'Oi, you, over here." The voice came from the direction of the Portakabin labelled "Boardroom" and belonged to a large, imposing figure dressed in jeans and an open-necked shirt. He was striding towards us with the pigeon-toed, bandy-legged gait of a former footballer. Even at a distance, he bore an unmistakable air of authority, menace even. "I'm Alan Mackin," he said. "I'm the chairman of East Stirlingshire. Come in and meet the directors."
Losing it
Thanks to a freak win in their final league game last year, East Stirlingshire narrowly avoided becoming the worst football team in Britain - ever. So what's it like to play for a club with a home gate of 200 and a weekly wage of just £10 (paid in cash)? Jeff Connor spent the following 12 months trying to find out. Ahead of the new season, we publish an extract from his book
Thursday July 28, 2005
The Guardian
'Oi, you, over here." The voice came from the direction of the Portakabin labelled "Boardroom" and belonged to a large, imposing figure dressed in jeans and an open-necked shirt. He was striding towards us with the pigeon-toed, bandy-legged gait of a former footballer. Even at a distance, he bore an unmistakable air of authority, menace even. "I'm Alan Mackin," he said. "I'm the chairman of East Stirlingshire. Come in and meet the directors."
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I had done my homework. As a footballer he had been a noted defensive hard case, mainly with F*****k. Originally from Paisley, he was a property developer and a tax exile in Spain (in west-of-Scotland terms, the equivalent of carrying a large sign saying "Don't f**k With Me"). One football writer had indeed warned me, "Don't get on the wrong side of him".
By the time I arrived at Firs Park, in the wake of the club's worst season ever - eight points from 32 games - the relationship between Mackin and the hardcore East Stirlingshire support had reached an all-time low. The "Shire" fans hated the chairman; the chairman despised the fans. The fear of Shire fans was that Mackin and the board would simply sell up, walk away, and allow the club to join the ranks of other vanished Scottish football institutions such as Third Lanark, Clydebank and Airdrieonians. They felt the board - based on Mackin's infamous decision in the summer of 2002 to set a wage cap of £10 a week and his lack of investment in Firs Park - was deliberately setting the club out to be uncompetitive. Mackin's famous wage cut had made national news, along with what amounted to a mass walkout of senior players.
The warfare was brutal at times. Some fans alleged that Mackin, during one of his famously rare appearances at a game, had used binoculars to spy on them. Or maybe he was just counting them. If Mackin wasn't going to dip in his own pocket, more money certainly wasn't going to come from the turnstiles: the average home gate was about 200.
The poisonous atmosphere between board and fans hardly made the manager's already uphill task any easier. When the previous manager had quit in February 2004, Dennis Newall had been on a shortlist of two as a potential replacement. He played a blinder at the interview: "I'll do the job for nothing," he told the board. No contest.
When he arrived at Firs Park towards the end of March 2004, the club were closing in fast on an unwanted record - that of the worst campaign in British senior football since Glasgow's defunct Abercorn Rovers lost 24 straight games in the season of 1897.
On an afternoon of high emotion, the Shire dug deep and, with the help of an opposition own goal, beat Elgin City 2-1 in their last game of the season - ending the run of 23 consecutive defeats. For all the wrong reasons, the Shire got as much press as Celtic and Rangers that day.
"I have to earn my brownie points here," Newall told me. "But I do have the hunger and desire to succeed."
Newall's Firs Park office is a time capsule, unchanged since the days when no less a managerial presence than Alex Ferguson sat there and thought dark thoughts about the directors next door. The carpet is worn and stained and Newall conducts business from behind the standard Formica-topped desk with his scribbled list of playing staff, ash tray, two mobile phones - one for his business, one for the club - and his cheap cigars. A lingering smell of liniment mingles with the smell of stale cigar smoke. It is the odour of football.
In early July, the traditional rituals of pre-season began. Players straggled back from Torremolinos with San Miguel paunches and orange faces, ready to embark on a punishing training regime designed to bring them to peak fitness for the season ahead - in other words, a few trots round the local park.
