A Taxing Issue

Only a fool wouldn’t acknowledge that the events this week at Ibrox has been the biggest story to have hit Scottish Football since, well, since forever to be perfectly honest. Equally only a fool wouldn’t realise that the implications of it extend well beyond the boundaries of G51 2XD.

It is understandable, therefore, that the odd column inch or two has been devoted to the remarkable story as it has unfolded over the course of the week. We are promised further revelations next week, and they too are bound to shock and grip in equal order.

I’ve been watching football in Scotland for 35 of my 43 years and in that time I’ve become used to the fact that two clubs, Fergie’s time at Pittodrie notwithstanding, have dominated the game almost entirely. I’ve got used to football writers desperately trying to shoe horn the ‘old firm angle’ into their reporting no matter how far removed the actual story is from either club. So used to it in fact that it now raises no more than a wry smile rather than my ire as it once did.

Until yesterday that is.

Yesterday found me, as usual if Thistle are at home, at Firhill. Morton were the visitors and while the goalless draw wasn’t a classic it was still a reasonably entertaining, if from a Thistle perspective frustrating, afternoon.

At the end of the game I trooped round the side of the pitch to hear what the two managers had thought of the 90 minutes.

On an afternoon where the icy wind cut you in half, the warmth of the new Firhill press room was most welcome. Morton manager Allan Moore was the first to speak and as usual he rabitted on at a fair old rate with a pretty accurate assessment of the game.

Next into the room to share his thoughts on the game was Morton’s Archie Campbell. Now you can understand the logic of wanting to speak to Campbell whose pace had troubled the Thistle back line all afternoon and it was Campbell after all who had blazed a penalty high into the sky.

(ex Ranger Archie Campbell sends a penalty over the bar - pic by Tommy Taylor)

Now Campbell, if you are unaware, had been on the books of Rangers until the end of last season though he had spent much of the season on loan at Cowdenbeath. Comment on the game he had just played in was pretty perfunctory before the press moved onto what they really wanted to hear; Campbell’s thoughts on what was happening at his old club and I don’t mean Cowdenbeath.

Next to speak was Thistle manager Jackie McNamara and like his Morton counterpart his assessment of the game was more or less spot on.

There was just one Thistle player left to speak before the press’ job was done for the afternoon.

Their choice? Darren Cole who is on loan at Firhill from, yes, you’ve got it – Rangers.

It could be that they wanted to hear what Cole thought about moving back to centre defence after playing left back the week before but I doubt it. At any rate I didn’t hang about to find out and headed off to the pub.

I’ve already acknowledged the significance of the situation at Ibrox but, and it is a pretty big but, these guys were at Firhill to report on Partick Thistle v Morton not Glasgow Rangers.

There were 2,500 or so people at Firhill yesterday and their primary interest was the fortunes of either Partick Thistle or Greenock Morton. Is it unreasonable of them to expect to open up their papers and read what their club representatives thought of the game they played in rather than at events elsewhere?

I’m aware that this has been nothing more than a rant but this ‘old firm at all costs’ sums up so much of what is wrong with Scottish Football and how it is reported on. I accept that both Rangers and Celtic are much bigger clubs than Partick Thistle. I accept that as a consequence of that they will dominate the media as much as they dominate the game itself. I’m not asking for a disproportionate amount of space to be devoted to Partick Thistle. I’m just expecting those sent to cover Partick Thistle v Morton to report on the game that took place in front of them.

Rant over.  

Ticket to Ride Back in Time

A recurring theme running through these infrequent blog entries is that of obsession. Or to be more precise the multitude of obsessions that have afflicted me over the years. One from my youth that hasn't previously been mentioned is that of time travel. Like, I hope, a lot of young boys I was intrigued by the thought of being able to travel in time. Ever the classicist I was more HG Wells' 'Time Machine' rather than Michael J Fox's DeLorean. That said, I'm still eagerly anticipating the flying cars and hover boards that lie just around the corner for us in 2015. 

