our network of senior players, or previous players, comes into play as well. From there, we have that face-to-face discussion with the player as to what we look for and what we think they can bring to this environment. Obviously, we try and sell the club to them as well.

What type of personality are you looking for?

Somebody that needs to be a winner. They are all in for the team — it’s not about them as individuals. Also what they bring personality-wise to the team is important, because they spend a lot of time together off the pitch.

Do you ever look for specialists, or do you want people to be flexible in your team?

It’s always good to have somebody that’s an expert within their position, or they excel within the position, but we’ve had success with recruiting players that are flexible, that are able to play different positions, and that gives us a bit of flexibility tactically with changing personnel as well as within games.

Give some examples of City players who have developed significantly at the club.

Lisa Evans came in really young with raw talent. She’ll talk about her first spell at the club in terms of how competitive it was here and how the senior players pushed her to be better. Also players like Erin Cuthbert — when you listen to her talking about her time here, it’s similar. We’ve played a part in their development. The best examples are probably the younger players that are coming through now, like Lisa Forrest. The progression that she’s made in the few seasons that she’s been a senior pro is great to see. The sky’s the limit, and I hope we can keep a hold of her for as long as possible.

Order your Nutmeg World Cup Issue NOW

Have you ever backed a player who the rest of the coaching staff didn’t rate?

The scouting team will look for players that have the attributes I like. The players they bring, I don’t always agree that they’ll fit in, or that they are the types of players we’re looking for, but I don’t necessarily think there’s ever been a time when somebody said somebody’s great, and I’ve thought that they’ve not been, or vice versa. There’s maybe been a slight difference in opinion, but I think we’re generally on the same page.

How do you help players develop their own unique identities on the pitch, while still meeting your high standards and your vision for the team?

We talk about our basic principles within every training session, in game plan meetings, and within game reviews. We always want to stick to our identity, our principles, but within that, the players need to bring their own individual qualities. We don’t want to be too prescriptive in terms of the way that we want to play. We want to give them the freedom to be creative, especially in the final third of the pitch.

How has being a former player influenced your managerial approach?

I like to think I can be in a player’s head in terms of what they’re thinking or feeling at certain times — I know where the pressure’s coming from. I can understand the decisions that they have to make in those moments on the pitch. As a player, I feel I always thought tactically anyway. I probably had the coaching hat on when I was playing, which helped the transition in that sense. I like to encourage the players to do the same. Just become students of the game, learn about different positions, different tactics, different formations, and I think the more you can add to your game through that type of education, the better the player you can be.

What behaviour do you expect from a player to be the best they can be?

Just everything that you’d expect of a professional athlete in terms of taking care of their lifestyle — making sure that they’re getting enough rest, the right nutrition, surrounding themselves with the right people and leading the right type of lifestyle. It’s making sure that when they come into the building they’re 100% ready to go for training.

Also, that they’re tuned into the analysis and buy into the other resources that we can provide, for example nutritional advice. We do a lot on the psychological support within the game as well. All the different aspects that are really important for the game, they’re all available here at the club in terms of the resources that we have. But once the player leaves the building, there is a huge expectation that that lifestyle and those types of habits carry on.

How do you balance celebrating wins with maintaining focus for the challenges ahead?

I won so much (as a player), but I probably never enjoyed it as much as I should have, probably not until the end of my career. So, the last time we won the league, a couple of seasons back, I made a point of ensuring that the players did celebrate it as much as they wanted to. It was a massive achievement, but it was done at the right time.

It’s really difficult in season when you win a big, important game, you kind of then go off celebrating and stay in that moment when you’ve got the next game to prepare for maybe two or three days down the line. We need to, very quickly, yes, celebrate the achievement and all that comes with that. But it’s on to the next one, because the next one’s the most important one.

If a Glasgow City player came along who was poised to break some of your records, how would you feel?

I would drop them — they’d never play again [laughter]. It’s about the team, but personal accolades are important as well. I think that you need to celebrate success of people, and you need to support them.

And listen, if somebody comes and takes my goalscoring record, then that’s good for me and my job right now.

How do you work with different personalities within the team?

We’ve got really quiet players, we’ve got players that are the centre of attention every day. They all come in here under the same guidance, the same rules and boundaries, and they all understand what those boundaries are and the expectations around them.

But the dressing room is a safe space. We don’t like to try and suppress anybody’s personality if they are loud. You sometimes need it in a dressing room to create that atmosphere and get the motivation going.

How do you keep that feelgood factor going if, for example, two players are competing for the same spot in the team?

It can happen. It’s a very competitive environment, and the players want to play, so they need to improve within games or training sessions to show that they deserve the jersey and to keep that jersey. So, training sessions become really competitive. There is always that challenge there to go and push that player and for you to take that jersey.

How do you feel about the team going forward for the rest of the season?

I’m pretty confident in terms of the squad that we have. We understood that it was going to become more challenging towards the end of the season in terms of the calibre of games that we have, and just the intensity of them and the frequency of them. We made a conscious effort to improve the depth in the squad, bring in some quality players as well that can come in and challenge for places.

I think that can only be good for us, because that competition then drives everybody on.

Like this high quality of writing? You’ll get much more of it in the latest Nutmeg Magazine — our World Cup edition. Order your copy by clicking on the cover below.

Share

By Stephen McGowan

Japan opened the 2006 Kirin Cup with a loss to Bulgaria before Scotland thumped the same opponents 5-1. Avoiding defeat in the second game against the hosts would win the tournament, a scenario tailor-made for the tactical pragmatism which served Walter Smith so well throughout a glittering career. Even if he told a colleague later that his throat was so dry from the night before that he could barely get his team talk out.

Coached by Brazilian icon Zico, Japan planned a big send-off before heading to Germany for the World Cup finals. Playing the game in the space-age Saitama Stadium, the host nation did their bit to make Scotland feel at home by conjuring up the kind of biblical rain usually seen in Millport in the middle of July.

“The first game had felt like any normal friendly,” says Steven Caldwell. “The second was like, ‘Ooft, this is one you want to play in.’

“I remember pre-match stuff like dragons on the field, a show for the fans. There was a big crowd. I was gutted I wasn’t involved in that game. It was such a spectacular build-up.”

The Scots managed to weather the storm. Half-time created some respite opportunity for yours truly to phone Slater, Hogg and Howison in Greenock and submit a verbal offer for a house already gone in the midst of the fevered, overheated property market of 2006. Japan came to know how that felt, spending the second half knocking loudly on Scotland’s door, unable to find a key to secure a way in. Somehow or other, the lock held firm.

“We were pumped 0-0,” Caldwell acknowledges. “But we defended well and hunkered down and managed to win the Kirin Cup. They were so up for it because they wanted to give their fans a big send-off. And we were just hanging in there in a classic Walter game.”

