Rugby – Blood and Porridge

June 26, 2024June 26, 2024

An honest John

From wikipedia.org / © Scottish Government

John Swinney became leader of the Scottish National Party on May 6^th and was sworn into office as First Minister of Scotland two days later. His arrival in the two roles comes during a difficult period for his party. First, the SNP has had to endure the spectacle of its once-mightily-respected, once-seemingly-unassailable former boss Nicola Sturgeon, who served as First Minister from 2014 to 2023, mired in a scandal whereby her husband, Peter Murrell, has been investigated and arrested over possible mismanagement of the party’s finances.

Then came the sorry saga of Sturgeon’s replacement as party leader and First Minister, Humza Yousaf. Yousaf was brave enough to defy the British-establishment line and challenge Benjamin Netanyahu’s policy of killing huge numbers of innocent Palestinians in revenge for Hamas’s slaughter of Israeli civilians on October 7th, 2023. But in most other respects, he was pretty hapless.

Most notably, he didn’t so much shoot himself in the foot as blow the foot off at the ankle when he ended his party’s alliance with Scotland’s other pro-independence party, the Scottish Greens. The Greens were so outraged they made it clear that they would vote against Yousaf in a no-confidence vote in the Scottish Parliament. Realising he was going to lose that vote, Yousaf resigned. His resignation at least seems principled compared with the behaviour of another First Minister recently. Labour’s Vaughan Gething, First Minister of Wales, recently lost a no-confidence vote in the Welsh Senedd and blithely refused to quit, dismissing the vote as a ‘gimmick’.

Swinney’s arrival as Yousaf’s replacement happened at an incredibly inopportune time. Barely had he got through the door of Bute House, the First Minister’s official residence in Edinburgh, than Rishi Sunak, British Prime Minister and a politician so clodhopping he makes Humza Yousaf look like a smooth operator, announced a general election for July 4^th. The polls say the SNP are going to lose a swathe of seats in the London parliament to Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. Even if Swinney was the best politician in the world, I don’t see what he could do to avoid that.

Not that I think Scottish voters are enamoured with Labour, who are so obsessed with attracting former Conservative Party voters they’ve made their policies a continuation of the right-wing ones that’ve damned Britain to rack and ruin during the past 14 years. For instance, they’ve vowed not to revisit the terms of the Tories’ Brexit arrangement with the European Union, even though it’s hobbled British businesses and it’ll thwart their plans to ‘grow’ the economy; and they won’t countenance raising taxes, which makes you wonder how they’re ever going to lift Britain’s public services out of their current, dire state. But I suspect folk in Scotland are so scunnered by the SNP’s recent scandals and mishaps, and so desperate to see the back of the Tories, that they’ll vote for Labour en masse next month.

For this reason, and because of Swinney’s bespectacled, unexcitable and unshowy demeanour – he’s often likened to a ‘bank manager’ or an ‘accountant’, although I remember one Scottish hack comparing him to ‘Harry Potter’, which I’m sure didn’t please the famously anti-SNP J.K. Rowling – there’s been speculation that he’s serving merely as a ‘caretaker’ leader, steadying the helm until someone of more substance takes over. In particular, many in the Scottish media expect the leadership to soon go to Kate Forbes, who’s currently Deputy First Minister. Famous for his negotiating skills, Swinney managed to talk Forbes out of taking him on in a leadership contest in May.

Anyway, I should say that back in my misspent youth, I crossed paths a few times with John Swinney – whose youth, I imagine, was somewhat less misspent than mine. When I’d been a pupil at Peebles High School in the late 1970s and early 1980s, one of my best pals was a guy called Roger Small. Once we finished school, Roger went to university in Edinburgh and I to university in Aberdeen. I kept in touch with him and on a few weekends came down from Aberdeen to stay in his flat in Edinburgh. My reasons for those visits were not wholly because of friendship. They coincided with the Five Nations Rugby championship, as it was then, which was held every spring and saw two Scottish home-games played at Edinburgh’s Murrayfield Stadium. I’d get a ticket, arrange to spend the night at Roger’s place, go to see the game in the afternoon and enjoy the post-match festivities in the evening.

From www.sportspages.com

On February 4^th, 1984, I dropped my stuff off at Roger’s and went to Murrayfield to see Scotland play England. Scotland won 18-6. In the Scotsman newspaper, back in those long-ago, pre-Andrew Neil days when it was worth reading, Chris Rea – no, not that Chris Rea – opined: “The Scottish forwards… were immense – a finely blended unit, alert and supportive. Their breakaways forced England into elementary errors. They foraged with devastating accuracy… Every Scot… played his part to the full.”

