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

By the start of June, World Cup fever will be ramping up, and what better way to add to the excitement than The Scottish Football Kick-Off World Cup Quiz?

Hosted by none other than commentator Rory Hamilton, expect general World Cup knowledge rounds, a Scotland at the World Cup round and much more.

There will be prizes for the top five teams.

Nutmeg are partnering the quiz to provide every quiz-goer with a free copy of Nutmeg — plus one of the prizes on the night will be a year’s subscription for the whole team.

Team Nutmeg will be in attendance and it would be a great chance to meet some of our subscribers.

Full details below.

Hopefully see you there!

THE SCOTTISH FOOTBALL KICK-OFF WORLD CUP QUIZ

Monday 1st June 2026
Hosted by Rory Hamilton
Arrival from 6pm for a 6.45pm start
The Clubhouse, Princes Square, Glasgow
£10 per person - maximum team size of five.

We are delighted to say that Nutmeg Magazine has come on board as a partner for the quiz. Every quiz goer can expect a free copy of a Nutmeg, and one of the prizes will be a year’s subscription for each team member.

Please purchase an entry for all of your team at the same time. The maximum team size is five.

If you would like to attend but don’t have a team, you can purchase a single entry, and you will be placed into a team with other single entrants.

Enter your team here

Today, we are very proud to announce Nutmeg’s partnership with — the leading podcast on Scottish women’s football.

The show is presented by Alison McConnell and Cheryl Smith, two of the best chroniclers of the Scottish women’s game across all media platforms.

A Level Playing Field features revealing interviews with the biggest names in the game, including Ballon d’Or Féminin nominee Caroline Weir and Scotland head coach Melissa Andreatta.

“Women’s football is rich with stories of resilience, strength, courage and determination,” says Alison.

That is reflected in some of the amazing conversations they have — and we think their form of storytelling is a perfect fit for Nutmeg’s audience.

You can follow them on all the socials — including Instagram, X and TikTok — and click the big red button to subscribe to the show.

Subscribe to A Level Playing Field

Please keep scrolling for a message from the hosts ⬇️

Hello!

A Level Playing Field is a podcast hosted by Alison McConnell and Cheryl Smith which discusses Scottish women’s football. It is essentially a relaxed chat with a weekly guest or a look at major coming events in the game.

We have quickly turned around episodes on incidents such as the departure of Elena Sadiku from Celtic and we had Grant Scott on the podcast on the same afternoon he was confirmed as her replacement.

We have also had Caroline Weir on our podcast, arguably the most high-profile Scottish female player, as well as Scotland manager Melissa Andreatta. Leanne Crichton, the Rangers manager, has joined us as has Gary Holt and Cara Henderson from Partick Thistle, while Hibs midfielder Rachael Boyle was one of our first guests.

Award-winning journalist Hugh MacDonald spoke to us at length about his role in ensuring the founders of women’s football were given their place in the Scottish Hall of Fame. Maria McAneny, who recently celebrated her 100th Celtic appearance and scored her first competitive goals for Scotland has also been on our guest list.

Our aim is to replicate the kind of content we enjoy listening to and deviate from a formulaic ‘here are the scores from the weekend’ type of show. We are keen to let people tell their story and share a little bit about who they are and how they got to the position they are in.

It is a peek at what goes on behind the curtain. Melissa described her swift realisation after the elation of getting the Scotland job that she had to drive home and tell her partner — who had just landed her own dream job — that they had to uproot from Australia with a six-month-old baby. Caroline spoke of still feeling like a 15-year-old when she walks down Dunfermline High Street and the surrealness of seeing her image painted on a gable end. Hugh recalled realising that women’s football had been dreadfully dismissed and vowing to rectify it. Maria remembered the teacher who told her football was taking up too much of her time and she should be thinking of hanging up her boots.

There is an abundance of such tales within the Scottish game. We look forward to sharing them and introducing some of the topics that we feel warrant discussion. Women’s football is rich with stories of resilience, strength, courage and determination. Allow us to introduce you to some of them.

Thanks,

Alison and Cheryl

By Patrick Barclay

Peter Lorimer was probably the most significant footballer ever to come out of Dundee.

There is a strong counter-argument for Jackie Mudie, friend and playing partner of Stanley Matthews in the Blackpool team who won the FA Cup in 1953. Like Lorimer, Mudie represented Scotland at a World Cup, scoring against Paraguay before the inevitable group-stage departure from Sweden in 1958, and his goals came at an even faster rate for both club and country (although neither was a full-time striker, each was as prolific a finisher as most who occupy that role).

A silly old sentimentalist brought up on the former Provost Road terracing of Dens Park could not let the debate pass without mention of Bobby Cox, Dundee’s captain when Scottish champions in 1961/62 and European Cup semi-finalists the following season, or of John Duncan, who followed the trail blazed by Alan Gilzean to Tottenham (Gillie, although the best player I ever saw in either of the Dundee shirts, was from the small Perthshire town of Coupar Angus, some 14 miles from Dens or Tannadice). And the heyday of Charlie Adam was hardly short of craft, style or spectacle. Through the decades there have been Ewan Fenton, who was with Mudie at Blackpool in 1953, Jimmy Gabriel, Bert McCann, Frank Munro, Derek Johnstone and David Narey.

But, to be serious, it is a choice between Lorimer and Mudie and, since trophies are a plausible guide to the magnitude of a career, the former’s achievements with the Leeds United of Don Revie break the tie: he won two English titles, an FA Cup, a League Cup and two Fairs Cups. And it could have been more because Leeds in their greatest era were frequent runners-up, most bitterly in the European Cup of 1974/75, when Lorimer believed he had legitimately put his side in control of the final against Bayern Munich with a volley only for Franz Beckenbauer to persuade first a linesman and then the referee that Billy Bremner had been in an offside position and interfering with play. As Leeds minds relived grievances instilled by dubious defeat at the hands of Milan in the Cup-Winners’ Cup final two year earlier, the players lost composure, fans rioted and Bayern, scoring twice, danced off with the European crown. Strictly speaking, the European Cup team was Jimmy Armfield’s, Revie having left for the England job. But the rancour was almost as familiar as the brilliance that took them to the brink of trophy after trophy.

Revie’s Leeds, though magnificently gifted, could seldom be classed as light entertainment. Not that the players let on-field frustrations unduly interfere in a camaraderie that lasted almost to the end, in Lorimer’s case, despite a dwindling list of Elland Road chums. The deaths of Jack Charlton, Norman Hunter and Trevor Cherry in close succession at least left his best friend Eddie Gray, a fellow Scot (from Castlemilk) and adopted Yorkshireman. So close had they been that, after Lorimer passed away, Gray kept pausing to absorb that he would never see his pal again and every time found himself humming the tune of The Road And The Miles To Dundee. That was Lorimer’s number. Among the ways Revie liked to bond his team was with a good old singalong. Everyone needed a song and Lorimer went for the traditional ballad about a young man meeting a lassie keen to reach his home city. Revie, whose wife’s family were from Scotland, always insisted on Lorimer’s party piece.

Yet, although one of Lorimer’s testimonial matches was held at Dens Park — in 1977, between Leeds and a Scotland XI, Gray never heard him express allegiance to either Dundee club. If he retained affection for any club other than his great love Leeds, it was Hibernian, whose Famous Five forward line of Gordon Smith, Bobby Johnstone, Lawrie Reilly, Eddie Turnbull and Willie Ormond illuminated the Scottish game in the late 1940s and early 1950s. His mother, Janet (née Duncan), who came from Fife, and Uncle Paddy certainly supported Hibs and Lorimer fondly remembered trips to Easter Road that sprinkled a happy childhood by the wide estuary of the Tay.

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.

Peter Patrick Lorimer grew up not in urban Dundee but the seaside suburb of Broughty Ferry, with its former fishing cottages, pier and lifeboat station. His father, Peter, was often absent with the Royal Navy and spent much of his leave in pubs — Lorimer put his heavy drinking down to harrowing wartime experiences with the North Sea patrols. Janet, a nurse, also did domestic service in order to make sure that Peter and his elder brother Joe were well fed and clothed. The boys slept in the sitting-room of their first-floor flat in Church Street, there being only one bedroom, bathed in a tin tub and used an outside toilet. And yet how they scoffed at the ‘’oary’ (rough, almost chavvy) people who came from the cities to holiday on Broughty beach!

Joe was the more academic. Peter lived for Saturdays, when, watched by his mother — his father had little interest in football — he would play for his school in the morning and Broughty YMCA in the afternoon, scoring lots of goals even when he played in defence (the power of his shooting was extraordinary long before he became known as ‘Lash’ or ‘Hotshot’ throughout the English game). Leeds were in the Second Division but had a scout called John Quinn who saw Lorimer’s potential so early that he was receiving (illicitly) ten shillings (50p) a week at the age of 12. Every Sunday, Quinn would arrive with a £5 note for his father. Although in addition his mother would receive a bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream and a dozen eggs, these were not bribes; in order to build up her son’s strength, she had to send him to school every day fortified by a glass of sherry into which a couple of the eggs, raw, had been tipped. Whether this helped him eventually to become Leeds’ record goalscorer is not known, but it certainly left him with no aversion to a drink.

After scoring twice for Scotland Schoolboys against England at Ibrox, he became the most coveted youngster in the British game. Among the scouts who flocked to Broughty Ferry at an exciting time for local football — Dundee had just completed the city’s first League triumph with the famous win at Muirton Park, Perth — was Joe Armstrong, Matt Busby’s emissary from Manchester United, who left a briefcase containing £5,000. While Leeds could not compete directly, they came up with a formula by which the Lorimers would receive £800, doubling their combined income for the year, and Peter an enhancement to the normal apprentice’s wage, plus free digs and other benefits which enabled him to send £4 a week home. This and a sense of loyalty to Leeds did the trick. Revie was in such haste to complete the signing that police presented the Leeds manager with a ticket during the drive north. Lorimer soon became the youngest player ever to figure in the Leeds first team — at 15 years and 289 days, he was among five teenagers, including Bremner, who took part in a 1-1 draw at home to Southampton in the Second Division — and a further £2,000 arrived at Church Street when he became a full-time professional.

It was not all fun at first. Homesickness played a part and Lorimer had to wait two years for his next senior appearance — impatiently, for he and Gray were in a hurry. But now Leeds were in the First Division, making such an impact that they ceded the title to Manchester United only on goal average and were runners-up to Liverpool in the FA Cup final. Lorimer became a regular in the next season alongside Bremner and John Giles, Hunter, Charlton, Paul Reaney and Terry Cooper, and soon Gray joined him, occupying the left flank while Lorimer took responsibility for the right, sometimes crossing, sometimes drifting inside to enforce that shot. It was of such velocity that it was reckoned — indeed measured — to be equal to the fastest bowling of the likes of Michael ‘Whispering Death’ Holding, whose West Indies attack was instrumental in convincing batsmen the world over that an increasing array of protective equipment was necessary to preserve their safety.

But Lorimer’s shooting was about more than power. His goals were as much the product of sumptuous technique. Often a helplessly clawing goalkeeper, upon landing defeated on his line, would find the ball spinning back out of the net to nudge and tease him. Connoisseurs of the all-time great goals will find pretty well everything in Lorimer’s immortal catalogue. To pursue the cricketing analogy, he could even impart the equivalent of reverse swing, once inducing the Ipswich goalkeeper to move optimistically to his right before the ball veered the other way to enter by his near post. He could do a gentle George Best lob, into the bargain cutting across the ball in a subtle variation on the Papiss Cissé theme, or if necessary a Karel Poborsky chip. Although the volleys were almost bread and butter to Lorimer, the one where he flips the ball into the air, waits and sends it dipping and swerving in a blur reduces even the best of Tony Yeboah to glorious pastiche.

Trophies were landed and celebrations savoured and yet this was an era — as Lorimer averred in a book published in 2002 bearing his name and subtitled Leeds and Scotland Hero — in which leading footballers’ earnings were insufficient to set them up for life. A few pints and a game of dominoes constituted his favourite recreation throughout his career at Elland Road and beyond, even though the book’s references to occasional excess include an unedifying tale of the shag-and-tell variety around the 1974 World Cup in West Germany; it was not unknown for Lorimer, during the first of his two marriages, to ask a lassie to show him a fair bit more than the road and the miles to Dundee.

