Loyal supporters won’t allow their game to die
Read GARY KEOWN
ARMAGEDDON. It only gets a mention in the Bible once. In the great story of Scottish football, though, the word rears its head almost as often as ‘and’ and ‘but’. Current SPFL chief executive Neil Doncaster famously brought it up in 2010 when foretelling of financial wipe-out as he lobbied clubs to agree to cutting the top flight to 10 teams. They didn’t. And, oddly enough, everything carried on as normal.
Doncaster’s one-time SFA counterpart Stewart Regan was next to use the term when warning of a ‘long, slow, lingering death for the game’ and all sorts of social unrest — yes, he did use that term — as attempts were made to gerrymander a way into the old First Division for Rangers after they’d gone belly-up in 2012.
Now, it’s Aberdeen chairman Dave Cormack hurling around the old ‘A-bomb’ in relation to the heavy toll likely to be reaped by the coronavirus crisis.
Yet, in a week of hyperbolic language from within the national sport over exactly where it is heading, there was another word used by one particular official that shone through amid the dark forebodings: Resilience.
‘You ask: “Are Scottish clubs going to go bust?”,’ said Hibernian chief executive Leeann Dempster. ‘I think Scottish clubs, because they are so loved, have a way of being resilient, but this is going to test even the strongest clubs.’
Dempster is no stranger to the theatrical soundbite herself. In the same interview, she spoke of ‘a meteor’ preparing to hit and it is difficult to disagree.
But the thing is this. Scottish football will not die. Its clubs will find ways to survive and reinvent themselves.
There will be no Armageddon, no matter how bad things get and no matter the government’s view on whether matches should be played behind closed doors or not. Because the public simply will not allow it.
Amid the rows, pettiness and tribalism that generally shape the narrative around football in this country, the one thing forever underpinning it is that powerful, overwhelming, lesser-discussed love that Dempster refers to.
Love of the game itself. Love of the club. Love of the live matchday experience and the culture and communality of being among like-minded souls.
Despite everything, all that continues to run deep in Scotland. And history shows that our football supporters, in particular, are almost universally unwilling to let the things they love slip away.
Dempster had a taste of it on her introduction to football at Motherwell, still recovering from coming out of administration — yet slowly on the way to becoming the first fan-owned club in the top tier.
Hearts will be next thanks to the phenomenal, sustained fundraising of their followers.
Of the many bumps in the road at Rangers since 2012, one thing that cannot be faulted is the unyielding loyalty of their fanbase from the Third Division upwards.
In total, 11 senior sides in Scotland have found themselves in administration over the past 20 years. Some more than once. They are all still here in one form or another. Some through the most arduous of routes.
Consider Gretna. The original club was run into the ground by the late Brooks Mileson in a nightmare dressed up as a fairytale by an army of sycophants and cheerleaders. They didn’t pick up the pieces, though. Joe Punter did.
A supporters’ trust formed a new club in Gretna 2008, spent a year or so playing in Annan and are now back at Raydale Park in the Lowland League.
Gretna 1.0 got Airdrieonians’ league place in 2002 after they went bust. Airdrie United was then formed, taking over an ailing Clydebank and relocating back to Lanarkshire. In 2015, the Airdrieonians name was reinstated.
As for the Bankies, their own fan-driven rise from oblivion has been a real tale to revel in. After the Airdrie buy-out, they reclaimed the club crest and got their new team into the bottom rung of the Juniors in 2003.
Within eight years, they were in the West Premier. They made it to the Junior Cup final in 2009, losing 2-1 to Auchinleck Talbot, and are now looking at working their way up the pyramid system.
These may all be new clubs. A minority of supporters may have found that hard to handle, but, for almost all of those that do go along, this is little more than a technicality.
Even now, the words of Clydebank’s former match secretary Stevie Latimer when discussing how 37 busloads would be going to Rugby Park for that historic meeting with Talbot still resonate.
‘Even when we were in the Premier League, I never remember us taking more than eight buses to any away game,’ he remarked. Us, he said.
That’s how he referred to the Clydebank of yesterday and the Clydebank of 2009.
The same emotions, the same sounds and songs, the same people with the same sense of union. The proof that, for all football changes, its real history will lie in the stories of its supporters no matter the prevailing winds.
Football is about to change again in Scotland. Hard times are coming. For most fans, though, that is hardly something new. Most fans have watched their clubs go through some sort of hardship over the past couple of decades.
Perhaps budget cuts will force them into watching a reduced level of football for the foreseeable future, but it won’t stop them going.
How do we know that? Well, compare squad lists from the SPL 20 years ago and the Premiership now and you’ll see a gulf in quality. Yet, attendances still stand up, per capita, to anywhere else in Europe.
The bigger clubs may have to focus more intently on rearing their own players. And who knows? The global effect of Covid-19 could even open the way for Celtic and Rangers — and possibly others — to escape to the kind of breakaway European League that former Scotland captain Darren Fletcher predicted last month.
However it all breaks down, our clubs will make it through this and find their level. One way or another.
The death cult inside the game that speaks of Armageddon sees things in terms of pounds, shillings and pence. That’s their job.
In reality, though, football isn’t about that. It is about the experience, the memories, the days out.
Sure, it would be great to watch world-class players every week, but, in Scotland at least, it hasn’t been about that for a long time anyway.
It’s about the pints, the pie and bovril, the patter, the carry-on, the sense of belonging.
Like Dempster says, it’s about love. And that can — and will — withstand anything.
In every element of our lives.