When the final whistle blew, I was extremely pleased that Scotland had demolished England, the Auld Enemy. So pleased that, on my way back to Roger’s flat, I indulged in a wee, celebratory pub-crawl along Rose Street, taking in such hostelries as the Auld Hundred, the Kenilworth and the Abbotsford. It probably didn’t help that I’d already done a pub crawl of Rose Street in the late morning and early afternoon, on my way to Murrayfield. Anyway, the result was that I was well-refreshed when I returned to the flat.

Roger had told me he was entertaining some Edinburgh University mates that evening, with the intention of going to a party later on. I was welcome to join them. So, at about seven o’clock, I trotted into Roger’s living room, plonked myself on the sofa in the midst of some people I hadn’t met before and, trying to be sociable, joined in the conversation. After a few minutes, a tall, lean, slightly intense-looking young man sitting on the sofa beside me turned his head towards me and asked incredulously, “Are you drunk?”

Ladies and gentlemen, meet John Swinney, future leader of the Scottish National Party, an outfit dedicated to the cause of Scottish independence, to freeing Scotland from the shackles of political rule from London, capital of England. Shocked that someone in Edinburgh, capital of Scotland, should be a wee bit inebriated after Scotland had trounced England at rugby.

But I can’t have been that inebriated because I managed to accompany Roger, John and friends to the party that night and managed to participate in the conversation enough to form the opinion that Roger’s mate John was a decent-enough, if sober, bloke. It turned out that the party was being held by someone from Peebles, the town where Roger and I had attended school, so I knew some of the folk there. Actually, it amuses me to think that the future First Minister of Scotland was once at a party rubbing shoulders with such well-kent Peebles eccentrics as the late Andrew Cleghorn.

Thereafter, I encountered John Swinney a couple of times in Edinburgh, briefly, while I was in Roger’s company. The last time was a summer or two later, during the Edinburgh Festival, when Teviot Row, the Edinburgh University students’ union building, had been turned into a venue and the pair of them were working there as bouncers. What a pity Oxford University’s notorious Bullingdon Club didn’t arrange a field-trip to Edinburgh at the time and try to subject Teviot Row to their yobbish antics… I would have paid good money to see John Swinney eject Boris Johnson from the premises.

I lost touch with Roger for a while after that, but bumped into him again in the late 1980s after I’d moved to Edinburgh. He kindly fixed me up with a part-time job at the (now-long-gone) Greyfriars Bookshop at the bottom of George IV Bridge. At some point I asked how John Swinney was getting on and Roger told me he was ascending in the ranks of the SNP. Later, when I mentioned his name to some mates from Aberdeen who were heavily into the cause of Scottish independence, they reported they’d seen him deliver a speech at an SNP conference and were greatly impressed by him.

I completely lost touch with Roger Small in the 1990s – he took off for Australia – and, several years ago, wondering what’d happened to him, I tried Googling him. I didn’t find him, but learnt something about his mother, Christian Small, who’d passed away in 2016 at the age of 90. Christian had been an immensely-talented amateur painter, but according to a friend she was ‘extraordinarily diffident about her work’ and needed ‘a great deal of persuasion’ to allow her paintings to appear in local exhibitions. Because of her modesty, presumably, it didn’t really dawn on people – family and friends alike – how good an artist she’d been until after her death. However, in 2018 and 2019, some events were held to commemorate her and her art, including exhibitions and the launch of a book called Inside & Out. The book featured her paintings interspersed with verse written by another friend, the poet and actress Gerda Stevenson.

One of those events was attended by John Swinney, who by then was Deputy First Minister of Scotland. On Twitter, he remarked that Christian Small had been the mother ‘of my dear university friend Roger.’ So, I’m glad he still remembers his old mate and still holds him in high regard.

© Scotland Street Press

Though he’s made his name as a cautious type – too cautious for some people’s tastes, which has led to them questioning his political acumen – it’s hard to find anyone with a bad word to say about John Swinney as a person. For example, the former Scottish Labour Party leader Jim Murphy once commented: “There’s nobody in Scotland who doesn’t like John Swinney.” I recall my old English teacher, Ian Jenkins, who served in the Scottish Parliament for four years as the Liberal Democrat representative for Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale, speaking highly of him too.

Thus, I’m pleased that Swinney now holds the highest political office in his country. He struck me as a decent guy and it’s good to see decency rewarded. Unfortunately, politics isn’t an arena where being decent always works in your favour. I suspect he has his work cut out for him – especially if the polls prove to be right and his party takes a pounding in the general election.