Tommy Docherty put him in the Scotland team, declaring in an introduction to the book that he believed Lorimer to be the best footballer in the world at the time, which was why he had persuaded the SFA to lift a life ban imposed after Lorimer spent a summer playing and coaching in South Africa in 1969, when apartheid was still in force. Lorimer played in all three matches in West Germany, a win over Zaire and draws with Brazil and Yugoslavia, ending up with 21 caps, which seems meagre until you factor in the ban and the much odder, in retrospect, tally of 23 rung up by Jimmy Johnstone, a partial contemporary. But for injuries, Eddie Gray would surely have got more than 12. It was Gray’s fitness record to which Brian Clough referred in the outrageous address to the players that conspired in ensuring his tenure as Elland Road manager would be short: “If you’d been a racehorse, they’d have put you down years ago.’’

Lorimer was taunted as a diver. Fair or foul? Suffice it to say he played in an era of refereeing in which players felt impelled to protect themselves. The methods chosen by Giles and Bremner, Charlton and Hunter — not to mention Reaney and Paul Madeley, and especially Allan Clarke, who was so fond of a battle he would blatantly wind up opponents such as Tommy Smith — meant that other teams would concentrate their aggression on the likes of Gray and Lorimer. So he bought the odd free-kick. He was, after all, equipped to make the most of them.

Yet Lorimer’s relatively routine hat-trick which began the celebrated 7-0 rout of Southampton in 1972 was from open play. Incidentally, because Revie was a close friend of the visiting manager, Ted Bates, he told his players to score no more goals, which is presumably why they instead contrived the ensuing multi-pass move in which Bremner performed keepy-uppy and heel flicks and Giles even did a rabona, all of which must have been much more wounding to Southampton than any number of goals. The following year at Wembley, it was Leeds’ turn to feel the pain, with Lorimer the victim of a revered save by Second Division Sunderland’s Jim Montgomery.

After 219 goals in the 618 matches of his main spell at Leeds, he returned in the mid-1980s to notch 19 in 87. In the interim, his aggregate was 49 in 159 for Toronto Blizzard, York City, Vancouver Whitecaps and University College Dublin. He went on to run The Commercial pub in inner-city Leeds, while remaining part of club life as director, BBC Radio Leeds broadcaster and columnist for the Yorkshire Evening Post. Lorimer lived near the racecourse at Wetherby and every year would join a party of about 20 in travelling to Scotland for the Perth Festival meeting, always staying at a hotel in Broughty Ferry. In the morning a hired bus would take them to the races, then back to socialise in the Ferry with old mates of Lorimer’s.

After his Yorkshire funeral, half of his ashes were kept in order that they may be taken north and laid next to the grave of his mother, the guide of his early life and career and dispenser — how the recollection made him laugh — of those sherry-and-egg breakfasts.

Share

Leave a comment

Yes, it’s a beauty. We’ve put together the very best team of writers to cover every aspect of our return to the game’s greatest stage.

• Stephen McGowan sits down with Joe Jordan, Scotland’s Mr World Cup

• Postcards from the World Cup, by the Tartan Army

• Adam Clery (ACFC, The Independent) discovers that Scotland invented Pep Guardiola in 1974 (honestly)

• An oral history of Scotland 4 Denmark 2

• Jonathan Wilson (The Guardian) on Morocco’s AFCON madness

• Daniel Gray opens up Craig Brown’s World Cup diary

• Jonathan Northcroft (Sunday Times) takes us through the seven World Cups he has covered

• Meet the Scot who was subbed on for Kylian Mbappé

• Craig Burley writes about France 98: the hair, the goal, the red card

• 196 pages of the best team in Scottish football writing

  Already a subscriber to the magazine? It’ll be on its way to you soon.

  Not on the team yet? Let us help you.

  
  Option one… pre-order your copy by using this link. ⬇️⬇️⬇️
  

Pre-order the World Cup Edition

Or, if you want a really good deal and a year of the best writing on Scottish football, select an annual subscription and receive a year of the magazine PLUS access to every post here on Nutmeg FC. ⬇️⬇️⬇️

The World Cup is round the corner. It’s time to get in training.

Orchestrator of the transfer which triggered the influx of Scots to Italian football, Neil Hickey would offer one piece of advice to Lennon Miller, Kieron Bowie or any other young player preparing to join Serie A: panning for gold takes patience. Time-intensive and physically demanding, it offers no guarantee of instant payback. La Dolce Vita won’t necessarily transpire in Year One.

“Aaron was fortunate because he hit the ground running,” says his father now. “Even Lewis Ferguson took more time at Bologna. [Late former Bologna head coach] Siniša Mihajlović didn’t start him for a while.

“So I would advise boys to be like Lewis and be prepared for the possibility that you might not start immediately. Listen, learn and work. Lewis has a great career at Bologna but he had to dig in at first and go through the football change.

“That was part of the reason I took Aaron there. I knew that his style of football would suit Italy.”

A move which opened up a new frontier for Ferguson, Josh Doig, Scott McTominay, Billy Gilmour, Che Adams, Miller and Bowie, Hickey left Hearts for Bologna in the summer of 2020.

Before turning down Bayern Munich and Celtic, his father had carefully studied his first-team chances and come to the conclusion that Bologna offered the best odds of an early breakthrough. So it proved after the opening day of the league season when a red card for Dutch left-back Mitchell Dijks late in a 2-0 defeat to Milan opened a window of opportunity.

Shortly after they arrived on Italian soil, Aaron phoned his dad — the voice he listened to before all others — to appraise him of the outcome of a training-ground bounce game.

“I said, ‘How did it go?’ And he said to me, ‘Good’. I asked what ‘good’ meant and he replied, ‘Good, good.’

“And I thought, ‘Oh….’ I asked how many touches he got compared to the other defenders and he said, ‘More’. But it wasn’t just more than the other defenders. It was more than anyone.

“An agent then called me up and said that Siniša Mihajlović couldn’t believe how well he played in the bounce game and planned to start him.”

With Dijks suspended, Bologna took on Parma at home and Hickey played for 80 minutes. He was picked for the next game as well, a 1-0 defeat to Benevento. Defying his youth and relative inexperience, he had made himself a difficult player to leave out. So it was in a new country, in a different spotlight, at Bologna.

While life was progressing well on the football side, the process of settling in Italy was proving more challenging off the field due to the disruption caused by Brexit and coronavirus.

The second wave of Covid-19 hit a badly impacted nation. By October 14, the number of positive cases was exceeding Italy’s peak in March. By November, the country was back in lockdown, divided into red, orange and yellow zones. A national curfew was imposed from 10pm until 5am as well as compulsory weekend closure for shopping malls and higher education institutions. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte described the situation as “particularly critical”.

“The first season was tough because the streets were empty,” Aaron recalls now. “That was a difficult time for someone my age to go abroad and play for the first time.”

His father joined him in Italy for a few months to help with the transition. By then, they hoped, the defender would be establishing a life and routine and social circle of his own. Thanks to Covid, the process was a good deal harder than they ever anticipated.

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

“I misread it at first,” admits Neil. “I would say to Aaron, ‘Are you not going out with any of the boys?’ And he would explain that not many of them spoke English.

“Most of them had their girlfriends there. Andreas Skov-Olsen, who has just joined Rangers, was there at the time and he was there with his girlfriend. And as soon as training finished everybody just went their separate ways. The wives and girlfriends from overseas were waiting on them getting home.

“Then Covid hit Italy badly. It was a complete shutdown and Aaron contracted the illness quite badly. He wanted to go home at Christmas and that didn’t transpire and it was quite a lonely time for everybody, but particularly an 18-year-old out in Italy away from home.”

Neil was running his surveying company remotely, then lockdown travel restrictions made it difficult for him to return to Glasgow. Their plans to go back to Scotland for Christmas were stifled by the government crackdown and they did not manage a return to native soil until May 2021, when Aaron came to the end of his first season in Serie A.

“I was fortunate because everyone was sitting at home conducting meetings by Zoom anyway,” Neil recalls. “The fact I was sitting holding meetings from Italy made absolutely no difference.

“I was able to look after Aaron but I wasn’t able to go to any games to actually watch him play.”

In Italy, normality became a fragile concept. Every day players would queue up in their cars before training and have a swab stuck up their nostril to check for signs of the virus. From time to time, relatives would also be asked to get checked out to prevent a dressing-room outbreak.

Brexit meant another change to the way life had been before. On January 1 2021, new restrictions and regulations were formally imposed on UK citizens at the end of the transition period. As a club, Bologna had never before signed a British player, but purchased their first during a period of legislative flux and bureaucratic upheaval.

“I phoned the club and asked if we had to do something about residency. They didn’t know. Aaron needed a residency and I was with him at the time, so the two of us were swished through the system. The club didn’t have a clue about the paperwork.”

Despite the off-field obstacles, Hickey thrived in the sphere which mattered. During his two seasons in Serie A, he made 48 appearances for Bologna, scoring five goals. By the summer of 2022 he was attracting interest from other clubs in Italy.

Napoli were first to test the water with a £10million bid and it’s tantalising, in hindsight, to contemplate Hickey in the same Serie A-winning team as McTominay and Gilmour. From the outset, however, Hickey had been upfront about his goals. The left-back had always seen Italy as a stepping stone towards the English Premier League.

“I was fortunate to have a bit of family there,” the defender reflects now. “But there were points when I thought to myself, ‘I’m feeling pretty homesick here.’ I just wanted to get back to the UK and get to what I knew.

“After a really tough period, things got better and I settled. I played games and I had a good season and that helped me to get the move to the Premier League.”

In the late 1980s and early 90s, Italian clubs had the edge on their English rivals. And a more technical and tactical type of play was why Hickey chose Serie A in the first place. However, there was one department in which the EPL excelled: finance.

English football became a licence to print money. So much so that it became cheaper to buy a season ticket at the San Siro and fly from England for every match than it was to purchase a season ticket at Arsenal or Chelsea. The Calciopoli scandal of 2006 saw Juventus and Milan charged with bribery or attempted bribery of referees. When Juventus were relegated, Serie A’s fall from grace was complete.

“It’s a sign of the times when a team like Brentford could outbid Napoli,” ponders Neil now. “But in hindsight Aaron was too young to go to Italy in the first place. He wanted to come back to the UK.”

Life at Brentford has never been easy. After playing 37 games, Hickey was sidelined by problematic hamstring surgery and spent two years on the sidelines. He sat out Scotland’s Euro 2025 campaign, forcing Steve Clarke to start Anthony Ralston, Celtic’s second or third-choice right-back, because Nathan Patterson of Everton was injured as well.

“This year has been better than last year and I am just taking it week by week to be honest,” explains Hickey. “I am trying to get back to where I was.”

Hickey’s next challenge is a selection joust with Bees’ Jamaican left-back Rico Henry. The knowledge that the World Cup finals is around the corner is both thrilling and a source of frustration every time he starts a game on the substitutes’ bench.

“I am so excited,” he admits. “I feel it now. There is probably not a day when I don’t think about it now. It can’t come fast enough and I really am buzzing to get out there with the boys and enjoy the experience.”

Fitness permitting, his inclusion in Clarke’s 26-man squad for the games against Haiti, Morocco and Brazil is assured. A sizeable percentage of the squad — McTominay, Gilmour, Adams, Ferguson, Miller and possibly Bowie — are likely to be plying their trade in Italy and Hickey’s status as an ambassador, a trailblazer, for Scottish players makes him an honorary member of the Serie A club.

“Before Lewis made the move I spoke to him. We were away with Scotland and he came up to me on the bus and said Bologna had just contacted him. He was asking me about it, but at that point I knew I was going. I offered some advice and recommended the move. I knew he would enjoy it; he has done so well.

“What I would say to any Scottish player thinking of going there is that it is going to be difficult sometimes. Liam and Lewis have taken up the language. I tried to and could understand what people said to me but I was never fluent. That makes everything easier.”

The Hickeys derive personal pride from their role in the Scottish invasion of Serie A, but prefer to focus on the bigger picture. Last year, Ferguson’s agent Bill McMurdo told of a dogged two-year quest to convince clubs in Italy that a midfielder from Aberdeen was worth the punt. The reticence seems to have gone now, Bowie the latest to make the jump when he left Hibernian for Hellas Verona for £6m in January.

“It’s just great to see that there are good options for our young players now,” says Hickey senior. “You see so many going down south too early, before they are ready.

“There are potentially six members of the World Cup squad playing in Serie A and if we had any part in that then it’s not a personal thing, more a delight for the country at large. It’s a happy accident because we didn’t mean to be trailblazers, but if we did and everybody benefits out of that then it’s great, isn’t it?”

