Fitba Hell

I CUT a pathetic figure on Boxing Day. Stranded in rural Ireland with nary an internet connection nor Radio Scotland reception in reach, I had only one way of keeping up with the Aberdeen score. While others supped hot port in front the Cary Grant matinee, I spent the best part of the afternoon glued to Ceefax, page 321.

There's a minimalist pleasure in watching the changing football scores on teletext. You turn the TV onto mute and settle down with a paper, glancing up now and again to see how things are going. It means you don't to put up with prattling pundits, instead enjoying a purer type of commentary. All you are told is when goals are scored, who scored them, and whether anyone has missed a penalty or been sent off. It's a surprisingly efficient way of conveying the excitement of a game: its twists and turns pop up on screen without warning, lending a sense of chaotic excitement to an afternoon lounging on the settee.

That's unless your team is turning in the latest of a series of embarassingly inept displays. Then, your chosen way of passing the afternoon is thrown into stark and unsympathetic relief, no less arcane an activity than shivering on a remote railway platform for hours in hope of glimpsing rare serial numbers on passing freight trains. On Boxing Day I spent the afternoon learning that Aberdeen were to be thumped 3-1 by Motherwell. The news of each goal hit me like a pixellated gob of disdain.

ONE of the most peculiar words used to deride a Scottish footballer is 'fancy'. It's a word that, going by the definition in the Chambers dictionary, sounds quite alluring: "Capriciously departing from the ordinary, the simple, or the plain." When spat out by a disgruntled season-ticket holder at Pittodrie, however, it takes on a new form.

"Dinna try ony o' that fancy rubbish," is a phrase I've heard intermittently throughout my football-watching days, always directed at one of the more skilful players on the pitch. It betrays a distrust for the the fleet-footed and the nimble; Scottish football supporters have more admiration for for the battlers and the triers. Watch football abroad and you won't hear the same lusty roar of appreciation you get in Scotland for a player who's sprinted 50 yards to make a sliding tackle and put the ball into touch. Tension levels rise among Scottish fans when a player tries to hold onto the ball, to probe, to outwit an opponent. If that same player manages to keep possession, the applause that follows is born as much of relief as appreciation.

Two of the most revered Aberdeen players of the modern era are Neil Simpson and Lee Richardson, names that are often cited on fans' message boards to contrast the feckless displays of today's Dons squad. Richardson is an odd choice of hero. He was only at Pittodrie for 18 months in the early 90s, during which time the team won not a single trophy. Yet his tenacity, hard-tackling and notoriety - Richardson felt his combative style made him a marked man among referees - ensured that, in Kevin Stirling's history of Aberdeen FC, Richardson was in a very short list of players rated by fans as the best of all time.

Compare Hicham Zerouali, easily the most naturally gifted footballer I have witnessed in an Aberdeen shirt: he had to die in a car crash to earn the same level of adulation. Zerouali had astonishing ball control, scored spectacular goals and sparked an audible crackle of excitement when he took to the pitch. But he was also sulky and liable to disappear from games if the mood took him. When he was hauled off at half-time in his final game for Aberdeen, after a dismal performance against Dundee in 2002, few tears were shed. He was talented, yes, but not a team-player; that was the consensus I heard at Dens Park that day. Only at a memorial service two-and-a-half years after he left the club, when he was venerated in a video that replayed his many breathtaking goals on endless loop, was he elevated to more than an interesting footnote in the club's history.

Scots are stubbornly Calvinist in their faith in the work ethic, and the football pitch is no exception. In other countries, the No 10 shirt is a gift bestowed upon a playmaker - a Hagi, a Maradona, a Stojkovic - but it doesn't carry the same significance here. This season Aberdeen handed the No 10 shirt to Darren Mackie, a local boy who runs fast and tries hard, but offers little more. The symbolism is fitting.

ANDY Walsh doesn't go to Old Trafford anymore. He was a Manchester United season-ticket holder for years and recalls the Law, Best and Charlton era with a hushed reverence that borders on the religious. But he doesn't go to Old Trafford now because he got fed up. He became uneasy as the Stretford End's atmosphere was dowsed by all-seater rules and the pursuit of corporate bucks. He was irked by a new and inaccessible training park that symbolised the increasing distance between player and fan. And he decided he'd had enough when an American family decided to offset its debt by taking over a dinky little soccer club across the Atlantic.