In the post-match mixed zone afterwards, coach Archie Knox, drafted in to cover for the unavailable Tommy Burns, marched up to the man from the News of The World and, with a nod to Smith and Ally McCoist, asked: “What the f*** did you do to them last night?”

Presented with a trophy taller than Chris Burke, captain David Weir painted on a rictus grin for the cameras while posing for pictures with a huge cheque. “It was for something like £10,000 from the sponsors from memory,” recalls team doctor John MacLean. “But nobody had told the players that there was a prize for winning the tournament.

“There was no real bonus up for grabs for the players in those days and I don’t know if the SFA were trying to keep the winners’ prize quiet or not, but the cat was out the bag when David was handed this giant cheque which was 10 feet by three feet.”

The £10,000 would barely have covered the bar bills at the end of a night of celebration when the only thing missing was Jimmy Johnstone swaying unsteadily from side to side in a Largs rowing boat. “I still think of that night out,” laughs Caldwell. “Brilliant.”

Brewing company Kirin set the ball rolling by laying on a few crates of the sponsors’ product in the changing room. “We had a bottle or two and I remember Walter coming on the bus and saying, ‘Listen boys, you can have a night out and a few beers, just make sure you are ready for the bus in the morning.’”

The rest of Part II is for paid subscribers. Been waiting for the right moment to support the best football writing in Scotland?

A long season finally done, Smith granted his assent to cut loose and enjoy a night out on the tiles, with one critical proviso. “Walter was a fantastic people manager and had an ability to get the staff all together to a point where we would have done anything and everything for him,” adds MacLean.

“He was fine with the staff having a drink of an evening, but we would always make sure that one of us never had anything to drink. You are there to look after people. Players, staff, SFA folk and, from time to time, journalists.

“So, I was probably one of the more sober ones on that final night. We all went to a restaurant, and it was shoes off, sitting cross-legged on the floor at a low table.

“Lovely food, great people then the boys gradually received the nod from Walter to go and do their own thing.

“I was the party pooper by coming home early at 4.30am and, as a couple of more drifted in, there was one for the road at the hotel bar.

“All that mattered to Walter was that everybody was on that bus at 8am and nobody was in jail. Or still in jail…”

While journalists retired to the Hobgoblin in Roppongi to watch Hearts see off Gretna in the Scottish Cup final — before progressing to a night of karaoke with BBC pundit Jim Duffy — players sought out a bar to watch Liverpool v West Ham in the final of the FA Cup.

Rumours of an unnamed player landing in police custody after dancing on the bonnet of a taxi persist. Unconfirmed, the old maxim of ‘What happens on tour’ holds firm after all these years.

One or two had previous when it came to missing a flight home from the Far East. In May 2002, a young James McFadden was forced to apologise for a breach of discipline after a game in Hong Kong. After a function in the British Embassy, the team had moved on. MacLean had knocked on McFadden’s room door the following morning to find his bleary-eyed room-mate Michael Stewart yanking it open.

“We asked Michael where he last saw him and he said, ‘In a big high-rise block.’ This was Hong Kong, remember. That didn’t narrow it down very much…”

Lightning threatened to strike twice when the Caldwell brothers returned to their shared billet as dawn broke, a mere two hours before the bus was due to leave at 8am. Tired and emotional — bladdered would be another way of putting it — the siblings made the critical error of lying down on their respective beds for a rest.

“So, we shut our eyes and had a wee sleep,” recalls Steven Caldwell. “I will never forget that room door getting banged at 8am like the hotel was on fire. Richard Simpson, the team liaison man, was shouting, ‘Come on, everybody’s on the bus.’”

Simpson wasn’t alone. In a flashback to Hong Kong, the team doctor was also dispatched to the 40^th floor to help the Caldwells downstairs in time to catch the bus transporting them to the airport. In the circumstances, using the glass lift was unavoidable.

“It literally took 10 minutes and repeated phone calls before either of them came to the door,” MacLean admits now. “The two of them were standing there in their underpants, still very much drunk.

“And they had to be encouraged to leave and encouraged to get dressed. They also needed the people banging the door to help them pack a bag as well.”

Caldwell takes up the story. “We jumped up and put our blazers on and dampened down our hair a bit. We had to throw everything in a bag because we hadn’t even packed, which tells you how young and stupid we were.

“We get on the bus and Walter is giving us the stare. He says, ‘I might have guessed youse two would be late. I might have guessed it would be the Caldwells.’

“So, he’s laying it on with a trowel and as we were walking up the back of the bus the boys are all cheering.

“It was just a brilliant, jovial atmosphere and the first and only time I was ever late for a bus. Eight minutes or whatever it was. We were mortified.”

While the memory provokes laughter, the episode decimated MacLean’s supply of aspirin and paracetamol ahead of a long flight back to London.

“Very few of the players who made it onto the bus were sober. And, of course, that was where someone decided to draw the famous artwork on Faddy’s face…”

The handiwork of Lee McCulloch and team masseur Billy McCulloch may, or may not, have been phallic in nature. MacLean also remembers helping Stewart ‘Omar’ McMillan, a legendary member of the Scotland backroom team, into a pair of socks.

“He was so drunk he couldn’t get down to his feet to get them on himself. You don’t necessarily want to start the day helping a man of mature years in his underpants into a pair of socks, but it was that kind of night.”

Scotland would return to compete in the Kirin Cup once more in 2009. Smith was back at the helm of Rangers by then and the chaos of the George Burley era was epitomised by an injury-depleted squad conceding two late goals — one an o.g. by Christophe Berra — in a 2-0 defeat in Yokohama. The hosts recognised few of the names in the starting 11 and Burley apologised to his opposite number for the undercooked paucity of his line-up.

The national team would win one more trophy — the little remembered Qatar Airways Cup — after Matt Ritchie’s goal sealed a 1-0 win over the Middle Eastern nation at Easter Road in 2015. During the period of famine and drought for the national team between 1998 and 2021, winning the Kirin Cup became a bigger deal than it should have been.

Now a respected analyst with a Canadian sports network, Steven Caldwell will cover this summer’s World Cup while wondering once more how it might have felt to have played in one himself. During a slightly unfulfilling Scotland career of 12 caps, it just never happened.

“It was a shame because we were close to qualifying for tournaments a few times during that era. Between 2005 and 2010 we were close but just missing that wee bit of quality where it mattered.

“That was the peak years of my career, and I was always hopeful that I would make a major tournament with Scotland, but we just never seemed to get over the line.

“There was always that anxiety that you might never get to a major tournament and sadly that proved to be the case for that Kirin Cup team.”

Leave a comment

By Stephen McGowan

In May 2006, a man going for an IT job interview at the BBC was mistaken for a prominent technology expert, pushed onto a studio sofa and asked to discuss an Apple legal dispute live on air. Days later, a binman in America uncovered a stash of documents detailing the movements of President George W Bush in a trash can. In a month of silly headlines, none were quite as ridiculous as Scotland travelling to Japan and winning the Kirin Cup.

