Disturbing Fans No.2: Hamilton Accies’ Last Great Orator

Last week I was browsing second hand book shops in Edinburgh when I came across a large hardback about Scottish football, published sometime in the 1980s. At the back end of the book was an obligatory, but short, section about the importance of fans. “Without the fans there’d be no game etc.” Alongside this dullard’s prose I found a picture of Ian ‘Fergie’ Russell, the man who inspired my short story ‘Furlington Welfare’s Last Great Orator’, published in For Whom the Ball Rolls. 

Literary inspiration - the
Late 'Fergie' of
 Hamilton Aacdemical 

During the early 1980s I went to a lot of games at Hamilton Academical, because my dad lived close by at the time. They played mainly in the Scottish second tier, and attracted around 1500 fans to their now demolished stadium, Douglas Park (it's a Sainsbury's). There are very few specific games that I can remember seeing there besides a mildly surprising 2-1 victory over Dundee in the Scottish League Cup. Truth be told, the most entertaining performer at Douglas Park was Fergie.

A portly gent, then in his late 40s, Fergie wore a shabby, dark grey suit and always had a red Accies scarf draped around his neck. His talent was to bark out unceasing invective for the entire 90 minutes, regardless of score and opponent...

Want to read a longer and much improved version of this article? You're in luck, it's just been published in the latest issue of the brilliant Nutmeg magazine (issue 32), and you can order it online here.

The Quiet Fan was published by Unbound in autumn 2018 and is here.

Sunday papers, scrapbooks, and knowing that Brechin beat Forfar

Scores, scorers, crowds and
tables = six-year-old's paradise

When I was six years old in the early 1970s I provided the Sunday afternoon entertainment for the Cocking brothers, the butcher’s sons who lived two doors up. Chris, the youngest, was my mate. We played football together, but he preferred war games, which always ended with his mum yelling at us for treading on her wallflowers while sidling up on the enemy. His two older siblings, Steve and Ian, were already teenagers who had nothing better to do on the Sabbath than pick up a copy of The People and test me on the previous day’s football results.

I can’t remember how it started. I was probably about to confront a Lincolnshire-based Nazi spy when I overheard one of the Cockings casually ask how Grimsby had got on the day before. I would have turned my attention from Fritz the Enemy - making an imaginary thick-accented plea for mercy - to chirp, “Lost 3-2 at Watford, goals scored by Coyle and Lewis. Crowd: 5,669.” What else did I know, they must have wondered?

And so I began to habitually turn up just as they were finishing off their weekly roast. They’d kick off with the big games (easy) and, in an atmosphere of increasing hilarity, make their way down through the four divisions, and then into Scotland too. Their incredulous delight came from the fact that I could remember every single score, from the Manchester derby to Forfar’s 3-1 away win at Brechin City. I

Calling on fans to boycott the next two World Cups

Eric Cantona shows us a sign

A few disparate but powerless voices have been calling on fans to boycott the next two World Cups on the grounds that both Russia and Qatar are serial violators of human rights. I am one of a very small handful of people I know who is refusing to watch the current qualifiers, and who will not watch a single World Cup game of any kind until the start of the qualifying campaign for the 2026 event.

Football’s authorities have always claimed, predictably enough, that they can not be involved in “politics”, as though human rights were a mere issue among others to be debated during electoral campaigns. As though sport exists in a cultural vacuum, never to be politically exploited by states wanting to present a phoney ceremonial façade of peace and national stability to the world at large.

Yet from Hitler’s 1936 Olympic propaganda triumph, all the way to Brazil’s World Cup and the Rio Olympics 80 years later, sporting

Disturbing Fans No. 1: The Bell Ringer From Hell

Just because I'm a quiet fan doesn't mean that I don't appreciate the effort that other supporters put into their noise. The first in an occasional series.

Schalke's bell-ringer from
 hell (pic: The Quiet Fan)

In 2005 I took my father-in-law, Gerd, to his first game since 1947, when as a teenager he’d seen Helmut Schön play in the small stadium opposite his house. For my birthday he'd bought me two tickets to the German League Cup Final at the newly renovated stadium in Leipzig, and begrudgingly agreed to come along "if you can't find anyone else". As it happened, I couldn't, and so we drove together from his home in Dresden to the outskirts of town and took the specially laid-on shuttle tram to the freshly rebuilt World Cup stadium.

There was a reason my father-in-law hadn't been to a game for 57 years. Although he likes to watch football on television, happily moaning from the safety of his sofa, his view of humanity at large has been shaped by growing up in 1930s Germany, and then fleeing Dresden from the post-war Soviet

The Quiet Fan - about the blog and the book

This blog would not exist without the book The Quiet Fan - a football memoir that recounts the quirks of growing up in the 1970s and 80s as a fan of both Lincoln City (by geography) and Scotland (by blood). It also examines not only why football is so important to so many of us, but how we can watch and enjoy it in a more sane, less furious fashion.

The book was published by Unbound in the autumn of 2018. If you like what you read here - the content is exclusive to this blog - then you will certainly like the book too.  

Previous books: For Whom the Ball Rolls (Fiction - 12 football short stories, 10 miscellaneous)
"A fine read. Plenderleith creates a bittersweet world [where] football can bring joy, misery and bewilderment in the same story." The Sunday Times

Rock n Roll Soccer: The Short Life and Fast Times of the North American Soccer League
"A compendious but vividly entertaining history of the League."  Independent on Sunday (Book of the Week)
"Written with a raffish exuberance worthy of its subject." Times Literary Supplement