While Hickey is under contract at Brentford until the summer of 2028, sporadic, fleeting appearances in the first team seem unlikely to keep him there. A move to Italy at the age of 18 was inspired by a desire to play first-team football and he is open to a return to the country where his career took flight.

“I think, now, he would quite like to go back to Italy to play for AC Milan or a club like that,” says his father. “When I say to him, ‘You wanted to leave Italy’ he says to me, ‘I was just too young to really understand it.

“Ask him why he would go back out of the English Premier League and he’ll tell you it’s the football. It’s the opera, it’s the colours on the strips, the way they play the game.

“In Bologna, you will see the mayor stuck in traffic while the police escort the football team through the town. You don’t really get that in the UK, do you?”

Share

By Stephen McGowan

In September 2020, Scottish sports journalists gathered on the steps of the Holiday Inn Express at Glasgow Airport.

Aaron Hickey, an 18-year-old defender with Hearts, was en route to Italy to complete a £1.75million move to Bologna.

Posing for photographs as he awkwardly hoisted an Italian tricolour over his head, the full-back’s forced grin masked the natural anxieties of a teenager on the cusp of a life-changing move to a new country.

“When we first went out to Italy, we were a bit unsure,” he reflects now. “It was totally new to us; the culture, the lifestyle, etc.

“As a kid, I always wanted to play abroad. We’d go on holiday and I’d be kicking a ball around thinking, ‘I want to go and play in the sunshine some day…’”

Celtic would have allowed him to stay in his comfort zone, but offered no certainty of a place in the starting XI at the expense of Greg Taylor. While Bayern Munich pitched for his services on the day they overcame Paris Saint-Germain to become the champions of Europe, there was an issue there as well. While he would train with the first team he would play for Bayern Munich II in 3. Liga.

Hickey’s father Neil, a Glasgow-based quantity surveyor, had always been the most influential figure in his career. Conducting a cost-benefit analysis of the interested clubs, Hickey senior compiled a list with one question underlined in bold at the top: Which club offered the highest probability of first-team football?

Bologna, seven-time champions of Italy, held out more hope than the others. And, as the Hickeys waved farewell to the assembled media and dragged their bags towards the departure lounge at Glasgow Airport they had no concept of how influential and transformative the move would be. By boarding a flight to Italy, they were prising open Serie A for a new generation of Scottish footballers.

“The main thing for a young player is that you need to make a name for yourself by playing first-team football and I thought Bologna was the right place for me to go and do that,” says Hickey.

“I thought, ‘No one has really gone there [Italy] since Liam Henderson.’ I wanted to try something different and it was a really good opportunity for me.

“I went to Bayern and it was kind of their reserve squad they were talking about. They were also telling me that I would be training with the first team, but it seemed to be more like reserve-team football.

“So it was either that or Bologna, being involved with the first team and hopefully getting my opportunity and taking it when it came.”

The opportunity arrived sooner than expected. Scots-born players were as precious and rare in Serie A as a ray of sunshine over Greenock. Denis Law had made a British record move to Torino way back in 1961. Nicknamed Lo Squalo — ‘The Shark’ — Joe Jordan played in Italy for three years for AC Milan, then Verona in the early eighties. Former Scotland captain Graeme Souness had won a Coppa Italia during two seasons at Sampdoria.

Henderson had broken new ground by making the switch from Celtic to Serie B Bari in 2018, then moved up a league to Verona a year later.

While Henderson was a trailblazer, Hickey was the gamechanger.

Nailing down a first-team place, the teenager became the first Scot to net a goal in Serie A for 35 years in September 2021. Curious Italian teams began to cast covetous eyes at the SPFL in search of the next Hickey. And a slow trickle gradually became an influx.

Our World Cup issue is about to go to the printers. Get a year’s subscription to our beautiful, 200-page print quarterly, starting with the WC issue — delivered straight to your door — PLUS a year’s access to every post on Nutmeg FC. Monthly digital-only subscription also available.

That was never part of the Hickey masterplan. There was no blueprint centred on triggering a stampede for Scottish footballers. A happy accident, the relationship developed organically.

Lewis Ferguson and Josh Doig moved to Bologna and Verona respectively in 2022. Jack Hendry spent a season at Cremonese. Scotland striker Che Adams left Southampton for Torino in 2024 as Scott McTominay and Billy Gilmour made the move to Napoli which secured both players a Scudetto title a year later. Last year, Motherwell raked in a record transfer fee when Udinese signed Lennon Miller. Hibernian did the same when they sold Kieron Bowie to Verona in January.

When Scotland head for the World Cup finals in the United States in June, manager Steve Clarke could select five, possibly six, Serie A players in his 26-man squad. While Hickey is open to the idea of a return to Italy at some point, he won’t be one of them. After 48 appearances over two seasons for Bologna, Scottish football’s missionary man joined Brentford for £14m in 2022 and stands on the cusp of qualification for next season’s Champions League.

The journey began with four years in the Celtic academy system where the progress of Kieran Tierney rendered Hickey’s prospects of first-team exposure at Parkhead slim to non-existent. In 2018 he moved to Hearts and, a year later, became the youngest player to appear in a Scottish Cup final in the modern age.

Despite a 2-1 defeat for Hearts to Celtic at Hampden, the Parkhead club acknowledged their own misjudgement. A year after they sold Tierney to Arsenal for £25m they made multiple attempts to sign Hickey back.

“It was going well at Hearts,” recalls dad Neil. “Aaron was playing 90 minutes and got 11 sponsors’ man of the match awards. Because he was only 17, he used to come out with the bottle and hand it straight to me.

“There was a bit of Manchester City chat. But that was only really chat and they would have wanted him down for their reserves more than anything.

“There was also the interest from Celtic. The question with that was, ‘Is he going to start?’ The Celtic directors were really good; they were really open about things. You could tell by the wages they were offering Aaron that he was not necessarily going to be a starter.

“That’s when they went out and brought in Diego Laxalt, a proven, experienced left-back from AC Milan. It was funny because, as it transpired, Laxalt moved from Serie A to the Scottish Premiership just as Aaron left the Scottish Premiership for Serie A.”

Italy had never really been on the radar. During a family holiday in the south of France, Neil took a random call from an Italian agent asking what he knew of Bologna. One of the founding members of Serie A, I Rossoblù — ‘The Red and Blues’ — were founded in 1909. The last of their seven titles to date had come in 1964.

“Aaron and I took a drive to meet them and have an informal chat,” Neil recalls. “They took us for lunch and Aaron had just turned 18, but we went to quite a sophisticated restaurant down by the river and it was elegant food.

“The training ground looked unimpressive so we went to the stadium and you could feel the history of the club. It was quite a unique stadium. Aaron got to walk on the pitch, then we stayed the night and drove back with no real firm thoughts.”

There was also an invitation to speak to Bayern Munich. The Bundesliga giants flew the Hickeys out to their state-of-the-art Säbener Strasse training complex to show them around the five grass pitches — two of them with undersoil heating. The 80,000-square-metre site also boasted two third-generation artificial turf pitches, a beach volleyball court and a multi-purpose sports hall.

“The training centre alone was like a small town,” recalls Neil. “They had all these state-of-the-art residences for players and so on.

“After that they took us down to the main stadium and gave Aaron the number three top, which I still have a picture of.

“They were playing a Champions League final against PSG that night. They won the cup and we went into the boardroom the next day and they Zoomed us from the hotel in Lisbon with the European Cup and so on.

“We were asking questions and they told us, ‘You will be training with the first team, but you will be playing for the B team.’

“That’s when I thought, ‘Hmm.’ While Aaron was still just 18, he was man of the match in the Premiership often and I didn’t want him to drop down a level.”

Around that time, Bologna sporting director Ricardo Bigon came back on the phone to follow up a lengthy, detailed WhatsApp message outlining the plans the club had for the young Scot. Mitchell Dijks, an experienced Dutch left-back, had joined the club in 2018 and Bigon threw open a door of opportunity and invited Hickey and his father to step through.

“He didn’t say Aaron was a starter, he just said, ‘You will be in full competition with Dijks.’

“He had to play. I knew he was special, but you have to assess who in the team has your slot. You look at who he is up against in that position because there is a competition for every spot. I knew Dijks and researched him and saw that he was good, but versatile. He could play in the centre of defence if Aaron played well.

“At that time, the English Premier League was quite a physical league and Aaron had just turned 18. I felt he would be better going to Italy. He had two feet, played the ball on the floor and never, ever punted the ball. He tries to play out from the back and I thought, ‘Let’s go back and see them.’

“They convinced Aaron because when they talked about the football, they spoke about it as if they were going to watch the opera. It’s all about the beauty of the game and we thought, ‘Right, let’s go to Bologna...”

Anyway, heartbreak parked to one side over losing this open goal of a pun intro (Rock and Rohl? Rohl Reversal? Rohl Model? I’ll figure something out later), it’s been quite the season for Rangers. I’ll skip the “Previously On…” for you and say, simply, that Russell Martin was the worst appointment I’ve seen since I was mistakenly called for a colonoscopy while waiting at the GPs.

Before you get into the whys and hows and whathaveyou, the most important thing to observe about Rohl-ball (all balls ‘rohl’, technically) is the foundation of solidity. Rangers had recorded a solitary clean sheet in the nine games prior to his appointment, but now have 10 in the 19 games he’s managed. That’s also one win, and then 14 of them, respectively, across the same periods which is, scientifically, Not Shit.

But getting your clean sheet percentage up from 11% to 53% — which are, sure, really gratuitous stats that nobody would ever actually use but I did work them out for my own curiosity and didn’t want that small amount of work to go to waste so there you are — is not what’s impressive here. Cobbling together a title charge, and talk of a ‘double’, after starting the season under the stewardship of statistically the worst manager in the club’s history, is.

If Rohl pulls that off, it’ll be a success built on the foundations of the lesser-spotted 4-2-2-2. Not entirely, mind you: he messed around with a back five in his first two games at the club, much like he’d done at Sheffield Wednesday prior, but this system was always what he was building towards. That it blew away Hearts, their most pressing challenge, felt fitting in both a quiet and extremely loud way.

A short history lesson for you. Danny Rohl learned an early chunk of his trade in the Red Bull system, and another more practical wedge working under Ralph Hasenhüttl at Southampton. The thing these environments have in common is a keen enthusiasm for centralised attacking. Regardless of the formation, Rohl comes from several different schools of thought that believe football is to be played, where at all possible, through the middle of the pitch.

Like, what do you notice here? Rangers flooding forward with the ball, committing seven players to the attack, and you could throw an (admittedly enormous) tea towel over the lot of them. No real interest in holding width, nobody looking to get tight to the touchline, not one little thought about “stretching the defence” in their heads; just coordinated centralised attacking.

There’s not one player in this attack who doesn’t have a teammate within about 10 yards. And the nearer to the centre of the pitch they are, the closer proximity to a colleague they are as well. You’re not seeing a 4-2-2-2 in that picture but you are seeing the benefit of one.

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

Rohl has said it himself in interviews, but the idea is to have central pairings that both support and complement one another straight through the centre of the pitch. Two centre-backs, two 6s, two number 10s and two centre-forwards. They can sit together and be solid, so it’s great out of possession, but they can also take up different vertical positions, safe in the knowledge that the space they leave is covered.

This is a few seconds prior to the image above, with the pairings highlighted so you can see how they move. The forwards and the 10s are occupying their normal positions, the former looking to pin the centre-backs and the latter looking to get into the space that might leave, but the 6s have split, with Tochi Chukwuani dropping nearer to his defence as a passing option and Nico Raskin jumping up to occupy the emerging gap between the lines. Again though, you’ll notice… still nobody out wide.

What width the side has comes in two forms. First off, the full-backs are there, and theoretically they can advance and retreat to give any pairing of two a wide outlet depending on where you’re playing the game. They’ll make it a 2-4-2-2 in certain phases of build-up, a 2-2-4-2 if they’re on the edge of the opposition box — you get the idea.

I have no idea if you personally use average position graphs with any regularity but, if not, let me assure you that’s a very weird looking one. Andreas Skov Olsen (who I’ll show you in a second) is the only player not-a-full-back to wind up with an average position not squarely within the width of the 18-yard box. Which brings us around neatly to Width Option B: flexibility. None of the players are encouraged to hold wide positions, but they can occupy them if it presents creative solutions.