In an era when Scotland’s national team repeatedly missed out on qualification for one tournament after another, Japan was an oasis in the desert. The 20^th anniversary fell on May 13 and for anyone who was there, the memories remain as vivid and bright as the neon lights on Tokyo’s Shibuya Crossing.

There was a 5-1 victory over Bulgaria in Kobe, a sighting of Mount Fuji from a bullet train moving at 180 mph, a rain-soaked battering from Japan in Saitama and nights in Roppongi bars yelling over age-inappropriate music.

It was a trip which incorporated the greatest barman prank of all time, a boozy night out with Walter Smith and Ally McCoist, karaoke with Jim Duffy, long sleepless nights and chronic cultural displacement.

Lee McCulloch was transfixed by green tea, Gary Caldwell took fright in the hotel lifts, Lee Miller expressed wonderment at the heated toilets and winger Gary Teale compared the streets of Tokyo to a scene from Bladerunner. Through it all, nothing thrown up by The Land of the Rising Sun could possibly match the culture shock of Scotland winning a tournament.

First contested in 1978, Argentina, France and Peru had all managed to wrestle the Kirin Cup from the hosts at some point. None were as surprised to win it as a Scotland side who managed to turn an end-of-season jolly into a voyage of discovery. The story of the team’s night of celebration should have been the script for a Netflix documentary.

“Japan was incredible,” recalls Steven Caldwell, a smile crossing his face. “Like something from a science fiction movie.”

Smith’s 20-man squad provided a mixture of experience and new faces and, when Caldwell sustained an injury in Sunderland’s final league game of the season against Aston Villa, he feared he might miss the trip altogether.

“I really wanted to go and see Japan. And to be with the boys. So, I went to the medical team half expecting the doc to say, ‘No.’ But he said, ‘You might be alright for the last game’ and I thought, ‘Yes, I’m going!’”

A nation of hyper-modern intensity, meticulous order and cultural subtlety, Japan was an assault on the senses from day one.

“It was a shock to the system,” Caldwell acknowledges. “Everything felt incredibly different to what we were used to.”

Chief medical adviser to the Scottish FA until March 2024, Dr John MacLean spent 25 years and 229 games attending to the needs of the national team. He is heading to this summer’s World Cup as one of seven Scottish medics drafted in by FIFA. Back then, he sensed that Japan would be different to the usual SFA travel package when management and team flew business class.

“We were in the lounges, then the nice big comfy seats and the players loved that experience. It was Japan Airlines and we took up pretty much all of the business class section. So, the party started a wee bit on the plane on the way out there...”

Travelling separately from the team, journalists began the end-of-season revelry paying for their drinks in economy class. Checking into a hotel in Osaka, Japan’s third-largest city of 2.8million people was known as the ‘nation’s kitchen’ on account of its street food. Keen to sample the taste and smells of Japan, a small group of four jet-lagged print journalists — this one included — dumped the suitcases and set off in search of culinary excellence. Asked to recommend somewhere suitable, reception staff ringed a venue on a city map. It was The British Pub.

Seeking a recommendation from the barman for a late-night drink after burgers and chips, there was a moment’s pause before some Japanese was scribbled on a piece of paper and handed over. At the nearby taxi rank, the driver scanned the instructions and a look of terror crossed his face. Scarpering into his cab, he revved up the engine and sped off into the night.

Order your Nutmeg World Cup Issue NOW

The taxi option gone, a bouncer stood outside a covered doorway in a lane round the corner was approached. Handed the note he, too, looked as if he had seen a ghost. What The Barman Wrote should have been commissioned by ITVX for an Agatha Christie adaptation. The episode remains as perplexing as the Washlet toilets which came with a heated seat and a control panel as complex as Artemis 2.

At least the football was straightforward. Before a crowd of 5,780 in the Kobe Wing stadium, Kris Boyd claimed a debut international goal against Hristo Stoichkov’s Bulgaria after 12 minutes. Undeterred by an equaliser, the Rangers striker added his second before half-time.

James McFadden made it 3-1 before a jetlagged Chris Burke was introduced with 15 minutes to play. After over an hour of yawning on the bench, the winger scored a stunning lob with his first touch, then made it five in the final minutes.

“There were some good players in that Bulgaria team,” Caldwell remembers. “But we scored five and played some decent football. Burkey did really well in that first game and a couple of others.

“We won that game handily, we were flying and feeling good. Everyone but me. I was trying to jog and when Walter saw me hobbling, he said, ‘Listen, don’t push yourself to play.’

“So I knew early that I wasn’t going to play and while that wasn’t great for my Scotland cap count it was nice to see Osaka and then go out and see Tokyo with no real pressure.

“I was a bit of a front-row mascot, hanging out and supporting the boys while knowing that I wasn’t going to see any action.

“I always remember walking the streets of Japan myself because I was not as focused on the games as the others and looking at all the neon signs and the baseball billboards and thinking, ‘Bloody hell, this is another world.’ I had never felt that before. It was very cool, very unique, very different.”

On the bullet train from Osaka to Tokyo, it pays to sit on the right side of the train. The view of Mount Fuji alone is worth the price of the ticket.

The blend of precision engineering and natural beauty makes the 320-mile journey between the two urban centres the most iconic in Japan. Buoyed by the unexpected ease of their 5-1 victory in Kobe, Scotland let the train take the strain as they swapped the relaxed vibe of Osaka for the manic intensity of the capital.

“The Japanese have this thing that they do where the supporters tidy up the rubbish in the stadia after games,” remembers team doctor MacLean. “We went into the dressing room after the final whistle and it was as clean as it was when we’d arrived four hours earlier.

“The bullet train to Tokyo was another amazing experience. They said to us to be at the station for, say, 13.11. You’d be standing there at 13.09 thinking, ‘This is going to be late.’

“Then you’d get to 13.10 and 45 seconds and you’re looking up the delay repay rules. Ten seconds later it would come round the bend, stop, people would get on and off and it would be gone by 13.11.”

Winger Teale remembers Scotland’s plush 43-storey hotel being surrounded by “cherry blossom trees in the middle of a metropolis” while defender Gary Caldwell learned that sometimes it’s better to travel than it is to arrive.

Due to a combination of claustrophobia and agoraphobia, Caldwell was terrified of lifts and the hotel elevator in Tokyo was like something from a Fritz Lang movie. Exacerbating the terror was the knowledge that he was sharing a room with his brother 40 floors up.

“The first couple of times he actually walked up and down the stairs,” recalls MacLean. “He had to leave his room half an hour before to get to team meetings in time. The only way he could go in the glass lifts was if he went in with someone else, closed his eyes and held on to the handle for dear life.”

