The downside of taking too much joy from the failure of derby rivals
NO SOONER had the SPFL drawn up its post-split fixture list than a message dropped in on social media.
“The announcement of the post-split fixtures has opened up the nightmare scenario for United fans and the dream one for Dark Blues supporters,” it declared, noting that it is now mathematically possible for Dundee United to be relegated at Dens Park in the second round of matches.
Doubtless it rightly reflected the view of many fellow Dundee supporters, perhaps the majority going by their interaction with United manager Mixu Paatelainen during the last game. However, the gloating, goading tone spoke to a particularly unhealthy aspect of supporting a team by gaining pleasure from the failures of others.
There is no attempt at false piety here. Plenty of friends and relatives who are dyed-in-the-wool tangerines have suffered some teasing over the recent months and will continue to do so.
However, I would have much preferred to see Dundee guarantee themselves safety last weekend with additional money in the bank and an eye on a place in European competition, than remain at risk, however slight, of being dragged into a relegation play-off, regardless of any opportunity to affect United’s fate.
Admittedly there is a sense that some karma may be at play given the fun United supporters have had down the years in recounting that two of their greatest successes, their only Scottish title win and their victory in the only all-Dundee final ever staged, happened on their neighbours’ home ground.
However, there is also the memory that on the night of that League Cup final the city’s pubs were full of supporters of both teams with little or no bother that I can remember. This at a time, as the seventies moved into the eighties, considered the most notorious for crowd trouble in the UK and Europe.
In many ways it was a toss of the coin whether my own preference was for the team my beloved grandad used to take me to watch, or for the one a small group of schoolmates persuaded me to get a ‘sneakie-in’ to see. The latter ultimately prevailed, so it was the Dens Park of Jocky Scott, Gordon Wallace and John Duncan, rather than grandad’s Tannadice that held my affections, for all that Jackie Copeland remained a great favourite.
There was, though, no sense of it having any greater meaning than sporting affiliation, a view that was reinforced unexpectedly and unintentionally the other night during a performance by the Scotland-based Irish comedian Dylan Moran.
Early in his warm-up gig for a major tour (highly recommended incidentally), he observed that he found it puzzling that of all the things Scots could have drawn from Irish culture, citing options that included a Zen-like lack of urgency and a capacity for impenetrable excuse-making, we instead chose sectarianism.
While, then, it might be going too far to dread the return of what some will embrace as the “Old Firm” game and others will emphatically claim is no such thing, many of us have little enthusiasm for that fixture’s renewed domination of the Scottish sporting agenda and all the bile the Glasgow encounters bring up.
It has been said before that many supporters of these two clubs gain more pleasure from the failures of their opponents than their own team’s successes and there is actually powerful mathematical logic for that being the case. After all, their spending power means wins are little more than routine, making defeats the more unusual events, the relative unexpectedness of which adds a specialness that is otherwise absent.
The mind-set in question is, however, also at least partly attributable to associations that are otherwise deeply outmoded. While church-based affiliation was central to life in the world Dylan Moran and I grew up in during the seventies, it is relevant to far fewer people in the more secular, multi-cultural Scotland of the 21st century.
The depth of emotion generated by adding that extra tribalism is, of course, the element that takes it beyond normal sporting rivalry and, for all that both Celtic and Rangers have again sought to issue more positive messages in the build-up to Sunday’s meeting, it would consequently be nice to think that this is one area in which the rest of us can resist taking a lead from them.
Or, to put it another way, I’ll settle for Dundee staying up.
TOMORROW Susan Egelstaff
The gloating, goading tone spoke to a particularly unhealthy aspect of supporting a team by gaining pleasure from the failures of others