Andy now follows the newly FC United of Manchester, a team he formed with other disaffected Manchester United fans last summer, and of which he is general manager. The side plays 10 leagues below his old team and attract crowds of 4,000, dwarfing the gates of their opponents. He was interviewed on Radio 4 yesterday, and expressed no regret that he'd sacrificed the annual pursuit of Premiership and European glory for the muddy toils of the lower leagues. It wasn't about the winning, he explained, it was about the lifelong bond that existed between a fan and a club. The problem was that Andy just didn't recognise the same club he'd started supporting decades before.

On Monday, I didn't watch the Scottish football highlights. The SPL had reverted to predictable type: Rangers and Celtic won, Hearts and Hibs stumbled. The season to that point had the been the most exciting in more than a decade, despite my own team's unremitting mediocrity, but the old patterns had re-emerged and I headed to bed early.

The interview with Andy Walsh made me reassess things. I can turn up at Pittodrie five to three (usually on a Saturday) and get a seat near the half-way line. It's on the expensive side, but if I sacrifice that DVD I was thinking about buying I've just about got the ticket price. Were I a few years younger, I might go down during the week and watch the players train on the open spaces of Seaton Park or Balgownie. I can speculate that Stewart Milne only got involved at Pittodrie because he saw an opportunity for his mass-produced homes, but I won't deny that our chairman grew up just a few miles from Aberdeen and can reasonably claim to have been a lifelong Dons supporter.

The standard and competitiveness of Scottish football have plummeted since my first game in 1980, but in many ways things haven't changed all that much at Aberdeen FC. The Andy Walshes of the north-east of Scotland are still to be found at Pittodrie.

THE kicking of the ball from play whenever an opponent develops the faintest semblance of an injury is one of the great irritants of modern football. Last night Inter Milan's players went apoplectic after one of their number fell to the ground and Rangers had the temerity to continue playing. When the game eventually stopped, TV cameras zoomed in on a sheepish-looking Chris Burke being subjected to an ostentatious display of finger-jabbing by his opponents.

Yet Rangers were right to play on. If an injury requires the game to be stopped, the referee should make that decision. It's a relatively recent custom for opposing players to put the ball out, and what started out as a well-meaning gesture has mutated into a travesty of sportsmanship; instead, it's often a cynical tactic designed to disrupt the flow of a game.

The clearest proof of this I have witnessed came in a bizarre match between Aberdeen and Dundee back in 2000. Dundee were in the midst of Italian manager Ivano Bonetti's honeymoon period, as pundits fixated on the glamour of extravagant signings like Claudio Cannigia - who made his debut at Pittodrie that day - rather than the inevitable downfall that was to follow such profligacy.

They also glossed over the less savoury aspects of the game imported by Bonetti - including the abuse of their opponents' goodwill. In the game in question, a Dundee player went down in apparent agony after about 10 minutes and Aberdeen duly kicked the ball out to allow treatment. The same thing happened about 10 minutes later, and again 10 minutes after that. Each time the break in play ended with a Dundee player bouncing back to his feet, only for a team-mate to plunge to the turf 10 minutes later. By full-time you could set your watch by the regular tumbles.

Dundee won a turgid game 2-0, but the abiding memory was of Aberdeen's young team looking flummoxed as yet another player lay on the pitch. They tapped the ball out each time, frustrated by the obvious time-wasting tactics but unwilling to break a taboo and retain possession. In doing so, they were outwitted by wily opponents and allowed the referee that day to abdicate his responsiblity to control the game.

As it turned out, the Inter player who writhed on the Ibrox pitch last night was genuinely injured. No matter - the Rangers players are to be congratulated for breaking with a pointless and abused convention.

GEORGE Best was the greatest of all footballers, or so it's been claimed in the days since his death. Pele himself said so, as we've been reminded ad nauseam.

