PITY the Scottish fitba’ fan. He/she assails his body by exposing it to temperatures that would force a polar bear to wear a scarf. He (the women are too smart) partakes at matches of food that makes an I’m A Celebrity challenge appear sumptuous. The football fan’s eyes have also witnessed such horror, horror on a football pitch that post-traumatic disorder was first diagnosed not after the Vietnam War but following an Ayrshire Junior Cup tie in the 1960s.
The fan also tortures his/her soul with thoughts of the supernatural with talk of jinxes, hoodoos and curses. It is why most fans follow specific rituals before big matches. It is why there is much chatter of bogey grounds.
The Biggissimo Bogeysimo, the Curse of Curses, the Jinky of Jinxes was, of course, the failure of Hibs to win the Scottish Cup since man walked upright and flexed his opposable thumbs (precisely 1902 in Edinburgh). There are three things I do not grasp a) when Hibs not winning the cup became such a thing b) the validity of Hibsing it and c) reality.
The first two can be dealt with here and I will leave the last to my therapist and heavy medication.
I am sure that Hibs fans must have suffered anguish at the cup drought and Hearts fans have rejoiced in this repeated failure. But for the rest of us it was, at most, a quirk in Scottish football.
There will be those who insist that the only reason I never watched the Famous Five is because Saturday was the day I queued for my pension but, honest Guv, I was too young to see them though my first professional interview was Lawrie Reilly, a great, humble, humorous man.
But I watched Eddie Turnbull’s teams in the seventies with great affection. They had wonderful players and an appetite to enthral rather than merely win.
But, rather than jinxes or hoodoos, all of the above and subsequent Hibs teams failed to win the Scottish Cup because they were a) beaten by the better team on the day b) beaten by a Celtic team who had just failed to make the final of the European Cup or, most fatally, c) had Pat Fenlon in the dugout.
These three circumstances are more than enough to deny any team a cup triumph and, while the Hibs fans tortured themselves with thoughts that they had summoned the wrath of the sporting gods by some unimaginable, unspecified slight, the rest of us simply believed that the time must come for a parade of the Scottish Cup down Leith Walk.
And so it came to pass. The story cannot be better told than by Aidan Smith, an Edinburgh native sentenced not only to watch continued failure but forced to write about it. This is a punishment that is exquisite in its cruelty. Persevered (Arena Sport, £14.99), his tale of (spoiler alert) how Hibs finally won the cup is thus intensely personal. It is also wonderfully wide-ranging, dramatic, moving and informative.
As Caledonian fitba’ fanatics, all of us accept that that the game exists only to punish us. But we endure because every so often – say, every 114 years or so –something happens to make it all seem worthwhile. It may be as simple as eating a pie that seems to contain meat. It may be as unexpected as that 6ft 6 striker trapping the ball. Or it may be as splendid as one’s team winning the cup.
Smith delves into this historic triumph with the aid of the celebrated combatants. It is smashing stuff. Alan Stubbs is clear and honest and the players are revelatory on the moments that brought success. Liam Henderson on a certain two corner kicks gives an insight into the precision professional football demands.
The highlight for this observer, though, is the section with Conrad Logan, the generously framed goalkeeper, who came from nowhere and has returned there but with a Scottish Cup medal in his ample shorts.
His brief exposure to Hibs did not dilute his joy at winning the cup but he serves to accentuate the beauty of the story. If Logan was ecstatic, grasping the significance of the occasion, how did it feel for those who had spent lifetime wandering from ground to ground in search of Scottish Cup redemption?
The answer lies in Persevered. It is benignly haunted by Smith’s departed father, and enlivened by Archie, a son who has the propensity for difficult questions that role entails. But is the energy, passion and mere presence of Smith that makes the book. This is a heady distillation of that intoxicating elixir that occasionally is drunk with some surprise by every supporter.
It is, in short, about that moment when everything just works out on the pitch and we are, in the midst of mortgages and existential angst, amazed about just how marvellous this makes us feel.
It also, incidentally, provides irrefutable proof of the mischievous nature of the sporting gods. Hibs did not just win the Scottish Cup. A team accused of psychological frailty, of weakness in latter moments of matches, won the cup by scoring in the dying moments.
They changed the meaning of a slur. They won spectacularly and with no little skill and immeasurable defiance. They Hibsed it.
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