The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
On each other’s team in 2021
It was clear from the strength and volume of the tributes to Jim Mclean this week that this was a loss felt far beyond the world of football.
That’s not to diminish his achievements on the sports field of course.
In a 22-year career at the helm of Dundee United, the club’s longest-serving and most successful manager steered his sides to more glories than could have been dreamed of before his arrival at Tannadice.
A pair of Scottish League Cup wins and the Scottish League title were remarkable.
A European Cup semifinal and a Uefa Cup final, toppling giants like Barcelona and Borussia Monchengladbach along the way, are staggering to look back upon.
This was not the destiny of clubs of modest means from small cities on the east coast of Scotland back then, any more than it is today.
And it may explain why sports reporters of a certain vintage wear the memory of his press conference rollickings (as frequent as they were fiery by all accounts) as a badge of honour, prefer ring to simply wall ow in the wonder of it all.
Perhaps that’s also why it wasn’ t just United supporters making pilgrimages to Tannadice to pay homage after his death was announced on Boxing Day.
Jim Mclean’s Saturday afternoon successes might have driven one half of Dens Road to despair, but the grand scale of his achievements helped put Dundee on the map.
The City of Discovery tag had yet to be coined when he began to work his magic in a city of industrial decline.
You’d have been laughed out of town in the 1980s for suggesting Dundee would have a V&A museum and a place on every hipster’s bucket list, not to mention booming computer gaming, medical research and creative sectors.
But many of those forty and fifty-some things leading the revival of today’s confident, outwardlooking city were shown at a young age that anything is possible if you are prepared to dream big and put in the work to make it happen.
That’s the kind of belief that elevates your reputation from successful manager to the subject of stage plays and statues, and it’s a useful message to tuck away as we tiptoe warily into a future where all bets are off.
A Good Deal for 2021 It’s just another turn of the calendar when all’s said and done and Covid rules meant the most muted countdown to the bells in living memory but seldom will a year have been so gleefully consigned to the dustbin of history as 2020.
Which is not to say that anyone is expecting 2021 to be a walkover.
The vaccine rollout holds hope for a return to some semblance of normality but the bill for last year ’ s lockdowns and restrictions is coming due and the scorched economy looks as likely to dominate the headlines over the next 12 months as the virus did in 2020.
Do you know what though?
There are worse places to be starting out from than here.
Pandemic fatigue and the battle to punt Brexit over the line in the dying minutes of December almost overshadowed the news that the Tay Cities Deal is finally signed, sealed and ready to deliver, but it remains a very big deal indeed.
It means Tayside and Fife are entering 2021 with £ 300 million in Scottish and UK government funding on the table.
It brings with it the potential to use it to unlock another £400 min external investment and create 6,000 jobs through 26 projects from the Eden
Campus research centre at Guardbridge to a drone port at Montrose.
A £ 2.5m expansion of Pitlochry Festival Theatre was approved by Perth and Kinross Council planners this week.
The returning Stone of Destiny – another late December windfall – will be housed in a revamped Perth City Hall and Dundee can look forward to adding centres of excellence in forensic science and cyber security to its transformed landscape.
There are green shoots beyond the Tay Cities programme too.
A revamp of the famous Royal and Ancient club house at the Old Course in St Andrews was approved this week.
The Tayside Children’s Hospital at Ninewells is in line for a £ 2m facelift following the successful conclusion of the Oor Wullie Bucket Trail-boosted ARCHIE appeal.
And plans for a massive expansion at P er th’ s Inveralmond industrial estate, with the potential to bring more than 250 jobs, will be considered by councillors later this month.
2020 was a stinker. It derailed plans and upturned priorities.
It robbed families of loved ones and livelihoods and it will take more than the turning of a calendar to put things right for a lot of people in our communities.
But we are boldly stepping into 2021 with a once-in-several-generations advantage that other areas would beg for, so until the coming year kicks the stuffing out of me, I’ m choosing to be optimistic.
Like the man showed us: think big, work hard and there’s no limits to what your team can achieve.