900 GAMES AND COUNTING
(and Ian McCall has kept details of EVERY match and team talk in his notebooks)
THE MEMORIES lie at his fingertips, they also sit just beyond his nose. ‘Every game, every team talk,’ says Ian McCall, fishing a notebook from a pile and peering into the past.
‘Just down there,’ he says later, before relating the obligatory Ally McCoist anecdote.
But, first, the notebooks and the football stories they contain and the life story they frame but do not detail.
There is a duality to McCall. He was the undisciplined player who became a conscientious coach. He was the sinner who was saved. He was the bellower who now speaks quietly. He is a man who can talk of life as ‘a blur’ but recalls dates quickly and easily.
Most of them are in the notebooks. They live to his left, within arm’s length of his seat in the Partick Thistle manager’s office. They chronicle a coaching career that has enveloped Clydebank, Greenock Morton, Airdrieonians, Falkirk, Dundee United, Queen of the South, Ayr United and, twice, Partick.
‘I wasn’t the typical identikit guy who was going to be a manager,’ he says. ‘I remember sharing a car with Davie Moyes, Tommy Wilson,
‘Ah, Morton v Airdrie, 20th January 2000. A job I should never have taken’
Firhill thrills: McCall is loving his second spell in charge at Partick Thistle (main), a contrast to his playing days at Rangers (below) in the ’80s
Billy Davies, all future coaches with big clubs. They would be nattering away about football. Focused. I would be lying sleeping in the back.’
He was branded a ‘maverick player’ at clubs that included Falkirk, Dunfermline and Rangers.
‘One of my first games as a manager... and the opposing manager said out loud: “He has no right to be a manager”.’
This was before the start of the century. McCall has now passed 900 games as a manager in senior football and, at 54, targets 1,000. That is for the future. The present is occupied by the task of preparing to face Rangers in the Scottish Cup tomorrow and of insinuating Thistle back into the fight for the Championship title.
The past is inescapable, though. It lies in these notebooks but also in memory. That initial jibe from the opposing manager is not forgotten. Other names spring from the pages.
‘Right, let’s pick a notebook,’ he says, pulling one from the middle of the pile. ‘Ah, Morton v Airdrie, 20th January, 2000. A job I should never have taken.’
He quickly becomes engrossed in the detail of that spell at Cappielow. ‘There’s Robert Earnshaw in the team,’ he says of the Welsh internationalist. ‘We had him on loan. Paul McDonald on the wing. He’s academy director here now.’
He picks another folder. Clydebank, 98-99, is daubed on the front. He invokes the names of Fraser Wishart, Kenny Brannigan and Gary Teale, perhaps an unholy trinity but one that is recognisable to any fitba’ fan of a certain age.
‘I go back to them now and again,’ he says of the notebooks. ‘They have team talks, wee details. They can be useful.’
Another significant part of his past remains undocumented, at least in notebooks. When McCall talks of his ‘hiatus’ from the game he is referencing the years from 2011 to 2015 when he ‘was dealing with a problem’, namely his addiction to gambling and the immediate aftermath of his recovery from it.
‘That period was dominated by just getting myself right and that took at least two years. I was working in the media and I wasn’t really applying for jobs. I don’t think many chairmen…’
The sentence drifts off but the unmistakable feeling is that McCall believed himself a pariah.
‘There were some really heavy hitters vouching for me, saying: “He’s changed his life around”. I had. I had a problem and I fixed it. But getting back in was difficult.’
