The Road to Lisbon (22 page)

I head into the brush and pee against a bank of honeysuckle, enjoying the foreignness of this secluded, sun-dappled place. I take care not to hit a little lizard who is enjoying the morning
warmth. I go back to the car. The lads are all helping out so I just sit right down, spark up a ciggy and draw in the smooth blue smoke.

“Okay Iggy – give her some gas.”

On Rocky’s command Iggy guns the engine. It barks and roars with complaint, then reaches a deafening, whining crescendo. The din sets my nerves on end; will the engine explode, shearing my
pals to pieces with ragged shards of shrapnel? Or will it simply surrender, and rupture itself beyond repair in order to stop the agony? Yet Rocky is unfazed, his hand calmly continuing to circle
in indication.

I watch him. He is utterly absorbed in the engine, in complete control of it. I wonder if I ever lose myself like that in my painting. Hard to know, I suppose, but I doubt it. Too many subtexts,
too much shite spinning around inside my head. I seem to lack a quality of certainty about myself that people like Rocky effortlessly possess. I feel a pang of envy as I consider how much Debbie
would doubtlessly be drawn to this man of action, this uncomplicated breadwinner. I think back to when they were both 16 and went out together.

Then I think about the first night she and I spent together. Her modesty, despite her profound beauty. I had watched her silhouette as she undressed carefully, seriously. I treasured that moment
as the most precious in my life. I knew this didn’t come cheap to a girl like her. I loved her for a lot of reasons but at that moment the main one was that she had chosen me.

Rocky looks up from under the bonnet. Flushed and greasy. Signals to Iggy to kill the engine.

“We need a new throttle cable. Fuck.”

I look out. At the rows of eyes fixed upon me. Scottish Press men, English, Portuguese, Italian. The world’s media . . .

I am the centre of attention. They are ready to hang on my every word. They are waiting, hoping, longing for a story. I am not going to disappoint them.

“Thanks for coming along gentlemen. I won’t keep you long. I know you all have deadlines, and I, frankly, have more important things to do.”

A ripple of laughter.

“I’ll take questions in a minute, but first . . . here’s my team.”

A dramatic pause. They all look at me as if I have lost my mind.

Forty-eight hours before the biggest match of his life and the Big Man is going to name his team . . . he has fuckin’ lost it, the pressure has finally got to him.

But I have my reasons. Eleven of them. Eleven names that have been inscribed on my brain for the past month; names that are the most powerful statement of intent I can deliver at
this moment. No secrecy, no hidden agendas, no mind games. Just the names of the men I trust to win in the style I want. I may be revealing my hand, but I am showing Herrera that I believe I have a
winning hand.

I’m showing that I know my best team, how we are going to play, how my players are going to rise to the challenge and that they can be relied upon on the greatest stage of
all. Eleven names that spell out belief and courage. I know my team. Do you know yours, Helenio? And, if you do, do you have the balls to tell the whole fuckin’ world? Those names will be the
sound of a gauntlet being thrown down. The men who now know they are in the team can relax and focus properly on the biggest challenge of their lives. They know that I believe in them. Their backs
will straighten. They will now feel they can conquer the world.

I reel through the names once more in my mind, the names that have become like a mantra. I do not need a sheet. They are tattooed on my brain. I stare straight ahead and out they
come, tripping off the tongue.

“Simpson . . . Craig . . . Gemmell . . . Murdoch . . . McNeill . . . Clark . . . Johnstone . . . Wallace . . . Chalmers . . . Auld . . . Lennox.”

I reach the end and wait for the scribbling to stop. They put their pencils down and look at me.

“Any questions?”

Silence.

“Well, I think that means you have got your story! And that means I can get back to the real stuff. Thanks boys.”

I walk out. I stand for a moment and listen.

Still silence.

Eddie, Iggy and me volunteer to walk westwards to find help at the next village.

“It’ll be okay lads,” I say as we amble along. “Even if we miss today we’ve got all of the morra to get to Lisbon . . . and even Thursday morning and afternoon if
needs be.”

The road curves slightly and we happen across a middle-aged, olive-coloured SEAT 600 which is parked up. A beautiful young woman, with chestnut hair and iodine skin, is standing on the passenger
seat, her upper body protruding through the sunroof. Alongside, a man has climbed a telegraph pole. He is attaching a flag, which has a red background with a green diagonal cross beneath a white
cross. The girl notices us with alarm and begins speaking urgently to the man. He clambers down quickly, exchanging a few sharp words with the female.