Even to my unpracticed eye, the Shire's limitations were plain. Their captain and longest-serving player, Graham McGhee - or Gee as he is known - looked like the sax player in The Commitments and played with the same dainty fastidiousness. Like the other Shire players he inherited, Newall had little patience with Gee: "He's a nice guy, but being a nice guy doesn't make you a nice footballer."
The two fullbacks, Chris Miller and David Harvey, were solid enough and there was a fair-haired winger called Chris Baldwin who possessed pace and balance on the ball but who fell over a lot in tackles and seemed too willing to blame teammates when things went wrong. The back four was marshalled by Chris Newall, raw-boned and competitive. Chris is also the son of the manager. His father insisted: "He's no different from anyone else if he f**ks up."
The Shire goalkeeper, Tony Mitchell, is known as the Cat. Six feet tall and weighing in at more than 14 stones, the Cat possessed the traditional physical attributes of most keepers, and the same eccentricities. Before any match, he insisted on playing the theme from Rocky on his ghetto blaster before a match. "Come ooaan, the Shire," he'd bawl. "Winners, eh?"
Unfortunately for a management whose main attacking ploy revolves round the keeper booting the ball high into opposition territory in the hope of finding the head of one of his midfielders, there was one drawback: the Cat couldn't kick a dead ball for toffee. If the wind was blowing towards the Land of Leather end, this was a big problem. With the high wall just feet behind the goal, the Cat's limited run-up meant he sometimes had trouble clearing his own penalty area.
But some of Newall's new signings looked more promising. A four-square striker called Ross Donaldson who, with his shaven head, unshaven chin and belligerent outlook resembled a 1970s French rugby hooker, put himself about in no uncertain fashion. He was what I recognise as an old-fashioned centre forward, but already he was finding it hard to impress his new manager.
"Ross Donaldson and Burger King, a marriage made in heaven," muttered Newall, then shouted: "Ross, you couldn't trap a medicine ball."
Amazingly, the delivery driver from Bellshill took this and more without a murmur, although I spent much of the season wondering where, and when, he would finally crack and turn on his tormentor.
Newall has a fine line in abusive rhetoric and, like many football managers, possesses the characteristics of a sarcastic schoolteacher. Donaldson apart, the manager's favoured target for abuse was a diminutive midfielder from Glasgow called Paul Ross. Newall doesn't like Ross's suntan, this being evidence of an ego he believes could drag the club down - "He thinks he has arrived because he is playing for us."
The real test came when Second Division Berwick Rangers arrived at Firs Park for the first home game proper. The Berwick match was also my first chance to see the inside of the Firs Park dressing room on a working day. Having played professional sport, I pride myself on recognising dressing room ambience, or lack of it, and it was all wrong here. The fierce war whoops on the other side of the wall easily drowned out the Shire's mutterings. Only the Cat seemed ready. Eyes bulging and teeth clenched, he looked like an East German hammer thrower at the point of delivery.
Newall had a few final, man-to-man words for his burly striker, demanding that Donaldson "behave like an animal". Donaldson, who plainly had no problems in this department, nodded and grinned. On the pitch, he was marked by the Berwick captain, Mark Cowan, a veteran defender with flat feet and a lantern jaw. A visiting fan informed me that Cowan ended most matches swathed in bloody bandages like Terry Butcher.
Berwick's first goal was scored by one of Shire's former players, and though Donaldson smashed in a glorious equaliser from 35 yards, a defensive lapse and a simple tap-in gave Berwick the victory. It was a result that seemed to leave both sides happy. The Shire avoided the expected drubbing and Berwick the ignominy of losing to them.
Arriving for a later match, against Dumbarton, I thought the good times had indeed returned when I was met by a large tail-back just outside the town. For the first time in living memory there appeared to be a queue of football traffic heading to the Shire. I was wrong. The hold-up was caused by a rogue cow, heavy with milk, trotting down the white line and peering into every car in the detached, incurious manner of cows everywhere. The Firs Park attendance that day was, in fact, 167.