He found recovery quickly. ‘Within six months, I was all right,’ he says. ‘The best people, those who are close to you, love you, are very proud of you. ‘I have hurt people, though, and some of them can never forgive me but I can’t do anything about that. I’ve tried.’ Another date, but not from a notebook. ‘October 5, 2022. I had a wee do for about 50 people. That was ten years on from giving up gambling.’ There is a theory that trauma can be the bedrock of success. ‘I can buy into that,’ says McCall. ‘I look back and reflect that my problem was my thinking. I hate doing things about Rangers — things that concentrate on my time there because I was basically just a reserve player.’ He played a couple of dozen games in three years from 1987 to 1989. ‘One of my problems there was thinking too much. I tried to analyse everything. I overthought everything. In terms of playing, it was straightforward. But everything outwith was difficult... training, should I be wearing a tie today, tiny little things. It stressed me out. I think I was a bit OCD and I believe that ties into addiction, too. ‘One of the reasons I have no website, no Instagram or Facebook account is that I know if I did I would get addicted to it.’ But before and after recovery, he was strongly bonded, even obsessed, by management. ‘I missed it for four years.’ Then another date. ‘January 5, 2015,’ he says, again without recourse to notes. ‘It had to be Lachlan. He was my saviour.’
THE saviour took on an unlikely form. Lachlan Cameron is a burly American with a propensity to make money and a familial allegiance to Ayr United. As de facto owner of the club then, he appointed McCall after the Scot’s years in the managerial wilderness.
‘Lachlan phoned me and he was on for an hour and a half. At one point he was talking about surfing. But he offered me the job. That changed everything.’
He adds: ‘It was the perfect time for me and I think it was for Ayr, too. It was waiting to be ignited. It was awful when I first went there. Really awful. Not a good dressing room. But the support base is good and vociferous.’
So how did he turn it around, where was the ignition key? ‘Cliche but true: sign good players and win games.’
His second spell in management has been turbulent but he believes he has changed.
What does he know now that he wished he knew in 1998 when he started coaching?
‘The ability to not get too up nor down. I have learned not to panic. In my second spell in management, there was always something happening.
‘First season at Ayr, a game away from going into the bottom league, then next season promoted, then relegated, then win a title, then finish in the Premiership play-offs, then left Ayr to come here and be demoted, then win a title, then Premiership play-offs again.’
His personality has softened, too. ‘I certainly wasn’t calm when I was at Clydebank. I was going off my head all the time. I don’t think some of the things I did in the nineties work now. You can’t do some of the stuff I did earlier. With me it was natural, I could never fake anger.’
He is content at Thistle, though the turbulence at boardroom level gives him a new set of characters to work with after the old guard resigned in the wake of the disposition of the shares bequeathed by lottery winner Colin Weir. He may be quieter in the dugout but he has always fought his corner in budget talks with boards. The next few months may be interesting as the race for the Premiership heads for the finishing line with Thistle having some ground to make up.
‘The future is all about the Jags,’ he says jauntily. ‘It is the greatest wee club in the world.’
More soberly, he talks of the reality at Thistle where the club has only been in the top division in ten of the past 40 years. This may
be a message to fans inside and outside of the boardroom.
But he envisages his future at Firhill. A couple of seasons more as a manager would see him hit the 1,000-match mark but he adds: ‘When I leave the manager’s chair I would do anything else for the club.’
There is no sense of entitlement in this. Again, he knows the reality of football and cites the recent travails of such as Jim Goodwin, recently sacked by Aberdeen. ‘This job has got harder,’ he says.
However, he embraces the softer side of the game. ‘My first match back after four years out was at Brechin City,’ he says. ‘I remember the door of the bus opens and I step out to be greeted by a Brechin City director who said: “Welcome back to Scottish football, Ian.” That was lovely.’
And there is time for a McCoist story. ‘We played them in the League Cup here and it went to extra time,’ he says of a match against Rangers on September 24, 2008. ‘We miss a sitter and Rangers go up the park and (Pedro) Mendes curls one in. And that’s that. We lose 2-1.
‘After the match we are all sitting down there,’ he points towards a sofa. ‘Walter (Smith), Kenny (McDowall), Ally and Gerry (Britton, McCall’s assistant).
‘They know I am gutted, so there is not much conversation.’
McCoist had played in a testimonial match the week before and had scored a hat-trick, aged 45.
‘Ally broke the silence. He asked me: “Hey Cally, did you hear about my hat-trick? And do you think I am the greatest player over 45 in the world?”
‘Walter just looked at me and we all burst out laughing.’
Life and football can both be a tough business. But there are moments that lodge in the memory and do not require a peek into a notebook to recall.