“Hola!” I call out, hoping to put them at ease.

The man tosses the flag at the girl and nervously lights a cigarette. He is about 30, of medium height and build, with handsome, broad features. His stance is rather effeminate, with one hand
tucked into his back pocket, the other pointing the cigarette with understated belligerence. He is unshaven and wears brown plastic-rimmed spectacles with tinted lenses, behind which his small eyes
dart quickly. His lips pout rather arrogantly as he regards us suspiciously.

“Gora Euskadi Askatuta!” shouts Eddie.

The man’s stern expression breaks slightly at Eddie’s words. Eddie sees my puzzled look.

“And I thought you were supposed to be politically educated,” he smiles. “It means, ‘Long Live a Free Basque Country’. That’s a Basque flag he was trying to
pin up. It’s forbidden.”

“Hola,” shouts the man. The girl is stashing the flag in the car.

“You speak English?”

“Sure. Ah, you are Scottish? You go to Lisboa for Celtic?”

His voice is rather high-pitched. His hair, which is thinning a little on top exposing a high forehead, is slicked to one side with oil and combed down into long sideburns. He wears a
tan-coloured leather jerkin which tones with his corduroy flares, and a white roll-neck sweater.

“Yes!”

“Ah, very good. We met a bunch of you in San Sebastian yesterday.”

“Our car has broken down, just back there. Is there a village nearby?”

“Ispaster. It’s less than a kilometre. There is a garage there. It is very small but they may be able to help.”

“I don’t suppose you could tow us?”

“No problem my friend. You should be able to squeeze into the back. My name is Xalbador. This is Angelu.”

We shake hands. The girl smiles shyly.

Inside the car Xalbador pauses, scratches the back of his neck distractedly. “My friends, I believe you saw . . .”

“The flag? You can count on our discretion, my friend,” I assure him.

“It is very important.”

“In Spain it is a serious business,” says Angelu rather timidly.

“No bother,” says Eddie in a soothing voice. “We know all about flags and symbolism . . . the fight for self-determination. We live in hope for the day when the Six Counties
are reunited with Ireland.”

“I salute that noble goal!” says Xalbador.

“Me too,” says Angelu, flashing a smile of brilliant white teeth at Eddie.

“Up the flying columns!” declares Iggy.

Most managers look back on their playing days with nostalgia. Life was simpler, then. They turned up, ran about a bit during the week, checked the notice
board on a Friday to see if they were in the team, and then finished their working week with a game. After the game, a few pints with the boys and then the cycle began again on Monday morning.
Footballers are creatures of habit and there was a comfort in the monotony. They knew where they were, had a set position and that was it. Simple. For a few, like me, it was plain dull. I hated the
repetitiveness of it. Ploughing round a cinder track, playing the same position week-in, week-out, it bored me to tears. I wanted to try out new things. But, as a player, nobody wanted to listen.
As a manager, you could make them listen. Encourage them, inspire them, command them.

Playing or management? Give me management any day of the week. Some people go to college or university to learn. My football education started to accelerate when I took my first
steps into coaching. Learning fired my imagination. I wanted to immerse myself in different football cultures, break free from Scottish and British football, to gain a more rounded education. The
memory of the great Hungarian team still burned brightly. I knew there were different things, great things, happening in Europe and I wanted to be part of it.

It was in November 1963, while manager of Dunfermline, that an opportunity presented itself. I was offered the chance to travel to Italy and study the methods of Helenio Herrera,
the legendary Argentine coach of Inter Milan, who had won the league the previous season for the first time in nine years.

Herrera was a small, serious-looking man with a huge presence. He did not walk into rooms. He entered. When he did, the atmosphere changed. Tall, bronzed footballers suddenly stood
to attention when he addressed them. He spoke to them with a brutal clarity. His philosophies were pinned up around the training ground.

Who doesn’t give it all, gives nothing.

Class + Preparation + Intelligence + Athleticism = Championships
.

He was obsessed with building a winning mentality. His players were trained to deliver positive messages to the media.

We have come to win . . . we have the players to be victorious.

If any deviated from the script, they were fined.

Discipline was top of his agenda. Smoking and drinking were forbidden. The players’ diets were strictly controlled. Three days before games he took his squad to a country
retreat to prepare them.

I looked around the walls of his office and saw box files packed with personal profiles of every player at the club. Thorough, meticulously researched, Herrera was taking things to
a whole new level.