For journalists, Tokyo brought the reassuring comforts of the Roppongi district, with its cosmopolitan nightlife, high-end dining and luxury shopping malls. Every trip ekes out an ‘HQ’, a bar where waifs and strays can always be found at the fag-end of a night — and the Hobgoblin pub ticked every box.

A favoured local for the Tartan Army, eyebrows were raised the night before the second game against Japan when manager Smith and assistant McCoist strolled in to join a stag night for the News of the World’s Kenny McDonald ahead of his nuptials in Slovenia a fortnight later.

Asked what he might like to drink, Smith replied: “A bottle of red.” The first of many, the night ended with a posse of Scottish hacks repairing to a karaoke bar to be serenaded by former Hearts and Dundee boss turned BBC pundit Duffy.

Like this high quality of writing? You’ll get much more of it in the latest Nutmeg Magazine — our World Cup edition. Order your copy by clicking on the cover below.

Share

I thought I’d be really clever this weekend. I had my own game to play on Sunday afternoon, and didn’t want to worry about too significant a word count when I got home, so I got the bones of my ‘Hibs, finally’ piece done ahead of the derby.

I’ll paraphrase because I hate wasting words: I’ve wanted to write about Hibs all season but wider Scottish football has been too funny to justify it. Rangers started with a BAFTA-for-best-comedy-entry one win in eight games, Celtic then seemed to take that as some sort of challenge, Motherwell just decided to play the most exciting football in Europe for a laugh. You know, you’ve been watching it.

Then there was some A-Level stuff about how I really like their 3-4-1-2 because it’s braver — and by extension, a lot more entertaining — then the usual 3-4-2-1. Two paragraphs about what an extra forward does for you compared to an extra number 10, how the wing-backs are absolutely nuts, and half an insight on why that means they drew games they’d otherwise lose.

But into the 86th minute of the Edinburgh derby, who would have given a shit?

Getting themselves into the top half of the split, Hibs were always destined to play a supporting part in the final act of Scotland’s best title race in 40 years. That they might have had a starring role in its most dramatic chapter shouldn’t quite have been the shock it felt to watch.

One-nil up, down to 10 men, but adding in petty spite for what they were lacking in physical bodies, the already-booked Felix Passlack slung an errant foot towards a ball he’d already lost. Hibs now had 42 minutes plus stoppage time to play with only nine men, and somehow they reorganised to make a game of it. A game that felt like it had slightly more in common with the quieter days of 1942 Stalingrad, but a game nonetheless.

The rest of this article is for paid subscribers. Been waiting for the right moment to support the best football writing in Scotland?

Read more

The Irishman had a stall outside the stadium yet offered no scarves or pin badges. “Get your Hibs rosaries,” he announced via microphone, “keep the big man onside.” Unmoved by the beads’ £2 price — surely a bargain for divine intervention — most supporters continued to stride along Albion Place without stopping. Their faces made this a cavalcade of the fretful. Many wore the expressions of pallbearers. What weighed on their shoulders were not coffins but something worse: the very real possibility of Hearts winning the league.

Back in the autumn, it had seemed impossible to most Leithers. Through the black winter the probability remained remote — surely Gorgie would fall and Glasgow overcome as usual. Now spring bloomed and still no-one had awoken from this longest and sweatiest of nightmares. Closer to the turnstiles, anxiety commonly escaped from mouths through guttural cries of “Intae these bastards” and “Come on the Hibees!” Gone are the newsreel days when an Edinburgh football disciple might watch maroon football one week and green the next. The modern city sticks to its churches.

Inside, in the minutes before kick-off, two Easter Road stands were illustrated by giant and glistening tifo displays. Over in the Dunbar End, Jambos expressed ridicule through song. Flame machines breathed their fires, Tannoy music faded and almost 20,000 locals hollered mightily. Here was occasion, here was significance. Here mattered.

Down on the touchline, both David Gray and Derek McInnes dressed fully in black. It leant them the appearance of a 1980s synth duo, temporarily suspending differences to undertake a lucrative tour. Fourth official Colin Steven stood between and behind them both, a session drummer glad of the work.

McInnes’ side swarmed forwards first, while Gray’s gave the ball away frequently and courteously. Composing themselves, Hibs swished into attack. Wide of the penalty area, Hearts’ Jordi Altena hacked grumpily at Nicky Cadden. From the free-kick that followed, with his right foot Jamie McGrath wafted over a cross. At the far post, Martin Boyle volleyed in. The net quivered like a flag in a hurricane. Three sides of the ground erupted as if a detonation lever had been pulled. The noise was heavy, visceral and sustained. For 30 seconds being there was like sitting beneath an aeroplane. Seagulls, hitherto resting on the main stand roof, evacuated to Fife. Men who otherwise rarely made eye contact with one another hugged as if back from Ypres. Leith was electric.

Order your Nutmeg World Cup Issue NOW

One particle of sport’s genius is that its plot twists come without subtle foreshadowing or build-up. Only minutes after the volcano, Hearts left-back Stephen Kingsley biffed forwards an unpromising pass. Poised at the edge of his penalty area, home keeper Raphael Sallinger controlled the ball with his midriff and then — under pressure from Pierre Landry Kaboré —quite preposterously caught it on the wrong side of the line. Play continued but the VAR had seen. Red card. There followed a pause while Hibs calculated their next move. Some of us dreamed of an outfield player in goal. Instead, Jordan Smith arrived, towel clung in his left hand like a child’s comfort blanket.

Everything had changed and yet the scoreline remained sealed, not least through Smith’s agility and poise. Hearts, as ever ignited by the eloquent feet of Claudio Braga, located their fluency but not the net. One-nil, then, at the interval, and referee Don Robertson serenaded from the pitch by a round of a cappella booing. Down in the pie queues, Hibernian faces now wore half a dozen expressions at once.

Those of them who queued longest may well have missed the next calamity to beset their team. Two minutes into the second half, Hibs were down to nine men. Pursuing an absconding ball, Felix Passlack executed a Buckaroo kick that caught Beni Baningime on the knee. Passlack had been booked in the first half and now had time to discuss dinner plans with Sallinger in the home dressing room.

Naturally the match reshaped from a contest to a blockade, a modern Siege of Leith. Hibs played a 4-3-1 formation, the one being Boyle who chased around enthusiastically like a postman with the end of his round in sight, until withdrawn breathless. Hearts tried a variety of angles and approaches, energetic artists at the easel. Marc Leonard bashed the bar from 20 yards. Each block by Rocky Bushiri and pummelled clearance by Jordan Obita provoked a rasping roar of acclaim. When Smith climbed to pluck a cross from the sky and swaddled the ball like a newborn, it was heralded as a heroic act. Somewhere deep down, however, those fans knew. They did not know how it would happen, just that it would.

With 25 minutes left, Sabah Kerjota tickled and teased his way down the right. Deep into the box having flummoxed Obita, he passed goalwards. At the near post, poacher supreme Lawrence Shankland forced a swift bout of ping-pong with Hibs’ Warren O’Hora and soon the Irishman had unwanted brackets after his name. Own goal, 1-1, Gorgie joy.

