Great Scots

Having survived the challenge of a sport-free week with no great hardship (Berlin absolutely rocked and Crime & The City Solution’s reunion gig was the greatest event in world history, of which more next issue) a refreshed and re-invigorated Foul Play returned to Dublin and finally completed the unspeakably arduous process of moving house.

One side-effect of this was that I’ve had to live without television and the internet since my return, basically ensuring that this has been easily the least sports-saturated fortnight in living memory, only relieved by the occasional trip downstairs to the excellent public house on top of which I now live.
In total, I’ve watched five matches in the two weeks since we last convened, which believe me is starvation rations by my usual standards. Easily the highlight was Celtic’s inspired demolition of the might of FC Barcelona, closely followed by the Hibs-Dundee United encounter on Sunday which – and it feels surreal even to type this sentence – has restored my beloved Hibees to the top of the Scottish league table. Not third place, or even second. Top spot. It almost certainly won’t last, but it’s still unbelievably intoxicating, and a prescient pre-season wager at 18/1 for Hibs to win the ‘SPL without Celtic’ now looks an increasingly inspired investment.
Regular readers may be dimly aware of my three-decade love affair with the club, which so far in my lifetime has yielded no silverware at all apart from two League Cups, subjected me to the agony of relegation once and several frightening flirtations with a repeat, more humiliating derby hammerings at the hands of Hearts than I care to recall, and the occasional glory of seeing wonderfully enterprising passing teams put together every few years, before the best players are inevitably picked off at will by the Glaswegian giants or predatory English clubs with superior paying power, leaving an endless uphill struggle to replace them with either callow youngsters or mediocre but affordable veteran journeymen who hopefully won’t let you down too horribly. (That’s the winner of the Elongated Sentence of the Issue Award, by a country mile – Sub Ed). There are times when I suspect the mythological Greek legend of Sisyphus (the lad who had to spend his lifetime pushing a massive rock up a hill which kept on rolling back down) was almost certainly inspired by Hibs’ struggle against the forces of economic gravity in football.
And yet, the landscape now is changed utterly. A most enjoyable trawl last Thursday through the Daily Record (an unspeakably low-rent Scots tabloid redeemed only by a voluminously gargantuan sports section) repeatedly prompted me to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. Five years ago, you couldn’t have made all this up: Celtic with their heads high, having humbled the greatest club team in living memory. Hibs on top of the table, taking full advantage of the fact that Neil Lennon’s men seem more than a little distracted by their Champions League adventure and are not exactly firing on all cylinders week-in week-out against the St Johnstones and Kilmarnocks. Rangers lumbering around DIVISION FUCKING THREE like circus clowns in a black tragi-comedy, paying in full for the sins of the previous regime when they fraudulently wormed their way to the title year after year after year, winning 7-0 most weeks with a multi-zillionaire subs’ bench which would have won the title with its eyes closed. And Hearts, our eternal tormentors, fighting for their very existence as the prospect of a Rangers-style liquidation grows increasingly real.
I’ll stop the gloating here: in all honesty, I don’t want to see Hearts disappear. Aside from all the staff who would be thrown onto the dole, it should be pointed out that some of my favourite people of all time (grandfather, uncle and many others) have been Hearts fans. The prospect of there being no more New Year derbies would at once be a relief and a disappointment. We have had the occasional day in the sun against them, but they’ve been few and far between; the men in maroon have tended to win by savage 4-0 and 5-0 margins while their fans took this as a cue to dance deliriously and wave Union Jacks, and the most recent of these humiliations – in May’s Scottish Cup Final, which Hearts won 5-1 – was an experience so horrific as to defy description. I never want to go through anything like that ever again, and if it transpires that the Jambos do have to follow in Rangers’ footsteps and start life from scratch in a vastly reduced capacity down in the wastelands of Division Three, one part of me is inclined to favour the idea whole-heartedly.
So, for the time being, things look rosier in Hibs garden than for quite some time. We’ve been here before, of course, and proceeded to tumble downhill without brakes, but the landscape now is an altogether different one, shorn of Rangers for at least the next three years, with only Celtic to overthrow. Given the disparity in financial resources, the chances of Hibs coming out on top over the course of a nine-month campaign must still be considered remote in the extreme, but it now seems at least reasonable to hold out the hope that a 110-year Cup drought may actually be ended within my lifetime, and this year seems as good a time as any.
I will return to contemplation of other sporting matters next fortnight but right now, nothing else comes close to Hibs’ ascension. We are wholly unaccustomed to standing on top of the table, and I’m massively enjoying the view. Go forth and conquer, lads.