A love letter to Scottish football
Words Daniel Gray
I only live in Scotland because of Philip Stamp.
It is possible that you don’t remember him. Stamp was a Middlesbrough midfielder in the 1990s, a local lad in a team of Juninho and Fabrizio Ravanelli, Emerson and Gianluca Festa. If that makes him sound like a street pigeon in an aviary of exotic parrots, it shouldn’t; when the Berwick Hills boy played he was there on merit, not merely as a butler to the stars.
I loved him. How could you not be infatuated by a midfielder who looked as if that very morning he had been kicking an empty baked bean can down some cobbled back alley, and was now nutmegging Julian Dicks or bounding between Manchester City centre-halves? Here was a comic book hero in a world of glossy magazines.
And then Middlesbrough sold him to Heart of Midlothian. Maroon Edinburgh took to Stampy immediately. Scoring an extra time derby winner at Hibernian’s Easter Road and then being sent off for celebrating wildly endeared him further. In the autumn of 2003, a Hearts-supporting friend I’d met through university suggested that I travel up to see Tynecastle’s Teesside idol. So it was that I ventured from north-east England to Partick Thistle’s Firhill ground, in search of Stampy on a Glasgow away day.
We drank well that afternoon, and well into the night. Sometime after midnight on the slippery quagmire floor of Edinburgh’s Citrus Club, I danced with a woman in a polka dot dress. I probably asked her – shouting in her ear over some indie staple – whether she’d heard of Phil Stamp. Two decades later, we’re still together. Stampy is our ginger cupid. Somehow, we resisted the temptation to give our daughter the middle name ‘Phil’.
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Moving to a country that you never planned to move to is a discombobulating experience. This was no long-held dream of heading north to live among bewitching scenery like those some English people have, nor an aching to return to ancestral homelands. I felt immediately estranged. On a wet day, walking down narrow grey-bricked tenement streets seemed like standing inside a soggy toilet roll tube. Sausages were square and people called bins “buckets” and said “How?” when they meant “Why?”
I resolved that there was only one way to combat this sense of displacement and try to assimilate better into Scotland’s rich cultural heritage: lower division football. In Dumbarton and Stenhousemuir, Alloa and Montrose, I would get to know this country better, feel more at home and find out exactly which meat was in a Scotch Pie. On two out of three counts, I succeeded.
Twice a month, I travelled homewards to watch Middlesbrough. On spare Saturdays, though, Scotland’s railway network distributed me across the land on an almost endless series of school trip-like days out, only with more windowless pubs than featured on most of our school trips. I reached parts of this nation that people I knew in Edinburgh seldom had. “Dingwall?!” they would exclaim, incredulous, “Is that even in the same time zone as us?” or “Airdrie?! Do they even have Greggs there yet?”
Thinking back now I feel fond – and even jealous – of those afternoons. Everything was fresh, different; towns and teams I had only previously encountered when listening to the classified results on BBC Five Live had become real. Names had floated from radio speakers and transformed into railway stations and high streets, club shop Portakabins and dishevelled terraces. Walking away from the waning teatime floodlights on some arctic February afternoon in Dumfries or Kirkcaldy, I began to experience the fleeting but vital sensation of fitting in. Inside a football ground and walking the streets surrounding it, you are all, for a little while, one country of your very own – the land of matchday.
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Highlights of those journeys stay with me: Encountering the homespun, characterful fixtures board at Somerset Park, Ayr United’s alluring home, and then the man next to me hurling such insults at the linesman as “Ye’ Stevie Wonder prick!”; the unique dwelling that is Cowdenbeath’s Central Park, with its scattered debris of farming equipment by the main stand entrance and giant tyres behind the dug-outs; Cliftonhill, corrugated temple of Albion Rovers where I am pretty sure a particularly dismal 0-0 with Annan Athletic gave me trench foot; gorgeous Cappielow, Morton’s Subbuteo stadium made real, and mistakenly submerging a small boy’s face in ketchup at the catering hatch; Arbroath, North Sea lashing over the wall and errant shots landing on the Pleasureland roof; or Palmerston, Queen of the South’s regal home with its paddock and elegant floodlights, and its furry elephant mascot waving – mortifyingly – in my direction.
As the years lapsed I escaped too into non-league, experiencing the Wild West frontier football of the Junior game. There in old mining villages they thwacked great lumps from one another before laughing the Saturday night away in fine social clubs with teak walls and strict drinks tray policies. I roamed north, encountering the oystercatchers of Strathspey Thistle pecking up the centre circle, and the father at Nairn County commentating for his blind son. The south brought the magnificence of Gala Fairydean Rovers’ Brutalism and the gentle pleasures of hapless Hawick Royal Albert.
Fairydean. Royal Albert. Ah the names here! Those Roses and Bluebells, Swifts and Stars, Shipyards and Mechanics. And then the nicknames too – Bairns and Binos, Loons and Lichties, Spiders and Staggies… This was a language of love. Other new words helped grow my infatuation with the Scottish football lexicon – “Shy” for a throw-in, “Briefs” for tickets, “Internationalist” instead of “International” and managers “Getting their jotters”, their team having been “pumped” once too often. Understanding these terms, recalling these nicknames and that Stranraer played at Stair Park or Annan at Galabank, gave the childhood thrill of learning a secret code.
On weekdays now I can still feel plagued by a sense of displacement. Yet on those sacred Saturdays I am rooted, I belong, a pilgrim welcomed. And as for Stampy that afternoon in Glasgow? When we got to the ground, it turned out that he wasn’t even in the squad.
