The ultimate derby

Sometimes you could live without football lore.

Ian Bell

Within all the gilded history and burnished legends there is the hint, the nagging thought, that the past was as good as it could ever get. It amounts to the suspicion that the best is behind you, and receding fast. This is not healthy.It has become our national habit, though. When was the last time the Old Firm entertained serious hopes in the Champions League? When did Scotland last qualify for something? When – and this is not a trick question – did Hibernian last win the Scottish Cup?

If history is truly a burden, Hibs are the Atlas among third-rank European clubs. We carry a world on our shoulders. We have history to burn. And, no, since you ask, it isn't even slightly funny: we stopped laughing at the statistical phenomenon of cup failure a generation ago. It's not an emotional burden, just a damnable load.

This year, everyone has invoked the last time Hibs met Heart of – spit just there, son; it's traditional – Midlothian in a Scottish Cup final. No-one actually remembers the event, of course: this was in the prehistory of the sport.

There is a solitary, fuzzy picture of some lads playing spot-the-ball before a 16,000 crowd at a place called Logie Green in 1896. But you have to trust me: that part of north Edinburgh has no other claim to fame.

Modern development, light and "mixed", now squats on the site. It was nothing special to begin with. In my youth, we used to joke that it was downhill all the way on the slope from Canonmills and Logie Green Road. Even we didn't guess that, where Hibs were concerned, the downside jokes were becoming superfluous.

In 1896, the pitch was home to St Bernard's. There's lore. In those days, the capital could indulge a "third force" in football instead of wondering whether it could muster one. St Bernard's – deceased in 1943 – had first been put together from the Third Edinburgh Rifle Volunteers, stalwarts who had happened to buy a ba' in Lothian Street and decided, possibly after the pubs had shut, that they were a football team. In 1895, they won the Scottish Cup.

This was more than Hibs managed the following year. Just the 3-1, of course, and just the setting in stone of what we call "rivalry". That year, the bowlers, suits and 'taches of the Scottish Football Association had insisted – for modern contrast – that the game be played at Logie Green, and certainly not at Hampden. Much good it did us. We won the cup in 1901/02 – against Celtic at Parkhead – then history stopped.

This is hard to convey. For us, there have been a handful of other finals. Apparently the world has moved on a bit since 1902, what with world wars and people shouting at mobile phones. But Hibs are like an entity in a Philip K Dick novel, lost in the timestream, trapped in a loop, forever – for facts are facts – Not Winning the Scottish Cup. Groundhog Century, we call it.

The sponsoring bookies vouch that Hearts are clear favourites this time. Just for once, you couldn't blame the men with the odds for that. Hibs have not had a good season. Skin from teeth can be produced in evidence. Whatever the eccentricities of the Romanov dynasty, Hearts and Paulo Sergio are self-evidently in possession of a better squad than Pat Fenlon can summon, even on a good day.

The smart money would therefore say I shouldn't get my hopes up. In this, I have an edge: what hopes? It also strikes me, though, that a derby game obeys no rules, that a modern minor-club professional only rarely understands the cursed local lore, and that this is all to the good. The less players know, the better. But perhaps that's just me, allowing my hopes to rise.

I should be wondering over who is most likely to benefit from the width of the pitch, whether there is any esprit left in the Romanov regime, and whether Fenlon needs this win more than the other lot. The facts say two things: we've got the best song, but it's an elegy; they have the better team, but it's fragile psychologically.

So then, enquire: how does football really work? What changes when two teams, ill-matched on paper, have shared so much history, when a cup final is also a derby game? The statistically improb-able fact is that nations have risen and fallen since Hibs last won the Scottish Cup.

Solutions to complex equations in theoretical physics have been found more often than the answer to our riddle. Many things have changed, but one has stayed the same: two teams in one smallish city, yoked together by rancour, history, family ties and shared frustrations.

That would be "the rivalry". Glasgow folk tend not to get it. Superficially, there are resemblances they understand, but those are deceptive. Here's the "Irish" club, from the east end of town. In contrast, there's the establishment institution, favoured by First Ministers, prominent Tories and big lawyers. The one in green likes to understand itself as the permanent underdog; the other lot in maroon – I'm minding my language – as part of the Scottish game's ancien regime. Hearts tend to have the bigger support: there's no argument about that.

What differentiates Edinburgh from Glasgow is that most of the other arguments happen within families. This rivalry is unusual because, very often, it is intimate.

Beyond the purist hardcore, small enough at the best of times, this cup final will be watched in households all over the capital and beyond by family groups whose affections are split down the middle. I don't hold this fact up as an example to anyone, but it alters the atmosphere. In Edinburgh, the demand for tickets has become irrational. You wouldn't want it otherwise. Hampden's meagre accommodation will be filled easily, just as Murrayfield would have been filled had the SFA given up protecting their national turf.

THIS is slightly encouraging, yet mostly sad. It speaks of a latent belief in Edinburgh football that finds no expression at any other time. We have heard a lot recently about how the Scottish game "depends" on the Old Firm. That's obviously true. What the excitement over this final says is that a whole other audience is out there, a potential waiting to be unlocked for everyone's sake. Someone should be pondering that fact.

A good game would therefore be nice, but a Hibs win would be better. We need this one, not for the history but for the sake of a printable fact: second bottom. We currently stand as testimony to the truth that a club can be well run, on an admirably sound financial footing, and still be going nowhere. That might please a banker, but it won't lure many back to Easter Road.

It's Hearts, though, this time. I call that ideal. It is precisely the luck of the draw I would have hoped for: 1896, and all that. No other tie would have drawn the tribes together in quite this way. It is a reminder, too often forgotten in all the pondering over the state of the Scottish game, that tribalism need not always be a dirty word.

Taken from the Herald