Anyway, I digress. Given the gift of time travel where, or more accurately when, would I go? As a Partick Thistle supporter then October 1971 would have to feature on any time travelling itinerary. Note to any non Thistle supporting reader who has stumbled across this blog, check out what happened on the 23rd of that month 41 years ago and you'll understand the desire to head back to that particular date.

So where else would I visit on my merry jaunt through time? With the music of The Beatles one of my current obsessions then I would need to take the opportunity to see live a band that split up while I was a mere toddler and stopped touring before I was born.

Sadly, I haven't, as yet, managed to discover how to create a flux capacitor and I can't drive, far less get a DeLorean up to 88mph, so October 23rd 1971 will remain a date that I can only visit via DVD.  

So too am I denied the chance to experience Beatlemania first hand.

The proliferation of Beatles tribute bands though does provide a good alternative. We are fortunate here in Scotland to have in the shape of Them Beatles one of the very best on offer.

(pic nicked shamlessly from www.thembeatles.com)

Them Beatles are much more than a band that play cover versions of Beatles songs. For a start their attention to detail is quite remarkable. To help create an authentic Beatles sound they perform without any pre-recorded music relying on their own skill and craft as musicians, they use instruments from each era, to recreate the music that so thrilled a generation in the 1960s and is still much loved to the present day.

Such is the desire to create as an authentic sound and image as possible 'Paul', expertly played by Joe Kane, even learned how to play his hofner bass left handed. Indeed all four do an astonishing job in creating their Beatle Alter ego. Clark Gilmour, with knees slightly bent, brings to life John's cheeky on stage persona and his gravely vocal, particularly on 'Twist and Shout' is so close a reproduction of Lennon's own performance that an audio recording could fool all but the keenest of ears.  

Craig McGown's depiction of George Harrison, the so called quiet Beatle, is quite remarkable and at the O2 last November provided the audience with a touching tribute to Harrison. Grahame Critcher meantime gives a virtuoso performance on drums and replicates Ringo's laconic vocals when it is his turn to take the mic.

It's not just the music from Them Beatles that sets them apart for other Beatle tribute acts. Their costumes are faithfully reproduced, with the best probably those from the Sgt Pepper era (see above pic).

I've had the pleasure of catching Them Beatles live on four occasions now and each gig has been different in some form. Last night at Platform Three in Bellshill they concentrated on the Beatlemania era with Paperback Writer, recorded in 1966, the latest of all the tracks they performed. They do, however, focus on the entire Beatles career up to, and including, the famous Apple rooftop performance in 1969, the last time The Beatles performed together. 

Them Beatles are perhaps best enjoyed as part of an audience that truly appreciates the effort that has gone into re-creating the sound and look of The Beatles but their performance never disappoints. Do catch them in action if you get the chance.

For more information about Them Beatles and tour dates check out www.thembeatles.com

Young Adult

Take a trip to the cinema these days and you will most likely encounter an advert where Ray Winstone will wander up down a cinema listing, in his own inimitable delivery, why he enjoys a trip to the cinema before declaring, with pause for dramatic effect, that he goes to the cinema for “the experience”.

That “experience”, in Cineworld Glasgow at any rate, will regularly involve being disturbed by people chatting and playing with their mobile phone. No number of inane ‘adverts’ from Orange will persuade people to switch their phones off for the duration of a film. My suggestion that those who insist of checking their facebook status while in the cinema should receive a poke from a high voltage cattle prod has so far fallen on deaf ears. I do, however, continue to live in hope.

A knowledgeable, appreciative audience can enhance the cinema experience.  Not a sound could be heard, to site an example, during the powerful adaptation of Lionel Shiver’s novel ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’.

Alas that wasn’t the case at yesterday evening’s screening of ‘Young Adult’ at the aforementioned Cineworld. Whether the audience were expecting something in the ilk of ‘Bad Teacher’ I don’t know, but this film seemed to go over the heads of the vast majority of them. The result was that it didn’t  hold their attention and played to almost constant low level, but annoyingly audible, babble.

