Words never failed them
Two broadcasting legends open up on their careers and the games they love
EVERY November, Britain’s wartime veterans are wheeled out, in dwindling numbers, for the nation to show their appreciation.
Memories of German bombers crossing the Glasgow skyline still vivid, Archie Macpherson can relate to the sense of melancholy.
Commentating on Scottish football never involved the firing of a gun, but there were clearly times when a pistol might have come in handy. There was shouting with Stein, wagging fingers from Waddell, tumbles with Turnbull and furious outbursts from Fergie.
Macpherson was there when three Scottish clubs won European trophies and described the national team’s travails at five World Cup finals between 1974 and 1990. Over four decades, he was a witness to heroic deeds on foreign battlefields. And, at the age of 83, he is one of the last survivors of Scottish football’s greatest days. One of the last men standing.
‘There is no use me gloating over this,’ he tells Sportsmail. ‘But I record it as a matter of historical fact. I am privileged to be part of a dwindling aristocracy who saw the very finest of the Scottish club game.
‘The very best clashes, the very best conflicts, the very best “battles” of the game and the best achievements.
‘I witnessed three European trophies, five European finals. I was at Wembley in 1967. I mean, will it ever happen again?
‘In that sense, it’s wonderful to have seen some of the great players. I mention Jinky and Slim Jim in particular, from both sides of the divide, who demonstrated the sheer individuality that came from the school playground.’
The glory days were already staging a Dunkirk-style retreat by the time he received a BAFTA for his contribution to broadcasting in 2005. In 2017, there was an induction into Scottish football’s Hall of Fame where his picture now hangs alongside the men he interviewed, drank with, and engaged in unarmed combat. Yet, outwith the BAFTA, there are no regimental caps or medals on show. ‘I was terrible,’ he admits. ‘I always regarded the people who kept diaries or took pictures on foreign trips as tourists rather than broadcasters.
‘When people come to me and say: “You must have a photograph of that for being there that night”, I think: “I don’t actually”. I was too immersed in what I was doing. And I regret that.’
What began with a short radio piece in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 became a world odyssey. He covered Celtic in Lisbon, Baxter’s juggling at Wembley, Rangers in Barcelona, watched the crossbars crash down in 1977, had his description of that Archie Gemmill goal spliced into Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting and braved the tumbling rain to watch Aberdeen triumph in Gothenburg.
And what does he have to show for it all? Not much.
‘I had a BBC colleague, Alastair Alexander, who would ask me to bring back little cigarette lighters or matchboxes with the name of a bar on it,’ he says. ‘He knew I liked a drink once in a while. I was bringing them back until I stopped and told him to “p*** off” eventually.
‘What you’re really left with is your body of work in the end.’
These days he does less broadcasting and more writing. Quarantined behind the glass windows of his Lanarkshire home, in a high-risk category for Covid-19, it whiles away the time.
‘The lockdown has been all right,’ he says. ‘We live in a nice area and I tend to think more about how other people are suffering more in Barlanark and Easterhouse or Trongate. We’re okay.’
A former schoolteacher, writing keeps his mind as fit as his body. His rapier-sharp observations of life are unaffected by the passing years. And while the government have forced him to confront the reality of being labelled old and vulnerable, he takes a strange comfort from the bickering and chaos Covid-19 has caused in Scottish football. It’s a world he knows well.
A battle over the destination of the league title has prompted a proxy war between the two old foes at the heart of his new book, More Than a Game: Living with the Old Firm.
‘It has always been about Rangers and Celtic from the day dot,’ he insists. ‘As soon as I entered the media, parttime, then full-time with the BBC, I became aware of the eternal power struggle between these two clubs. It’s not just about a football match. It’s about influence and what they think their influence can be on other clubs. Both of them think that way. No question about it.’ In a league run by clubs for clubs, Celtic’s current status as top dogs was secured when Rangers fell off a financial cliff face in 2012. Macpherson (left) believes those events are at the heart of the current fallout. ‘Well, one club can influence things now by winning everything,’ he says. ‘Celtic are markedly financially stronger than Rangers and that is a huge asset. It doesn’t