Puskas, di Stefano, Cruyff, Platini, Maradona and Zidane are just a few of those who might beg to differ. But any attempt to rank such greats is futile. Most people only know Puskas and di Stefano from grainy footage of Real Madrid's 7-3 European Cup final thumping of Eintracht Frankfurt in 1961. Younger fans will have seen little of Cruyff other than the execution of his famous turn, and, of all Maradona's goals, they will only be able to visualise a couple that he chipped in with against England in 1986.

A few years after retirement and any footballer, no matter their talent, will see their career distilled in the collective consciousness into a small collection of moments. Even the singular talent and persona of Eric Cantona, only eight years after his retirement, has for me been reduced to his strutting, faux-incredulity after a sublime chipped goal, the karate kick at Crystal Palace, and a fluff against Borussia Dortmund in the 1997 Champions League semi-final. When the talents of George Best are pitted against those of Pele, few of us can say with any authority who was superior - but we can use a handful of highlights to decide who was our favourite.

So, Pele: an outrageous dummy; a shot from the half-way line; that perfect pass to Carlos Alberto; and the most aesthetically pleasing header you're likely to see - all through the haze of a Mexican summer. Oh, and that black-and-white footage of a precocious 17-year-old lobbing a befuddled defender to score in the 1958 World Cup final.

And Best: glee at trundling the ball home on the way to winning the European Cup; the dab of the right boot that saw 6' 5'' Pat Jennings lobbed while just feet off his line; keeping his balance to round a keeper a millisecond after Ron 'Chopper' Harris tried to break his leg; hugging the post bashfully after one of his six goals against Northampton; stealing in to pinch the ball off an unsuspecting Gordon Banks and flick it over the England keeper.

Pele might have been the better player - I don't know. But I prefer the George Best scrapbook.

THE first edition of Scotsport SPL went down in legend. From the ponderous version of the classic theme tune to the bizarre finale of jumper-wearing journalist Graham Spiers playing some Elton John on a stray piano, it was a spectacular display of broadcasting ineptitude that media studies lecturers will be playing to horrified students for years to come. The cringe factor has never been so intense since that first edition, but Scotsport SPL continues to unite fans of all persuasions in their derision of its awfulness.

Yet I must confess to a sneaking affection for Scotsport SPL. For a start, it has rehabilitated the two men who provided the soundtrack to the football viewing of my childhood. Archie McPherson, with his bluster and laboured metaphors, may lack the slickness of modern-day contemporaries, but, like Brian Moore and Kenneth Wolstenholme, his is a distinctive football voice that is inextricably linked to many a classic clip. Jock Brown's love for the drama of football, meanwhile, is evident in his emphatic delivery and boyish incredulity at any feat of footballing skill. Albeit, he's a little more muted these days - perhaps because of the ignominy of his time at Celtic and his long exclusion from terrestrial TV - but he remains one of the greatest and most underrated of commentators.

Other innovations of Scotsport SPL are less easily defended. For a start there's the 11pm Monday night scheduling, which, along with the competition prizes - mostly tickets for matches outside Scotland - suggest the producers are trying to run down the game in this country rather than build its profile.

Then there's Karen O, the DJ whom programme-makers felt could be our answer to Gaby Yorath - failing to realise that Yorath is an effective presenter because of her knowledge and authority, not because she happens to have blonde hair and a pair of boobs. Julyan Sinclair, on the other hand, is an accomplished TV presenter - few know he once won a Bafta - but he obviously knows how maligned Scotsport SPL is, since he wears the look of a cabinet minister the paparazzi have found cottaging in the Downing Street loos.

That's before you get to the bewildering arrogance of Andy Walker and the embarrassment of the unfortunate footballers (usually youngsters shoved into the spotlight by their canny elders) taking on pointless challenges like Throw-in Throne, although producers seem to have finally copped on that this was sending viewers scurrying behind their settees. Most infuriatingly, the programme-makers stubbornly refuse to bow from pressure from viewers to show more highlights, and continue to sacrifice action replays for the inane observations of a studio of shell-shocked fans.

