Trying to stay buoyant in a suspicious sea of maroon

Aidan Smith

A MAN can change his house, job, car, religion, political affiliations, socks and even his wife, but his football team is supposed to be one of life's constants. Could he, though, for an experiment swap sides for a season? Could he support the other lot, the dreaded enemy from the far side? And would the experience teach him anything about football, loyalty and, most of all, himself?

I am a Hibs fan, my father was a Hibs fan. We followed our team all over the land. We stood on the same terrace steps, then later, sat in the same seats, come rain, hail or relegation. As my school results show, I've sometimes cared for Hibs a bit too much. And dad, who enjoyed a rich and varied life, once cancelled dinner with Julie Christie because it clashed with a Hibs European tie. When he died, his closest friends wore green-and-white scarves to the funeral. We were Hibees through and through. My little brother, however, believes dad took a dark, dark secret to the grave: that deep down, when all was said and done, at the end of the day, Brian, Faither, was a Hearts fan. Is this my real heritage?

Today, opening the 2004-2005 season, Hearts are playing Aberdeen. I find myself a Hibby swimming against the maroon tide, while trying vainly to pass himself off as one of them.

An overactive imagination is a dangerous thing. And today, coming from a safe, sheltered, thoroughly drippy middle-class background, and never having been in a proper fight in my life, mine is in serious danger of combusting. Everyone else is walking to the stadium, minding their own business, or talking about Big Brother, but I'm pretty sure they're all mere seconds away from identifying the imposter in their midst. I'm absolutely convinced I couldn't be more conspicuous if I was sporting Alan Rough's ludicrous bubble-perm, 26 years out of date, or wearing a Hibs shirt and singing a Hibs song.

It's not the fact that, almost every week in The Scotsman, I profess my love for Hibs, and that these dribblings are accompanied by my mug-shot. It's not that which makes me assume I've already been spotted, clocked, metaphorically measured for a wooden box. Even without this damning evidence, I'm sure they can tell I'm a Hibs fan. They can just tell. After all, I know, just by looking at them, that they're Hearts fans.

And those Jambos that I've just overtaken on the outside, the ones nattering about Big Brother, the televised social-experiment game-show which this year will eventually be won by a man who's been transformed into a woman, Nadia Almada ... do these Jambos know they are participants in a similar experiment where one of their number has a shocking identity secret of his own and that 'Nadia' re-arranged spells 'Aidan'?

Gorgie Road, which starts off as Dalry Road, is a long, grinding route into the Wild West of Edinburgh. Tynecastle's closest counter-attractions are, in no particular order: a cemetery, a bingo hall and ... that's it, really. I reach Robertson's, a Hearts pub, the Hearts pub, and the kind of establishment where, in legend, a request for a mineral water will silence the metaphorical piano-player in the corner, silence the whole seething rabble.

At last, the stadium. I join the queue, not for the away end, where among the Aberdeen lot I could feel safe, or safer, but the main body of the kirk, the Hearts stand that many times during derbies I've greeted with a cheery, two-fingered wave.

At the turnstiles, I notice the price above the entrance - £18. That's two quid cheaper than an equivalent match at Easter Road, so much as today might pain me, and in lots of different ways, I console myself that it won't hurt me in the pocket. But when I reach the gate the attendant doesn't have change of a £20 note. Her supervisor has been informed, but as I wait for my measly two quid, she ushers the rest of the queue through. As they squeeze past me, cheerfully informing the attendant they're happy to pay more if it will guarantee Hearts' future, it must be crashingly obvious, if it wasn't before, that I'm not One Of Them. Eventually, my pathetic two quid arrives and the turnstile clicks to grant me entry into Tynecastle. It is like the sound of a rifle being cocked.

I REACH the top of the steps just in time to hear the stadium announcer urge the faithful: 'MAKE SOME NOISE!' With the match already under way, I can't find my seat. Someone is sitting in it. Too scared to do the job myself, I ask a steward to move the squatter. He says I'll have to find a senior steward for that task. As we debate the problem we're blocking the view of fans behind us and now they're out of their seats, shouting. One man, of an age that suggests he's long retired, has leapt to his feet to lead the protests. Now the fans behind him are telling the old git to sit down.