That was a shame as this was a film that deserved better. Charlize Theron gives an excellent performance as Mavis Gary the ghost writer of a series of books aimed at the Young Adult market. With a failed marriage behind her, a drink problem and a bad case of writers block she receives an e-mail from her High School sweetheart, Buddy played by Patrick Wilson, announcing the birth of his baby son. In attempt to recapture what she perceives as her glory years she returns from the big city, in this case Minneapolis, to her small time home town with the avowed aim of winning Buddy back.  

On arriving home she encounters High School contemporary, although she barely noticed him, Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt) a “fat geek” who was beaten so badly by at High School by some jocks who, mistakenly, believed he was gay that he was left crippled.

As good as Theron’s performance is, in my opinion it is Oswalt, a leading US stand- up comedian, that steals the show here.

This dark comedy, more ‘feel bad’ than ‘feel good’, explores the impact your school years, in particular those immediately before adulthood, can shape your life. Mavis and Matt form an unlikely friendship. Or perhaps, given that both have, for entirely different reasons, been unable to escape from their adolescent years, not quite so unlikely. Mavis, made bitter by life’s disappointments, yearns for the return of her youth while Matt’s injuries seem as much mental as they are physical.

The humour in this film is often uncomfortable and while you won’t leave the cinema with your mood lightened do go and see it if you get the chance. Don't forget your cattle prod. 

Valentine’s Day Massacre

I touched on my obsessive personality in a previous blog entry. There have been a whole host of things that I have become obsessed with during my 43 plus years on the planet but the dominant, all consuming, one has always been the fortunes of Partick Thistle Football Club.

Calculating the amount of actual time I devote to Partick Thistle is a task that I’m simply too scared to perform lest the men in white coats take me away. And therein lies my greatest fear. Not so much that my obsessive, compulsive behaviour will end up with me sectioned for my own good, but that the consequence of that would mean I would miss a game.

You see I simply can’t miss a Thistle match. I can no more get up on a match day and not go to the football than I can avoid blinking.

January 1^st 2005 was the last time Partick Thistle played a fixture without myself being in attendance. While I like to think that the players stopped, took a look up in the stands and wondered, maybe even worried, where I was the world didn’t stop turning simply because I was on the Isle of Mull that day rather in Paisley where I should have been. 

It was, however, an uncomfortable afternoon. The scenery on the Isle of Mull is desolate yet beautiful. As we took a trip round the island I should have lost myself in the beauty of the countryside, yet all I could do was worry about what was unfolding at Love Street. The fact that for much of the afternoon I had no signal on my mobile phone didn’t help.

When word eventually came through that we had drawn 1-1 I was relieved that we hadn’t lost. If truth be told I was equally as relieved that the 90 minutes had passed without anything out of the ordinary, my non-attendance aside, occurring.  

Since that afternoon over 7 years ago I have made sure that wherever Thistle are playing you will find a fat, overly intense, grey haired man there watching and worrying.

That means that every social engagement has to be arranged with where Thistle are playing in mind. Want to book tickets for that show at the theatre? Better not, we might have a re-arranged league game or cup replay that night.

In moments of rare self-analysis, which I suppose the blog is a kind of, I hate the fact that I get so wrapped up in the fortunes of a mere (did I really say that?) football team. I hate too the fact that I have involved others in my obsession as well. My better half has gone since meeting me from someone with no interest in football to someone who spends every second Saturday at Firhill. She can be found in the Jackie Husband Stand selling programmes and when she calls Thistle “we” I love her all the more.

She understands the massive role that Partick Thistle play in my life, which is why when she learned that instead of a romantic tete-a-tete somewhere on Valentine’s Day I’ll be making a 250 mile round trip to watch Partick Thistle play Ross County she just shrugged, laughed and said “never mind”. She probably knew that given an ultimatum between spending time with the woman I love and 22 hairy arsed footballers, the hairy arsed footballers would win every time. And that is just plain wrong.  

Window Shopping

Excited about the imminent closing of the transfer window?