Inured to the suffering that goes with being a Shire supporter, many of them have turned their side's haplessness into a positive. A mordant sense of humour comes with the territory; travelling to see their team lose every week has become like a medal of honour. At one of their early matches, with the Shire still embedded in a dreadful losing run, I was seated in the Firs Park stand when a 10-year-old, face almost invisible under a black and white scarf, turned to his father and asked: "Dad, can I clap when we score?" "Yes, son, but you'll be waiting a long time," replied his father. On another occasion, 4-0 down against stennybottom at Ochil View, one Shire fan shouted from the terraces: "Come on Shire, 5-4 will do."
Home matches were invariably enlivened by four or five teenagers, quick-witted and sarcastic in the manner of Scottish youth, who always sat in the stand directly above the home dugout, a homemade Shire flag draped over the railing in front of them. The Dead End Kids, as I christened them, had a great line in patter and already possessed the sense of the absurd that goes with supporting the Shire. No one was safe.
"Pretend the ball's a pie," they would chorus at Donaldson. Once, when the Cat went down at the feet of an opposing centre forward and took a blow to the head, one of them called: "Get the vet to put him down, he's still moving," as the poor goalie writhed on the turf.
The trip to Peterhead began badly for Donaldson. He arrived yawning, unshaven and without a tie and was immediately fined half a week's wages. This was all part of the manager's professional approach. The loss of a fiver will focus anyone's mind.
A salty sea breeze wafted in from the nearby coast across Balmoor, the new home of the Blue Toon, as Peterhead are mysteriously known. With an hour to go before kick-off, the Shire players were urged on to the pitch by Newall, where they huddled nervously in the centre circle, like penguins on a shore patrolled by killer whales.
"The nutse opposition out there," announced Newall, "are all grouse-beaters and sheep-shaggers." F*****k's city slickers would show these country bumpkins how it's done.
Peterhead opened the scoring after 11 minutes with a diving header and on the half hour another accurate cross, and a melee in the Shire goalmouth, brought the second. At half-time, with the prospect of a heavy defeat looming, Newall launched into his charges with a tirade of frightening ferocity. Each player, his son Chris, included, was lacerated in turn. He started at No 1 and finished 14 minutes later at No 11. If the referee hadn't knocked on the locked door to call them out for the second half they would probably still be there, cowering on their benches in front of their irate manager.
Peterhead's Jamie Buchan made the points safe with a 20-yard shot low into the net after 54 minutes, before David Hagen ran unmolested through a petrified defence for the fourth. Ross Donaldson, being Ross Donaldson, was booked for unsporting behaviour before the Peterhead substitute finished things off with virtually his first touch of the ball.
The full-time paint-stripping was probably worse than at half-time, and on the way home the players remained traumatised in a state of total abjection, a sort of resigned shellshock. Battered and bowed, we arrived back at Firs Park at 10 past nine that evening, having spent 13 hours on a journey to nowhere, the only material gain being the £10 (in coins), in a brown envelope, left on each seat. Or a fiver, in the case of the main striker. One by one, they filtered silently into the F*****k night. "Have a nice weekend, lads," said the manager.
In the absence of F*****k, who had moved on to higher things, the match against stennybottom had become the local derby for the Shire. With their strings tugged by one of Newall's "flash gits in fancy boots", they overran the Shire to the tune of 6-0. Striker Joe Savage helped himself to a hat trick and Newall went nuclear. "It's clear some who are here will be going as they are not good enough," he warned. I looked up to find most of his players eyeing each other and wondering who he meant.
By the time of the first of the two trips to Gretna, in October, I had begun to wonder what a winning football coach looked and sounded like. I longed for the hearty ring of young men's laughter (the justification for any sport), the sight of Dennis Newall and his assistant Greig Denham with their arms around each other, and the merry crack of Tennents ringpull cans. True, we had managed a mind-boggling draw at second-to-bottom Albion Rovers, a result that ended a run of 11 successive defeats, but that hardly counted.
Searching for a crumb of comfort, I realised that when the Shire had lost 5-0 to Peterhead in the first league match of the season, Albion Rovers had lost 6-0 to Gretna on the same day. Strictly speaking, according to goal difference, Shire had then been off the bottom of Division Three for the first time in three seasons. Dennis Newall was not amused.
