My father ran an amateur football team. (I never once heard him refer to himself as a ‘manager’. I suppose it was his politics.)
Strictly speaking, he ran a ‘juvenile’ side – for ages 18-21. ‘Youth’ football was for the 16-18 year-olds and the ‘amateurs’ were ‘the auld men’ over 21.
This explains why as a child I was often to be found on the touchlines of black ash pitches in Glasgow like those at Cowlairs. Red-ash, ‘all weather’ surfaces were just coming in but I seemed fated to be tied to the old-fashioned cinder pitches. I played my schoolboy football on Springburn Park’s rolling black ash pitches. (Make a slide tackle on a Saturday morning and you’d spend the rest of the weekend using a nail brush to ease out the cinder particles from the scars on your thighs.)
Even my local junior team, Glasgow Perthshire, played on black ash at their Keppoch Park. It bred a tough outlook. I remember one game standing by one of the dugouts and a player went down injured, rolling about and holding his leg. The manager turns to the trainer: “You’d better see whit’s wrang wi’ him.”
“Ach, naw, Ah won’t bother,” says the trainer, leaning back with folded arms against the dugout wall. “He’s actin’ it. Ah kin tell.”
Wherever I‘ve lived around Britain, I’ve tried to take in the local semi-professional and amateur teams. Me and a stray dog watching for free on a wind-swept park. Me paying a few quid entrance then another pound for a watery Bovril, sheltering from a freezing rain in a rickety stand with a few dozen other stalwarts. I enjoy it. Thanks to my Dad, I had an early training for it.
But why all this jolly nostalgia? Well, I hope there are plenty of Rangers’ fans who share my mentality and enthusiasms. If Mr Green gets his way, they’ll have plenty of opportunities to visit cold, windy parks and ramshackle stadiums in Coronation Street settings, tucked behind gas holders and scrap yards – though, sadly, the black ash has long disappeared.
Mr Green’s latest Big Idea is to take Rangers into English football via the Conference League. This may of course just be a scare tactic to encourage the football authorities in Scotland to permit a more rapid return of his club to the SPL.
However, Mr Green is a Yorkshireman who appears to have little interest in the general welfare of Scottish football so his threat to take Rangers down south is probably a very real one. He has spoken of buying out one of the Conference League teams and taking its place. In four or five years, by his reckoning, Rangers will have worked their way up the divisions and into the honey-pot of the English Premier League.
Will it be so easy? Even if Mr Green uses EU competition laws to overcome the opposition of the FA to a Rangers’ transfer into English football, I doubt even the smartest lawyers in the land will get round the taboo against division-hopping by buying out a football franchise.
No, cunning legal work might allow Rangers to move into English football but they’d have to start at the bottom. The very bottom. That’s where the cold, windy parks come in. After a few years of that, it’s the tumbledown grounds behind the gas works.
FC United of Manchester is a good, illustrative example. Created by Manchester United fans disillusioned by the Glazers capture of their club, they decided to start anew. In the tenth tier of English football. They had the resources and support to hire Bury FC’s ground as their home venue. But their away games in those early years were on public parks. Now, eight years after their foundation, they are in the Evo Stik Northern Premier League, battling it out against the likes of Rushall Olympic, Frickley Athletic and Kendal Town. And still three tiers below the English League.
But of course, Rangers have more resources than FC United so their movement through the divisions would be much more rapid, wouldn’t it? Given the Gers’ patchy showing in the Scottish Division Three, I wouldn’t be so sure of that. The general quality of the Evo Stik Premier is probably superior to what Rangers have played against this season. And that’s before you get to the Conference and the lower levels of the fully professional game in England. It’ll be a good decade, at the very least, before Rangers get within striking distance of the fabled EPL. (It took AFC Wimbledon nine years from its creation to reach the Football League’s Division Two.)
And the early years of the adventure will be spent on public parks. I trust the Rangers’ owner will lead by example when it comes to supporting the team away from home.
Wrap up warmly, Mr Green.
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