On went the encirclement from left, right and centre, met frequently and admirably by home resolve. Over in a sunshine corner, time and again Hearts’ Alexandros Kyziridis wrought havoc with his piston legs. He seemed to glide as if barefoot on sand, where defenders bumbled as if running over cattle grids. Green clock hands ticked drowsily where time collapsed quickly for those behind the goal. With four minutes left, Kerjota once more hypnotised Obita. At the edge of the box, Blair Spittal begged for a pass with the desperation of a sailor whose boat was leaving harbour. Kerjota obliged. Spittal bludgeoned the ball into the bottom corner and sprinted off in berserk delight. Four thousand Hearts supporters pogoed and crowd surfed and clinched and kissed and banged shins and went dizzy and didn’t know what day it was any more. They made the noise of 40,000.

Hibs fans would not be awaking from their nightmare any time soon. If only more had stopped for those rosaries and kept the big man onside.

Like this high quality of writing? You’ll get much more of it in the latest Nutmeg Magazine — our World Cup edition. Order your copy by clicking on the cover below.

Share

By Rob Haywood

It was the prototypical battle of good against evil, black against white, light against shade. You get the idea. England’s all-white leather-on-willow garb; straight from the village green. Up against Croatia’s chequerboard tablecloth gone bad: black with satanic hints of red on the socks and numbers, unpronounceable names on the back. This was the World Cup semi-final 2018.

Retired referee Graham Poll later wrote that: “Croatia are the masters of the dark arts.” It had been widely accepted for centuries that Croats were the bogeymen under the bed and the monsters in the cupboard. “If you don’t behave, a Croat will get you,” was the threat given to small children from the Middle Ages onwards. Even the item that ties (pun intended) the name of the country with its most famous historical fashion item, the cravat or neck-tie, is something that grabs you around the neck. The stage was set.

The English media hinted strongly that Croatia would be tired after two extra-time games but seemed to forget that Columbia had also taken Gareth Southgate’s side the distance. If anyone had bothered to look at the numbers, they would have seen the truth: the average time played by each man in the starting line-up in the tournament to that point was for Croatia 398 minutes per player and for England 378 minutes. So Croatia’s players had played 20 minutes more football over the previous five matches. That’s just four minutes per match. No one should have been surprised when Croatia did not fade during the game.

These were simple numbers to find and study. Croatia themselves were involved in much more complicated analysis as the tournament moved on, and Scotsman Marc Rochon was at the centre of it.

Though Rochon grew up on the south coast of England and has the accent to prove it, his family roots are firmly planted in John o’ Groats. When his father took a job at Marconi in Portsmouth more than 30 years ago, Marc moved with him. A sports science degree at Solent University led to a work placement with Southampton (under manager Jan Poortvliet, the Dutchman who was nutmegged by Archie Gemmill in 1978 on the way to that goal), a year at Tottenham as an intern and then an analyst role at Portsmouth as they went into administration.

In December 2014, Rochon took a call from Ben Stevens, then the head of analysis at Newcastle, with whom he had worked at Southampton. He was told a club in the Middle East was looking for an analyst and asked if he was interested. Portsmouth were mired in the middle of League Two with no budget, so he was intrigued.

The club was Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates and he took the call. “When they explained what they were doing and how they were working, I was extremely excited,” recalls Rochon. “I had the phone call between Christmas and New Year and they called back on the 29^th and asked if I could fly out the next day!”

He managed to negotiate a two-week window to get his affairs in order — which included getting married. “My [now] wife was pregnant and it would have been illegal for her to be there pregnant while unmarried. So within two weeks we upped sticks, got married and moved to the other side of the world.”

Rochon provided valuable insights for the incumbent head coach, the Croat Zlatko Dalic, as domestic trophies were won. It led to a trip to the final of the Asian Champions’ League. However, a narrow defeat to a South Korean club in that showpiece event and changes on the Al Ain board led to Dalic’s departure in early 2017 while Rochon stayed on.

Nine months later, the Croatia national team faced the prospect of missing out on qualification for the 2018 World Cup. Dalic was installed as interim head coach for the final group match away to Ukraine. A win was needed just to reach the play-offs. When Rochon heard the news, he contacted his old boss. “I sent him a message saying, ‘Congratulations on your appointment. If you need anything let me know’,” says Rochon. “He replied saying, ‘Let me know everything you know about Ukraine.’ They were not on my radar.”

Order your Nutmeg World Cup Issue NOW

Dalic was appointed on a Friday with the crunch game on the following Monday. “From the Friday to the Saturday evening, I basically spent the entire 24 hours watching Ukraine [videos], checking the data, writing a report on how they set up, what were their strengths and weaknesses,” says Rochon. “I constructed a report showing how they typically set up, who are their creators, who are the key players in their possession map, what are their set plays.” In the end, it was a 20-page document. Rochon sent it across and Dalic read it cover to cover.

Croatia won the game 2-0 and faced Greece in a two-legged play-off. Rochon was again asked to contribute and when Croatia won through, he left Al Ain at the end of that season to join the World Cup finals preparations, but without a contract in place. “Going into the World Cup it was just, ‘Let’s see how we go and we’ll take it from there’,” he recalls.

“That was the same for all of the staff and I believe for the head coach as well. So we went into a World Cup not having a contract, not knowing what would be happening after the tournament and with no guarantees what would happen during it. What we did go in with was an excited group of staff who were motivated to do anything we could and focused on taking it step by step.”

Rochon was left on his own to provide all of Croatia’s data and video footage, and had virtually no budget. He arranged to get video feeds from FIFA which he could edit and send to the bench during games. “For everything else I begged, borrowed and took things from other areas,” he explains. “I had access to a Wyscout account which I paid for myself because I knew if I didn’t have that I wouldn’t be able to provide individual clips to the players.”

It’s impressive that Rochon can remember much about the 2018 World Cup because he was surviving on two to three hours’ sleep per night. “Red Bull and Pro Plus were my friends,” he laughs. With Croatia enjoying a successful tournament, his sleep-deprived trip went on for longer than many expected. There were intense periods between the games and even more pressure during matches as he was doing the work of several people by himself.

“During games, I had live communication down to the bench,” he recalls. “I was in the press box with a separate desk and the opposition would have the same and then we all took feeds from the FIFA TV station. We’d have a camera which was slightly wider angle and just following the play, a high behind-the-goal angle, and cameras focused on each of the 18-yard boxes as options to be able to view. I was sat there with one laptop using [video analysis platform] Sportscode, preparing clips to show at half-time of a lot of different events that I thought would be of interest: passes between the lines that were causing us an issue or passes into certain areas where we were being overloaded or underloaded. I would run down to the dressing room at half-time and then run back up. In all I was using three laptops, two TV screens and a radio to talk to the bench.”

