SCOTTISH football has produced many legends. Jock Stein, Jim Baxter, Billy Bremner: the list could fill the paper. To it we would like to add Aggie Moffat. Sounds unlikely? Think on.
Football is about far more than the stars on the pitch. It is dependent upon a host of backroom staff, operating far from the limelight, often taken for granted, perhaps even unappreciated or unpaid. But they are the backbone of the game. And no one had more backbone than Aggie Moffat, who has died.
For 27 years, Aggie made the tea, laundered the strips and kept the dressing rooms clean at St Johnstone. Former manager Alex Totten recalled fondly and with respect that the kitchens at St Johnstone were “very much Aggie’s domain”. But it was another manager who famously got into hot water with the tea lady when she confronted him in a corridor about a broken kettle.
Graeme Souness, once a fiery player on the pitch and a renowned leader of men, met his match when Aggie tackled him not just about the kettle but about the mess left in the away dressing room by his Rangers team. The tea lady soon put Souness’s gas at a peep, and the incident persuaded him that Scottish football was just too hot to handle.
We should say that Aggie was more than a tea lady. Apart from the cleaning and tidying up, she made sandwiches and much-loved soups. Her late husband Bob also helped with the match-day sandwiches, and it is to all such stalwarts that we would like to pay tribute.
To the cleaners, kit-men, physios, groundsmen and women, ticket office staff, programme sellers, stewards and even the poor, benighted lads and lasses dispensing dubious pies and scalding Bovril from draughty kiosks: where would the game be without their contribution? Football owes a great debt to them all, and the late, great Aggie Moffat of St Johnstone, who cleaned the strips and made the soup and kept the dressing-rooms tidy, might well be considered their patron saint.
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