Take the third goal. The player on the ball here is Dujon Sterling, the right-back, who is the one providing the width down that side. But the aforementioned Olsen has just gone and stood on the touchline, with an absolute yawning chasm between him and anyone from the midfield who’d ordinarily have been marking him. It’s the second phase from a corner he took, I’ll grant you, but he makes no effort to return to his actual position and, instead, just stays where the space is.

Hearts’ title challenge is, roughly, 98% built on how difficult they are to play against and yet he finds himself with a space the width of Buchanan Street to swing the ball in for the goal. All from just being a little bit flexible with his role.

What’s telling about this brand of football is that it’s not easy to either coach or play. Six players all occupying the central areas is great when it works, but done badly it’s a congested mess that hinders more than it helps. Likewise, the full-back roles require defensive work-rate, technical competence, and attacking verve to a level that exceeds even your common wing-back. You can’t just turn up and get 11 random lads to give it a go.

Rangers were active in the transfer window though. Chukwuani, Tuur Rommens, Ryan Naderi and that man again Olsen all arrived for a not inconsiderable £12million. All four of them started the victory over Hearts, with one at full-back, one at 6, one at 10 and one up front. Rohl urgently installed a spine into the team that was comfortable playing this brand of football, and the results were immediate.

He knows this system, he knows what it can do, and he’s already got a team that knows he’s right. Can Rangers win the title? Well, they’ve got better odds than just a Rohl of the dice, haven’t they? (HAHAHA!)

Share

Finally, the concrete roof had cracked and it was now easier to believe in spring. “Blue sky at last”, said a pensioner as he bailed from Coral bookmakers’ on Cocklaw Street, although he may have been referring to a change in his gambling fortunes. A man carrying eight cans of Tennent’s, some bacon and a packet of morning rolls walked by grinning, a simple but effective Saturday mapped out ahead of him.

This lifting of the miasma meant that from the top of Kelty, other local villages and towns — vanished and mythical for weeks on end like so many Atlantises with Costcutters — could now be seen below. They lingered among fields and hills in camouflage shades, a sleepy valley which once rumbled from beneath and spat coal into the world.

Central Fife’s diamonds were not always black. Some gleamed. From up here, down to the west is Townhill, fount of Billy Liddell the Liverpool titan. Cast eyes inwards to Hill o’ Beath and see Slim Jim Baxter dribbling between the bings. With his range, he might just have found the head of Alex Venters, prince of Cowdenbeath then Ibrox. Glancing two miles east, Lochgelly’s ghosts could play a bit too, and they fled south to spread the good word with their feet: ‘Smiler’ Wilson, a league winner with Newcastle United; Bob McKinlay, who played more times for Nottingham Forest than anyone else has; Ian Porterfield, who walloped in at Wembley to win the FA Cup for Sunderland. All of them and so many more, ascending from the black to illuminate the green.

How Kelty Hearts could have done with one of their own homespun marvels, the great Raith Rovers marksman Willie Penman, now. Averaging less than a goal per game this season, they began the day chained to the foot of League One, their foremost chance of survival the continuing traumas of Hamilton Academical. It was Valentine’s Day and lonely Hearts had a microwave meal for one in the freezer and an old DVD of When Harry Met Sally primed.

Still, love of a football club is rigid and so a few hundred villagers trudged to New Central Park, a perky ground of maroon trimmings and cheery huts. They were joined by 70 or so guests who had travelled the 150 miles from Peterhead. This season, their team has neither threatened the top reaches of the division nor been irked by its trapdoor; it’s been a shoulder shrug of a campaign. At least their shirt pattern peppered character upon this bland impasse, mirroring as it did that of a mid-1990s Argos shower curtain.

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

In the minutes before the teams ambled onto the plastic, AC/DC’s Thunderstruck fumed from the Tannoy. Its ferocity seemed to box at cold ears, an aural bullying. “Thank Christ for that!” hollered a Peterhead voice when finally the record capitulated. As if trying to run from its echoes, Kelty began the game sharply. Their endeavours pillaged a corner. Arran Pettifer, effervescent early on, jogged over keenly to take it, a Labrador with a new stick. His kick, though, curved through the air and out of play again at the far side of the goal. It was like watching someone walking into a room and forgetting what they were there for.

The game veered between head tennis and slick passing, a bipolar encounter. A gaggle of northern teenagers banged on the hoardings and bawled for the “Blue Toon”. Their team heaved forwards. Cammy Smith tried a shot that was more of a question than an answer. In goal for Kelty, Kyle Gorlay wafted his save in a harmful direction, a traffic cop gone rogue. A man deftly carrying four pies walked in front of me and the next thing I saw was Peterhead’s Craig McGuffie celebrating. 0-1, and weary resignation drifting in cartoon thought bubbles above a hundred and more home heads. All those living a relegation season know their death sentence already; that is half the agony.

Seeking reprisals, Kelty laboured forwards and many a Peterhead man chased in response. The sound it made on New Central Park’s 4G surface was that of a muffled stampede; a dozen horses wearing slippers sent berserk by a storm. Then for a solid 20 minutes nothing happened. The ball seemed suddenly afflicted by a form of agoraphobia that left it unable to leave the middle third of the pitch. Blue Toon centre-half Josh Kerr accomplished a neat backwards header and in the away end it was greeted with the kind of over-inflated glee usually reserved for parents whose toddler has successfully used a potty. Half-time felt like the end of a 23-hour coach trip spent in the company of Louis Walsh.

Once more unto the breach went Kelty, hauling themselves towards goal. Pettifer skedaddled in a temptress of a ball that whizzed across the area like a fat dad on a log flume. No-one read the signals and it bombed into touch. When they did muster goal efforts, their shots were slower than clouds. At the other end, home left-back Brody Paterson volleyed against his own post. “Is he trying to get on You’ve Been Framed, or something?” asked a man near me. “£250. More than he probably gets here.” It was a sobering thought.

The clock’s icy hands shivered onwards and a niggling kind of crabbiness overcame a number of players. Kelty skipper Craig Clay and his midfield counterpart Andy McCarthy tussled, going at each other like frustrated office workers charging at a vending machine to dislodge a hanging packet of Walker’s Max crisps.

With half an hour remaining, Kelty introduced substitute Ross Cunningham. Returned from a spell at Stirling Albion, the forward was welcomed in a manner as rapturous as was possible by 300 people who could no longer feel their hands. On an afternoon of huffing, puffing and meat-slap headers, Cunningham looked like a footballer. It was in his hips, in the whipped manner of his stride and in his measured demeanour, which was that of a paramedic at an emergency. He lifted terrace and turf, as good players can.

Quickly, Kelty hit the bar, albeit the ball moved in a tottering kind of motion that resembled a moth rebounding from a lightbulb. Then, Cunningham’s moment. Tatty play flung the ball towards his chest, 25 yards from goal to the right of the ‘D’. With his second touch he nutmegged Kerr and then, swapping his foot for a fine detail paintbrush, bowed a shot with the outside of his right boot. Curving on a rainbow, the ball greeted the top corner with a Valentine’s kiss, and supporters embraced as if home at last from war.

Sometimes this game of ours produces enchantment from the insipid, drags art from a quagmire. Those grey clouds had resolutely disappeared.

Share

Previously, we have revisited Scotland’s first group match at the 1986 World Cup; a crucial qualifier on the road to Euro 96; an Edinburgh derby from 2006 that played out like a sequel to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; and a Dundee v Kilmarnock clash from 2001 when Ayrshireman Alan Mahood outshone Argentine sophisticate Claudio Caniggia.

This time, as Martin O’Neill prepares to take Celtic into a knockout tie in Europe for the first time since 2004, The Replay is going back to that UEFA Cup run, the season after Seville.

Like O’Neill himself, that team seems to loom large over the modern history of Scottish football. Two different Rangers sides have reached European finals since then, and Celtic have had greater unilateral dominance of domestic prizes in the seasons since O’Neill first left. Yet those teams don’t quite have the heft of O’Neill’s best elevens, or those Rangers sides with whom they jousted across Glasgow.

Are we just romanticising our younger days, when the idea of 32-waist jeans didn’t seem like a cruel joke? Do we secretly prefer the visual aesthetic of pre-digital broadcasts, with less resolution, less depth of focus, less criticism of our choice to watch live televised sport from our co-habitants? Or is it — and stay with me here — that Henrik Larsson is a better watch than Daizen Maeda, regardless of how fast he can run?

In the first part of the century, Celtic — and Rangers — were attracting and retaining a better class of athlete, before moving by necessity to a recruitment model based more around development and resale. Also, this team in particular seared into the memory indelible moments, great goals by those big-ticket players scored during titanic heavyweight brawls with continental giants. That shit stays with you.

Let’s see why this team maintains such a rosy legacy, while welcoming to The Replay the plucky upstarts from Catalonia, who may just have a player or two worth watching themselves.

THE WARM-UP

Celtic are here, in the round of 16 of the UEFA Cup, only because they came up a little short in a tough Champions League group, finishing two points behind Bayern Munich and one more behind Lyon, having lost each of their three away games by a single goal.

Barcelona, on the other hand, are exactly where they should be. They have not won a trophy for five years and they finished sixth in La Liga last season. While Celtic were playing in Munich, Barcelona had to play a team called Matador Puchov, from Slovakia, in the spit-and-sawdust rounds of UEFA’s second-tier football fest.

The previous summer saw turmoil at Camp Nou. In came a new chairman, Joan Laporta, a new manager, Frank Rijkaard, and Ronaldinho, a 23-year-old Brazilian signed from PSG for €32.25million in the fulfilment of a key Laporta election pledge. He has long hair, massive teeth, he wears the Barcelona No.10 shirt and does things with a football you’ll want to tell your kids about. You can’t miss him.

More importantly than all that guff, this football match takes place mere hours after terrorist bombs killed 193 people and injured over 2,000 more in Madrid. There is a minute’s silence at Celtic Park to recognise a tragedy the terrible wake of which is still rolling over Spain’s capital.

Celtic are in terrible nick. Injuries to forwards Shaun Maloney, Chris Sutton and John Hartson mean Craig Beattie gets a rare start here. They only have six substitutes (including the reserve goalkeeper, who obviously won’t be a factor tonight) because that’s how many match-fit, UEFA-registered players they have on staff!

Celtic wear Umbro. I could do with the hoops being a bit wider and I don’t like the way the black Carling logo sits across the chest. 4/10, would not buy.
Barcelona are in Nike, old-school blaugrana verticles, a chunky collar and no sponsor. 😍

Your whistler is Wolfgang Stark and that is a good name for a referee. He’s 34 and he is a bank teller from Landshut, Germany. Let’s go.

THE FIRST HALF

2.35
Ronaldinho is faced by Stan Petrov in the middle of the pitch. He hops backwards twice, rolling the ball with his studs, and then gives a six-yard, no-look pass to Xavi, who is six yards behind him. It’s all completely unnecessary and we need a lot more of this sort of thing.

Scoreflash! Bordeaux 3 Club Brugge 1
This might not be a big deal in 2004, but now this would be one of the greatest ever upsets of European football, a fourth-tier French team beating a Champions League perennial.

4.31
Even without Sutton and Hartson, there is a clear physical mismatch here. Celtic have Stanislav Varga and Bobo Balde at the back, and Larsson is majestic in the air. As is Carles Puyol, despite not being the biggest centre-back, but in general, Barcelona are going to be outmatched at corners. So… here they are with two inventive variations in succession. Xavi rolls it to Ronaldinho as he comes off the near post, he slips to the bye-line, cuts it back and Olegeur’s shot is blocked by Balde for another corner. This time, Xavi pings a flat one to the edge of the box, where Luis Garcia should do better than slash it over the bar. Clever stuff.

6.43
It’s great to see Xavi pass the football again. Here he finds Javier Saviola, El Conejo or The Rabbit if you prefer. Balde has seen it coming and slides in and Saviola… just steps out of the way! Balde sliding in is about the same height as Saviola standing up, so perhaps what is on its face an act of despicable cowardice has some justification.

11.09
We need to talk about Stephen Pearson. Six weeks before this game, he was at Motherwell, where his form had been rewarded with a first Scotland cap. Here he looks to the manor born, driving at Michael Reiziger and Puyol as though he’s been doing it all his life. This time he catches a long ball on his chest and just as Puyol thinks he can pounce, Pearson nudges it forward with his thigh and unleashes a cracker of a drive that zips just past Victor Valdes’s right-hand post.