During Croatia’s knock-out games, they twice needed penalty shoot-outs to progress and Rochon had, of course, prepared for this eventuality. Videos of opponents’ previous kicks and shot maps showing placement were provided to Croatia’s goalkeepers.

In the last 16 against Denmark, Danijel Subasic saved the first kick from Christian Eriksen. Rochon explains: “[Afterwards] the Danish analyst asked, ‘Did you do analysis on our penalties?’ and I said, ‘Yes.’ He said they’d spoken to Eriksen before the penalties and said, ‘Please don’t shoot your normal way.’ Because on his map all his penalties for Denmark had gone in the exact same spot. So they said, ‘Please don’t shoot that way because they’re going to have watched you.’”

Playing England in the semi-final added an extra edge for Rochon. At the final whistle, he drew some strange looks as he jumped up and screamed out in English. Croatia became the smallest country in almost 70 years to reach a final.

For much of the final, Croatia pushed France close. Ultimately, they were deflated by some controversial first-half decisions. “Looking back on it, I was too tired to take in what we’d achieved,” says Rochon. “My personal feelings going into the final were that we could have done a lot more. We hadn’t followed our usual procedure that we had with the other games, the extra attention and the extra rigmarole around a final meant there wasn’t the available time to do things, everyone was clamouring over a piece of the players. I took a picture on my phone when the ticket manager came in the dinner room and he was surrounded by 20 players, you couldn’t see him.

“There was an awful lot going on around that which I thought we could have done better and I would like to think that if we ever got to that position again, we’d manage that a bit better.”

At the next major tournament, the delayed Euro 2020, Rochon found himself pitted against his home nation in the group stages but the planned base at St Andrews was abandoned because of Scotland’s strict Covid guidelines. As it happened, the final group game between Croatia and Scotland was key for both nations. “Up until the game I was fully focused on the win just like any other match but hearing the national anthem was really heart-wrenching,” he says.

“When Scotland scored, I had to remind myself not to cheer for a brief second, but quickly focused on the game. I would have loved to see both qualify but I had to make sure my team qualified and on a personal level I wanted the people I worked with to win.”

Like this high quality of writing? You’ll get much more of it in the latest Nutmeg Magazine — our World Cup edition. Order your copy by clicking on the cover below.

From the noble steps of Lime Street station, they welcomed the invasion. Locals waiting for friends and trains gave directions to favoured pubs. Four men who looked like they sat there a lot raised their cider cans in salute, all “Welcome to Liverpool” and “What’s under yer skirt, mate?”

There was a breeziness in the manner of those they greeted, informed by circumstance. Genetically traumatised by past campaigns, these Scotland followers were able to picture an alternative reality with meticulous precision. In that abominable vision, tonight’s berth would have been taken by a fixture of qualifying consequence. Instead, they smiled and sang because Scotland were about to play a game that didn’t matter. Last November’s Denmark hysteria had survived the winter and echoed into spring. Even Scouse daffodils knew of Kenny McLean from the halfway line.

Yet more content Caledonians dawdled down by the Mersey. There, in that milky light which has always made this a place for dreaming, kilted and capped they waved their Saltires at bemused passengers aboard a cruise ship who quite possibly thought they had mistakenly docked at Greenock. Some Scots queued to have their photos taken with sculptures of the Fab Four. “There’s quite a lot of Beatles stuff here, Dad” said a boy of 11 or 12. He was one among many youngsters today receiving an away days education rather than a classroom one. Seldom have so many dental appointments been phoned in, or notes declaring attendance at far-off funerals submitted.

Then came the march one and a half miles upstream to the Hill Dickinson Stadium. Thousands stomped by vast and lanky old walls with their rusty gates to nowhere, tracing the steps of so many yesteryear dockers. Bars that have sprung up to profit from Everton’s flit blared Yes Sir, I Can Boogie to entice visitors, but it felt as though Scotland needed new songs. “Hats and scarves, cash and card” barked street vendors bearing orange and blue half-and-halves. Fans gathered on the pristine plaza outside the main stand, some pleasantly deep in beer, others intoxicated by being somewhere else, somewhere new.

Then, we were in, inside a glossy blue world where sentry lines of seats sweep for the clouds. Every smidgeon of the stadium is organised, calculated. If Goodison Park was your grandma’s flat, full of beloved knick-knacks but whiffing slightly of Silk Cut, then the Hill Dickinson is a chain hotel, spotless but staid. Only time will give it the flaws, crow’s feet, yarns and memories that make a house a home. Yet an airtight arena like this has one instant advantage — noise gathers rapidly and cannot escape. Tunes kept by two or more ends radiate and then cascade to the turf, as they did now when Scots behind both goals chorused for their nation ahead of kick-off.

The team took their warbling to heart, bulging forwards and finding the Côte d’Ivoire defence drowsy. They allowed George Hirst to run through them as if kindly holding doors for a pregnant woman. Twice he managed shots on goal, though neither effort was especially menacing. When the Elephants did muster momentum, in midfield Billy Gilmour and Ryan Christie snuffed proceedings and played succinct, fluent football.

Order your Nutmeg World Cup Issue NOW

After Scotland’s keen start, the game became more end-to-end. This, though, was never in a thrilling, electric manner; more the morose swinging of an antique pendulum on a grandfather clock. Then, Côte d’Ivoire curated a series of passes that stretched their opponents asunder. When they reached the penalty area, Elye Wahi urged a flat shot towards goal. It pecked the heel of centre-half Dominic Hyam, trundled in front of goalkeeper Liam Kelly — who seemed to stand and watch in disbelief, like a man whose bus had driven straight past its stop — and then struck a post. Nicolas Pépé popped in the rebound and Ivorians sprinkled around the stadium hollered and jigged.

The goal seemed to whisper a sweet nothing into the ears of the Côte d’Ivoire players: you are good at football. Now they stroked the ball around gallantly and deciphered angles where Scotland saw straight lines. Wahi swirled through beautifully and flung a shot onto the roof of the net. Reminding everyone of his own prowess, Scott McTominay finally connived an opportunity within his lethal range on the area’s edge, but Alban Lafont saved diligently.

Then, the game drifted into a stupor. At times, it could not even be regarded as proceeding at walking pace; instead, it rattled along with the slow and dispiriting murmur of a faulty Stannah stairlift. The crowd quietened. Existential questions wrought inner turmoil. Why were Scotland playing a game in England? Which berserk masochist invented international friendlies? Was it the grey wheelie bin this week, or the green one? Back on the pitch, Gilmour snapped into a challenge with gusto and it shocked us all, a bedroom light switch flicked suddenly in the dead of night.

Scotland started the second half with craft and heart, their passing more adamant than before the break. Scampering as ever, Andy Robertson spurred his team forwards. From a useful spot in the box, Hirst managed a header but it scarpered away from goal with the erratic trajectory of a shuttlecock in a gale. Further efforts followed, not least through a torrent of Scottish corners and free-kicks.

