THE air was heavy with the smell of stale alcohol and burnt human skin. The aroma conjured up what it must have been like to have been involved in a blood sacrifice on the scale of Aztecs at the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan (just outside Dennyloanhead) or a witness to the worst excesses of the Tonton Macoute under Baby Doc Duvalier.
It was, of course, worse than that. It was Heatwave Sunday and the scene of this horror was the 21.32 from Partick. The inhabitants were showing off more flesh than the bumper book of Playboy Models Visit Chicago Meat Market. They were as boisterous as only Glaswegians can be with that intoxicating cocktail of natural rays and electric soup. There were casualties.
One sat across from me, his eyes so glassy they looked double glazed. “You’re a football writer,” he said, his quality of judgment obviously cruelly diminished. “I wonder how do you come up with your ideas and how do you know what questions to ask?”
My answer was swift and full of sincerity: “The next idea I have will die of loneliness. And I don’t ask questions. I have people who do that for me,” I said.
These interrogators tend to be experienced, bright and have an idea of what has just occurred on the football pitch. The delicate matter of the post-match press question is best left to these professionals. This truism is never more brutally illustrated than by edited highlights of my misdemeanours. These include asking Neil Lennon, then the Celtic manager, whether he was going to sign a player he had already signed (I had mixed up names), congratulating Jamie Murray (he had lost a match but played well, a distinction that may have been lost in translation) and inquiring of Wayne Rooney if he believed in Soren Kierkegaard’s tenet that spiritual matters had to be lived rather than observed and whether this had any experiential resonance with him.
No, the post-match press conference demands an element of aforethought and precision. It also requires an ability to be so focused on the match before one’ s eyes that it would make the Dala Lama’s meditational state seem akin to the rampaging of a two-year-old after consuming the contents of a selection box and mistaking a cone of cocaine for a sherbet dab. And who of us has not done that?
But I digress.
My priority in match reporting was simply to record the correct scoreline. And I almost always did that. I was quite good at naming the scorers, though obviously not infallible. But I was completely oblivious to almost everything else. Witnessing the pitch invasion at Hampden in the cup final, I offered up a small prayer that I was hill-walking rather than covering the match. There is a chance – a shade of odds-on – that I would have missed the entire shambles.
IT is why I hold the pros in such high regard. They would ask to speak to people I was unaware had played. I subsequently found out that one interviewee had not only scored the match winner but been sent off for removing his shirt. But only after receiving his first yellow card for a celebration that involved full marital relations with his partner who was both a "soap star" and the prospective parliamentary candidate for Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley.
But back to the train. The glazed-eyes fella wondered what we asked of footballers and I referenced a case when a “wee” team came to Celtic Park. The match had been humdrum, Celtic winning comfortably. My concerns over how to spice up such mundane fare were diverted when Gaz, the Einstein to my Benny from Crossroads, insisted that we should speak to the No.9 of the visitors. The ball-boy standing behind the Celtic goal had enjoyed more touches than said under-employed striker. But Gaz was adamant.
And when the forward came in, Gaz was commendably brisk, in the manner of a procurator-fiscal seeking to dispose of a case that was so open and shut it should have been fitted with a zip.
“The reason we want to talk to you,” he told the bemused striker, “is that you seemed not to be fully supportive of the referee’s decision to award Celtic their first goal.”
The striker paused only to take a deep breath before informing us that that said goal had involved a series of handballs so deliberate and blatant that we should record it as having being scored from the free-throw line. He attributed this to his fervent belief that the man with the whistle was a Celtic fan who presumably was not now in the building, having had to leave swiftly to catch a supporters’ bus home.
When he had finished his evidence, Gaz looked around in vain for anyone to provide a cross-examination. There was, of course, no need. The big striker had supplied such a news story that even I could spot it. He was allowed to step down from the witness box – sorry dais – and left the room to a murmur from we hacks.
In a moment’s silence, I ventured that we should all chip in for the striker’s taxi to Hampden for the inevitable disciplinary hearing.
There were those who said I should give Gaz a fiver for doing my work for me. I considered this but ruled it out. I mean, I would have had to do that with every one of them.
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