Travelling Hopefully - Let's Hear it for the Diddy Teams

It was Robert Louis Stevenson that wrote “to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive”. He wasn’t, of course, writing about Scottish Football but he might as well have been. Stevenson was trying to suggest that hope and anticipation is better than reality. You can’t tell me that that doesn’t sum up perfectly the experience of supporting the vast majority of Scottish football teams.

Scottish Football, as if you needed reminded, is played on a pretty uneven playing field. Two, for now, giant teams dominate the game in this country almost entirely. They share the major honours between themselves to such a degree that from season to season I can’t recall which one has won what. The rest of us are consigned to the ranks of mere also rans or, as one PA announcer at Ibrox infamously put it, searching for crumbs from the master’s table.

Given that the chances of us mere mortals carrying off one of Scotland’s major football honours are slight it’s a wonder why we bother at all.

The game in Scotland may be dominated by the two, for now, richest and powerful teams but while money can buy you titles and honours, hopes and dreams remain free. To paraphrase the words of Robert Louis Stevenson; we continue to travel hopefully across the highways and byways of Scottish football. Sometimes even, as Kilmarnock found out today, the reality does prove to every bit as good as the hope and anticipation.

(40 years on and Thistle are still celebrating - pic by Tommy Taylor)

I’ll not pretend to be any great fan of Kilmarnock, I’ve had too many hairy, scary trips back to the comfort and safety of a Thistle supporters’ bus for that, but my heart soared for them at Hampden Park this afternoon all the same.

I’ve not, yet, had the pleasure of experiencing Thistle play in a national Cup Final but when I do, and it will happen, it will be an occasion that I’ll savour to the full. Today if the pulse rate of a Celtic fan quickened any it wasn’t at the prospect of adding another League Cup to their hoards of domestic honours but rather the latest ‘thrilling’ instalment of their sibling rivalry with their, for now, partners in the Scottish football duopoly. Defeating Kilmarnock to win the League Cup would have been a mere incidental in their point scoring squabble with Rangers. The elation of a Celtic victory today would have lasted just long enough for the morning hangover to kick in.

It was good for Scottish football, therefore, that the game ended in an unexpected triumph for Kilmarnock. It was unquestionably their day but the fan of every ‘diddy’ team in the country shared their joy at the final whistle. It was a vindication of our continued support for whichever one of the less celebrated teams in Scotland that our allegiance lies with and proof in the value of continuing to dream.