More than a game

NOVEMBER 1989: THE NATIONAL SPORT

THE nation is about to be converted. Once again, for 90 minutes on Wednesday, Scotland will be independent, bidding for a place among the full-time countries in next year's World Cup Finals.

For some, football's central role in Scottish life is an affront. In this version, the game is the 'opiate of the people', soaking up vast quantities of energy and aspiration which would be better applied elsewhere. This, however, is to misunderstand the sport's true nature. It isn't an escape; Scots bring their deepest concerns with them to the match.

Many years ago, soccer historian Bob Crampsey described Hampden Park as the nearest thing Scotland has to a national assembly. Those who thought that whimsical should have been at the 1988 Scottish Cup Final. All round the ground, red cards were brandished at the unwelcome visiting dignitary, Margaret Thatcher.

It was far from an isolated occurrence. Scottish football always reflects its times. In 1909 Celtic and Rangers fans at the Scottish Cup Final replay joined forces to riot at Hampden when they discovered there would he no extra time. Inevitably they were denounced as ruffians but did they not also embody the militancy that was springing up in the wake of a depression?

In 1906 Glasgow returned its first Independent Labour Party member to parliament. The 10 years which followed that Cup Final included the Rent Strike of 1915 and the rudiments of revolution in 1919. That Hampden riot was influenced by more than mere hooliganism.

It isn't lust a question of rebellious Glaswegians. No matter how the fortunes of the SNP rise and fall at the polls, nationalism has a strong hold on the terracing. Those 'Remember Bannockburn' banners may be preposterous but the message is potent too. Football isn't a mute, it's a microphone.

The football memorabilia to be auctioned at Christie's in Glasgow this week speaks of far more than the simple facts engraved upon them. The past is talkative. Lend an ear and you'll be there all day. The inscription on the inner case of lot 19, a pocket watch, measures not only the height of fame but also the extent of a later fall. The time piece was presented to Manchester City's Scottish manager Tom Maley in commemoration of his side's FA Cup victory in 1904. Two years later, he was banned by the football authorities for making illegal payments to his players.

There is, though, little poignancy among the medals and mementoes displayed; this is the stuff of congratulations. A watch-fob, shaped like a football, opens to reveal a record of Arthur Geake's service to Queen's Park in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The hordes cheering and stamping (one trusts) as they watch Scotland play Norway on Wednesday will he regrettably close to his principal achievement.

The present Hampden Park, the third, is all too obviously the same stadium as the one whose construction Geake masterminded between 1900 and 1903. Its tatty, crumbling fabric should not blind us to the majesty it possessed at the time of its opening. This was the greatest football stadium in the world, licensed to hold 125,000 in 1910.

The Nottingham-born grain merchant Geake was referred, to as 'Uncle Arthur', but he looks a severe figure in the surviving photograph, the waterfall of his heavy moustache pouring down to a whiskery jaw. The aura of propriety, to he fair, was a necessity. Queen's Park's resources were slight when they began building the ground and they needed to maintain public confidence.

The award of watches and their paraphernalia to men like Maley and Geake is typical of the age. Time itself was an honour; the accumulation of years was to be welcomed. The team groups of the period show even young players mimicking respectable middle-age. They have the remote expressions of men engaged in feats of mental arithmetic.

Football, they seem to say, is only a phase they are going through. Life holds nothing more fair than the prospect of a position of office in the local Chamber of Commerce. It would all he incomprehensible to the modern-day star like Ally McCoist, willing to delight a youthful radio audience with his reading of the Rangers Rap. Yet, ironically, it is the current performers who are the true men of substance. If the watch was the ideal symbol for those Edwardians, the car phone must be its equivalent for the modern-day player.

It could be that the real fun was had by those men of the 1870s who stare grimly out of their photographs. The pleasure of inventing the SFA and the Scottish Cup fell to them in a meeting at Dewar's Temperance Hotel in Glasgow on 13 March, 1873. The copy which survives of the first constitution and rules has a "let's get this straight" tone about it. A handy Definition of Terms includes the following: "Hacking is kicking an adversary intentionally."

A little time was required for football to determine its own worth. The 5/- subscriptions of the member clubs in 1873 went towards the purchase of the Scottish Cup for £56-l2s-11d. Its makers, Messrs George Edward & Sons, included in the price a modest set of medals. Christie's have the one which belongs to the victorious Queen's Park captain J.J. Thomson. It is made of silver and shaped in a Maltese Cross. By the time of the second final in 1875, the winners' medals were of a more precious metal; football had put itself on the gold standard.

Receiving one of those must he a moment of intensely personal achievement hut the glow of satisfaction is more widely diffused down the decades. Medals are a family affair. The memorabilia of some sports, such as golf, move from dealer to dealer for tens of thousands of pounds. Football isn't like that.

The 1930 FA Cup winners' medal actually comes from the East Coast. It was won by Alex James, star of the 'Wembley Wizards' side which beat England 5-1 in 1928, while he was with Arsenal. The Final with Huddersfield was, quite literally, overshadowed. Just before half-time. the German Graf Zeppelin breached flying regulations and passed over the pitch at a mere 2,000 feet, dipping its nose to salute the watching king.