Yet it didn’t feel as though a goal would follow. When the Scotland crowd sang, it seemed in hope rather than expectation, the desperate beseeching of an old car to start on a frosty morning. Côte d’Ivoire absorbed the pressure and then deployed more clipped, lithe football on the break. In injury time, Simon Adingra hit a post, before one last saga of whipped crosses from the Scots, who now seemed to be playing pitch and toss in a world of chess.

The final whistle peeped and some performed their scripted boos. Many more applauded, grateful of a pointless night on Merseyside. “There’s a bit left in the hip flask, Tam” said a bearded man as we trudged back into town. “Ach well,” replied his friend, “it could be worse.”

Like Daniel’s writing? You’ll get much more of it in the latest Nutmeg Magazine — our World Cup edition. The second print run is whizzing off the printing presses now. Order your copy by clicking on the cover below.

Silently cursing the gods of football for their Glasgow bias, Hearts have spent much of the last six decades as the nearly men of the Scottish football league.

Runners-up on five occasions, the Tynecastle club have mastered the art of the masochistic, pain-ridden collapse.

The last time goal average was used as a measuring stick to decide the destination of the Scottish league flag was season 1964/65. Had goal difference been adopted a year sooner, Hearts would have finished as champions by a comfortable margin. Change came too late to prevent the title going to Kilmarnock on the final day.

Fast forward to May 3 1986 and a Hearts side decimated by a pre-match bug travelled to Dens Park for the concluding match of the season, backed by 15,000 fans. Alex MacDonald’s side needed just a single point to become the fourth different club to win the Scottish league in five seasons. Lose the match, and it was still possible to become champions, on goal difference.

By half-time, pursuers Celtic were four goals up on St Mirren and the goal difference was neck and neck. A photographer shouted the score from Paisley to keeper Henry Smith as he left the field, planting the seed of doubt.

“Big man, Celtic are 4-0 up...”

“Bollocks,” replied Smith, dismissively.

“No, they are 4-0 up,” the snapper insisted.

“Oh, are they?” asked Smith. “Right, okay…”

When Tosh McKinlay went off injured, Dundee threw striker Albert Kidd into the fray. Kidd hooked his first goal into the roof of the net after 83 minutes and added his second before full-time. His goals had much the same devastating impact as exploding bullets.

Hearts faced Aberdeen in the Scottish Cup Final the following weekend. After days spent expelling their mental anguish, the Tynecastle players were given a painful dose of PTSD when Alex Ferguson and his assistant Willie Garner arranged for their Aberdeen side to be waiting in the foyer of the National Stadium when they arrived.

“Fergie got us there early and told Willie to wait for the Hearts boys coming into Hampden before the final,” remembers former Dons midfielder John McMaster.

“And the boys were told to say to the Hearts players, ‘That was unlucky last week…’

“They’d spent a full week with a psychiatrist trying to get that Dens Park trauma out of their heads and there was Fergie putting it right back into them. He calculated that their brains would be blown out by what had happened the week before. We had the cup won by half-time…”

Twenty-something footballers drawn from various parts of the planet, the current Hearts team are untainted by the failures of the past. The last time the Tynecastle club had even an outside chance of winning the league, most had yet to be born.

In 1998, a three-horse title race bore echoes of the current campaign. While Hearts were never fixtures at the summit, they hung on to the coattails of Glasgow’s big two until April, when a drop off in the final five games of the season proved calamitous. Jim Jefferies had spent months telling his players to beat all the other teams and cross the obstacles posed by Celtic and Rangers when they came to them. They couldn’t do it.

“I still think back to a game on a Wednesday night close to the end against Motherwell,” Jefferies tells Nutmeg FC.

The rest of Part II is for paid subscribers. Been waiting for right moment to support the best football writing in Scotland?

Read more

By Stephen McGowan

“The one thing that has annoyed me all my life is this acceptance that Rangers and Celtic must win, that everything is geared around them, that nobody but nobody is expected to beat them.”

Sir Alex Ferguson, Aberdeen matchday programme, September 2 1978

Tony Bloom is not the first to use data to level the playing field with Celtic and Rangers. Closing in on their one-and-only league title in 1983, Dundee United had no cutting-edge analytics to call upon. Only a friend of manager Jim McLean, perched high in the Tannadice stand with a pen and paper.

“Dougie Houston used to play with Wee Jim at Dundee,” recalls former United defender Maurice Malpas. “And he came to every home game and did stats for the strikers and defenders.

“It would be a bit of paper and notes on how many times the strikers linked up or how many times they gave it away or kept it, or had an attempt on goal.

“With Eamonn Bannon and Ralph Milne, it was the number of crosses they got into the box. For full-backs like me, it was the number of crosses I let into the box. You would get a couple and Wee Jim would rip the backside out of you. ‘That’s too many crosses, son.’

“So that was the start of stats in football. Dougie did his data with a pen in his hand and there was nothing hugely technical about it. Get the ball in the box and try to score a goal. Stop the ball coming into the box to stop Celtic, Rangers or whoever from scoring. It was basic stuff, but football has always been a simple game complicated by idiots.”

For Scotland’s provincial clubs, simplifying the task of beating Celtic and Rangers to a league title has been devilishly difficult. A mission which has vexed minds, big and small, since Dumbarton faced Rangers in a play-off to decide the destination of the first-ever Scottish league title in May 1891. Playing out a 2-2 draw at Glasgow’s Cathkin Park, the clubs shook hands and agreed to share the trophy.

The Scottish league title has been contested 130 times in total, pausing for World War Two. In 110 of those years, the trophy has been won by either Rangers or Celtic. The other 19 titles were hoovered up by Aberdeen (4), Heart of Midlothian (4), Hibernian (4), Dumbarton (2), Dundee United (1), Motherwell (1), Kilmarnock (1), Dundee (1) and the now defunct Third Lanark. The winner of season 2025/26 will be determined in a matter of weeks.

The statistics show that Celtic or Rangers should win because they usually do. Should Hearts cling on to win for only the fifth time in their history, the significance of the achievement can be gauged by the fact that that just 14% of the leagues contested have been won by teams outwith the Old Firm. Breaking the big two requires a level of skill, guile, mental strength, cunning and excellence. Or, as Brighton owner and Tynecastle investor Bloom hopes to prove, targeted, pinpoint data.

Recalling the last winner from outside Glasgow requires a long memory. Many of the fans who now follow Scottish clubs were not born in 1985 when Willie Miller’s headed goal in a 1-1 draw with Celtic at Pittodrie secured a third title in six seasons for Alex Ferguson’s Aberdeen. Those were different, more equitable, times.

