I like football. I still play 5 a side for an hour on Friday nights. Each year I'm probably some centimetres slower, and some millisenconds slower on the uptake. But now and again, there's still the move, the shot, the feint, the turn, and yes, even the goal that for the senior footballer is every bit as satisfing as the straight drive for the golfer, the ace serve for the tennis player, the try saving tackle of the rugby player. Yes I watch football on TV, occasionally in the North East Arctic Saturday risk the South Stand in Aberdeen, but still nothing like scoring in the glorious ordinariness of the Torry Leisure Centre on a Friday night.

So I feel qualified to laugh at the silly punditry of this article here.

Premier League – Leon Osman's wondergoal: genius or mis-kicked fluke?

What a fatuous, wonderless, unimaginative, right brain no brainer question that is! The armchair experts looking at video footage try to judge a spectacular goal on technical merit, artistic impression and amateur geometry!

Given the combination of human intention, learned skill, inherent gift and ability, training, tactical awareness, alertness to opportunity, instinct to move and be in certain positions at the right time, team awareness and individual co-operation, the strengths of the opposition, balance, physical fitness, height (yes sometimes size matters) age, weather conditions, flight of the ball – och and any other of the multi-variables I've not mentioned – given all that it could be argued every goal is a mis-kicked (sic) fluke; and every goal is an act of genius. Neither is true or false – what it is, is a goal, a joyful indication that we are quite good at this game, a successful fulfiulment of effort and energy harnessed to purpose and held within the constraints of the game's rules and regulations!

It is a wondergoal – the more enjoyable because technology shows you how unsaveable it was – except it would have been saved easily if the goalkeeper had also chocen amongst a multitude of variables and was standing nearer his right hand post. In a contingent creation, football is possible. Analyse it with nonsense like the above and you are arguing for a world where all that ever happens is deserved, precictable, analysable and wonderless world. 

Or to put all this more succinctly, the so-called experts who dissect a goal, dessicate spirits – from such those who live wittily cheerfully dissociate 🙂

Today is the biggest football day in the history of Ross County Football Club. The cup final at Hampden. There will probably be a few others there, but I've got my ticket and the important thing is I'll be there. The manager Derek Adams I've known since he was 8 years old; the Director of Football, Geroge Adams, a personal friend of years standing. The achievement of a former Highland league side in getting into Division 1 was huge – a cup final is a sign of another kind of arrival. And European football next year – I want tickets for Ross County v Barcelona.

No idea how the game will go – the miracle is their being there. To win would be a sign of eschatological proportions that would herald a new era in possibility thinking. Either way, travelling with two friends in their car (I've done the journey already this week! :)), encountering long roadworks on a road that will funnel both sets of fans from the North, getting parked and into the stadium, surviving the Hampden pie, and then home before whatever time – going to be a long, big, tiring, fun day. Why not?

Post Match Update

Ross County 0 Dundee United 3

Yes, I'm sad the fairytale came to an end Ross County. But they had over 20,000 supporters, the match was without incident or acrimony on the pitch and the fans were brilliant with each other. The Hampden pie didn't happen because the one thing that hasn't changed is the inability of a national football stadium to have caterers who can serve at something above slow motion. I stood in a queue for 12 minutes and it barely moved. However, given the other dietary experiments of the day, probably just as well. A long day – from 9.15 am till 9.45 pm – was it worth it? Yes – not for the football, but for the friendships.

I am a long time supporter of Aberdeen Football Club.

For my sins, which are many.

As you will see, Aberdeen are top of the Scottish Premier League.

Start of season, alphabetically, we are always on top of the league.

If only we didn't have to actually play the game!

Now all we have to do is start winning. 

Prayer

Lord, have mercy!

I believe, help my unbelief!

May we not find the Gospel word of warning to be true, that "the first will be last".

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Update at half time : Aberdeen 0 – Celtic 3

Does the sound byte "we are not called to be successful but to be faithful" refer also to Aberdeen fans?

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Full Time : Aberdeen 1 – Celtic 3

Could have been worse – and two of the goals (one from each side) were things of beauty. 

