Fitba Hell

The fitba pundits have been counting this down for years now: Kris Boyd will soon overtake Henrik Larsson as the all-time SPL top scorer.

What a totally meaningless observation. Doesn't anyone else find it irksome that the dawn of the SPL 10 years ago is routinely taken as a Year Zero for the Scottish game? The constant citing of SPL statistics implicitly devalues all that went before for 100 years and more. So Boyd is held up against Larsson, but not Jimmy McGrory, Joe Harper, or even Ally McCoist.

The same thing happens in England. Jermaine Defoe scored five today, a joint Premier League record according to Radio Five Live. In other words, a record if we discount any goalscoring feats before 1992-93. Rupert Murdoch will be happy about such amnesia, implying as it does that the only period of English football which matters began when Sky threw open its coffers.

But going back to the SPL, what exactly is so different now? Well, few could deny that standards have plummeted in the last decade. So Boyd should have a word with any pals he has in the media, and tell them to stop harping on about the SPL: his stats would look a whole lot more impressive held up against all the legends of the Scottish game, and not just the mediocrity of the last decade.

I was a naïve 18-year-old when I arrived at Glasgow University in 1993, never having been to Scotland's biggest city before for more than a couple of hours. I’d grown up in Aberdeen, disliking Celtic and Rangers purely because they were big teams who got in the way of my team’s hopes of winning trophies; I had only the vaguest awareness of their sectarian affiliations. The last 16 years have been an education, and I still haven’t got my head round the warped logic of Old Firm allegiance.

It’s been thoroughly depressing to see pea-brained bigots trying to twist Remembrance Sunday and Armistice Day to their own agenda. Depressing to hear a band of Celtic fans singing in protest outside the Falkirk Stadium during a minute’s silence on Sunday. But equally depressing to read about the indignant ravings of those Rangers fans who hijack the poppy for their own anti-Catholic agenda. Depressing to hear the editor of fanzine Not the Celtic View saying that he “neither condemns not condones” the incident at Falkirk, depressing to see the moral high ground subsequently claimed by internet ranters who would blithely sing about being “up to our knees in Fenian blood”.

Armistice Day is not about the glorification of the British military, as the above would have us believe. Most of all, it is for sombre reflection on how close the world came to cataclysm in the 20th century. How depressing to see the poppy sucked into the poisonous little vortex of Old Firm squabbling.

Never mind whether Newcastle have sold out with their new stadium name. I'm more interested in the epic amount of syllables that have been squeezed in: there's a grand total of 13 in the (draws breath) sportsdirect.com @ St James's Park Stadium. Bloody hell, the Gettysburg Address wasn't much longer.

Part of me is reluctant to write anything about this. The branding experts behind this decision must have known there'd be an outcry and that no fan would ever use the ludicrous new name. They will also have known, though, that the more ridiculous they made it, the more it would become a talking point. So they surrounded "St James's Park" with some faddy lower-case letters and a dash of tautology (isn't a professional football team's park always accompanied by a stadium?) Then they rubbed their hands in anticipation of newspapers' mocking sports op-eds and the outrage-fuelled phone-ins. And there you go: how many of us are talking about a sports shop chain that only existed on the fringes of our consciousness last week?

The new name is not the result of some corporate numbskulls' incompetence, but a calculated attempt to get some leverage for a brand, precisely by reducing an iconic sporting venue to a laughing stock - and in doing so, flicking an even mightier two fingers to the Newcastle fans than some might have realised.

The Highland League is like French pop music: a familiar form in a bizarre parallel world. Like Serge Gainsbourg singing about men with cauliflowers for heads or suicidal ticket collectors (youtube.com/watch?v=HsX4M-by5OY), it has a whole lot to recommend.

It's home to some of the world's most evocatively-named football teams: all hail Buckie Thistle, Forres Mechanics and Clachnacuddin. There are so many crazily high-scoring games that anything less than a 5-5 draw with seven sendings off and a refereeing fatality in a freak seagull collision leaves spectators tinged with disappointment. Not to mention hard men so uncompromising they make Vinnie Jones look like guy from the Domestos ads, and the grisly pleasure of seeing how many Fort William get humped by each week.

Sadly, as my friends at Inside Left document elsewhere - www.insideleft.net - the plight of Clach shows the Highland League is as vulnerable to the vagaries of global economics as anything else.

If you're anywhere near places like Wick, Rothes, Fraserburgh or Turriff, get along to see these towns' teams play. The games are entertaining and the welcome warm, as I can testify from when my stag-do stopped for several hours at Cove Rangers' dinky Allan Park (capacity about 1,500). Our waitress in the hospitality section - which was a smidgeon of the cost for a far stuffier affair at Pittodrie - would not stop bullying us to quaff free booze. It was the first time I'd seen a stag party protest that they'd really rather stop drinking now, thanks very much.