Player wages were broadly similar across the board, while phrases like ‘Champions League windfall’ and ‘multi-club ownership’ had yet to enter the vocabulary. Prior to the Bosman ruling in 1995, clubs like Dundee United could tie their best players to eight-year contracts in order to prevent them going elsewhere.

Get 12 months of access to every post on Nutmeg FC PLUS a year’s subscription to the beautiful, 200-page print quarterly — delivered straight to your door.
Monthly digital-only subscription also available.

It always helps when Celtic and Rangers are in the throes of a periodic meltdown. When Aberdeen claimed three titles in five years, the ‘biscuit tin’ mentality of Celtic’s old ruling families contributed to a lack of ambition and investment, and a malaise around Parkhead. Under manager John Greig, meanwhile, Rangers finished a distant fifth in the Scottish Premier League the day Ferguson’s Aberdeen battered Hibernian 5-0 at Easter Road in May 1980 to win their first title in 25 years.

A squad of strong, resilient characters led by an indomitable manager conjured up a perfect storm neither Celtic or Rangers could cope with until Graeme Souness pitched up at Ibrox and changed the rules of engagement.

“It was all down to belief,” recalls Dons legend John McMaster now. “And it came from the manager.

“Big Billy McNeill was at Aberdeen for a year and he installed a bit of that in us. An attitude of ‘We have to beat them if we’re going to win the league.’

“Fergie followed him and pushed it in our faces every f****** week. He constantly told us that there was no use beating the other teams if we couldn’t beat Celtic and Rangers. And, by God, we did.”

In April 1980, Aberdeen travelled to Celtic Park and won twice in a fortnight. Watch the old Scotsport highlights of those games on YouTube and the noise is pierced by fans in the Parkhead Jungle chanting “Fergie, Fergie, shut your mouth.”

One by one the mental barriers were being pushed, probed and dismantled, and when McMaster surveys the current Hearts team, he sees the signs of a manager learning from the master. Ferguson has recently offered help and advice to Tynecastle boss Derek McInnes on how to go about detonating the deference and the fear surrounding the Old Firm. In six meetings with Celtic and Rangers this season, the Edinburgh team have lost only once.

“At Aberdeen, we believed that we had a better team than those two,” says McMaster. “We had better players. And I see Derek McInnes drum the same message into Hearts.

“Hearts have beaten Celtic and Rangers repeatedly this season, the two of them know they’re in a game these days. Derek has found a way to get that into the players, that they can compete.

“Fergie would say to us, ‘Don’t turn your back on a Celtic or Rangers player. They’ll kill you.’ We were on a crash course to become winners. And when we won that league, we didn’t just win it, we hammered Hibs 5-0 at Easter Road. And Fergie came on the pitch at the end leaping around like a loony.

“It was the first time we’d won the league since 1955, the first time any team outside Celtic or Rangers had won it since Kilmarnock in 1965. It changed everything.”

At Tannadice Park, an hour or so south of Aberdeen, Ferguson’s greatest adversary scribbled down notes. Dundee United’s McLean was described, at turns, as a bully, a bampot and a visionary genius. United fan and screenwriter Neil Forsyth once described him as a “coiled spring of hunger and anger and determination, who rose in the morning wounded and seeking revenge”.

Far from getting his players on side, it felt as if McLean was pushing them away. Pushing and pressing buttons in the hope of provoking a reaction.

“Wee Jim wanted us to say, ‘I’ll show you’ and it often worked,” recalls captain Paul Hegarty. “Maybe if he’d said to us, ‘You’re doing well lads’ we’d have taken our feet off the gas. We never really found that out.”

United had learned how to win in the League Cup tournaments of 1979 and 1980. Then they pipped Celtic and Aberdeen to the title on the final day of season 1982/83.

“Wee Jim wasn’t stupid,” says Malpas. “He made it him against us.

“After a bad game we looked out for each other because we knew we were going to get pelters. It wasn’t us against the world, it was us against the manager.

“We had players who could make us a hard team to beat, and had players — myself included — who were eight out of tens every week. Then we had players like Paul Sturrock and Ralph Milne and Eamonn Bannon who could be unplayable on their day.”

Winger Bannon barely spoke to his manager for four years, telling the Guardian: “Managers now pat you on the back and give you cuddles. He was the exact opposite. After games when he came in bawling and shouting, it just turned into white noise. You switched off.”

After a 6-4 aggregate win over Monaco in the UEFA Cup, McLean famously fined his players for failing to entertain the fans enough. Players seeking an escape route invariably found that the terms of their lengthy contract bound them to the radiator like a hostage in handcuffs.

“In our day you didn’t leave because you couldn’t,” admits Hegarty. “The only way you could leave was a big transfer fee or if you were freed.

“Aberdeen players didn’t leave because there was no Bosman ruling so Alex Ferguson and Jim McLean made sure they had a solid core, then added two or three better players every summer. There were none of the huge rebuilds you see now with 13 or 14 players coming in.

“The players we had were together for a while, together with the manager, acquiring familiarity and self-belief. All of these things combined to make a title-winning team.

“I had a chance to go to Spurs, Dave Narey had a chance to go to any club you care to mention. Paul Sturrock had a chance to go to West Ham for big money.

“Ask those players if they would change anything and they might say, ‘The money.’ But I arrived at Dundee United in 1974 and the players I worked with all those years became like brothers to me.

“We still keep in touch, you know them and trust them inside out and when Wee Jim gave us a rollicking at half-time we put an arm round each other and said, ‘You’re doing okay, forget that.’”

There was no discussion of winning the league until they actually did it. After leading the SPFL Premiership for five months Hegarty — born in Edinburgh and once a player with Tynecastle Boys’ Club — suspects Hearts are under more pressure now than Dundee United ever were.

“We flew under the radar for a big part of the season. We just played our game and stayed there or thereabouts in third or fourth position until we started to think, ‘Here we go, we’ve a chance here.’”

On April 20 1983, United travelled to Celtic Park and won 3-2. They secured their first-ever Premier Division victory at Parkhead with ten men after Richard Gough was sent off.

Hegarty opened the scoring, the teams exchanging blows until the late Ralph Milne secured the winner with six minutes to play. Now 71 and residing in Monifeith, where he has lived for 52 years, Hegarty keeps one eye on his grandchildren as he rhymes off the final games of that season in short order, complete with scorelines.

“We beat Kilmarnock, Morton and Motherwell, all 4-0 wins against strong teams.

“For the first 25 minutes against Motherwell, it was a real nervy affair and we looked edgy until Eamonn Bannon produced once of his magnificent free-kicks from 25 yards into the postage-stamp corner. That settled our nerves and we sealed the league with the final win against Dundee at Dens.

“That day showed what you need most to beat Celtic and Rangers to the league. A solid nerve.”

• Part two tomorrow: Hearts have been the nearly men of the Scottish league for 60 years. Thanks to Tony Bloom, breaking the Old Firm finally looks more likely than ever…

Share