IN looking for someone to help promote their Persevered tour, Hibernian could not have alighted on a more suitable candidate than Darren McGregor. The Easter Road club elected to mark last year’s historic Scottish Cup success by taking the trophy around 114 venues in Edinburgh and the surrounding areas, one stop for every year they had waited to get their hands on the trophy once more. McGregor, a lifelong Hibs fan, happily tagged along on several of those dates, even if a proposed visit to his old primary school in Leith had to be shelved on the grounds that it had been long since bulldozed to the ground.
McGregor’s career trajectory also tied in nicely with the message Hibs were wanting to portray of never giving up. The defender was relatively late arriving into the professional game, did not turn full-time until he was nearly 25, and then missed two years of football due to injury. And yet at no point did he abandon his dream. Now he can approach a second successive William Hill Scottish Cup semi-final this afternoon having won both the cup and the Championship over the past 12 months.
“The tour has been unbelievable,” he said. “The club asked me what primary school I went to so we could take it there, but it’s been closed down. Which probably tells you something about what kind of primary I went to.
“The highlight for me was taking it back to Leith Athletic, the team I started with as an under-11. I was quite a late starter [as a player] and stayed there to under-19s. So that was special, taking the trophy down there, showing the kids and saying: “Listen, you can make it, even if you’re here at 13, 14, 15…”
“There’s this big assumption that, if you’re not playing with Hibs and Hearts at the age of 13, you’re done. Young players can use me as an inspiration, someone who made it as a full-time professional at 24, going on 25. I took until 19 to get to Cowdenbeath. So, if you can take a bit of motivation from that, do it. You can do it.
“Even a couple of years before that, I was in a clothes shop folding jeans so it really is a dream come true and, as I keep telling people, the dream just gets better and better. Going to Rangers from St Mirren that was unbelievable, something I never expected – and probably something that would never have come my way, in different times, with the Rangers teams they’d had.
“Then for Mark Warburton to turn up and effectively release me, if there was one other club in Britain I wanted to join, it was Hibs. So to then get this chance, come to Hibs and win the Scottish Cup, then win the Championship - it’s all a win-win for me.”
Aberdeen will start the tie as favourites but McGregor felt it would be unwise to write Hibs off. “We know that Aberdeen are strong all over the park. They’ve got some really good players – in fact, I don’t think they’ve got any weaknesses, to be honest. But I believe that we’re a big-game team. We’ve proven that in past years. So it’s a win-win for us.
“If we go and just give a good account of ourselves, the fans will be happy because we’ve won the league and reached the semi-finals of the Scottish Cup. If we do manage to win, it’s the cherry on top of the cake, another Scottish Cup Final – which the Hibs fans have been spoiled with.”
Today’s occasion also marks a first return to Hampden in four years for Neil Lennon whose last appearance there was overseeing a Celtic Scottish Cup final win over Hibs in 2013. The national stadium has been a scene of mixed results for the Northern Irishman but he is glad to be heading back.
“After the Ayr game in the quarter-final I knew we were going back and it was a good feeling,” he said. “I’m looking forward to it and I know the stadium pretty well. It’s different, the logistics are different, but the good thing is that it’ll still be fresh in the players’ minds because they played there three or four times last year.
“I’ve got some great Hampden memories although I’ve also had some disappointing ones as well. I suppose I’m in the in-between bracket. I think we normally take the east side at Hampden. That’ll be home from home because we were always there with Celtic.”
As the leading side in the Championship, there have been few times this season when Hibs have begun as underdogs but Lennon thinks it might suit his men.
“Aberdeen will be favourites but we have had that all season and I had it all my career at Celtic so it is difficult. To be fair to Aberdeen, they have handled the games pretty well this season except when they have been underdogs against Celtic, who are different class at the minute.
“But Aberdeen are favourites and their fans will be expecting to get to the final against a Championship team, although we are not a Championship team any more. I want to win the cup because I want to win everything. I have won it twice as a manager and four times as a player and you never get tired of winning.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here