18.02
We’re live on the BBC for both legs of this tie, thank goodness. As well as Rob MacLean and Sandy Clark on commentary, we have intermittent updates from touchline reporter Chick Young. “Frank Rijkard is so laid-back he’s almost horizontal” may not be an entirely original line, but as we cut to Rijkard leaning on the side of the dugout as if he’s waiting for Mrs Rijkard to come out of the changing rooms at Marks, it does make sense.

20.39
I love football because it gives us both Ronaldinho and Bobo Balde. Ronnie bamboozles Alan Thompson with a flick and a spin before setting Garcia free for a cutback which Balde intercepts and clears. When the ball is returned to Gabri, Balde slides in with full force and no regard for consequence; Gabri ends up 10 yards behind Balde, it’s like the aftermath of a motorcycle accident.

24.57
What a move! What a miss! It goes Xavi-Ronnie-Thiago Motta so fast that Celtic defenders are spinning around, trying to work out where the ball is. It’s at the feet of Saviola, burrowing (ahem) into the box. He takes two touches, the ball is on his right foot and Rab Douglas has advanced to the edge of the six-yard box when Saviola side-foots well wide with his right foot.

29.53
Comedy gold from Rob MacLean. “News that Valencia have been beaten…”
Scoreflash: Genclerbirligi 1 Valencia 0
“… by that well-known Turkish team.”

32.37
Balde breaks up a Barcelona attack and follows the counter upfield as Larsson picks things up. He jinks Puyol and looks for a pass, before realising that the best option is his giant centre-back. Screw it, thinks Larsson, this’ll be a laugh, and rolls a ball into the box. Balde lumbers after it like Robocop, Reiziger glides across to kill the danger. The Dutchman gets there first but Balde launches into a sliding tackle that turns into the game’s first shot on target, pinging across goal and forcing Valdes into a save.

35.21
Xavi side-foots a first-time volleyed pass from a deflected Celtic clearance right to Saviola, he finds Ronnie who is suddenly in the box faced only by Douglas. The great Brazilian drags a right-footed shot across goal and wide. Two big let-offs for Celtic. “Martin O’Neill is raging,” says Chick Young.

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

37.22
“The referee has been conned there,” says Sandy Clark on co-comms, as a replay shows Varga sliding under Saviola and knocking him into the stands with his hip. Yellow card for Varga.

40.07
Ronaldinho! That’s more like it. Isolated with Didier Agathe on the left, he flip-flaps the full-back, taking out both Agathe and Pearson and popping up with the ball glued to his laces on the bye-line. Ronnie fizzes one in between Balde and Douglas at the near post and it looks like a tap-in for Garcia before Jackie McNamara steams in from left-back to save the day. Three replays of the Ronaldinho move, and I could have gone for three more.

41.38
Larsson comes alive. He pins Olegeur at a throw in, and back-heels the ball to Petrov on the edge of the box. Petrov hits a first-time pass to Thompson as he charges the area but it’s on his right, which is the difference between a half-time lead for Celtic and a sharp save by Valdes, down and to his left.

44.31
Mark this down. Motta challenges Balde for a header by jumping into the defender and throwing a fist at his face. Bobo is holding his mouth and looking around, evaluating what has just happened and what may happen next as a direct consequence.
“Bobo’s gonnae get ye!” sings Celtic Park.

Half-time. 0-0.

MacLean: “There’s news from the tunnel. There’s been a bust-up. Punches flying.”

Chick: “A right Barney… Motta in the middle of it all… the police were there, too.”

We see the tunnel area, with Rijkard trying to keep Motta out of trouble. David Marshall, the Celtic substitute goalkeeper, is emerging onto the pitch, with a strange look in his eyes, as if he has just received life-altering news.

Now we are live with Chick.

This is exactly like Walter Cronkite, the legendary anchorman once known as ‘the most trusted man in America’ breaking the news of the Kennedy assassination in 1963. Exactly the same.

Chick tells us that Motta and Celtic goalkeeper Douglas have been red carded after a fight in the tunnel. However, just like in ’63, that’s only the starting point to a web of mystery, claim and counter-claim. From post-match interviews later this evening all the way to podcasts some two decades later, the facts will slowly emerge from the fog of war. Or, to put it another way, Balde leathered Motta in the tunnel, there was a multi-player melee, Douglas tried to break it up and the referee sent off Douglas and Motta on the somewhat misguided advice of another official.

Beattie’s evening is over. On comes Marshall, just turned 19, to keep goal against Barcelona and it’s 10 against 10.

THE SECOND HALF

46.45
Ronaldinho pops a long ball over the top to release The Rabbit. McNamara smells the danger and seems to get there in time, but Saviola does a stop-start move to get a yard and a clear shot from inside the box, but again a Barcelona forward misses the target with a big chance.

48.05
Red card for The Rabbit! Saviola is just outmuscled by Thompson, there’s nothing else in it, but the wee Argentinian takes the huff as the ball bobbles away and takes a good old kick at the back of the Celtic midfielder’s leg. It’s an auto-red. What a nutter. “Ten v nine, is that right?” asks Clark. Yes, Sandy. That’s right.

54.54
Pearson lures Reiziger in by slowing down when receiving the ball on the left, then moving off just as the full-back commits to a sliding tackle. Pearson takes a sore one, Reiziger takes a yellow. Take note.

58.58
Celtic are in front and it’s a goal containing the DNA of this team. Everyone does their thing. Agathe tests his opposing full-back with a sprint down the right. Petrov spots the space this has created and has time to ping a deep cross into the box. There is no Sutton or Hartson, so Larsson does No.9 things, getting between Puyol and Reiziger for a perfect knockdown. Finally, into the box rushes Thompson, who spears a left-foot volley into the ground and past Valdes. Celtic Park is rocking.

61.30
Well, Wolfgang, you’ve made a howler there. Reiziger takes out Pearson high and late after Celtic’s dynamo robs him of the ball. The referee realises a second booking for the Barcelona man will leave ten v eight and decides to give a free-kick and nothing else. A more plausible course of action would have been to penalise Pearson for getting his thigh flesh on Reiziger’s studs. Rijkaard immediately withdraws Reiziger for Gerard Lopez.

65.01
Motta has tried to sneak out to the mouth of the tunnel, but Celtic Park grasses him up like it’s a panto. Soon he is surrounded by suits and police, but instead of retreating into the dressing room, he establishes a beachhead several metres down the tunnel. His field of vision must be minute, but he is taking his stand and adding to the evening’s drama and for that we must thank him.

71.32
Garcia is replaced by Ricardo Quaresma, the Portuguese Stephen Pearson.

Scoreflash: Liverpool 1 Marseille 1 (Drogba)
Must keep an eye on that lad.

76.51
Ronnie is now playing an entirely different game to everyone else on the pitch, waiting in the centre circle for opportunities to do his thing and impact the match, while conserving energy. Now he takes the ball in front of Balde, taps it with his right foot onto his left toe so it zips away from the defender. Celtic Park lets out a loud, collective ‘Ooooohhh!’

82.33
Thompson is replaced by Momo Sylla and so I think of 2 Unlimited.

86.07
Sandy gives Man of the Match to Pearson. Balde was the only challenger, but I think he got it right. Now all we need to find out is which lucky viewer who agreed with Sandy has called in at 25p per minute and won the Man of the Match competition…

88.38
Ronaldinho bids Celtic Park farewell and is replaced by Marc Overmars. Andres Iniesta! Andres Iniesta is on the bench! If only Rijkaard knew what he had.

90.26
Sean Connor from Inverness! Sean Connor from Inverness has won the competition and receives a DVD player. If we factor in three weeks for the BBC to get the prize to Sean and assume he had enough disposable income for one new title every two weeks, here are the No.1 selling DVDs in the UK for the first month of Sean’s new home cinema regime: Master and Commander: Far Side of the World; Kill Bill, Volume One; The Last Samurai. That’s a pretty good run for Sean straight off the bat.

91.53
Marshall has the ball in his hands as the final whistle blows. How must he feel? Has it dawned on him that Douglas will now be suspended for the second leg in Catalonia, two weeks from tonight?

THE AFTERMATH

The second leg finished 0-0 and is one of two folkloric performances that bookend Marshall’s career, such were his heroics that night at Camp Nou. Celtic progressed to a quarter-final against Villarreal, which ended in defeat, a 2-0 loss in Spain following a 1-1 draw at home.

In Scotland, O’Neill’s team won the double, taking the league flag by 17 points, including a 25-game winning streak that set a British record. They won the Scottish Cup with a 3-1 victory over Dunfermline. Larsson scored two that day and 41 in 58 games across the season. A year later, O’Neill resigned to care for his wife, Geraldine, who had been diagnosed with lymphoma.

Larsson moved to Barcelona in the summer of 2004, under freedom of contract, and was a key figure in their 2006 Champions League win, a pivotal moment in their rebirth as a European superpower. Neither Marshall nor Pearson spent the meat of their careers in the Celtic team. Pearson played in England, most notably with Derby, and in India and back at Motherwell. Marshall, too, spent most of his time across the border; his other bookend, of course, was the penalty shoot-out against Serbia which qualified Scotland for Euro 2020 (actually 2021).

Barcelona made progress under Rijkaard, but it was under his successor, Pep Guardiola, that they became a superpower. The coach and the emergence from their academy of one of the greatest footballers of all time, Lionel Messi, were key components of that success, but four players who made the trip to Glasgow in 2004 were vital to Barcelona’s most glorious era, and that of the Spain national team. They are Xavi, Puyol, Valdes and Iniesta, who warmed the bench at Celtic Park.

Ronaldinho? He finished third in voting for the Ballon d’Or in 2004, nine months after this game, despite Barcelona ending the season with nothing. He was that kind of player. Think of Xavi or Iniesta, as great as they were, and you see too the team around them. Ronaldinho takes up the screen all by himself. And it’s impossible to look away.

Share

By Rob Smyth

Video killed more than just the radio star. Blanket coverage, streaming and YouTube have done permanent damage to the mythology of football. Old folk will have no need to tell their grandkids about Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi; their entire careers will be instantly available in High Definition.

Reality rarely matches up to the fertility of the imagination however, and there is something magical about a great moment that is not easily accessible on video. In 1977, Rivelino played an 80-yard pass against England that is seared into Kevin Keegan’s memory.

“I was about three yards away from Rivelino and I felt the wind as the ball passed me at shoulder height,” said Keegan. “The astonishing thing is that it stayed at the same height all the way. I watched wide-eyed as it flew on and on; that’s one of the rare times when I’ve felt outclassed.”

How could that possibly be as good on screen as it is in the mind’s eye?

Davie Cooper’s legendary solo effort for Rangers against Celtic in 1979 — voted Rangers’ greatest-ever goal in a fans’ poll — has retained a similar mythical quality despite being all over YouTube. There are two reasons for that. The shaky, grainy footage, taken from an unusual angle behind the goal with a hand-held camera, gives it a bootleg quality. And not even Walter Mitty could have imagined a goal of such unique brilliance. It is Exhibit A in the case for Cooper being Scottish football’s last genius.

“He was a Brazilian trapped in a Scotsman’s body,” said Ray Wilkins, who played with Cooper at Rangers. It’s a lovely quote but not entirely correct: while Cooper had the balance and skill of a Brazilian, he had a very Scottish chutzpah. He was a modest man, who sometimes seemed almost embarrassed by his talent, but he became a swaggering superhero when he put on his costume of a Clydebank, Rangers or Motherwell kit.

The same was not necessarily true of the Scotland shirt. Cooper won only 22 caps, a frustratingly low total, and never started a World Cup match. But if he did not leave an impression on the world game, he certainly did so on one of the world greats.

In 1984, Rangers played a mid-season friendly — called the KLM Challenge Cup — against a Feyenoord side that included Johan Cruyff and Ruud Gullit.

“Davie Cooper,” said Gullit years later, “was one of the best football players I have ever seen.”

He included him in his all-time XI of those he had played with and against. Ronaldinho and Zinedine Zidane were on the bench.

Although Cooper was inconsistent, his boyish enthusiasm for the game was such that his genius could assert itself in any setting — from the Scottish Cup final to the KLM Challenge Cup or even the Drybrough Cup final, which Cooper illuminated with his goal against Celtic in 1979.

The Drybrough Cup was played from 1971–74, and then for the last times in 1979 and 1980. It was generally held as a warm-up to the new season, and involved the four highest-scoring teams from Division 1 (and latterly the Premier League) as well as the same four from Division 2 (and latterly the First Division). It was not just the qualification criteria that was designed to promote attacking football: the SFA changed the rules in an attempt to create more space in midfield. For a couple of years, in the League Cup and Drybrough Cup, players could only be offside if they were past the line of the 18-yard box.