March 11, 2024March 11, 2024

Nostalgic wallows 1: Bill McLaren

© BBC

We’re nearing the end of the 2024 Six Nations rugby championship and my mental health feels more kicked around than the ball in the matches. Up until the Saturday just past, the two teams I support, Ireland and Scotland, had been doing well and I was entertaining hopes that the championship would conclude with them at the top of the table. But what a difference a Saturday afternoon makes. Ireland got beaten by England, the team nobody wants to get beaten by. Against all expectations, Scotland lost to Italy, the team regarded as the one in the championship ‘making up the numbers’ and who usually finish bottom.

Anyhow, aside from the anguish… The championship reminds me yet again of how much I miss being able to watch an international rugby match and at the same time listen to the knowledgeable and dulcet tones of Bill McLaren.

Although McLaren, who died in 2010 at the age of 86, worked as late as 2002, it was in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s that he was indisputably the voice of British rugby union. This was an era when sport, if you weren’t at the live event itself, was viewable only on a handful of terrestrial TV channels. It was common for one channel to have a monopoly on broadcasting one sport and, by extension, for one commentator to have a monopoly on talking about that sport. Hence, in my youth, it was almost impossible to see horse racing without hearing the posh but eerily robotic tones of Peter O’Sullivan, or boxing without hearing the excitable Harry Carpenter, or Formula One without hearing the gaffe-prone Murray Walker, or rugby league without hearing the indescribable-sounding Eddie Waring. McLaren fulfilled this role in the world of rugby union and for me was the best sports commentator of the lot, though I’m undoubtedly biased. Rugby has always been my favourite team sport. Plus McLaren came from Hawick in the Scottish Borders, the region where I spent many of my formative years.

There were three reasons for McLaren’s greatness. Firstly, he knew his stuff. I remember watching a McLaren-commentated game on a pub TV in Aberdeen sometime in the 1980s. I was in the company of my good friend, the late Finlay McLean, and at one point, Finlay turned around to me and marvelled, “He’s just steeped in the game, isn’t he?”

When a try was scored, McLaren didn’t just tell you the name of the player who’d crossed the line. No, he’d also observe how the player was the great-great-nephew of the man who’d kicked the winning points in the legendary Hawick-Galashiels derby of 1937, or a direct descendent of the tight-head prop with the great Western Province team that’d dominated South Africa’s Currie Cup in the 1890s. It wouldn’t have surprised you if he’d identified the player’s granny as the stylist responsible for grooming the mutton-chop sideburns of J.P.R. Williams, which were rugby’s main contribution to fashion in the 1970s. McLaren seemed to know everything about rugby.

His knowledge was encyclopaedic, but this was backed by a conscientious and professional attitude to research. I read somewhere that when preparing for a game, he’d cover a full sheet of foolscap with notes about each player. This meant that in the commentator’s box he was constantly shuffling around some 30 sheets of paper.

Secondly, although he was a Scotsman and often commentated on games involving the Scottish rugby team, he was never biased. On the contrary, he always applauded good rugby, no matter who was playing it and even if Scotland was on the receiving end of it. McLaren’s neutrality was especially admirable when you compared him with the international football commentators on the BBC at the time (and indeed still now), who seemed incapable of narrating an England World Cup match without speculating every second minute about whether ‘we’ could win the World Cup just like ‘we’ won it back in 1966.

Thirdly, and most importantly for me, his commentaries were laden with poetry. McLaren had an amusing, fanciful, frequently wonderful talent with language. Admittedly, he could be a tad unflattering in the turn of phrase he used to describe the over-sized players on the field. English prop Colin Smart – famous for getting stomach-pumped after drinking a bottle of aftershave as a post-match lark – consisted of ‘considerable acreage’; English captain and lock Bill Beaumont looked ‘like someone who enjoys his food’; Welsh forwards Scott and Craig Quinnell were ‘two well-nourished individuals’; Scottish flanker Finlay Calder had ‘hands like dinner plates’; and Calder’s gangly fellow-Scot Doddie Weir was ‘the lamppost of the line-out.’ As for the legendary and frankly massive New Zealand flanker Jonah Lomu, running into him was like ‘trying to tackle a snooker table’.

