Saturday Interview

By Aidan Smith

The blazing sunshine beating down on this expanse of green offers a chink of light to the humble scribe eager to meet a football man face-to-face again after the Covid-enforced crackdown on such pleasures. I was once chased by the parkie here, for trying to skip on to the pitch-and-putt course without paying, but now I’m sat at the required distance on a bench listening to the yarns of Parkie.

Donald Park in Edinburgh’s Inverleith Park places the man roughly halfway between Tynecastle and Easter Road, the two grounds with which he is most associated. Career highs and lows include a fine reputation as a finesser of young talent at Hibernian and, as a player himself, the notoriety of being a member of the very first Hearts team to be relegated from the top flight. Sacked twice as a coach in Leith and once in Gorgie following brushes with Rod Petrie and Vladimir Romanov, he has always managed to bounce back. “I’ve developed a wee technique for that,” he smiles. “When you leave, don’t bang the door too hard behind you!”

Never mind the two-metre rule, the very business of interviews is a strange one for Park. “I normally don’t do press. This is a good face for radio.” Beneath the thicket of hair and a moustache still flourishing at 66, he was a wee Highland terrier initially on the wing and then the midfield. For his tenacity he always turns up in Jambos’ lists of the underrated and unsung. He was unwanted in 1978, went to Partick Thistle, was determined to prove Hearts wrong and helped demote them for a second time. Relegation is topical at Tynie so let’s begin with the first, 43 years ago.

I read out a typical line-up from that season: Jim Cruickshank, Jim Brown, Roy Kay, Graham Shaw, John Gallacher, Dave Clunie, Kenny Aird, Drew Busby, Willie Gibson, Parkie, Bobby Prentice. It doesn’t look too shabby on paper, so what went wrong?

“I don’t remember a defining moment which told us we were doomed. There was no animosity, no unrest in the dressing room or unhappiness with the manager. It was just… a disaster. When we knew we were down there wasn’t any anger, just embarrassment.”

Park fronts up and takes some personal responsibility. “I think I stopped doing the things I could do well. And if a team drops 5 per cent, don’t track back quick enough, for instance, then silly goals get lost. It’s amazing the difference that 5 per cent can make. The effects can be astronomical.

“The fans were grumpy that season but they’d every right to be. I remember one guy giving me pelters from the halfway line most of the game then at the end marching round the terracing all the way to the tunnel – you could do that before segregation – and jabbing his finger at me all the way. You couldn’t accuse him of not tracking back!

“Look at that team: it wasn’t bad. Willie Gibson was phenomenal. Never hit the ball cleanly, always found the corner. And Drew Busby was hard as nails but honest, a gem of a man. Me, I was never great but I had a decent attitude. Our manager John Hagart was a lovely guy though just too nice. The harshest he got was to say: ‘You’re doing great, absolutely fantastic – but you’re no’ playing the day’!”

Park hails from the village of Caol, the son of a British Aluminium worker in nearby Fort William. A pimple of a place before the opening of a paper mill, Caol deserves a Queen’s Award for Industry for the professional footballers it has turned out: “The first was Donnie Gillies who scored a famous goal for Bristol City at Elland Road to knock Leeds out of the FA Cup. Then there was John Mcginlay and Duncan Shearer who became Scotland internationalists and George Campbell who played for Aberdeen. Duncan’s actually my second cousin, a result of all the inbreeding in the Highlands!”

So how come they all managed to avoid shinty? And were that sport’s office bearers weeping at the village gates when they left? “I loved shinty and played it in the summer but loved football more. At the bottom of our road there was a concrete bus shelter a bit like a pill-box and I used to spend hours trying to hit a ball through the hole.” Quite a contrast with the 4G pitches and training domes Park would inhabit as an under-age coach with Scotland, another rewarding stint for our man.

“As a youngster I was always trying to better myself as a player,” he continues. “I made an important decision not to go with drink. Coming from the Highlands that could have blown me off course. I didn’t touch it until I was 22 and then I’d be drunk on two shandies.”

Park arrived at Tynecastle in 1972 having been signed from the old Inverness Caledonian by Bobby Seith. He doesn’t have a bad word to say about any of his bosses, despite suffering the odd bump and bruise along the way. “I’m still shy but was much more so back then and would just sit in the corner of the dressing room, dead quiet.

“My sister Sylvia had a flat off Gorgie Road and I stayed with her. I actually came down to Edinburgh thinking I could combine football with studying maths and chemistry at Heriotwatt University but my chance in the first team came quickly and I had to put the books away. I wondered about becoming a schoolteacher after football but that wouldn’t have worked: I’m far too crabbit!”

Park scored on his debut in a win against Arbroath but a few weeks later would come a scoreline to make him shudder: Hearts 0, Hibs 7. “It haunts me,” he groans. “Folk still say: ‘You played in the seven-nil game, didn’t you?’ It was my first Edinburgh derby but I’m not sure I did. I missed a chance when it was nil-nil – the ball came on to my left foot and I can still see it go by the post – but after that I didn’t get another touch.

“Hibs had a brilliant team back then. Alex Edwards was fantastic and so was Crops [Alex Cropley] and [John] Blackley, all of them really silky, while Shades [Erich Schaedler] would just batter you. Maybe this was the naive teuchter in me but if I didn’t have a game I’d go to Easter Road and watch that team. Paid to get in as well.” It sounds more like the