If, like me, you follow a team in Scotland then the answer will almost certainly be ‘no’. With the window about to slam shut (or any other similar transfer window cliché you can think of to the describe the last day of January) only one deal has taken place in Scotland in January that has involved a transfer fee. Even then the £35,000 that took Dougie Imrie from Hamilton to Paisley was hardly at the top end of the market.

Given the perilous financial state of Scottish football it can hardly come as a surprise to anyone that January has been largely free of transfer activity in Scotland. Few film crews camped outside grounds in Scotland with hoards of expectant fans swarming around them as the midnight deadline draws ever closer.

Transfer Window Deadline Day (such an important event in football is surely deserving of capital letters) is supposed to be a day of high drama. Sky Sports News displays a clock ticking down with the logo ‘time remaining’ next to it just in case we couldn’t figure out for ourselves what it means.

It’s the media circus that surrounds TWDD that truly irks this writer. What compels people to go and stand outside a stadium or a training ground on a cold January night? Were there no TV cameras there would they still turn up in the hope of seeing some star speed through the gates in a car with tinted windows? Are Sky Sports merely reporting the news and, ahem, drama of the day or are they, by turning up with film crews and cold looking reporters in tow, actually creating the drama that they then report on and declare ‘dramatic’?

Just as Christmas Eve can induce panic and generate some injudicious purchases so too can TWDD. The difference is that on Christmas Eve the worst you can do is spend a few quid on a jumper with a garish design upon it that will languish in a drawer until it goes in the charity bag. On TWDD you can spend £35million on Andy Carroll. Just about as useful as a Christmas sweater but a damn site more expensive.  

The Beatles - An Obsession

I think I have always, right from a very early age, had the tendency to be obsessive about certain things.

First obsession that I recall was for all things dinosaur related. I can still remember the acute sense of disappointment I felt when my father told me that instead of the book on dinosaurs that I had been craving he had bought me instead a book on chickens. He was, of course, kidding but  it took me a good few minutes before I realised that.

Next was Famous Five books, then the books of Michael Hardcastle. As I got older the obsession became football, one team with the huge capacity to disappoint in particular, and I had (sorry, have) the football programme collection that is almost a timeline of that particular obsession.

Recently, thanks to some cheaply acquired tickets for Paul McCartney’s concert at Hampden Park, the obsession has become The Beatles. And not just the music either, but rather anything and everything that has been written and said about them. It is fortunate, or perhaps not, that there is so much material out there to help fuel the obsession.

This morning another couple of books arrived, adding to my ever increasing library of Beatles literature. The fact that my Beatles books are already occupying a whole shelf in my bookcase prompted me to cast a critical eye over my Beatles book collection.

Hunter Davies’ ‘Authorised Biography’ seemed a natural place to begin my Beatles reading with. During 1967 and 1968 Davies was given unparalleled access to The Beatles which gave him an unique insight into their lives. Given that it is an authorised biography it is naturally a sanitised account of the band. There’s no mention, for example, of them dabbling with LSD and the obvious impact that had on their music. Davies’ preface to the 40^th anniversary issue of the book though helps create a more balanced picture, but even allowing for the ‘flaws’ that being an authorised account inevitably brings this remains a fascinating account of The Beatles. If it isn’t already in your Beatles library then rectify that as quickly as possible.

‘Balanced’ isn’t a word that immediately springs to mind when reviewing Philip Norman’s ‘Shout – The True Story of The Beatles’. As many authors have done he appears to have used Hunter Davies’ book as a source for much of his information meaning that there is little new, or especially insightful, contained within its’ pages.

It’s Norman’s obvious bias though towards John Lennon in preference to McCartney that really irks. That Paul can be a little ‘prickly’ and a bit of a control freak is a pretty well established fact but if the picture that Norman tries to paint of McCartney is any way accurate it would seem almost impossible for The Beatles to have operated as a cohesive group. Additionally his view that George Harrison and Ringo Starr were basically lucky to be in the right place at the right time is harsh, especially with regard to Harrison’s contribution, in the extreme.

