Nothing serious I hope
It is symbolic, like the Bells ushering in the New Year. It is our way of announcing the arrival of the new season proper.
Tonight will bring the return of the two hour, five nightly version of Superscoreboard.
It is symbolic, like the Bells ushering in the New Year. It is our way of announcing the arrival of the new season proper.
None of your well intentioned but fundamentally meaningless, friendly matches or the sectional stages of the third placed domestic trophy, shorn of Scotland’s European competitors until the climactic stages.
Next weekend is the start of the full blooded, ferociously competitive league season that will make or break reputations, lead to sackings, provoke frenzied rivalry and be more divisive and contentious than any other in the history of our game.
Ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seatbelts, extinguish all smiles and place your chair in the upright position. We are ready for take-off.
And of course, the usual, time honoured rituals must be respected and observed, chief among them being what should be a harmless game pundits play as part of their job but is, in fact, the most troublesome of all would be innocent pursuits.
This is the job of predicting who you think will win the Premiership title, the one that will bring Celtic Nine in a Row or else end their assault on the history books in its tracks.
During another life for me as a newspaper journalist, little caused more animosity and acrimony as giving players marks out of ten for their performances during matches.
It is a useless exercise designed to fill space. Useless because how can one man, or woman, satisfactorily assess the performances of anything up to twenty-eight players at the same time?
Impossible. Improbable. But it has been known to drive allegedly under-valued players to fresh heights of apoplexy. Trust me.
Likewise, then, the practice of forecasting who will win the league title, thirty-eight unplayed games from now until next May. It is nothing other than an exercise in how to lose friends and alienate people you’ve never met.
What follows is a true story which illustrates the point.
Some years ago, I was standing in the corridor of a hospital listening to my wife, daughters, sisters-in-law and nieces sobbing in a room several feet away as my mother in law endured the final days of a life belatedly blighted by illness.
The silence was broken for me on a personal level when a man asked if I was that guy off the radio and before I can answer in the affirmative, challenges me to tell him who will win the league title.
Hoping to get this intrusion into private grief over and done with as quickly and as mannerly as possible I deliver my one word answer.
“You are joking me,” said my interrogator, confusing my answer with an invitation to a prolonged discussion on the subject.
When I pointed out that he had requested a forecast, which I had readily given and which was non-negotiable, the penny suddenly dropped.
He looked at the sign above my head, which said High Dependency Unit, and then uttered the immortal words, “Nothing serious I hope,” before wandering off as if nothing had happened.
Such is the world of punditry in public.
The point of the story is that predicting the outcome of a two horse race which is thirty-eight furlongs long is a fairly hazardous business when you think about it.
Thirty-eight games have to be played. Weeks remain before the transfer window closes and your choice of league winner, or somebody else’s tip, has the opportunity to sign new players who could significantly influence the outcome of the competition.
There can fluctuations in form, severe problems caused by serious injury or internal combustion in the dressing room and all manner of things you didn’t see coming up on the horizon.
There is even another transfer window in the winter when the complexion of the championship can suddenly be altered due to football’s equivalent of cosmetic surgery.
But absolutely none of this matters because the old ways have to be recognised. Celtic or Rangers must be picked for the prize because no other club has the budget to sustain a legitimate challenge.
And woe betide the man, or woman, who gets it wrong.
Your choice will originally be criticised by your detractors because it is supposedly based on prejudice, an agenda against another club and when all else fails, a severe lack of intelligence.
Ten months from now you will, in the event of having guessed wrongly, be held up to ridicule and be reminded for years thereafter that you were so lacking in knowledge and so blinded by the desire to see your favourite team win the title that you made an unforgivable error of judgement.
But you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?
A snap judgement made in print back in the day over the advisability of Celtic’s decision to sign Lubo Moravcik led me, twenty years later, to stand outside Celtic Park and explain myself for the benefit of viewers to Celtic T.V.
Twenty years. And no remission, far less a pardon from the Governor.
What else could I do other than end the interview by saying I hoped to be back on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Lubo’s signing to explain myself once again, this time for the benefit of those who weren’t born when I wrote the original piece on the man who made mincemeat of my misjudgement?
Onward and upward. It’s the only way. Move from one mistake to another with no loss of enthusiasm. That’s the spirit.
So this season’s title-winning prediction is coming up on Superscoreboard. Trouble will undoubtedly follow.
Nothing serious I hope.