He escaped the
death penalty, but
was robbed of his life
The positive
power of
the death knock
In my favourite place,
we were locked in
by 6.30pm
SR anthology
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My journey of love and loss
Anthony Silkoff
Kicked out of the mosque
Mike MacKenzie
The night I nearly drowned
Bill Jamieson
Grand Grossartia
Katie Grant
The age of disillusion
Gerry Hassan
The trouble with being a Scottish man
George Chalmers
First day in prison
Walter Humes
Tribal nation
Marian Pallister
The people crushers
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Today’s banner
Spring lambs, Ayrshire
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
The rivals:
Old Firm
or infirm?
Alasdair McKillop
‘Inside the Divide: One City, Two Teams, The Old Firm’, by Richard Wilson, (Canongate, Edinburgh)
He criticises those who disdain Old Firm encounters while enjoying it
as a guilty pleasure and he does not let his own profession off the hook
in this regard.
Dramatic intervals aside, what emerges is some appreciation of the scale and organisation inherent in one of these games, but also the costs. Wilson does not shy away from acknowledging the bigotry and occasional violence that gets outsiders – and many insiders – so vexed. Unlike many others, however, he also displays an appreciation of the Old Firm game as a pre-eminent sporting spectacle and as something that bestows a sense of belonging and identity on thousands of people. This is fundamental to an understanding of the rivalry, without which any attempt to explain the ‘Old Firm’ is almost certain to revert to clichés. Wilson, on the other hand, does a reasonably good job of striking a balance between empathy and critical distance.
Throughout the book, Wilson does not simply try to wish away the fact that Old Firm encounters are an expression of the hard, tangled complexities of the past. He criticises those who disdain Old Firm encounters while enjoying it as a guilty pleasure and he does not let his own profession off the hook in this regard. ‘It is gleeful, this revelling in past indiscretions, before new ones are denounced and moralised over’, he argues. He acknowledges that the coverage often tends towards hyperbole and violence and goes on to say: ‘sports writing has often invoked war imagery because it is the confrontational aspect that is so vital to the grip that sport has on people’.
The media are complicit, he contends, in perpetuating the hostility by the way they hype up the games and rehearse past misdemeanours. Serious discussion of the role of the media was sorely lacking during last year’s moralising, so it should be welcomed that one journalist is willing to tackle his own tribe’s complicity rather than pointing an inky finger at the clubs and their supporters.
Wilson does a nice line in sympathetically and succinctly capturing the dynamics of the rivalry: ‘What is expressed during the game is the instinctive need to stand for something, to be worth something, which is shaped by the historical distinctions between the two clubs’. It becomes unacceptable when this manifests itself as violence, whether towards other fans, medical personnel or a referee who has made a contentious decision. Those who subscribe to the view that this behaviour outweighs the right to the adversarial expression of affiliation will probably find most to support their case in the chapter ‘Football, Blood and Bandages’.
One paragraph, which lists the violence that followed a game in August 2000, makes for harrowing reading.
In the final analysis, Wilson has produced a book that challenges partisanship but not necessarily of the straightforward green and blue variety. There is the partisanship of the Old Firm fans as a collective who would deny some of the high costs stemming from the clash of two teams in one of Europe’s forgotten leagues and who would utilise history and identity in unacceptable ways. Then there is the partisanship of the blithely disdainful who condemn without understanding. Wilson is a writer of uncommon ability and he deploys his skills to produce a balanced book that engages critically with the topic in a sophisticated manner so often absent from much media commentary.
