From yesterday's edition...
It was on October 27, 1962, that I started to scratch a living out of watching football. Military historians would immediately be aroused by that date, because as I trundled in a red Lanarkshire bus towards my first BBC assignment Nikita Khrushchev’s ships were heading for Cuba with nuclear missiles on board. They were to be aimed at Washington. My bus was aimed at Douglas Park, Hamilton, on that very Saturday afternoon Armageddon was looming. Awaiting their fate were Accies and Stenhousemuir and a thinly populated press box for which the expression “meeting a deadline” was perhaps about to take on a new meaning. I did seriously hope I would see the end of the game, but I recall little of it except that I can now tell David Currie of the BBC that I saw his father play striker for the Accies. I can also deduce that the news must have filtered through to the Kremlin that Hamilton badly needed a home win because in an unprecedented humanitarian gesture the Russians withdrew their nuclear threat, helping the Accies climb the table by dint of winning 1-0. Humanity’s survival was worth a precious two points for them and a few bob for me.
Since then, the club, for which I have an understandable affection for kick-starting my career, has taken the art of survival to new heights. They know more about cliff edges than any other club. Play-offs bring out the best of them, to the disappointment of those who see them as squatters with undesirable habits — like winning on that pitch.
I know clubs who hate the sight of the place, for the absence of grass alone. But over and above that, it is unquestionable that Accies have proved resilient in the face of a kind of elitism that disregards the simple rectitude of hanging in there, balancing the books and being able to defy gravity by sheer effort that perhaps doesn’t have the sheen of outstanding quality, but works.
They will now be into their fourth consecutive presence in a top league, which is a post-war record for them. Their detractors mock the fact that they can muster a home support of only about 2,000, and take just a couple of busloads, or so, outside the burgh. What does all that offer a league which is trying to market itself as a prime brand?
Scott Struthers, associated with the club for 30 years, and now working for Uefa, snaps out a simple riposte to that: “We have been a model of financial stability for the past 14 years, the boardroom has barely changed in that period — that’s stability. Is that not what everybody in the game needs to consider now?
“As for our pitch, it earns us £450,000 a year on the youth development system alone, plus extras, and through our long-term planning we have the ability to find young talent, much of which was developed on that same pitch. That’s what we’re offering Scottish football.”
And to England they offer James McCarthy and James McArthur, whose transfers have transfused the club with £6 million, to the envy of other clubs of their ilk, who would have done the same in the stark business of surviving.
This springs from a youth development system run by George Cairns, out of whose pack of 150 boys have come Jimmy Hamilton and Andy Winter, both of whom scored for the Scotland Under-16 team against Qatar recently.
So into a new season they go with the almost certainty they will again join that peleton of clubs bunched behind the front runners, and nurturing the ambition to split from the group and make a dash for a European place.
That is as much as any of these clubs who fight continually to avoid relegation can aspire to. With Hibs in the mix now, and competition to avoid the cliff’s edge intense, we ought to remind ourselves that the league will be intriguingly more complex and appealing than simply trying to calculate how many points Celtic will win the title by.
Accies World
Forum for Hamilton Academical supporters.
