Something unusual and long overdue is going on in Scottish football.
Most local authority officials around the country wouldn’t know an open-topped bus if it ran them over, but suddenly they’re having to book them and plan the route for a victory parade.
Lord Provosts are putting on the chains of office and ‘toon cooncillors’ are muscling in on photo-shoots for some reflected glory. All because their local club has at last done something special.
In the last three years it’s happened in Dundee, Kilmarnock, Edinburgh, and now Paisley. The last six cup finals in Scotland have been won by six different clubs.
You didn’t need to be from Paisley to recognise how moving the entire League Cup final was for St Mirren supporters yesterday.
Since they last won anything, in 1987, plenty of their fans are no longer with us, others have drifted away from the club, while fans who were kids back then are now parents themselves and took their young ones along yesterday. When their team delivered for them and the cup was being hurled into the air by one jubilant player after another, The Skids’ The Saints Are Coming blasted over the public address system. The St Mirren end was rocking. Plenty of those fans had a lump in their throat.
It’s too easy to say winning something means more to, say, a St Mirren fan than it does to a Celtic or Rangers supporter. Old Firm supporters celebrate every trophy with unbridled joy, even when it’s only weeks after their last one.
But it does not have the profound, lasting significance to them that it does to those who support anyone else. Even now, on their knees in Division Three, Rangers fans can expect to be back contesting the major honours, and certainly the cups, in about two or three years.
St Mirren fans let themselves go last night as the sluice opened and years of mediocrity, pain and relentless disappointment washed away. But they know, too, that it could be another few years before they win something again.
What makes days like yesterday so refreshing is the nourishing effect they have on some of the traditional football heartlands. St Mirren will milk this cup win for all it’s worth for the next few months. They’ll take the trophy round schools and youth clubs, all in the hope it might eke out some more supporters or investment. It probably will.
The temporary weakening of Rangers, and Celtic’s surprisingly poor recent record at Hampden, has given others their chance.
Between 1996 and 2006 the Old Firm won nine of the ten League Cups. From 1999 to 2009 the pair of them won ten of the 11 Scottish Cups. They hoarded every single league title too, of course. In the attempt to convince as a competitive football nation that is the equivalent of a nuclear winter, monotonous and depressing.
But the last six finals have been won by, in chronological order, Dundee United, Rangers, Celtic, Kilmarnock, Hearts and St Mirren (incidentally, the last three all defeated Celtic en route to winning their cup). Usually a sense of hopelessness can overcome a club and its support when it’s up against Celtic or Rangers.
When St Mirren last reached a cup final they shifted fewer than 10,000 tickets and the most plausible explanation for that is that in the 2010 League Cup final they were playing a strong Rangers team and much of their latent support didn’t think they had a cat in hell’s chance. That turned out to be just about right, considering that they couldn’t beat that Rangers side even when it went down to nine men. Yet nearly 17,000 followed them yesterday. Why? Because they reckoned they had a far better chance against an ordinary Hearts team sitting just one place above them in the bottom half of the SPL. It had a genuine competitive edge and their fans responded.
None of the team which started for St Mirren yesterday played in that horrible 2010 defeat. It was a different manager, too.
What it meant to Danny Lennon was obvious from the fact he was out on the pitch posing for photographs with his family and the cup long, long after the final whistle. He deserved his special moment. “This is for the community of Paisley,” he said.
“We are a community club and I’m absolutely delighted that we have delivered this piece of silverware for the first time in the club’s history. I had a look around at the fans because I wanted to take it all in. I might never get to another cup final. No amount of alcohol tonight will get me any higher than I am right now: I’m on cloud nine.”
But yesterday might have meant most of all to those who have not only turned out for St Mirren at cup finals but for all the years of frustration, disappointment and slog in between, from chairman Stewart Gilmour and the dozens of behind-the-scenes staff to the hard-core 4000 who are there come rain or come shine.
St Mirren delivered for them just as United, Kilmarnock and Hearts have recently delivered for their traditionally suffering, tolerant supporters.
And when the alternative would be watching Celtic win the League Cup for the 15th time, or Rangers for the 28th, it’s clear that days like yesterday don’t just give Paisley a shot in the arm, but all of Scottish football.
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