Great. Various members of the Tynecastle staff already have me down as a cheapskate and a yellowbelly and, if I haven't quite started a riot in the Wheatfield Stand, I've certainly made an enemy of a sizeable number of its season-ticket holders before the first home match of 2004-05 is five minutes old.

I mustn't do anything else to upset them. I must cheer loudly for Hearts, and abuse the opposition with cartoon venom. But can I do these things? A great goal is a great goal, and instinctively as a Hibs fan, but a Hearts goal?

My best hope today is that the match is abandoned. But for what reason? Bad football stops play? Bad municipal maroon colour scheme stops play? Bad fan fashion-sense stops play? It's not going to happen. This game still has 80 minutes to run and they're going to be seen out. My second-best hope, then, is that I'm not required to acknowledge a Hearts goal.

"It's a battle," says the man behind me. "Aye," agrees his friend, "a right battle."

And there's relish in their voices rather than reproach. This is typical opening-day fare: spurious excitement and lots of playing to the gallery with soap-melodrama lunges for hopelessly-overhit passes. Oohs and aahs are louder and last longer because fans are just happy to have football back, to have their Saturdays blocked off for another nine months, to have an excuse not to accompany their wives or girlfriends to soulless, out-of-town shopping centres, that they'll pretty much accept any old tosh on the pitch.

Once, at Easter Road, we accepted Paul Tosh, a member of manager Jim Duffy's radical, bonkers vision of football-team-as-circus. There was Jimmy Boco (rhymes with Coco), John 'Yogi' Hughes, an Icelandic goalie who was really a basketball player ("Like a drunk trying to catch a balloon," conceded Duffy eventually) and Chic 'Chico' Charnley, a semi-mythical trick-cyclist of a footballer who could score goals from the halfway line and disarm intruders at training when they were intent on settling arguments with swords. But although we led the league during the first few weeks of 1997-98, the clown-smiles were wiped off our faces when Hearts won the derby.

Aah, the derby. I could write a whole book on it. I could write seven books on the most famous Hibs defeat of Hearts there's ever been. But right now I'm struggling to get to the end of this match report. To quote David Byrne, Dumbarton fan and chief Talking Heid: "This is not my beautiful house." And Hearts - huffing and puffing in their new kit, not much different from the old one apart from the pigeon-sh*** epaulettes - they're not my beautiful team.

They are, however, the so-called third force in Scotland. On this showing, their third way involves tons of physical presence, a mean defence, a right-up-your-arse midfield, a ginormous Dutch tree of a striker called Mark de Vries who's injured today, and a coach in Craig Levein who doesn't take any snash from the SFA, referees or other managers who bleat about aggressive tactics.

But I'm a Hibs fan, and, aesthetes that we are, we crave football played with flair. We don't just crave it, we hunch up the collars of our Noel Coward smoking jacketsand pine for it, like Algernon Charles Swinburne would a randy monkey. I can't claim recently that Hibs have been especially beautiful: until last season, they scudded about under the long-ball terror-reign of Bobby Williamson, a coach who never 'got' Hibs, or the expectations of their fans. When we complained about the poor quality of football on offer, he blurted: "If you want entertainment, go to the cinema."

The game passes in a blur - a month-long blur. And finally it's over. I can go home. My first match as a wannabe Jambo has made my head spin and my stomach lurch. Nobody put a foot on the ball. Nobody passed it along the ground. Nobody scored a goal. And nobody in the crowd, if they're brutally honest, left Tynecastle believing that association football, Scottish-style, is on the brink of a bright and shiny tomorrow.

• Extracted from Heartfelt - Supping Bovril from the Devil's Cup by Aidan Smith, published by Birlinn on 31 October, £9.99. For more information phone 0131 667 7799.

Taken from the Scotsman