So why do I tune in so eagerly every Monday? Because Scotsport SPL sums of the essence of Scottish football, in the same way that the more polished coverage of Champions League and the English Premiership reflects the corporate sterility that has crept into football elsewhere.

The SPL has yet to be invaded en masse by the the prawn-sandwich brigade. The players, other than the Old Firm's top stars, earn little more than a decent professional wage and continue to live in much the same world as the fans who watch them. Most of the grounds in the SPL are still at the heart of their community, few clubs having yet felt the need to shoo their followers to characterless out-of-town sites. Branding, meanwhile, refuses to get much more sophisicated than mugs with club crests and bibs carrying the same "I'm the best dribbler at Pittodrie/Easter Road/Tannadice" that were on sale 20 years ago. The Scottish game retains a ramshackle enthusiasm that compels thousands of fans each week - just like Scotsport SPL.

I WAS reminded on Saturday of why I put up with the plodding predictability of Scottish football. Not at Hampden but in Geneva, where England beat Argentina 3-2 in one of the greatest friendly matches I've seen (albeit that's faint praise since most examples of the genre I've witnessed have been the notoriously turgid affairs that Hampden seems to specialise in). I take no pleasure in seeing England win - especially after hearing the rousing choruses that taunted the Argentines about the Falklands War - but Michael Owen's two-goal salvo thrilled me for another reason.

Each goal your team scores while a match remains alive sends you into momentary euphoria. It's an addictive rush that allows people like myself to cast off the shackles of manly stolidity and share a moment of sheer pleasure with thousands of strangers. Those who decry football's low scoring fail to realise that this is one of its beauties: the rarer the pleasure, the more intense the pleasure. The rush is further intensified because the goal is the only way of scoring. Compare rugby, where the fundamental aim of scoring a try is undermined by the hefty scores accumulated through penalties awarded for innocuous offences.

No other sport can match the purity or the rarity of the goal. So when two come along to win a game right at its death, this is the football supporter's manna from heaven. Just ask any Manchester United fan who watched the 1999 European Cup final. That United beat Bayern Munich to become European champions made for a night to remember, but it was the timing of the two goals that ensured the game would be recalled with reverential awe.

The England-Argentina game may not have provided quite so important an occasion, but this was still a vigorous match injected with that most rare of footballing denouements. England is not my country and I felt no joy in seeing Michael Owen's second goal defeat the Argentines; what I did feel was a frisson of excitement at witnessing the full realisation of football's potential to transcend. The thrill might have been vicarious, but it tantalised with the prospect that next time it could be me.

FEW countries are obsessed with football like Scotland; few countries are as indifferent about football as the USA. Yet, according to FIFA, Scotland are ranked 62nd in the world while the USA are seventh. This Saturday we'll have a better idea of the gap between the two sides' abilities when Scotland play the US at Hampden, and, if one Scottish footballing legend is to be believed, his native land could be on the verge of a humbling experience.

Charlie Cooke was an old-school winger with Dundee, Aberdeen and Chelsea, remembered with misty-eyed fondness by those lucky enough to watch him play in the 1960s and 1970s. He was long-haired, good-looking and taunted lumpen full-backs like a matador - in short, the nearest Scotland ever got to a George Best. But while we wake each morning expecting to read Best's obituary in the paper, Cooke's whereabouts are a mystery to most.

He saw out his career in the short-lived glamour of the North American Soccer League, a venture that also helped boost the pension funds of Pele, Beckenbauer and Best himself. After the NASL collapsed, Cooke stayed on across the pond, enamoured by the USA's can-do mentality and lack of any need for a word like dreich. Now he is one of the most respected coaches of youth soccer - as they still insist on calling it - in the country.

When I spoke to a him a couple of years ago, he had news for those who patronised his adopted country's ability with a football. People don't realise how big the sport is here, he told me. Soccer is the biggest participation sport in the country among children, and, Cooke insisted, that pointed to an inevitable conclusion: the USA would be world champions within 20 years. And this of a country who, when it was awarded the 1994 World Cup, ranked tractor-pulling ahead of association rules football among its favourite sports. But by 2002 the USA had reached the quarter-finals of the World Cup. Cooke told me that he hadn't seen Scotland play in a while, but that they'd struggle against the USA. Now, on Saturday, I'll get a chance to see if the Americans really have progressed as much as Scotland have regressed.

