t’s a long time since this website has been updated with anything even vaguely resembling regularity. Once upon a time, BH was not only a printed fanzine, but also a busy web community of Saints news, views and rubbish Dundee jokes. My main excuse for letting all this slip is that I’m a lazy bugger at heart, but there’s also the marginally more acceptable reason that I now have to spend most of my time in London. While I still spend frankly stupid amounts of time and money travelling to watch my boyhood heroes, I’m no longer an ever-present, and feel my ability to publish fair comment on the latest right-back or new pie range has long since diminished.
Incredibly, though, blueheaven.org.uk still pulls in a daily slew of hits from all over the world. Admittedly, many of them appear to be from people looking for recipes for Scottish ‘Biscuits’ (hello biscuit fans, if you’re reading this!). But a fair whack of them are also St Johnstone supporters. People still use this site to get in touch and ask me how they can get hold of old fanzine issues, or when there will be a new one, or even whether I can spare some time to give a fans’ view to the media.
So, in my own odd way, I feel an annoying sense of residual duty to use this site to express some sort of view on the crisis that is currently ripping through Scottish football. Which means me crawling out of retirement for one last rant.
On 4th July, our club will be asked to vote on whether or not a cheap, hurriedly constructed version of Rangers will be allowed to play in next season’s SPL. It could be the SPL’s very own Independence Day, or it could be the day that sees thousands of fans up and down the country turning their backs on clubs they have supported for their entire lives.
In the BH fanzine days, Rangers (or The Forces of Darkness as we always knew them) were essentially treated as the comedy bad guys. And I suppose that now, with their fiendish EBT scheme, TFOD have indeed turned out to be Scottish football’s equivalent of Dick Dastardly in Wacky Races; always stopping mid-race to place increasingly elaborate obstacles in their competitors’ way, too stupid and greedy to realise that if they only kept going they’d be miles ahead anyway.
And now that it’s blown up in their faces, after years of boasting about being too good for Scotland and threatening to pack up their belongings and head elsewhere, Rangers need a favour. The mighty Rangers, with their world record stash of domestic trophies, wondrous marble staircase and noble history of religious intolerance, need a favour from us, the shampoo on their shoes.
But there’s just one problem. Because they’re not even Rangers, are they? Rangers – the real Rangers that is, with their cheeky, lovable fanbase – lie dying in the gutter. And, while a succession of predictably dodgy characters squabble over the scraps, a New Rangers has appeared like a phoenix from the flames. Or, at least, a phoenix from some shampoo. A stinking phoenix from a pile of corrupt, festering shampoo.
Yet this new club (catchily titled Sevco 5088 – it’ll look great on the Union Jack flags), that has never as much as kicked a football, supposedly has the SPL running scared. We can’t upset Sevco! Anything but that! After all, without the pulling power of Sevco, the league will degenerate into something akin to Irish-League-meets-swingball, with no TV deal, no Sevco fans to swell our stands and piss in our shop doorways, and none of that juicy European glory we’ve all grown so accustomed to dining out on as Scottish football fans. The end of the world is officially nigh.
Unfortunately, the pro-Sevco argument falls apart on two fronts: 1. It’s bollocks (if Scottish First Division clubs can survive without the Old Firm or a TV deal, then why can’t the larger clubs of the SPL?); 2. Even if it weren’t bollocks, it’s not the point. It’s not about money. It’s not about product. It’s not about standard of football. It’s not even about Rangers (because, let us never forget, they’re not Rangers). It’s about sporting integrity, and it’s about supporters up and down the land saying enough is enough.
From a purely personal point of view, if I was at all bothered about watching the world’s greatest footballers playing sexy football inside a packed stadium and in front of a huge TV audience, I would not be a St Johnstone supporter. I, like many others, support Saints because they are my local club, representing my home town. From an early age, I was hooked on the sights, sounds and smells of following that club. My most enduring memories of watching Saints stretch from buying blue popcorn and Dotty bars as a kid in the Ormond Stand, to losing the league in the last minute of the season at Hamilton and being hammered 4-0 by Stenhousemuir. Very few of my St Johnstone memories involve any sort of glory, and those that do stand out only because they are so rare. Yet, like the rest of us, I’ve carried on going back, and at increasingly hard-to-justify levels of expense at that.
To paraphrase one of the contributors to the We Are Perth forum, what it boils down to is this: I’d rather watch St Johnstone playing amateur Sunday league football on the North Inch, than pay to see them willingly participate in a fixed, corrupt Premier League. Because that is exactly what the SPL will become if it allows a brand new football club to leapfrog the lower divisions and start out in the top flight, based purely on the strength of an application form.
Is this really how the SPL wants football to work now? Should we ditch the concept of promotion and relegation completely, and just open up every place in the league to the highest bidder? Why even bother playing football at all? Why not just turn the whole league into one big, obscene auction?
If that is what the SPL wants, then I’m afraid it’s probably time for me – as a fan of football, not of business – to bow out. And if it’s something St Johnstone are prepared to vote in favour of, then like many other fans I’ll be forced to re-assess whether or not I really want to support them. That’s something I never thought I’d say. But, while I’ll always be a Saints fan at heart, I’ll view my commitment to supporting the club in a very different way if the club votes ‘yes’.
If I could make one plea to Steve Brown and the rest of the St Johnstone board, it would be this: please don’t turn your backs on the club’s ethics. Those same ethics prompted Geoff Brown to speak out against Livingston and Gretna, and they’re as valid now as they were then. Don’t give in to bullying, or greed, or corporate threats. Don’t give up on being a football club. Don’t give up on being St Johnstone. No surrender.