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A surgeon who has to perform a delicate operation on someone's spine in a couple of days time spends an entire evening drinking with friends, and is still at it at 5.a.m. just two days before the scheduled surgery.

A defence lawyer needs to get on top of a complex and complicated brief in order to construct the defence of his client. He has recently lost a high profile case because he wasn't as fully prepared as he could have been. But two days before the court appearance he spends an entire evening drinking with friends, and is still at it at 5.a.m. just two days before the scheduled court appearance.

A young professional graphic artist has an interview and possible major contract opportunity, but she will have to deliver a coherent, persuasive and forward looking presentation and business plan to demonstrate her capacities to do her dream job. But two days before the biggest interview in her life she spends an entire evening
drinking with friends, and is still at it at 5.a.m., and now only two days
before her make or break interview.

Each of them stupid eh? Irresponsible? Arrogantly and self-indulgently self absorbed, no? And if found out you'd expect them to have to take the consequences, and these consequences decisive, eh?

So when the Scotland football team make consistency into a vice because they are consistently underperforming, and two senior and key player spend
an entire evening drinking with friends, and are still at it at 5.a.m.
just two days before a make or break World Cup Qualifying match – what happens. They are sent home – then they apologises – then they come back – and then are placed on the substitute bench. Why?

Apart from the total lack of professionalism, the lack of personal discipline, absence of respect for team mates and manager, there is worst of all their cavalier "stuff you" attitude to the fans who pay serious money to watch them. If we are going to lose, better to do so with a team of players for whom playing football for their country is worth more than the price of a night's boozing.

I'm writing this before the match in question – I so hope neither player is brought on. If they are, then hard to see what discipline and respect is left in a Scottish dressing room.

P.S.  It's 22.09 p.m.

Scotland 2 – Iceland 1.

And they did it without the two brilliant irreplaceables – which means they weren't irreplaceable, and not brilliant either.

As an Aberdeen fan, and a Christian, I watched last night’s game between Aberdeen and Falkirk with mixed feelings. In old fashioned Biblical terms, Aberdeen get into the top six of the Scottish Premier league as those who enter by the skin of their teeth. Falkirk played us off the pitch for big chunks of the game, including the first 15 minutes till we scored with our first attempt on goal. Then after conceding early in the second half, we grabbed a late winner, from an acute angle, with the ball a few millimetres still in play (if you’re an Aberdeen fan) or at least three inches out of play (if you support Falkirk [nickname, The Bairns]).

What was funny, silly and, for fans who pay good money, frustrating but still funny, was the way each team tried to waste time once the score suited them. There’s something of the Primary 1 class level of non-grown-up behaviour in the playground, about professional players walking slowly, bending slowly, fumbling with the ball before lifting it, cleaning it on the shirt, then dropping it for the team mate to throw it, but not before he also slowly retrieves it, cleans it (cos it’s dirty again cos it was dropped, ye see), then feigning to throw half a dozen times before the ball comes back into play, yawn, zzzzz.

While desiderating on the fitba theme, congratulations to Ross County who won promotion from Division Two, on Saturday. Derek and the boys done good. A ten match winning run after Christmas, a blizzard of goals home and away, the place buzzing and confident for next year – not bad for one of the youngest managers in the professional game. So it’s been a good week to be on holiday and reflect on the deep and serious things by which men live. Sheila, by the way, has no problem with the non-inclusive ‘men’ in the last sentence – she wouldn’t want to be included in the sad, perspective-limited, theatrical worldview that us football fans willingly pay money to inhabit.

Aberdeen 2 – Bayern Munich 2

 Just spent a couple of hours sitting on the edge of the sofa, looking at the TV screen between my fingers, from behind the cushion, and sometimes squinting through near closed eyelids. Most of us were prepared for a hard lesson in due humility, or even overdue humiliation. But the boys done good. And the return is next Thursday on my birthday – so I get to choose the food for our meal, and the entertainment for the night. 

Come on you reds!!!!!!!!!!!

