Aidan Smith: ‘Hearts are my second team’

Football is too polarised now - there was a time when Edinburgh football supporters enjoyed watching both clubs

The elegant Donald Ford in action for Hearts against Clyde at Tynecastle in 1970. Photograph: Scotsman Publications

A story the other day that Edinburgh may soon be getting its first new brewery for 150 years – and here was the key bit: in the west of the capital – took me all the way back to 23 September, 1967 and my first Hearts game.

It was in the old First Division, Dundee the opposition. The crowd was 9,404 and the visitors’ line-up included Jim McLean, who wouldn’t cross Sandeman Street for another four years; George McLean, no relation, who must have been glad to get out of Ibrox if only so the comic Lex McLean, definitely no relation to George, would cease his merciless mirth at the centre-forward’s expense; and a teenage Jocky Scott.

The Jam Tarts – they weren’t called Jambos back then – lined up like this: Kenny Garland, Ian Sneddon, Davie Holt, Alan MacDonald, Arthur Thomson, George Miller, Jim Fleming, Jim Townsend, Donald Ford, Jim Irvine and Tommy Traynor. Hearts won 1-0, Ford scoring the winner in the second half. I can’t if I’m honest remember much about this momentous occasion but the smell of that day has never left me.

The pong from the breweries around Tynecastle attacked the nostrils, or at least they did those of a schoolboy more accustomed to the exciting aromas of Bazooka Joe bubble-gum, Airfix glue and Scalextric after an afternoon’s high-speed cornering.

Did it influence my decision to follow the other Edinburgh team instead? It’s definitely random enough. As random as preferring one shirt colour over another. As thinking one match programme front cover looked classier. As factoring ground access and egress into the ultimate decision. (To get to and from the Gorgie colosseum in ’67 from where I lived, a building site had to be negotiated. Muck from it would invariably spoil the adolescent look I was trying to rock, though goodness knows what that was).

Now for the bit no one believes: Hearts are my second team. I realise that’s a hippie thing to say, a Fotherington-Thomas thing to say (he was the drip in the Molesworth books who would skip around chirruping “Hello clouds, hello sky!”). But it’s true. For one thing, they’re the team, apart from my actual team, in which I’ve invested the most amount of time.

I was the last of the generation to go weekabout to Tynecastle and Easter Road. This was a fine and noble post-war tradition for the men of Edinburgh like my father and it was mostly the men, though in fact my parents did some of their courting at the football. The terraces at both places were packed because Auld Reekie football was the best it’s ever been, before or since.

Rationing continued but not in quality of forward play. One Saturday afternoon the bunneted aficionados could revel in the Famous Five, the next the Terrible Trio. The capital, to quote Harold Macmillan, had never had it so good. Those who witnessed the carnival of two spellbinding attacks will have had a feeling for one team or the other and maybe a passion, but no one was interested in declaring it, or demonstrating the division. After WW2, the country had had enough 
of fighting. Everyone just wanted 
to get along better and enjoy themselves. No one was going to prove they were more Hibs than Hearts by defiantly not joining the throng heading westwards when that was where they really wanted to go. It would have been plain stupid if, in cutting off your nose, you’d missed a hat-trick of towering Willie Bauld, pictured inset, headers.

So my introduction to football began with my father taking me turnabout. Even though the late 1960s wasn’t a golden time for Hearts and I was 
more likely to see a hat-trick of clodhopping Ernie Winchester misses, I attended just as many of their games as Hibs ones for a good three years, and after making my choice would continue to pop along to Tynie if there was an interesting match in prospect such as a European tie or a pre-season visit from some big shots from England.

Then everything changed. Increased car ownership allowed fans to travel to see their team play rather than watch the other lot. Football became more tribal. Ireland’s Troubles influenced some, as did 
Clockwork Orange/skinhead culture. Fans were scrapping in grim towns so those in one of the world’s most civilised cities thought they’d better do the same.

The scrapping has stopped (mostly, although maybe it could reignite at any time) but these days it’s the done thing to declare yourself one or the other. To show off your tattoos and, if you could, let people peer inside your soul, confirming where you stand. If you support one team, ergo, you must hate the other. The rivalry defines you. It’s always been so. Well, that’s rubbish.

Why can’t I be nostalgic for Ergo Winchester, ballooning another good chance over the School End or indeed a crisp, slotted finish from that fine fellow Ford, he of the Action Man stuck-down hair? Why can’t I feel sympathy for Hearts in their current miserable situation? Why must I be seen to dance on their grave?

But everything is polarised now. The self-interest demonstrated by most clubs recently is yet more tribalism. Hearts might well be top of the self-interest league table but what would you want your club bosses to do in their position? Fight. Yeah. Get intae thum.

Ex-Hearts manager Paulo Sergio has joined the battle. He says that if the club “don’t have the chance to fight for the results after all the investment then everybody will feel it is not fair”. Neglecting to mention those chances largely not taken in the 30 games played, he vows that the fans will “never forgive or forget” seeing the club sent down.

It is too fanciful to hope this kind of talk won’t have the desired effect, or that we won’t hear more of it. The stench of bitterness may end up polluting the skies more than a brewery ever could. Yes, Hearts could use their sense of injustice as motivation while raging about how everybody hates them, but haven’t we got a club who do that already?

The Jam Tarts, as they used to be, need to find another route back, one more in keeping with their proud history from my father’s time. They may not be the second team of many but remarkably, though they try my patience, they’re still mine.

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