That initiative had died by the time the competition was revived in 1979. Rangers reached the final for the only time in the Drybrough Cup’s short history, where they would meet Celtic. They tore into their archrivals from the start, with the 18-year-old John MacDonald giving them the lead after a one-two with Cooper.

It was all too much for MacDonald.

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.

“The enormity of what I’d just achieved hit me full on,” he said. “I ran to the Rangers End to celebrate and ended up throwing up all over the place. By the time the rest of the lads came over to congratulate me, I was on my hands and knees being as sick as a dog.”

MacDonald’s unusual contribution would be overshadowed, as would Sandy Jardine’s glorious second, when he ran the length of the field before battering the ball past Peter Latchford.

“I scored one of my best goals that day,” said Jardine, “and it hardly got a mention.”

That was because of an even better solo goal with 12 minutes remaining.

Cooper received a pass from the wing inside the Celtic area, facing away from goal and with Roddie MacDonald attached to his back. He controlled it on his chest and volleyed it up in the air, allowing it to bounce as he jockeyed for position with MacDonald. When it did so he flipped it infield away from MacDonald, at which point Murdo MacLeod and Tom McAdam converged.

Cooper lobbed the ball first time away from both and towards goal. As the ball dropped again onto his left foot, with Alan Sneddon haring across to cover, Cooper stretched his left leg to calmly cushion a volley over Sneddon’s head. That put him clear on Latchford, and after chesting the ball down he tucked it precisely into the net.

In just seven touches — chest, flick, flick, flick, flick, chest, finish — Cooper beat four players and the goalkeeper. It’s hard enough doing that when the ball is rolling perfectly along the floor, never mind when it’s in the air.

“It was a goal born of utter self-belief and complete cheek,” said the great Celtic defender Danny McGrain, who was one of the few on the pitch not to be left behind as Cooper scored.

“The moment seems to last forever. You could be ultra-critical and say that if you beat that many defenders in their penalty area they are the ones who are ultimately at fault. But it was as if they were transfixed as the ball was lobbed over one head after another in a surreal sequence of events. I kept thinking to myself, ‘He’ll get him’ or ‘He’ll surely get him this time’ or ‘We must get it out of the box this time.’ It never happened.”

Celtic pulled a late goal back but Rangers were emphatic 3–1 winners.

“We were so much on top that we could have netted six and that score will still have flattered Celtic,” said Cooper. “Obviously I was pleased with the goal I scored, too, because you don’t score goals like that very often. More’s the pity!”

Later, the former Scotland manager Andy Roxburgh produced a video of Cooper’s highlights with a soundtrack of It’s A Kind of Magic by Queen.

“Football is not about robots or boring tactics,” he said. “It’s about excitement, emotion and individual flair and imagination as shown by Davie Cooper.”

The goal demonstrated all those qualities. He was, as the former Hearts striker John Robertson put it, “one of the original tanner ba’ players”, and on this day he turned Hampden Park into the school playground. For a man who once said he supported only two teams — “Rangers, and whoever is playing Celtic” — this goal was the ultimate.

When someone has such rare talent as Cooper, and especially when they die so young, it is very difficult not to romanticise their career. And it would be wrong to say Cooper’s was one happy story. He had some lost years at Rangers in the early 1980s, when he was often left out by John Greig, and the only time he was a Scotland regular was during a brief spell in 1984–85.

Unusually for a player of his type, Cooper’s best years were in his thirties. He was superb for Rangers under Graeme Souness, something that Walter Smith attributes to being alongside better players; then, when he went to Motherwell at 33 because he wanted regular first-team football, he had such a profound influence in a midfield role that there is a stand named in his honour at Fir Park.

“It wasn’t until he went to Motherwell that I realised he wasn’t a winger,” said his former Rangers team-mate Gordon Smith. “Just because he was skilful and couldn’t tackle, he was put out on the wing. But in any other European country, he would have been a midfield playmaker — as he was at Motherwell — and I think he would have been an even greater player for Rangers there.”

Gullit wishes that Cooper had tried his luck in Europe. “He had incredible skill and a command of the ball,” he said. “There was something about his play that made him stand out. When I saw him play I was flabbergasted. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Who is this guy?’ and I fell completely in love with his play.

“It surprised me a lot he didn’t become a big international name. It’s incredible that a player with his skills did not make it to the international top flight. I don’t know if it was because he stayed in Scotland but he had the talent to be one of the greats. He was a unique player, not comparable to any other. No, Davie Cooper was one of a kind.”

Gullit still talks about Cooper now, often bringing him into a conversation without prompting. If you asked him what cars they used in The Italian Job, he’d probably say “Davie Coopers.”

On the face of it, Cooper did not have much going for him as a player. He was short and slight, an obvious target at a time when GBH was a yellow-card offence at worst. He had no real pace and no right foot. He could be inconsistent.

But he had a left foot that was Harvard educated, sleight of hip that allowed him to beat defenders without touching the ball, a full range of passes and crosses — and, as he showed in the Drybrough Cup, a football IQ in the high 160s.

“He was the quickest thinker I’ve ever seen,” said Tommy McLean, who played with Cooper at Rangers and managed him at Motherwell.

Although Cooper had some of his best years at Motherwell, he will always be associated with Rangers. Cooper was a fan on the pitch, whose simple comment — “I played for the club I loved” — has become his epitaph.

At his funeral in 1995, Walter Smith delivered a eulogy.

“God gave Davie Cooper a talent,” he said. “He would not be disappointed with how it was used.”

Especially not on one magical day at Hampden in 1979.

Click here to view that incredible goal.

Share

“Here you go… no, no — the beer’s free. Oh, and have you heard the football scores? Rangers won the league.”

If I had known then that the Scottish Bartender of the Year award was a thing, I would have campaigned for it to go to Sonny Priest, owner of Valhalla Brewery, in 2005 for simultaneously supplying me with free pints and the news about Helicopter Sunday. Beat that, hipster mixologists.

Like many Rangers fans, I’ve pondered that day frequently over the years. And every time I reflect on those crazy events my first thought is for Jim Wallace, later Lord Wallace of Tankerness, whose untimely death on January 29 has deeply saddened all who knew him.

Many excellent obituaries will be written about Jim, by people far more eminent than me. But I alone can tell you the tale of how Jim found out and reacted to that legendary title win.

Back then, Jim was the Scottish Government’s Deputy First Minister. I was his private secretary. In Yes, Minister terms I was Bernard Woolley to his Jim Hacker. Whenever government ministers go somewhere there is invariably a Bernard in tow to carry the bags (literally) and make sure the minister knows where he’s going, what he’s doing, etc. It’s an important but far from glamorous role.

Jim and I shared a love of Rangers. It’s not essential for a minister and private secretary to support the same team (handy, given I was also once private secretary to Celtic interim chairman Brian Wilson in his Westminster days), but it does help.

The happiest I ever saw Jim was on Sunday May 22, 2005, when I broke the news to him about events at Fir Park and Easter Road. On that day we were visiting the island of Unst, the northernmost inhabited part of the United Kingdom. Getting there was a long slog involving a plane to Sumburgh and then two car ferry trips until we finally reached our destination. You feel perplexed that you’ve spent half a day travelling and yet you’ve not even left Scotland.

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.

Jim had been invited to represent the Scottish Government at the launch of the Promoting Unst Renewable Energy (PURE) project. This involved making a speech and then formally switching on a wind turbine. Ironically the wind that day was too strong for the turbine to operate safely, but nonetheless we managed to set up a decent photo with Jim posing in front of the ‘on’ switch with his hand poised portentously.

After the formalities, we retreated to an adjacent refreshment tent. Before devolution, Jim had been MP for Orkney and Shetland constituency for a long time and so was well-known and much loved in Unst. As we entered the tent, I invited him to mingle and offered to find us both a drink.

Jim and I had been listening to the football on the car radio as we travelled from Sumburgh. On arrival in Unst, the Rangers and Celtic matches had reached half-time, with Rangers drawing and Celtic leading by one goal. Jim said: “Ah well, that’s it. No coming back from this.” I concurred. We turned our phones off, exited the car and gave football no further thought.

This brings me to the Bartender of the Year. Sonny had supplied a generous amount of beer that day and was on hand to pour the pints himself. He handed me a drink and, presumably able to recognise a Bluenose when he saw one, casually mentioned that Rangers had won the title.

I scuttled off to find Jim muttering, “Excuse me everyone, sorry DFM; something urgent has arisen” and took him into a corner to break the news.

He smiled but then doubt crept in.

“Wait — it could be a wind-up. Is it a wind-up?”

He nodded in the direction of two men in the corner.

“Go and ask them the scores.”

These random blokes were able to confirm that somehow Celtic had blown it against Motherwell and the title had gone to Govan. Jim was watching anxiously and it was great to be able to give him a thumbs up and a smile. We had earlier vowed to have “just the one” beer but that went out the window (or tent flap, technically) and the early flight back to Edinburgh the next morning was no fun.

Jim was a man of honour, compassion, decency and good humour. I had huge respect for him and enjoyed spending time with him. Not many bosses you can say that about. I had been a tad grumpy that morning because I’d be travelling and working instead of plonking myself in front of Sky Sports, but my Helicopter Sunday experience turned out to be far better and more memorable than could ever have been the case in a pub or on the sofa. And I will always treasure the memory of such a special, unique day in the company of a truly great man.

Rest in peace Jim, and thank you.

Share

The first-ever chief executive of the Scottish Professional League — precursor of the SPFL — Roger Mitchell’s LinkedIn page now refers to him as a ‘change agent’.

A corporate consultant with interests in music, technology and sport, Mitchell also hosts and runs the sports business podcast Are You Not Entertained?

Writing recently on the social media X account of the award-winning podcast, he addressed the revolving door propelling modern football managers into a stadium and back out before they’ve had the chance to sew their initials on their training kit.

“The volatility in European football is simply not sustainable,” said Mitchell. “United, Chelsea, Spurs, City, Liverpool, Palace, Forest, West Ham, Wolves have all had their managers leave or be totally shredded in five months. When is someone going to say, ‘Stop’?”

A chartered accountant from Glasgow, Mitchell now runs the Albachiara consultancy from Como in Italy. During a conversation by direct message, he expanded on his theme. Identifying short-termism as the scourge of the modern manager, he fears that most are now regarded as here today, gone tomorrow commodities.

“The difference in money for certain performance milestones is now too big,” says the SPL’s CEO from 1998 until 2002. “Get relegated, don’t get into the Champions League. Any early signs of missing out, create total panic. And those monies are existential, not jam on top.

“Then you have American and financial owners with no experience of team-building and patience. They don’t feel the game. They panic and listen to the wrong advisers. They’re babes in the wood.”

He suspects that fans in the boardroom pose a further threat to the current-day coach. While supporters’ groups seek fan representation at the upper levels of their club, the plus points might be cancelled out by the negatives. Calm and reason might be supplanted by emotion and knee-jerk reaction. When directors spend their days camped on supporter message boards there’s a danger that they’ll follow the sheep rather than lead them.

“Fans with instant meme culture have created a culture of hero to zero, day by day,” adds Mitchell. “Fan media lives on hate-watching. Rage. Sack the manager. That’s the new vibe and owners feel this.”

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

One executive from a sizeable Scottish club identifies the boredom of fans as a growing threat to the job security of managers.

The days of the television repair man have come and gone. When TVs malfunction these days, they’re cast into the nearest recycling centre and a new flatscreen model is purchased from Currys. Mobile phones are upgraded on an annual basis. In a world where everything is disposable and replaceable there seems to be no reason why a football manager should be any different. The head coach has much the same shelf life as a family hatchback from the local branch of Arnold Clark. Steady, reliable runners might be given three to four years before supporters grow restless and agitate for something shiny and new on the driveway.

Sacked after eight years at Pittodrie, Derek McInnes was a successful Aberdeen manager, one of just two since 1995 to win a major trophy. A victim of the modern desire for change for change’s sake, his record exceeded anything achieved by the five Dons managers brought in since. His only mistake was to hang around a little too long.

“My kids have a hard time watching anything for 30 seconds much less five minutes or an hour,” acknowledges St Johnstone owner Adam Webb.

“They are really challenged to stick with something, whereas I grew up in a time when we read books for hours or watched two movies in a row. There is a general change in society whereby things need to change often and quickly.

