Sandstone Press

Nothing is final, anything is possible (2)

Posted by RLD on 5th June 2010

The domestic football season traditionally ends with the Scottish Cup Final at Hampden. On the morning before Ross County played Dundee United Sandstone had two authors signing their new books at Waterstones, Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow. Moira Forsyth’s novel Tell Me Where You Are had just been released and Simon Varwell’s travel book, Up The Creek Without A Mullet, had been going for only a few months. Both authors went to the game afterwards since both live in Highland Scotland have a sense not only of being represented by Ross County, but also that the wider area which both they and Sandstone are part of was being represented.

Neither regularly attends games and Moira had only recently discovered that football is different when watched live, with the whole pitch and the technical areas in view, as part of a crowd. Television coverage can be gripping but the active presence in the Stadium: noise, atmosphere, passion, take the experience to a different level. It is also different in the respect of association, even identification with the players who cease to like the actors in a soap opera, although following a club does have soap opera elements. For example, rising to applaud a player who has contributed well when he is substituted and leaves the pitch is participatory. It is part of belonging to each other, even though the players are mercenaries.

This is the nature of the professional game. The clubs represent group identities. Players sign to ply their trade in that context for a wage. Across the world some of the contexts are very negative indeed. The means of transfer through time, hard as it might be to take, are three of the foundation stones of community, tradition, loyalty and family. I write ‘hard to take’ because tradition, loyalty and family are just as much the foundations of prejudice and enemies of civilisation. The clubs can be carriers of very dangerous viruses.

Professional players, management staff, and Board members cannot but be aware of this, and mostly tread that fine line about as diplomatically as possible. That is not to suggest a lack of commitment. When the final whistle blew that Saturday, and Dundee United had won the Cup, County’s captain - I had better nail my colours to the mast here, in case it is possible that anyone has missed them - our captain Richard Brittan, broke his heart to the point of being beyond consolation. Remembering the times I have wept in dressing rooms when there was much less at stake my heart went out to him.

United’s experienced and canny manager, Peter Houston, and his staff had done their homework on our side and played their bigger, stronger players wisely against us. The suspicion about Hibernian and Celtic, the Premier sides who had already already fallen to First Division County, was that the complacency of reputation and standing had entered their collective nervous systems before the game. United played the game for what it was, the Scottish Cup Final, and so they won.

Their fans had us outnumbered by more than two to one and put on as good a show as their players, although no one put on as good a show as the 20,000 County fans at their first Scottish Cup Final. We filed out of Hampden feeling not so much the beaten side, more like an athlete who has achieved a personal best and wonders what more is possible.

There was no sense of ending, although change is inevitable in such a venture as a football club. Within a couple of weeks our athletic central defender Alex Keddie, who had been a vital player throughout the season, had signed for another First Division club, and our Chairman, Dave Siegel, had stepped down citing time pressures. These are the realities of professional sport and, at first sight, they suggest a weakening of the Club, but not necessarily so.

The same realities inform us that Richard Brittan may also leave. In time he certainly will, they all will. Richard’s tears are not rendered invalid by this reality. He gave his loyalty along with his skills when he signed the contract. It won’t have been a sub clause, but it was there, just as real, in the culture of representational sport, in the social DNA, and he will transfer them to his next employer.

I guess I am the only one whose mind turned to Mark Hateley. Mark’s Wikipedia entry tells us that he ended his playing career with ‘a couple of appearances’ for Ross County. This is true. I was, decidedly, not following football at the time, but friends who witnessed the once great player making his Big Mistake said he played ‘like any other forty year old man’. There is a time for the leaving of things.

Mark crossed one loyalty barrier in 1990, when he joined a Scottish club, Glasgow Rangers. With Rangers he remained until near the end of 1995, returning briefly in 1997 in what turned out to be a tactical master stroke by Rangers manager Walter Smith. In 1990 John Major became British prime minister in succession to Margaret Thatcher after she had been deposed by her cabinet colleagues. In 1997 the Conservative Party under Major lost a British General election to the Labour Party as it was led by Tony Blair. Among much else this broke Scotland’s constitutional log jam with the released pressure leading us into devolution, the Scottish Parliament and continuing constitutional change, but that is an aside.

Mark Hateley’s dates at Rangers coincide with the Major Years and the philosophies that were established then and which the succeeding Labour government adopted and developed. In an interview Mark noted that the essence of economic policy at that time amounted to payment by result. The end of ‘jobs for life’ was in sight, in large private sector companies and in the public sector, in local councils and water authorities. The implications for pension schemes, transience within the work force, and the stability of the family would take some time to unfold for most.

In this environment of change Mark made his point. Football led the way. To a centre forward like him it was nothing new. He went out on a Saturday and either scored goals or failed to score goals. If he was successful at a high level the world was his oyster, life in beautiful locations was his, in beautiful homes, so were sports cars, motor bikes. Fail to score and he was out of the team, much poorer and quickly forgotten. Success was his only pension plan.

All of this has developed for us all and will continue to do so, especially as Britain grows poorer as seems likely. Football led the way as it always had done.

The record of results in what for many decades was the annual international fixture between Scotland and England, the oldest organised sporting rivalry in the world, shows a great record for Scotland for half of that history. Later England took over and, eventually, wins for Scotland became rare, reflecting not only the increasing economic gulf that occurred between the two countries in that period but also the transference of population, of talent, it sprung.

Staying in international football, it is often forgotten that when England won the World Cup in 1966 Scotland was right behind them. People celebrated in the Gorbals pubs. I know because I was in one, after watching the game in black and white on a screen roughly the size of a large postage stamp, in my cousin’s flat in Oxford Street. What parts jingoistic arrogance and jealous resentment played in the partial breakdown in Human relations that followed is a moot point, but the way was prepared for political divergence.

In 1961 Glasgow Rangers unsuccessfully contested the European Cup Winners Cup Final with Fiorentina. This was the first major British success in Europe, ushering in a new era of Europeanism that was conservative and hindered by memories of ‘The War’ but it was a beginning. In 1966 Glasgow Celtic were the first British club to win the European Cup. A Scottish club, they succeeded with a side made up entirely of Scottish players. Two decades later, Liverpool, an English football club, would win the same competition with a team containing no English players at all. The easy transfer of labour, firstly throughout the European Community, later across the world, had raised standards in football and made a victory like Celtic’s not only impossible but shown such an aspiration to be regressive.

In England and the larger European economies, the battle for racial acceptance and equality has been fought in football since the 1960s until, now, an English football side without black players is almost inconceivable. A major football side in Europe that is not thoroughly cosmopolitan is equally inconceivable and so it goes in society. Change comes first in professional sport where there is no room for sentiment, only winning qualities, and little enough for compassion. Yes, it’s hard, uncompromising, but it is incredibly sensitive to change and so lives among us as a bellwether, a Sybil if we have the nous to interpret. In its aspirations, its methods, the things it leaves behind, it speaks of the future as it will roll out for us all. It is a blind old soothsayer in the guise of athletic young men in search of glory and wealth.