Now and again something happens which exposes the superficial levels at which we sometimes conduct our mental and emotional lives. Take football. For football supporters the team dominates their worldview. Local economies react to the fortunes of the local team; the morale and hopefulness of whole communities is responsive to the results, the way the season is going, how well the team is playing.Like everyone else the least bit interested in football, I have my opinions, more or less informed, as biased as any pundit, and just as likely to exaggerate the cosmic significance of 90 minutes of grown men huffing and puffing up and down the park.

But as I said at the start, sometimes we are all reminded of how fragile life is, how precious and unique and irreplaceable a human being is. And we were so reminded last Saturday, when Phil O’Donnell, the captain of Motherwell Football Club collapsed and died during a match which his team won, and for once the result was an irrelevance.

Bill Shankly’s famous quip, ‘Football isn’t a matter of life and death. It’s far more important than that’, remains a humorous piece of over-stated rhetoric. But even the most famous of Liverpool managers knew that was exactly what it was, and all that it was. No game is more important than life. The Motherwell manager Mark McGhee, in a statement on behalf of the Club, made it clear that for now, no one was interested in the training pitch, the football pitch or anything else to do with football, till due respect had been paid, till their friend had been remembered and his family cared for. Alongside such sudden tragedy and its human significance, football is relegated to its rightful place.

So yes, football can give rise to some of the silliest, overblown claims about the game’s importance. And sometimes listening to those involved in ‘the game’, you wonder if the real world ever gets a look in. But countless football supporters live out their inner struggles through the ups and downs of their team. Their identity and sense of who they are is mortgaged to the team, the stadium, the colours, the names and numbers on the shirts. And that became so obvious as I watched the devastated groups gathering around Fir Park. Football has its problems alright, but when you witness the sense of loss, the genuine grief and sorrow of a community at the death of a young family man, you become aware of the social and humanising importance of sport when it is exemplified in such popular, respected and decent players; and when it evokes such humane and genuine affection.

With apologies to Bill Shankly, football isn’t a matter of life and death; rather it is one way in which many people celebrate the life they live in their community, and live through the joy and sorrow that are the changing colours of every individual life. The current practice of a round of applause in appreciation of a footballer who has died is both moving and an important reminder, that life is irreplaceably precious, and that at its best, for football players, football is one expression of that hunger and vitality to achieve through effort, to excel in skill, to express the reality of who they are, through a game that when played both fairly and skillfully, and with all my prejudice admittedly showing, is a beautiful game. Phil O’Donnell was a player who graced the teams he played for, and who gave back in dignity and sportsmanship, easily as much as he earned.

One extra fragment of evidence to add to widespread testimony and appreciation – outside Fir Park there are scarves left in tribute from many different teams, including both Celtic (whom Phil O’Donnell played for) and Rangers. In sorrow and loss of such a good man, sectarianism is transcended, blue and green on the same side – no bad tribute in itself.

There’s a time to be humble, to not gloat, to be self-deprecating, to shrug the shoulders apologetically and apologise for not doing what everybody expects; a time to remember that pride goes before a fall, to consider the feelings of others and refrain from crowing.

This isnae wan o’ them, though!!!

Aberdeen 4 F C Copenhagen 0

At the end of a glorious evening of solidarity with the Dons, exhausted by the emotional and physical cost of kicking every ball (while lying supine on the sofa, occasionally hiding behind a cushion) we emerge not only as winners, but 4 -0. Christmas will be an anti-climax now, unless somebody can think opf something better than 4-0!

Anyway, not to go on about it, but I would like to place on record my appreciation for the efforts of the Aberdeen team this evening, my admiration for their earnest endeavours, my complete endorsement of their tactical awareness, and my absolute incredulity that when I play back the recording there are indeed four goals and I wasn’t dreaming. So, to avoid being tediously repetitive, if I may reiterate briefly…..4-0!!!!!!!!!

Best corny line from the commentary: referring to the AFC management team, "There’s the three wise men – Jimmy Calderwood, Jimmy Nicholl and Sandy Clark – and they’re looking for a star tonight!"

Time to say my evening prayers, which tonight will be 4 thanksgivings and 0 complaints. 4-0, get it?