On the training field, he broke the mould. He carried out drills I had never dreamt of. He laid out his philosophy, explaining his concept of mounting lightning-quick attacks from
deep and the value of overlapping full-backs. He was thinking thoughts no-one had before. The players were well-drilled athletes, clean-living and open-minded, diamonds polished by his militaristic
regime.

It made me think about Scottish football; the closed minds, the rivers of alcohol, the clouds of tobacco smoke and the betting dens. How would Herrera survive in Scotland? He
wouldn’t. He would take one look and leave. I had to find my own way to get the best out of players who had grown up in one of the most densely-populated, heavily-industrialised corners of
Europe.

I watched how Herrera talked about football, broke it down, analysed it like a science experiment, or a mathematical formula. Herrera was most famed for developing the
catenaccio,
the stifling ‘door-bolt’ system with its close man-marking and its rigid line of defenders. He spoke passionately about the role of attacking full-backs. He picked
out Giacinto Facchetti as the prime example of a defender he had converted into a rampaging full-back and spent just as much time in the opposition’s half as he did his own. It was
inspiring.

Herrera had happened upon a winning formula, but I began to wonder if there was a gaping hole in his master-plan. I thought about the players that made my pulse race, Patsy
Gallacher, Georgie Best; players whose individual genius could light up a game and get the crowd buzzing. Where would they have fitted into Herrera’s vision? They wouldn’t. He would
have run them out of town. It occurred to me that Herrera had most of the jigsaw but there were pieces missing, and I suspected that those pieces were the most important to me. Despite all the talk
of attacking full-backs, there was no denying that defence was at the core. His method was more about his players stopping opponents rather than expressing their talents. He had built an
impenetrable system, and he had done so with a level of professionalism that would surely lead to even greater success. He was light years ahead of his contemporaries, but I left believing that his
system also seemed too rigid, too inflexible. Maybe one day somebody would crack the code, and then where would he be?

But I never forgot his presence. Herrera removed any doubts over the importance of complete authority in management. After that trip, I knew a great manager had to be like a
dictator. He was not there to be liked. He was there to command respect and to demand that his orders be followed. Everything else flowed from that point.

We introduce Rocky and Mark to our new friends and get out the tow rope. The little SEAT valiantly takes up the strain and we glide solemnly the short distance to the village.
It’s a pretty little place, a cluster of buildings with veined-pearl walls and terracotta roofs, nestling at the foot of a hill. The garage is a dilapidated wooden shed, peeling red and white
paint. A rusty petrol pump sits on the oil-stained forecourt bearing the letters
CEPSA
.

Rocky emerges from the gloomy interior shaking his head. He is followed by the silver-haired proprietor, who wipes his greasy hands with a rag as he chats in Basque with Xalbador.

“He’s gonnae have to order the part from Bilbao,” Rocky informs us. “We’re stuck here till the morra I’m afraid chaps.”

A concerned grumble emits from the group.

“Well, while we’re here we might as well treat Xalbador and Angelu to a beer, to thank them for the tow, like,” suggests Eddie.

Hibs came calling in early 1964 and the job was too big to resist. I had turned Dunfermline around from relegation candidates to cup winners. I had restored
respectability and even made a mark in Europe. I could go no further. It was time to broaden my horizons and Easter Road was the place to do it. They had a bigger fanbase and substantially more
money than Dunfermline. It was a step up, another test of my credentials but one that I was sure that I needed. I had ideas, but I needed the players to execute them. Hibs were struggling, 12th in
an 18-team league but they had good players. And they had Willie Hamilton. Hamilton was the key to everything. Quick, two-footed, skilful, a joy to behold; he was also a loose cannon. Name a vice
and he had it. If I was to achieve anything with Hibs, I had to get Willie playing. Some players respond to a hard-line approach. Willie did not. You could scream at him all day and he would nod
his head solemnly . . . and then wander off and into the nearest pub, spraying around his wages like the passes he made on a Saturday. Willie took risks every day of his life. He also took risks on
the football field. That was the key to his greatness. He lived on the edge, but he gave Hibs their edge. He needed to be indulged, cajoled, occasionally shouted at, but mainly looked after.
Man-management was the key to being a leader of men and no-one challenged me more in that respect than Willie Hamilton. Sometimes he was a liability, but other times he was a hero, and for those
times, you had to just sit back and marvel; for at those times, the world looked a beautiful place. The grass looked greener, the birds sang in the trees and God was in His heaven when Willie
Hamilton was in full flow.