Kenneth Roy My plan for saving a great Scottish…

22.03.12
No. 530

SR anthology

Sit back, decide within five seconds that there’s nothing worth watching on the box, and relax instead with the Scottish Review, the new paperback anthology of pieces from Scotland’s online current affairs magazine.

     Among the 42 selected gems:
     Eileen Reid

     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
     Plus many other SR favourites, all neatly wrapped up in an elegant 144-page bedtime read, with photographs by Islay McLeod and an introduction by editor Kenneth Roy.
     £7.50 plus £2.50 p & p.
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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)

Richard Wilson is a freelance sports writer whose work appears regularly in the Herald and Sunday Herald. He is arguably one Scotland’s best sports journalists, with a style that appears to be influenced by the elder McIlvanney and one can’t help thinking these two things are probably related.

     ‘Inside the Divide’, his new book about Rangers and Celtic, was published on the cusp of what will surely come to be seen as two distinctive periods in the history of the rivalry that consumes a disproportionate amount of time and energy here in Scotland. The first period encompassed the so-called ‘shame game’, parcel bombs and breathless legislation. It was accompanied by much tutting – a sound that is associated with the Old Firm as much as naughty songs – and soul-searching about the tribal animosities that still hitch a ride on a football match.
     The second period, marked by Rangers’ entry into administration, has the potential to change the dynamics of the rivalry in unpredictable ways. It is Wilson’s misfortune that his book appeared before one half of the Old Firm started to look potentially new and decidedly infirm, thus opening up a new chapter in rivalry that is now well past its centenary.
     The book is not a straightforward narrative history of the rivalry and he concedes in his acknowledgements: ‘some unsurpassable books have already been written on this subject’. One is left to conclude that he is probably referring to the work of the academic Bill Murray who did much to enhance serious writing on the topic. Murray’s work is clearly an influence but Wilson chooses wisely in not attempting to follow in his footsteps. Rather, he anchors the book in one particular game which took place at Celtic Park on 3 January 2010. Individual chapters focus on the role of a different group involved in choreographing the vortex that is an Old Firm game and, when it is considered opportune, he takes the reader on historical detours.
     There are chapters focusing on the players, the match officials, the managers, the fans,and the police among others. These have been assiduously constructed through the use of interviews and newspaper sources.      Furthermore, each chapter is either preceded by or interspersed with ‘dramatic representations, informed by the people I have spoken to for the book and during more than 10 years of covering the Old Firm’. In essence, these are imaginative attempts to get into the heads of the people involved, but some work better than others. The ones to be found at intervals during individual chapters become distracting and their value and contribution to the book might be questioned.

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.

Alasdair McKillop is a member of the Rangers Supporters Trust writing in an independent capacity