BLUE BRAZIL FACING ‘FIGHT FOR FUTURE’
Cowdenbeath fan Ferguson warns of relegation pitfalls
EVEN as a man of faith, there are some questions which will always remain unanswered for Reverend Ron Ferguson. The motivation behind his lifetime of devotion to Cowdenbeath FC is not one of them.
With the Blue Brazil rock bottom of League Two and seeking salvation via the play-offs for a third time in seven years, he will admit to fleeting moments when a less trying calling feels more appealing. These soon pass.
‘People do wonder why we put ourselves through this form of torture,’ said the author of the classic Black Diamonds and the Blue Brazil.
‘You could say that it belongs with the Presbyterian religion. You do learn to ride with the punches and then pop up for more.
‘But what if there is no more? That’s a different scenario. You don’t want to contemplate that one in the middle of the night.’
For lifetime devotees of the club, Cowdenbeath’s present plight is no less precarious because of its familiarity.
Fife’s oldest club finished in 42nd place on the ladder in 2017 and 2018 but had just enough about them to see off East Kilbride and Cove Rangers respectively.
Others in their position — East Stirlingshire, Berwick Rangers and Brechin City — have lately not been so fortunate.
Ferguson’s fear is that more than just senior football will be lost from the town of his birth if Maurice Ross’ side don’t prevail again against Bonnyrigg Rose tomorrow.
‘I suppose you get used to it but you always think: “Oh no, not again”,’ he said. ‘It’s very hard to get out of these leagues if you are relegated.
‘You look at some of the clubs who go down and almost disappear from view. It’s a pretty horrific thought.
‘It’s excruciating. I’m putting my kids through this torture, too.
‘You keep thinking: “How many times can they avoid the bullet?” But they have done that so far. ‘The club means so much to supporters precisely because of the demise of the pits. In some ways, football has kept the name of the town alive. ‘The players just have to raise their game. They are under pressure because if they go down another division, the future of the club could be at stake. That’s the reality.’ The first time the team were in this pickle, Ferguson contemplated asking for divine intervention. Instead, his namesake — who’d been captivated by his wonderful chronicling of coal, Cowdenbeath and football — duly obliged. ‘I persuaded Sir Alex Ferguson to send a message of goodwill to the players before the East Kilbride game,’ he explained. ‘I’d known him from my time as a minister in Glasgow. He’s read Black Diamonds and wrote the foreword to it. ‘I went into the dressing room before the game to read out his text message saying “Come on the Blue Brazil”. The players were buzzing and ready to go. You could see the effect it had on them.’
The impact that the club has had on Ferguson’s (below left) life has been profound. A journalist before he became a minister at the age of 23, he cannot recall a time when he wasn’t tethered to its fortunes.
‘My earliest memory is of going to a game at primary school and hearing the supporters drumming their feet in the wooden stand,’ he said. ‘You would see players going in for tackles. Their jerseys would come up and you’d see the black dust from the mines on their skin.
‘The players were all hardy customers from working down the pit. They were all very strong men.
‘I remember one time Alex Menzies, who was a big centrehalf, a Dunfermline player kicked him and he got injured. He was being taken off on a stretcher but jumped off it and ran back on the pitch and got the ball. Cowdenbeath scored a goal from that. It was absurd. You wouldn’t get away with that these days.
‘It was that quirky stuff that made the club so well known.’
His book, a cult classic of football writing which was first published in 1993, helped spread the gospel. The number of converts has grown steadily. Last year, the Lyceum Theatre and the Pitlochry Festival Theatre staged a play based on it.
‘I remember when Black Diamonds came out, the chairman at the time, Gordon McDougall, told me that guys were coming up from the south of England and Ireland just to stand on the terrace in midweek just to inhale it,’ said Ferguson. ‘There wasn’t even a game on. There was just this fraternity of lower-league fans who travelled up.
‘I suppose the club became a big name in its own right. It was terrific.’
Ferguson’s ministerial postings have taken him from Glasgow to Iona and, as of 1990, Orkney, where he still resides. His spiritual home remains Central Park.
‘I don’t get there nearly as often as I used to,’ said the 82-year-old. ‘It’s just the distance. The Pentland Firth is no mean piece of water and then it’s all the way down.
‘My children go to some games and my son has me set up with Blue Brazil TV. Even when I’ve not been able to go to games, my mind is always at Central Park come 3pm on a Saturday.
‘When I was younger and they were playing away from home, they would read out the scores on the radio. If they said we’d lost, I was always waiting on them correcting it and saying: “Cowdenbeath actually won 4-0”. That was a classic headbanger’s response.’
Moments of triumph have been not so much rare as an endangered species. The team won the old First Division in 1914, 1915 and 1939 but, as the decades passed, the theory grew that it would take another World War for them to win another.
This belief strengthened in the early ’90s when the team somehow managed to go 38 home games without victory.
The seemingly interminable wait was ended in 2006 when the Blue Brazil were triumphant again in the form of the Third Division title.
‘That was my highlight,’ said Ferguson of that year under the
You do learn to ride with the punches and then pop up for more
stewardship of Mixu Paatelainen. ‘We had never seen a helicopter bring a trophy to Cowdenbeath before. There were old miners crying at the sight of it.
‘Gordon Brown was there and handed over the trophy — the first in over 60 years. It was quite an extraordinary thing altogether. It was just amazing seeing the trophy draped with the colours.’
There was a Second Division title to come under Colin Cameron in 2012. Not only did the team play Rangers in the Championship three years later, they earned a 0-0 draw with the Glasgow giants.
Since then, the trajectory has been alarmingly downward with successive demotions preceding those two grim but successful attempts to hang onto their status.
They’ll need to do it all again tomorrow and in the return seven days later. Faith in the side is fragile. Support for it is unwavering.
‘I wouldn’t swap being a Cowdenbeath supporter for the world,’ insisted Ferguson. ‘The thing runs too deep. It’s too much part of your bloodstream.
‘The feeling you get when there are those rare moments of triumph is just astonishing. But when you get that familiar feeling of doom, you think: “Why do I do this?”.
‘In some ways, it’s a good training for life, which also has its ups and downs.’