I'm not convinced by Cooke's argument, and rest my case on my experiences as a counsellor in a summer camp in North Carolina in 2000. Eager to make some converts to the real football - "Because the foot kicks the ball," I said with sniffy pedantry - I organised a USA vs Rest of the World challenge soccer match. The Rest of the World consisted largely of talented Venezuelans sent north for the summer to improve their English. By contrast, the US had a paucity of talent. One eager volunteer informed me he was the best goddam defender in his state, which, when I gave him a trial, turned out to mean only that he could toe-punt the ball a phenomenal distance in whichever direction he was facing (but only if it was stationary).

My only hope for evening up the sides was Phillip, a gifted all-rounder who was at least as talented - and bigger - than any of the Venezuelans. But on the day of the match, Phillip was nowhere to be found. As kick-off approached I was still searching the vast camp's many cabins, until one of Phillip's friends strolled up to tell me my star player would not be playing. The reason? Because he was 'kinda embarrassed' to play soccer.

Football is a sport most played largely by younger children and women in the US, but it was only Phillip's reluctance to show up that made me realise realise how deeply unfashionable it remained. He was happy to wow the opposite sex with his skills on a basketball court, but, to Phillip, admitting a flair for soccer was the social equivalent of asking a girl out by breathing garlic in her face and asking whether she'd like to learn Klingon.

I admit to a bit of concern about the prospect of Scotland suffering a humbling on Saturday. But if football had even the slightest hint of street-cred across the pond, I'd have been absolutely terrified.

I FELT a familiar sense of bristling anger on the train back from Rugby Park on Saturday. Aberdeen had just been hammered 4-2 by a mediocre Kilmarnock team, and a young group of Dons fans decided to perk themselves up with the Iain Durrant song. This was the reason for my irritation, and, for those of you unfamiliar with this particular ditty, here's why.

In February 1988 Aberdeen were serious title contenders when they played Rangers, the favourities, in a home league match. The game was a 2-1 victory for Aberdeen packed with drama, but, 17 years on it's remembered for just one tackle. Neil Simpson, the Aberdeen midfielder, went in over-the-top on Iain Durrant, a young player who was being touted by some as one of the most gifted of Scottish footballers. Simpson's tackle was a poor one all right, although I remember thinking at the time that I'd seen worse. It was the end result that made it so infamous: Durrant didn't play regular fotball again for years and never scaled the predicted heights, eventually seeing out his career at Kilmarnock - hence last Saturday's singalong.

Simpson became a pariah in the eyes of some, with much of the vitriol being shovelled on his name by Rangers sympathisers in the Glasgow-based media. He moved to Newcastle United a little while later, but his career, too, petered out.

Which brings us to the Iain Durrant song, the words to which go something like this:

"Who's that lying at Pittodrie?
"Who's that lying on the floor?
"Looks like Iain Durrant to me, and he's gone and bust his knee,
"And he won't be playing for Rangers anymore."

Usually accompanied by rounds of "Nice one Simmie, nice one son."

Neil Simpson was my favourite player when I was growing up. During kickabouts at the park I would leave my top hanging out of my shorts, like he did, as I attempted in vain to imitate his skills. That Simpson played only five times for Scotland hides the fact that he was one of the most talented players of his generation, dominating some of Europe's top stars when scarcely aged 20. His game was a mix of dogged ball-winning, surging runs, surprisingly nimble feet and a healthy dose of goals from midfield. When I recently watched recordings of Aberdeen's 1983 wins over Bayern Munich and Real Madrid, the only player I could think of to match Simpson's style was Roy Keane.

I cringe when I hear the words of the Iain Durrant song, their lyrics as witless as their rendition is tuneless; I squirm when I hear the glorification of a talented player's serious injury (it takes some effort to cede the moral ground to Rangers fans and their rabble-rousing bigotry, yet some Aberdeen supporters have a right good go). But what really sticks in my throat is when this song comes from the mouths of people whose behinds were still being wiped clean by their mothers in 1988. These fools reduce the career of one of my boyhood heros to a single tackle.