© BBC

He had a fondness to likening players to animals. They might behave like ‘a demented ferret’ or a ‘bag of weasels’ of a ‘raging bull with a bad head’ or ‘a whirling tsetse fly’ or ‘a runaway giraffe’ or ‘a slippery salmon’. The Scottish scrum-half Roy Laidlaw (whose nephew Greig captained Scotland for seven years up until 2019) was as elusive as ‘a baggy up a Borders burn’ – a baggy being, to quote the Dictionary of the Scottish Language, ‘a species of large minnow.’ Unsurprisingly for a Borders man, Scotticisms were common in his delivery. Rugby balls were likened to ‘three pounds of haggis’, the famously square-shouldered Scottish skipper Peter Brown was like ‘a coo kicking over a milk pail’ and an injured player sitting dejectedly at the side of the field whilst sucking on a mint was at least ‘enjoying his sweetie.’

When it came to describing the turbulent passions and physical violence often unleashed on the pitch, McLaren was amusingly euphemistic. Cheating was frequently described as ‘jiggery-pokery’ and punch-ups were dismissed as ‘a bit of argy-bargy’. I remember when fists started flying in the middle of one scrum, he commented: “It’s getting a bit unceremonious in that front row.” And when Scottish centre Jim Renwick – whom McLaren had coached as a schoolboy – missed a kick and was caught by the camera mouthing the F-word, McLaren diplomatically remarked that he was ‘muttering a few naughty Hawick words.’

Some of his sayings became catchphrases. When a player prepared to kick a conversion and half the stadium made disparaging noises in the hope of distracting him and making him fluff it, McLaren would invariably remark: “There’s some ill-mannered whistling.” And when a conversion-kick made it between the posts despite being taken from a torturous angle, he’d declare: “It’s high enough, it’s long enough and it’s straight enough!”

Aware that in the Borders towns local players who’d made it onto the national team were seen as heroes, he’d often serenade the scorer of a Scottish try with the lines, “And they’ll be dancing on the streets of…” or “And they’ll be drinking his health in…” – Hawick, Galashiels, Kelso, Melrose, Selkirk, wherever – “…tonight!” As an honorary Borderer, I’d say they were more likely to be drinking his health than dancing in the streets.

McLaren’s manner and delivery were immensely relaxed and comforting, but his early life had been no bed of roses. As a young World War II serviceman, he had to endure the Battle of Monte Cassino, of which one eyewitness said, “The men were so tired that it was a living death. They had come from such a depth of weariness that I wondered if they would quite be able to make the return to the lives and thoughts they had known.’ McLaren himself described Monte Cassino as a ‘vision of hell on earth.’

After the war, he was diagnosed as having tuberculosis, which put a prompt end to any hopes he had of becoming a rugby internationalist. TB was then considered incurable and he wasn’t expected to survive, but he and four fellow sufferers agreed to be guinea pigs for the trials of a new drug, streptomycin. Thanks to this treatment he recovered, but three of the four other volunteers died. It was while he was convalescing that he produced his first sports commentaries – describing table-tennis matches over the hospital radio.

McLaren was passionately attached to his hometown and famously said, “A day out of Hawick is a day wasted.” Several years ago I visited Hawick for the first time since the 1980s, and saw to my dismay how much it’d deteriorated. Its high street was run-down and riddled with derelict properties – thanks to a faltering economy caused by the closure of local woolen mills, and also thanks no doubt to the opening of branches of Morrison’s, Sainsbury’s and Lidl, which’d sucked the retailing life out of the place. My first thought was: “What would Bill McLaren have said?”

McLaren’s commentaries were emblematic of an earlier, more innocent age, when rugby was still an amateur sport and because of that it was incredibly accessible. This was especially true if you lived in a rugby-daft place like the Borders, where the guys you saw performing heroic deeds for Scotland on TV on Saturday afternoons existed during weekdays as mortals like everyone else. As a kid living there, I was delighted when the man from the electricity board who came to our house to check on a power outage was none other than Jim Renwick. Meanwhile, Scottish fullback Peter Dods was a joiner down the road in Galashiels and my old man, a farmer, was on nodding terms with Scottish flanker John Jeffrey, who farmed in Kelso – Jeffrey’s teammates had nicknamed him ‘the Great White Shark’ but to Bill McLaren he was just ‘the big Kelso farmer’. And let’s not forget local electrician Roy Laidlaw, whom legend has it had to rewire the public toilets in Jedburgh the Monday morning after the Scotland team he was part of won the Grand Slam in Paris.

Yes, Bill McLaren’s voice evokes a simpler time in rugby, before professionalism, sponsorship, corporatism, razzmatazz and a profit-driven need to win at all costs took over. But homespun though his persona was, I don’t believe there’s been a sports commentator in the years since who’s come close to matching him.