“But for the quality and wellbeing of a football club, for the success and history of the club, I hope it will dawn on clubs that it’s not the right practice in football.”

The reasons for owners pulling the trigger vary from club to club. It might be team selections, a dismal style of play or a failure to win big games. It might stem from a fundamental difference in outlook between manager and board.

As Russell Martin discovered, it might even be membership of the Green Party or a vegan diet. Or the appearance of a white tactics board in the hands of a Celtic manager wearing green training shoes. Sooner or later, even the skilled operators induce boredom and irritation in their own supporters.

Mitchell identifies the wealth of young footballers as a further threat to the shelf life of the progressive manager. While some — like Wilfried Nancy at Celtic — unsettle players by virtue of being the wrong men making the wrong changes in the wrong culture at the wrong time, player-power can strike anywhere at any point. At the elite level the modern player is wealthy enough to regard authority with withering contempt.

“Today’s players and their agents are not controllable,” adds Mitchell. “See Mbappe and Alonso. And they know it.

“They get managers sacked and a coach has no real control over a dressing room. The era of the big man-manager is dying, (Carlo) Ancelotti is maybe the last one. Pep Guardiola was another but he’s dying. Mourinho is gone. It’s a combination of all these things.”

John McGlynn will never fret over pampered millionaires in the Falkirk dressing room. One of the gnarled survivors of the Scottish game, the 64-year-old is the son of a miner from Wallyford, the village on the outskirts of Edinburgh which gave rise to Rangers treble-winning boss Jock Wallace and Scottish Cup-winning Hearts legend Jim Jefferies.

Over two spells at Ibrox, Wallace managed Rangers for nine years in total. Jefferies led Hearts for six and a half years over two tenures at Tynecastle. By the standards of the modern game, McGlynn’s three and a half years at the helm of Falkirk should land him a long-service medal.

“People often say to me, ‘I don’t know how you do that job’,” he admits. “You talk about Jimmy Thelin losing his job and you never want that. Wilfried Nancy went from Celtic shortly after and Russell Martin has gone from Rangers as well.

“It’s hard at these clubs. There are huge clubs where you are hardly allowed to lose one game never mind a few games. Or lose a cup final to St Mirren.

“And, of course, you’re wide open when you’re not losing games. Everything seems wrong.

‘With Russell Martin it was the way he dressed. With Nancy it was his tactics board. When the criticism and scrutiny start, there is no stone left unturned and that’s the reality of management in this day and age. It isn’t easy.

“But what people forget is that, ultimately, managers are flawed human beings. We are not robots. We’re just the same as everybody else and, alright, in some places they might get paid very well. And some people seem to think that means that you have to take all the abuse going.

“But the other side to it is that we know what we are getting into when we go into this business. If you want to have longevity, you need to accept the rough with the smooth.”

Managers might also need to accept that they’re not as important to a club’s success as people seem to think.

In Soccernomics, the bestselling book written by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski the authors use data to argue that the number of coaches who actually make a difference at a football club is vanishingly low. Some, they claim, add so little value that they could be replaced by a secretary, the chairman or the club mascot. Their importance, they believe, is vastly overstated. Most really are disposable.

More influential in the success or failure of a club, they believe, is the budget available for players. Former Dundee United, Southampton and Plymouth manager Paul Sturrock went some way towards talking himself out of a job when he said: “Money talks and money decides where you finish up in the leagues.”

“The bottom line is this,” wrote Liverpool legend and broadcast pundit Jamie Carragher in his autobiography. “If you assemble a squad of players with talent and the right attitude and character, you’ll win more football matches than you lose, no matter how inventive your training sessions, what system you play or what team-talks you give.”

Former QPR chairman Tony Fernandes acknowledged that “managers do play a big part,” before bursting the bubble. “Ultimately, if you have rubbish players, there’s nothing a manager can do.”

The managerial blame game is a form of scapegoating. Football directors wash their hands and shove the responsibility for their club’s poor performance in another direction. Billionaire owners blithely overlook their own role in the model and structure they put in place, and the poor recruitment over a period of years. If Kuper and Szymanski are right, the relentless, brutal sack race is one the manager never wins.

Not, that is, until the compensation cheque lands in his bank account.

Share

Leave a comment

Relegation from the SPFL Premiership forced St Johnstone’s American owner Adam Webb to take stock and assess.

Simo Valakari had been manager for seven months, taking charge of 35 games. The Finn had expressed the hope that, together, he and the club could do something special.

When the Perth side finished bottom of last season’s top flight, five points adrift of 11th place Ross County, special wasn’t the word which came to mind. Under Valakari, Saints had won 11 games and drawn four in all competitions, a win rate of 31.4%. Losing 20 of their 35 fixtures, they had conceded 55 goals and scored 36.

Despite results, Webb had forged a relationship with his manager off the pitch. So much so that, come the end of the season, the Atlanta-based attorney flew his manager out to the United States to plot the path ahead. After three days — and one or two 3am finishes — they agreed to regroup and go again in the Scottish Championship. Saints currently sit in top spot, relishing their televised face-off with second-placed Partick Thistle at McDiarmid Park tomorrow night.

“I do believe — and I think everyone senses — that we have a problem,” says Webb. “There is too much of a readiness to fire the current coach and to think it will solve everything when the truth is that it rarely does.

“I think people should consider all these factors, including cost, disruption and the question of loyalty to the people you appointed. What does it say about your organisation if you are throwing people in and out so readily?”

One of Scotland’s wealthiest men, Roy McGregor adopts a different approach to managerial relations at Ross County.

The Highlanders have made 12 managerial appointments since 2010. While Don Cowie survived relegation after a play-off defeat to Livingston, the reprieve was short. He was replaced by Tony Docherty in August.

Docherty had previously lost his job at Dundee despite keeping the Dark Blues in the Premiership at the expense of County and St Johnstone. He lasted four months in Dingwall before a 6-0 defeat to Raith Rovers prompted his removal and the installation of Stuart Kettlewell, a coach fired by Kilmarnock after six months, 21 days and 23 games in charge.

Trigger-happy football clubs are not unique to Scotland. In April 2025, a CIES Football Observatory report analysed 65 leagues and found that, on average, 65.6% of coaches had been in their roles for less than a year.

Ranked 49^th on the list of volatile footballing environments, the SPFL Premiership paled in comparison with Costa Rica’s Primera Division and Liga MX in Mexico — where 100% of the coaches lasted less than a year. Half of the managers in the top tier of the SPFL suffered the same fate while a quarter lasted one to two years. A mere 16.7% had been in post for three years or more, the average tenure of a coach in the Premiership working out at 487 days.

While the return of Livingston’s David Martindale and Falkirk’s John McGlynn raised the average slightly, the line dipped when the nation’s top clubs began throwing P45s around faster than Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis.

Russell Martin lasted 123 days at Rangers after a calamitous reign. Celtic watched events unfold across the city but failed to heed the warnings and stood by Wilfried Nancy for 33 days. Hired as part of a three-year project, Aberdeen’s first Scottish Cup in 35 years failed to prevent Jimmy Thelin’s dismissal in half that timeframe. Factor in Kettlewell’s departure from Kilmarnock and a third of the teams in Scotland’s top division have already changed their manager this season.

While results offer the most common explanation for managerial sackings, results considered satisfactory in an 18-team league might be hazardous in a 12-team competition like Scotland. Fortunes, like perceptions, can change quickly.

Valakari had been manager of St Johnstone for less than three months when Dundee made the 22-mile journey to Perth last January and won 3-1. Defeat made it two points from eight games for a Saints team which had failed to win a game since November. After the final whistle, 30 members of the club’s ultras group gathered outside the main door of McDiarmid Park to register their protest. Undergoing treatment for head and neck cancer at the time, Webb was unmoved.

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

“Our biggest priority is pleasing our supporters and keeping them on board,” he tells Nutmeg FC. “But you just have to know that short-term thinking is not good for our club.

“You can’t blow with the wind. We have to spend the time developing our identity and ethos, and sometimes you have to lose a little bit before you can build up.”

A former investor in Cambridge United, Webb arrived in Scotland with a limited knowledge of the Scottish game. A crash course on the nuts and bolts of an idiosyncratic league was delivered by a man who had been there, seen it, done it and worn the t-shirt.

“I sit down often with Geoff Brown, the former owner of St Johnstone who was around our club for nearly 40 years. And he has told me on at least two occasions that the most important relationship at any football club is between the chairman and the head coach or manager.

“He gave numerous examples of that and it sunk in with me. And I am very glad that Simo and I are both willing to spend the time building a personal relationship, a friendship and a connection not just related to the business of St Johnstone. When I am over in Scotland, I have dinner with Simo once a week and I have met his wife and children and their girlfriends. In the summer, he stayed with us here in Atlanta for three days.

“Simo said we were drinking until 3am but I don’t remember the exact time. That’s how bad it was….”

Hibernian are another club who have reaped the reward for holding their nerve. Bottom of the Premiership after one win in 12 games last season, chairman Ian Gordon was invited to Las Vegas for clear-the-air talks with former investor Bill Foley and his Black Knight Football Club lieutenants Ryan Caswell and Tim Bezbatchenko after complaints that their input into key decisions was being ignored. The future of manager David Gray hung by the slenderest of threads after a defeat to St Mirren.

“I remember thinking, ‘This has to calm’,” says Easter Road sporting director Malky Mackay of that period.

“My role was to make the place a stable ship and ensure that every message coming out of here is normal. What people expect. We had to become the club that we should be.

“There was a perception around the club where that wasn’t necessarily the case.”

In hindsight, a 96^th-minute equaliser from Rocky Bushiri in a 3-3 draw with Aberdeen in November 2024 proved to be a sliding-doors moment. After defeats to St Mirren and Dundee, when everything felt dysfunctional and chaotic, Hibernian rallied. They lost just one of their next 14 games and Gray became a contender for manager of the season.

“People outside were seeing what was happening on the pitch,” explains MacKay. “I was seeing what was actually happened behind the scenes.

“We had a pretty imbalanced and bloated squad and we lost six games in the last five minutes. There were huge individual errors happening, we had four red cards in 12 games and we missed three penalties.

“No excuses, but everyone could see that anything that could go wrong was going wrong.”

While five clubs started the new Premiership season with a new head coach, Hibernian stuck with what they had. MacKay had been the manager of Watford, Cardiff, Wigan and Ross County. He had walked in David Gray’s shoes many times. He understood that the results of a manager could not be judged in isolation. More often than not they reflect the model and structure and recruitment of the club he represents.

“You are judged every Saturday on 90 minutes and until you stand in those shoes and see the pressure that comes from players, staff, owners, press and the public you don’t know how that feels,” adds Mackay.

“Some of that is taken on these days by a sporting director, which is the way it should be now.

“But the role is still incredibly pressurised where you are being abused on a daily basis by fans and by social media. And that affects people’s lives. Back in the day when I was a young manager, you got two or three years to do your job.

“These days you are lucky to get 12 months. The situation is getting worse.”

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this, or have something to add, please leave a comment. 🗣️ Tomorrow: Part II — We explore the reasons why managers are now a disposable commodity with former league supremo Roger Mitchell and Falkirk boss John McGlynn.

Share

By Chris Marshall

DISPATCH ONE: AGADIR — Cameroon 1–0 Gabon

The bus leaves Agadir for the match venue on the city’s outskirts just 50 minutes before kick-off. A delay in departure is explained simply as, “This is the way.” We know what’s about to come.

There is a thrill to seeing new floodlights emerge for the first time. The ruby-red beacons on each corner of the Stade Adrar’s brutalist structure are no different, although the adrenaline spike soon flatlines as, with the bus unable to toot, rev and bruise its way towards its designated space the handful of people on board are dumped at a roundabout. The driver waves hands in a general direction.

It’s been raining all day so there is relief that the downpours have ceased. Not that it has helped the four Cameroonian brothers struggling at the same spot we disembarked, their banged-up Honda well and truly stuck in the mud. Green shirts now splattered red-brown.

The walk apparently takes 35 minutes. We have 20 to make it in time for kick-off. Perspiration soon replaces precipitation as jackets and jumpers are balled into hands.

Despite the rush, the chaos, the complete lack of structure to any part of this matchday, it’s hard not to get sucked in. The energy simmers, but never feels dangerous, even as the surge past redundant turnstiles carries you in. There is Gabonese song and Cameroonian colour, but the red and green of Morocco is never far away. Free entry for locals swells the throng.