An altogether better account of Paul McCartney can be found in the pages of Howard Sounes’ ‘Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney’. This book benefits from being the most recent account of his life dealing with his tempestuous relationship with Heather Mills.

A further strength of the book lies with the relatively brief account given of The Beatles early years given how well documented that period already is. The most interesting sections of the book deal with McCartney’s marriage to Linda and his time with Wings, including his ill-fated trip to Japan and spell in jail.

Still on the subject of Paul McCartney, Peter Carlin’s biography is also worthy of a place on your bookshelves though his account stops before McCartney’s relationship with Heather Mills really started to turn sour.

Returning to The Beatles by far the best book I have read thus far has been Peter Doggett’s ‘You Never Gave Me Your Money : The Battle for the Soul of The Beatles’. This really is essential reading for any Beatles fan. It is a fascinating and detailed account, focusing on the Apple days, of the tangled business dealings that ultimately lead to bitter court appearances and the demise of The Beatles. The book explores in detail a subject matter that is only briefly touched upon, by the then surviving members, in The Beatles Anthology, as delightful as that is.

To round off, for now, my look at some Beatles books we flick through the pages of Ken McNab’s ‘The Beatles in Scotland’. As the title suggests, this book explores The Beatles’ Scottish connections. This doesn’t just focus on their tours through Scotland, including their very first tour when they went by the name of The Silver Beatles, but also John and Yoko’s prolonged visit to Scotland following a car accident and a look at the ‘Scottish Beatle’, the unfortunate Stuart Sutcliffe.

The personal accounts from those that “were there” and the wide variety of photographs are the book’s strengths. The major weakness being the apparently rather slipshod approach to research which sees some rather basic errors committed.

With a number of titles sitting in my ‘to read’ pile and an almost unlimited amount of source of material this will be a subject that I am bound to return to at a later date. In the meantime all recommendations gratefully received. 

You'll Never Win Anything with Kids?

So another season passes by without Partick Thistle adding to their 1921 triumph in the Scottish Cup.

Saturday’s defeat at the hands of Queen of the South was a massive disappointment, of that there can be little doubt. Disappointment in a football sense as the team didn’t play anywhere near as well as they can do, and disappointment in a financial sense as the potential of some much needed income that a prolonged cup run might have produced is lost.

The reaction from the Thistle fans to this defeat has been one of anger. The frustration is understandable. Queen of the South aren’t by any stretch of the imagination an especially good team. First Division side defeating another First Division though isn’t surely a result of any great note?

The calls for the removal of the manager, and a radical restructuring of the football side of the Club’s operation certainly seems to be out of perspective with the result.

The wisdom of the Club’s Youth Development scheme has been called into question in some quarters. The lack of players from the youth system in the current Thistle first team has been sited as justification for scrapping the youth development structure in its’ entirety.

That, to this writer at least, seems a foolhardy course of action to follow.

A successful youth policy takes years to develop. It isn’t just about those at the oldest age group, under 19, for whom the natural progression is now into the Thistle first team. That age group should be the tip of the iceberg.

Beneath that level there should be teams of varying age groups whose development is nurtured through its’ various stages. A lack of players from the youth system in the current first team, and it is unfair to suggest that there has been no success in that front, is no reason to abandon a youth structure that includes boys still in their very early teens. 

Developing these players into potential future first team players is a task that requires as much patience as it will hard work. There will naturally be those that don’t make it. The number growing as they get nearer to full professional contracts and the Thistle first team.

The current Head of Youth Development at Firhill, Gerry Britton, has only been in his post for a few years. Nowhere near long enough for his labours to have borne fruit, but significant progress has been made. He, and his band of coaches, need to be given the time to continue their work in trying to create an enviable youth structure.  One not unlike Hamilton’s which has earned their club significant transfer fees. 

  

The work that needs to be done in terms of Youth Development should be allowed to be continued irrespective of the fortunes of the first team at any given time.