ALEX McLeish looks weary. He's been manager of Rangers for four years now and the strain is clear in his increasingly saggy features. Each draw or defeat - and sometimes even a win - is met by calls to quit from a spoiled generation of Rangers supporters, who know no middle ground between ugly triumphalism and self-indulgent caterwauling. McLeish's media interviews are prickly affairs, with any hint of criticism taken as a personal jibe. Setbacks are explained away with a surly lack of good grace; Hibs' tactical superiority in a 3-0 win at Ibrox in August was dismissed as sheer luck.

I met Alex McLeish once, in 1988. Then, he was in his prime as a player, an imposing centre-half for Aberdeen and Scotland whose defensive partnership with Willie Miller overawed many a striker by reputation alone. Off the field, he was a softer character. I met him once at the Oldmeldrum Sports, an old-style gala in the north-east of Scotland where home-bakes and raffles were as important as any display of athletic excellence. I was a 13-year-old Aberdeen fan, dumbstruck as I stood in line before one of my heros, waiting for a signed photo. McLeish, the star attraction at the gala, was warm and chatty, unperturbed by the long queue snaking back from the foldaway table he was stuck behind. His off-field self-assurance matched the ease with which he strolled through most matches.

The contrast with the McLeish of 2005 is stark. Today, he's a truculent, embattled figure, whose jitteriness is betrayed by eccentric after-match analyses. Last Wednesday he blamed the boos that followed the Champions League draw with Artmedia Bratislava on the Slovakians' exuberant celebrations at the final whistle.

He's not the first Old Firm manager to undergo such a transformation. Martin O'Neill used to be one of the more engaging BBC pundits, his straight-talking analysis laced with a sense of mischief. Years into the Celtic job, however, and he became a moodier figure who found offence too easily. When Aberdeen players celebrated a 2-0 win in December 2001, following a series of thumpings by Celtic, he churlishly barked that they'd acted like they'd won the league. His successor, Gordon Strachan, already seems possessed of a deeply furrowed brow and rattiness far removed from his once impish demeanour.

To manage an Old Firm team is to put up with the expectation that every match should be won. But for many fans it's not just a case of wanting to wind up the local rivals; this sporting rivalry is fuelled by swaggering sectarianism. Celtic was formed in the 19th century as a project to help poor Irish immigrant Catholics in Glasgow. Protestants then started to gravitate towards Rangers. The legacy is a simmering menace whenever the two teams meet, which frequently boils over on the city's steets. Some young men have died for wearing the wrong colour of shirt.

The media blames football thuggery on an aberrant minority of social outcasts. That explanation doesn't hold at Ibrox and Parkhead, where sectarian banners and songs celebrating terrorist attrocities are common currency. When sporting rivalry curdles into such a deeply unpleasant conflict, it's no wonder Alex McLeish looks so sour.

SCOTLAND is obsessed by football like no other nation. The Brazilians and the Italians may challenge us when it comes to breast-beating passion, but there the similarity ends: our obsession is singularly joyless.

Our national team specialises in abject failure and has never gone beyond the first round of the World Cup finals; our national league is an unedifying brawl between two bastions of sectarian intolerance.

Yet we keep coming back to the football. We pay the £20 entry knowing there’s better entertainment on offer at the local multiplex for a quarter of the price, and endanger relationships by dashing into Dixons for the final scores while out shopping.

Scotland is a peculiarly one-sport nation. We don’t find solace elsewhere when football makes our lives a misery. Compare England’s football fans who, while squirming at the embarrassment of defeat in Northern Ireland, could still bask in the afterglow of the Ashes.

Scottish football is a selfish, exploitative partner in an unequal relationship – we devote our lives to it for little in return, clutching onto infrequent slivers of pleasure. And no matter how often we threaten to break-up and swear we’re never putting up with that crap again, football knows we’ll come sloping back for more.

Welcome to Fitba Hell.