Smith Persevered

How Hibernian Smashed the Biggest Curse in Football
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-0-85790-921-3
Verlag: Arena Sport
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten

One hundred and fourteen years and no Scottish Cup for Hibernian. It could be considered the biggest curse in football. Cock-up after near-miss after not-a-hope. Over the years Hearts fans have even tried to get the term 'Hibsing it' - to chuck away a vital game from a favourable position - included in the dictionary. Every year would come the mention of 1902, the last time Hibs had won the cup. 1902, when Buffalo Bill still alive and the bra was newly invented. And then came 2016 and a run all the way to the final at Hampden. Hibs couldn't finally, at long, long last, win the infernal, blasted thing ... could they? Aidan Smith takes us on the turbulent journey that was Hibs' 2016 Scottish Cup Campaign, through a season of peaks and troughs which, despite everything, finally delivered that elusive Cup victory Hibs fans have craved for so long.

Aidan Smith is the author of three previous books: Persevered, Heartfelt and Union Jock. He is a journalist with The Scotsman and a seven-times winner in the Scottish Press Awards.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Smith, Aidan

Leseproben

THREE

‘I WANT TO TAKE ALL THE CANCER FROM ALAN . . .’

AN OLD LECTURER at journalism college, when he was explaining the art of writing a newspaper story and how you had to hook the readers with a smart intro, liked to replay his greatest hits from long years in the ink trade. ‘Women look much smaller with their clothes off,’ he once declared apropos of nothing, ‘but footballers look much smaller with theirs on.’

You couldn’t get away with that sort of thing now. But was it even true? Alan Stubbs, fully clothed, has just appeared in the doorway of the cafe and he’s filling it like the bad guy in a comic-strip and blocking out the sun. He’s immense.

The point I guess my tutor was trying to make about footballers is that when you meet them away from the pitch out of their kit they shrink. Footballers can certainly look huge when you’re a small boy peering over the terrace wall at them thrashing your team. In 1968, when I was deemed old enough for a match featuring the Old Firm, Celtic came to Easter Road and said to Hibs: ‘Go on, dare to take the lead. With only eleven minutes left, see if we don’t roar back with four great goals.’

Celtic were terrifying just running onto the park. Three regular Gigantors led the way: Billy McNeill, Bobby Murdoch, John Hughes. Maybe it was those hoops stretched across barrel chests which made them seem so much bigger than the Hibs players. Even wee Jimmy Johnstone – who I thought was no taller than the boys kicking empty fag packets in pub doorways while their fathers downed pints of heavy inside – cast a long cartoon shadow that day. The final score was Hibs 2, Celtic 5, just as it had been in Stubbs’ comeback game at Easter Road.

The first time I met Stubbs he was just a few days into the job of Hibs manager. This was in Portobello – Edinburgh’s Venice Beach, his home for the duration. Porty is a place of shifted sand – the seafront is partly-imported – but the man wasn’t wobbling, despite the challenges facing him. The eighth boss in ten years, he was unperturbed by the post appearing a thankless task, a near-impossible one. The manager immediately before him presided over a horrific transmogrification of a Jekyll & Hyde nature – or a Preston North End 26, Hyde 0 nature – as they went from Euro hopefuls to relegation chumps. The manager before him had been responsible for monumental stinkers, the two worst results in the club’s history.

Stubbs dominates the room but in a quiet way. He impresses with his determination but this is football, nothing more life-or-death than that: worse things happen to people than their teams failing to fulfil sometimes over-inflated aspirations. He repeats what he said on his first day in the job of wanting to make the supporters proud. The man has undoubted presence.

Stubbs’ battles with cancer have left him with one fewer testicle and a scar from surgery, after which forty staples were needed to put him back together. ‘They opened me up and moved various organs out and to the side to get to the tumour,’ he told me. Cancer took Stubbs to ‘the darkest, darkest places’ and the pain was overwhelming. ‘I could feel the staples, I could feel my insides, I could feel everything.’

He talked freely about all of this. ‘I live with cancer,’ he said. He spoke movingly of his dad Ronald who delivered cigarettes for a living but crucially drove the youngest of his five children to juvenile games in and around Kirkby, the Liverpool overspill which became a town, and who developed cancer at the same time as Stubbs and would eventually die of it. ‘Dad told a friend of mine: ‘I want to take all the cancer from Alan, take it with me so he’ll be alright.’ That was typical of him, selfless to the last.’