The game is over almost as soon as we arrive. A single goal enough in a contest that rarely bursts into quality. Gabon simply cannot cross a ball. Half-time and the Laughing Cow encourages you to dance; people do. It’s fun. Something to do inside a stadium footprint lacking the gentrification big football has made you accustomed to.

Full-time. Back into the darkness. Tired, we find the bus back to the beach, by luck more than anything else. Despite Morocco’s relentless noise, the sound of organisational communication is absent.

The first of several trip decompressions begins. As opening impressions go, AFCON has certainly made one. A chaotic, intoxicating and sometimes infuriating evening is winding down, but it feels there is still much more to come. Despite it all, I’m ready for the next rush.

This article is free, but most of our content is paid. Don’t miss out… get a Nutmeg season ticket. Sign up and get 12 months of access PLUS a year’s subscription to the beautiful, 200-page print quarterly — delivered straight to your door.

DISPATCH TWO: THE CLIMB — Egypt 1–0 South Africa

Like lemmings they climb. It’s Boxing Day and the spectacle of these scurrying ascents are more entertaining than any rummage through the sales.

Daylight provides a new perspective on a venue destined to host the World Cup in 2030. We bustle along cavernous new roads flanked by plastic-wrapped buildings ready to serve, rows of saplings yet to take root and rubble yet to be smoothed. It’s a project incomplete.

The bus leaves earlier this time but somehow there is still a rush. Again, entry for locals is free post kick-off but that doesn’t stop the scramble up the stadium’s perimeter. Get caught and back down you go.

The difference in attendance from kick-off to half-time is captivating and I easily follow the stadium’s communal evolution from our spot in the nosebleeds.

On the pitch, the football King Mo’s Egypt and Bafana Bafana serve up is attritional and a bit tetchy, although the former does dink the only goal home from the spot. There’s a red card — not sure why, it’s hard to follow the action at this range — and the following rammy is entertaining enough.

As the winter sun beats down, the youths scale ever higher. Dangling legs and pride-filled silhouettes atop the stadium structure are backdropped by the Atlas Mountains. The pursuit of the perfect view is never-ending.

There’s food this time; a boy sells lollipops for pennies from a Perspex jar liberated from your Granny’s favourite sweet shop and there’s sandwiches too, ten dirhams for a roll filled with sardines, olives and rice. I enjoy it as we watch the second half, my forehead slowly reddening.

The mood is light as we spill back onto the slow road to the city. We see the sandwich seller, empty floral tray under his arm, and a beautiful dusk adds to the desert tones.

I spot a flag we’d seen before. A quick eSIM activation tells me it represents the Berber people, the same people we’d spent Christmas Day with amongst Saharan dunes on the Atlantic coast.

Morocco play later and as the hubbub starts to calm it’s hard not to think that their participation is the reason for our latest transport delay. Eventually our exit arrives, and so the search for a screen to watch the hosts begins.

DISPATCH THREE: MARRAKESH — Cote d’Ivoire 1–1 Cameroon

The noise of Marrakesh is relentless. A ten-minute walk through the city’s medina an overstimulation that modern Glasgow life does not prepare you for.

Don’t look down. Don’t switch off from the world or put the ear buds in. One false move and any one of car, bike, cart, tuk-tuk or donkey will come crashing into you. A tiring state of high alert, but boy does it make you feel alive.

Ahead of our final game, a cool 11km outside the city, we undertook that most culturally important task of having a pint in the (not-so-Irish) Irish pub. It would prove a decision well made as first a Scotland shirt and then a group of groundhoppers appear with spare seats on their bus to the game to share. One transport crisis averted.

While the matches in Agadir had charm there was a feeling that we hadn’t really seen AFCON at its finest, but Marrakesh changed that.

The night prior we had watched Nigeria face Tunisia in a cafe where the working men of the city catch up. A little coffee cup replaced the pint glass in the corner of the screen. We enjoyed the game with an espresso and the familiar oohs and aahs football brings as the other patrons insisted our place was front and centre.

At the Grande Stade the experiences I had hoped for continue. A festival of noise and colour. The stands bubbling with west African rhythm, Zoom calls to family back home in Abidjan and Yaoundé to make collective experiences feel whole.

The Dance Cam, present at every game, must have been spinning such was the party atmosphere in a stadium that felt built for football. Cote d’Ivoire score and my new friends beside us go wild. Cameroon reply and the opposite stand begins to scream.

A ding-dong battle between two of the continent’s most storied names played with an energy that carried you along. I sang. I danced. I felt like that white guy dancing meme. It was class.

The game finished level but I felt a winner. This was the AFCON people romanticise, a relentless noise that brightened the soul, and although there was yet another long wait for buses as Moroccan infrastructure tried to kill our buzz there was no doubt that on this night, there was magic in the air.

Allez, allez, allez.

EPILOGUE: A MOROCCAN CHRISTMAS

I went to Morocco partly for the adventure, but also because I’d lost track of what I wanted to be. The wires of connection tangled and frayed as I started to live life where I often felt nothing, a forced spark quickly fading.

There are no prompts to how you feel. No algorithm to manipulate, no metric against which emotion can be measured. To be human is to be aware of the unexpected whilst being completely unprepared when those moments arrive.

It doesn’t matter whether it is a gut punch that throws you to the floor or a moment that has you soaring with teary-eyed euphoria. You can’t trick emotion. You can manage it, hide it, even fake it, but our greatest responsibility is the ability to feel, and to make other people feel.

Football makes people feel. It builds community and cultivates belonging, creates shared memories and encourages new adventure. It acts as a gateway to worlds unfamiliar and often surprises you when you least expect.

Without football I wouldn’t have gone to Morocco this Christmas and across a few chaotic, intoxicating, occasionally stressful, but often soothing days, I managed to start to rewire some connections.

In a world seemingly looking for the quickest way to skip to an ending that might not be what you hoped, it’s important not to forget that often the journey is the best part.

Find Chris’ contributions to online human-interest magazine Medium and his photographic essays on Instagram.

Share

Tynecastle Park has a particular sound when those crammed into it hold their collective breath amid a moment of high drama. It’s not quite silence. More like a shared intake of air, a collective pause as over 20,000 lives briefly align.

On Saturday, January 17, I stood inside that glorious Edinburgh footballing cathedral sharing that precise experience with two of my three sons, Alexander (16) and Fraser (13), as Hearts and Falkirk faced each other in a tense Scottish Cup tie that was clinched by a penalty shoot-out (the 8pm kickoff meant eight-year-old James was too young to attend).

When Bairns striker Ben Parkinson successfully dispatched the decisive kick high down the centre, my boys leapt into the air, eyes wide with glee and disbelief as back pages across the land were hastily rewritten.

Poignantly, at the same venue 65 years earlier, my father Brian Marjoribanks Snr had set in motion events that would eventually make front-page news and altered the course of our family’s destiny.

In September 1961, aged just 19, Dad scored on his debut for Hibs in an Edinburgh derby. He would become (he always said) only the third player ever to cross the capital divide when he later signed for Hearts.

However, he surprised the football world in 1964 by announcing he was quitting the game to pursue a career in his first love: drama.

When the papers covering the story hit the newsstands, BBC Radio’s Today programme invited Dad on and asked him to recite Shakespeare. The slot had not been billed as an audition, but that afternoon he received a phone call asking if he fancied a starring role in Dr Finlay’s Casebook, the top TV drama of the time with each episode watched by an audience of 12 million.

Then, after a spell starring alongside Jimmy Logan at the Glasgow Metropole, Dad accepted his most famous role as a television and radio sports presenter with BBC Scotland.

He became a household name on the small screen over 18 years with the Beeb before taking on a high-powered role with broadcasting regulator the ITC (now Ofcom), then serving in his retirement as an international juror at the Prix Italia Television Festival in both Sicily and Venice.

But it was his goal at Tynecastle in 1961 that proved the catalyst for his remarkable career and there’s no question he influenced my own choice of work as a national newspaper sportswriter.

This article is free, but most of our content is paid. Don’t miss out… get a Nutmeg season ticket. Sign up and get 12 months of access PLUS a year’s subscription to the beautiful, 200-page print quarterly — delivered straight to your door.

With my family’s special history with Tynecastle, allied to its tight pitch and incredible atmosphere, it’s no surprise that the Gorgie ground was my favourite sporting venue in Scotland while writing about the beautiful game. Fittingly, it was the stadium I last reported from (Hearts 3 Dundee 2; the Jam Tarts were down 2-0 at half-time) before I was made redundant out of the blue the following morning.

Yet when time was called on my 20 years as a national sportswriter in January 2024 the timing could not have been better. Falkirk were finally getting good again after a long spell in the footballing wilderness. With the benefit of the extra time I now had on my hands as I waited to start my teaching postgraduate at the University of Glasgow, Dad and I returned to watching the Bairns together just as we had during our golden years under Jim Jefferies in the 1990s as we marvelled at Simon Stainrod’s sorcery with a football.

During this time, Dad began to revisit tales he had first told me as a child. As a teenage Queen’s Park player, he had been given a complimentary ticket to the 1960 European Cup final between Real Madrid and Eintracht Frankfurt, and he had always stated that he had instead chosen to take a girl on a date. Now he told me the real story. He did not have the money to pay for the trip to Glasgow and he regretted not having been at Hampden Park to witness Madrid beating Frankfurt 7-3 in one of the greatest European finals of all time.

His own father, John Marjoribanks, had died when Dad was just 13 and he grew up without the privileges his extraordinary life has afforded me and had to make his way in the world without a father of his own.

Each time we drove past Quarry Park in Brightons, Falkirk, Dad would remind me he once scored nine goals in a single match there. Now he told me the part he always omitted: when he scored his ninth goal, he ripped open his right boot. Without the money for a new pair, he feared his promising career may be over before it had really begun.

One of the pictures of Dad I love the most is where he is being marked in a game by Celtic’s 1967 European Cup-winning captain Billy McNeill. Smiling mischievously, Dad reminded me that he had let me believe he had scored in that match until I was 16 years old, when he admitted it was actually a teammate who had found the net.

I will always cherish those months and matches with Dad but I would have asked even more questions had I known what lay just around the corner. In August 2024, I received a phone call telling me Dad had suddenly and unexpectedly suffered a stroke at his villa in Menorca. My brother Graham and sisters Katie and Jenny and I were on the next flight to Majorca to join our Mum Kathleen at Dad’s bedside in the Son Espases Hospital in Palma where two days later, on the morning of August 9 2024, he passed away.

The grief remains raw but fond memories of a life lived to the fullest help soothe the pain. Dad had an incredibly rich, varied and successful career on the football field, in the theatre and on television. But the roles he cherished most in his life were devoted husband, adoring father and doting grandfather.

So I made a promise to myself that I would take his grandchildren to Tynecastle for a real-life history lesson, to the place where our family story was shaped because of Dad’s talent and hard work, traits that ensured he made the most of every opportunity that came his way; the perfect lesson for any father to pass down to his child.

So there we were: Alexander, Fraser, my wife Jennifer and I, walking down Gorgie Road last weekend on our footballing pilgrimage to see an impressive Falkirk team taking on a Hearts side proudly on top of the Scottish Premiership.

As the boys hugged, danced and sang in the Roseburn Stand at the game’s thrilling spot-kick denouement, it suddenly felt bittersweet because Dad was not there to share the moment. But then a thought struck me. Falkirk had won and my sons were as captivated as I had been when Dad first took me to Brockville to see Falkirk win promotion to the Premier Division in 1986. I realised I was standing right in the middle of the past and the present.

Dad had once strode out onto that Tynecastle pitch unsure where his future would lead. I now stood in the same stadium, still figuring out 17 months later how to live without my biggest supporter, my biggest critic, my biggest inspiration, my hero. My extraordinary Dad.

I’m still coming to terms with the fact that the final curtain has come down on his remarkable story that took flight that day at Tynecastle Park in 1961. Yet as I walked out into Edinburgh’s chilly January air, I smiled as I looked by my side to my boys who are ready to begin our family’s next act.

Next month, Alexander and Fraser will tread the boards at Grangemouth Town Hall, performing with Falkirk’s gifted Big Bad Wolf Theatre Company. The boys inherit their Granpa’s passion for drama first, football second, as well as his talent, work ethic, his unshakeable self-belief and his courage to try and live a life less ordinary.

Just like Dad striding out onto the Tynecastle turf all those years ago, their scripts are as yet unwritten. With their incredible Grandpa as their inspiration, all the world is their stage.

Share