Arsenal won 2-0 and James sent his medal to Raith Rovers director Robert Morrison who had nurtured his talent during the early days at Kirkcaldy. "If there had been no Bob Morrison," an accompanying note said, "there would have been no Alex James."

Some items leave their owners hands in more prosaic circumstances. One wonders what the strip worn by a Celtic player in their victory over Dundee United in the 100th Cup final will fetch. Has its value appreciated or dwindled in the light of subsequent career moves by its original owner, Maurice Johnston? He sold the garment shortly after the match.

The clubs and football bodies must covet some pieces of the auction treasure trove but this one clearly belongs elsewhere. Shouldn't Glasgow's People's Palace be raiding its budgets for one special purchase? This jersey was social history in the making.

Price, although comparatively modest, ensures that such keepsakes are not the province of the average football fan in any case. He must make do with the mass-marketed memento. It has always been so. The club shops themselves are new but their merchandise is not. Plates, mugs, tea pots, handkerchiefs, badges and the like have been with us for most of this century at least. The true entrepreneur could even attempt to harness two popular passions in one product. The Britannia Pottery sold figures of Wee Macgreegor, urchin hero of J.J. Bell's stories in the l900s, kitted out in a Rangers' strip.

Medals mark the conclusion of a footballer's activities but souvenirs are just the start of the fan's life. The market in football programmes has grown to such an extent that it almost possesses an existence independent of the game itself. Programmes for inconsequential matches are sought after for abstruse reasons.

Scotland v Northern Ireland, 1928, is desirable only because it was, unusually, played at Firhill.
As Alan Cunningham, owner of Edinburgh's Football Crazy shop explains, each collector sets his own targets. "One will he looking for all his club's home games in Europe, another might want one programme for each senior side in Britain each season. We estimate that around 2,500 teams have issued programmes in this country at one time or another, so the permutations are endless."

While football memorabilia has not reached the price level of stamps and other collectibles, the desire to complete a programme collection will drive people to more painful expenditure. A Scottish Cup final from the 1920s might set you back £200. At least individual programmes don't taunt you with your failure to buy all their brothers and sisters. Not like football cards. Everyone can remember the quest for the two or three names that would make up a complete set. It always ended in penury or a bad mood; never in success.

They were very popular between the wars, but in Alan Cunningham's words: "Most of the series featured a guy from Celtic, a guy from Rangers, and 48 Englishmen you'd never heard of." The cards were given away with cigarettes, later with a whole host of goods including bubblegum. Nowadays they just come on their own - stickers with no accompanying sticky stuff. They give kids plenty to think about but nothing at all to chew over.

This development takes us full circle, to the scraps which were produced from the turn of the century onwards and sold in bags. These would be gummed into albums. J Baines of Bradford whipped business along by offering prizes to the people who returned the most empty bags within a week of their issue.

Christie's have around 1,000 examples of his work, not always concerning football, but he claimed to have produced a total range of 888,888 different designs. That may be an exaggeration but his appealingly gaudy emblems do show signs of having been produced in haste.

Such curios can bring the last century alive but they also tend to point out our remoteness from it. Another of Babes' stickers bears the legend 'Well Dribbled'. It must have been a popular cry of the day but only a brave soul would give voice to it on the terraces now.

The shifts in language work like continental drift, easing us further from the past. No wonder we are fascinated by the bric-à-brac of another age.

Stickers, cards, programmes, jerseys, medals, watches - perhaps we are not drawn to them by the business with a football so much as by the extraordinary stories they tell of other people. A cap awarded to a Scotsman seems hardly worth a glance until you look again and notice he won it for Chile. Robert Cunningham worked for the Donaldson Shipping Line and lived in Valparaiso. After two years residence there, he was eligible for the national side and played for them 27 times in the 1890s.

The sport travels well; not only over oceans but also across wider boundaries of class. The crude rural versions of the game enraptured Sir Walter Scott. It was said that he would rather his son excelled at football than won the highest honours of Europe's foremost university.

The game also breaches the defences of chillier intellects. Indeed, it has been said of the philosopher A J Ayer that a profound scepticism was the inevitable consequence of his deep entanglement with the fortunes of Tottenham Hotspur.

There is a serious point to be made. Football, especially in Scotland, cannot be patronised as the senseless pursuit of a class who know no better. At its heart lies a mystery we can neither solve nor ignore. Whenever the ball is tossed out and a simple set of rules applied, a strangely compulsive spectacle emerges.

Edwin Muir grew up in Orkney, much closer to the values of Scandinavian culture than to the sporting obsession of Scotland's industrial heartland. His poetry has little to do with the superficialities of daily affairs. Yet in the waspishly affectionate biographical notes his wife Willa wrote about him in the mid-l920s, he is described as: "passionately devoted to football, although now too shortsighted to play.. .watches football for hours."

Later in the same piece she refers to his "unusual combination of clear thinking and passionate intuition". Who can doubt that football exercised both faculties?

The game's attraction is such that we find the circumstances of an individual and his era drawn into the confines of a small medal. These aren't inert pieces of bric-à-brac waiting for the auctioneer's hammer; these are signs of life.