Stubbs made Ronald proud when he signed for Everton, the team they supported together, and during our chat that day he conveyed the sense he’s striving to demonstrate his gratitude to his father for his football life. But this is not a tense or wound-up fellow; he has a ‘carefree’ air. That’s down to having fought cancer and won. ‘I live for each new day. What’s the point in worrying?’ Maybe other better-qualified candidates for the Hibs job were scared off by the high casualty rate but not Stubbs.

The cynic will say that having coached at Everton but never managed before, he’s a cheap option for a club which doesn’t like to splash the cash. If it’s not working come the autumn he can be removed and an old hand in a dugout duvet shuffled into position. But there’s something tantalising about the appointment: Stubbs hails from England’s redoubtable north. He was a centre-back. He played for Celtic. Wasn’t that Tony Mowbray, too? Mowbray’s Hibs were a bonnie side; a similar model will be most welcome after much recent grimness.

Hibs, Hearts and Rangers, all fighting for the Championship title and automatic promotion, will make 2014-15 a second-tier season like no other in Scottish football history, and a far more cut-throat league than the Premiership. But Stubbs doesn’t need presence in his first few breathless weeks in the job; just points. His goalie scores the winner in the opening game against Livingston and then the team lose three in a row, including the Edinburgh derby, never a smart thing to do.

Maybe the rookie deserves some sympathy. Stubbs took over with half the old squad having been invited to find new employment after demotion and those that remained still staggering around in shock. He had to find new players, his feet and a feel for the Scottish game – all at once and quickly. Then comes the first eye-catching result: a win at Ibrox. It’s choreographed by Scott Allan, one of the new signings. An enormously talented attacking midfielder who’s wasted a couple of years of his career, Allan suddenly starts demanding the ball for ninety minutes, reverse-passing teams to death and by the season’s end will be Scottish football’s hottest property. His manager is credited with the transformation; he says it’s all down to the player.

Hearts get off to a flier and don’t let up. Hibs are unlucky in the next two derbies and then they beat their city rivals. Rangers are thrashed at Easter Road, then Hibs win again at Ibrox. Hibs finish runners-up only for Rangers – by then on their third manager of the season – to find a way to squeeze them out in the playoffs. The promotion campaign has been a failure but in the final minutes of the final match applause ripples round Easter Road. The fans – among Scotland’s grouchiest, grumbliest and hardest-to-please – don’t normally greet non-achievement so warmly. Stubbs, though, has given them back their football team.

The Hibs way. Trapping it under a jam-jar is tricky, just as trapping the ball was tricky for some reluctant Easter Road legends down the years. Does it exist?

Hibs fans, obviously, think it does. They like the team to have flair; thus Hearts supporters sneeringly call them flairists. Actually, Jambos call Hibbies poncing delusional snobs and borderline-Nazi master-race purists who perpetuate a myth of Brazil-influencing attacking aesthetics and who have actually borne witness to some chronic rubbish down the years.

It’s true; they have. But Hibs fans don’t appoint the club’s managers, or hand them scribbled notes before kick-off suggesting how best to bring about a total fitba afternoon. There are managers who will come along and decide Hibs should be tougher, more direct, more prosaic. All supporters want to see their team win but some place a slightly greater premium on winning with style. If your father was fortunate enough to witness the Famous Five, then if you and he were lucky enough to watch Turnbull’s Tornadoes together, it’s an inevitable and entirely permissible reaction when the ball is hoofed long and high to weep into your velvet sleeve, your snuff box or your first edition written by one of the French intellectuals.

Stubbs’ predecessor was Terry Butcher. The faithful readied themselves for one of those eras where it was decreed the team would have to win ugly. Imagine how the fans felt, then, having to watch Hibs lose ugly. But they approve of Stubbs, his diamond formation, his charging wing-backs, his choice of Liam Fontaine as a ball-playing centre-back in the manager’s own image, his trust in the creative workshop operated by Scott Allan and fellow midfielder Dylan McGeouch, his astute parenting of the young striker Jason Cummings to find a balance between responsibility and radgeness, increasing the boy’s wisdom without compromising the fearlessness, and last but not least his wild-card pick – an example of that carefree nature, perhaps – of the occasional dazzle of Dominique Malonga. ‘Stubbsy, Stubbsy,’ chorus the fans, happy with their team again.

The Scottish Cup in 2014-15? Hibs receive favourable draws all the way to the semi-finals but that means Hampden where they usually lose. This defeat is the eleventh out of fifteen visits since the century began. So maybe Stubbs won’t be able to overcome the hoodoo which has broken far more experienced men. Anyway, promotion is the main aim, isn’t it?

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Stubbs’ second season starts like the first: slowly. Rangers want Scott Allan, table a couple of derisory bids, he...