Massive Hibsteria

A perennial underdog of Scottish soccer has at last had its day. Craig Fitzsimons couldn't be more delighted!

Craig Fitzsimons, 15 May 2012

The Euros are still two entire months away, but they can wait. Foul Play has more than enough to obsess over in the meantime, and no, I’m not referring to Man City’s just-about-still-breathing title hopes. A few hundred miles to the north, in a city in which I spent vast stretches of my childhood, something astonishing is afoot.

Hibernian FC – an entity to whom my entire existence was more or less devoted throughout my teens and early 20s, until Real Life took over – have snatched a place in the Scottish Cup Final, thus presenting them with the opportunity to win the thing for the first time since 1902, when my dearly-missed grandfather wasn’t even a glint in his daddy’s eye.

To get one’s head around the sheer enormity of the occasion which awaits, it might help to bear in mind that the world’s last surviving First World War veteran passed away two months ago, and she was a bouncing one-year-old when Hibs last lifted the Cup. There is, surely, nobody alive who can remember it happening. Generations since have come and gone; infinitely better Hibs teams than the 2012 vintage have failed to scale this particular Everest; and yet now, after a season which can only be described as horrific, they are 90 minutes away from eternal immortality.

The semi-final against Aberdeen was straight out of Roy Of The Rovers, involving a ridiculously brilliant start (1-0 up after three minutes), followed by an hour of abject terror as one awaited the inevitable hammer-blow of an Aberdeen equaliser, duly delivered round about the hour mark by a preposterously wonderful long-range strike from the Dons’ Rory Fallon.

The half-hour that followed was one of unrelenting torment as the action swung wildly back and forth; then, with five minutes of normal time left, an astute through ball from Garry O’Connor found Leigh Griffiths, who was surely doomed by the weight of a hundred years’ history to trip over his own feet, or sky the ball a mile over, or at best, unleash a magnificent strike sweet and true into the net only to watch in horror as the linesman raised his flag.

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