While in England the top-flight zombie clubs limp towards the inevitable conclusions of this season with fans hating the owners and owners distanced and uncaring of fans, in Scotland something remarkable may be about to happen. St Johnstone, a fine 137-year-old club, have – for the first time – reached both cup finals. Having already beaten Livingstone 1-0 in the Scottish League Cup final to win only the second major trophy in their history, only Hibernian now stand in their way of the sort of cup double that, for a generation, has been something only the two Glasgow clubs achieve.
If you don’t keep your eye on football up here, it may surprise you to learn that we still take both cups very seriously indeed. While in England, too many clubs find playing in either cup competition a drag on their main reason to exist – generating money in order to generate money – in Scotland, because of the green and blue duopoly of the last 35 years in the league, the cups have become the place where you might overcome the odds and triumph, with Hearts, Hibs, Dundee United, Inverness Cally and St Johnstone themselves all winning in the past 10 years.
In winning the League Cup, the Saints join Kilmarnock, Ross County, St Mirren and Aberdeen as winners over the last decade.
St Johnstone play at the 10,600 capacity McDiarmid Park on the outskirts of Perth (once known as St John’s Town, hence the club’s name) and won the Scottish Cup in 2013/14, their first major trophy. Now they’re back again, hungry for more success.
They also won the Scottish Challenge Cup (currently going by the wonderful title of Tunnock’s Caramel Wafer Challenge Cup) for non-top-flight teams, in 2007/08, have picked up seven second-tier titles and even got to the third round of the UEFA Cup in the early 70s, but this cup double would be the biggest achievement in the club’s history. Hell, getting to both finals probably is.
Managed by Callum Davidson, who remains their most valuable player when they sold him to Blackburn Rovers for £1.75 million in the late 1990s, they progressed to the cup final by beating St Mirren with this superb free-kick.
In this mad, illogical and blinkered world, that’s the sort of strike that would be regarded as better the more expensive the player is and the higher the level they play.
Now only Hibs stand in their way, a club that is seeking its second cup win in five years after winning in 2015/16 and ending a 114-year long wait since their own last cup triumph. It’s the sort of clash that falls under the title ‘Proper Football’. This is roots football, born of and still part of the community, not separated by the tinted wheels and gold spinners of massive wealth.
St Johnstone lost £20,000 last year due to Covid robbing almost all income from the club, but had prudently saved a ‘rainy day’ fund for £2.6 million, so they remain in a healthy financial situation, free of borrowing and debt. Financially sensible people running a football club? Whatever next?
When you’re a smallish club – though their average attendance of 3,938 is easily the most popular thing to happen in and around Perth – which doesn’t win anything that often, these are the truly glory days and makes all the seasons of trudging to the ground as the snow sweeps down from the north, blowing in off the Cairngorms, worthwhile. It is, in a very real sense, what football is all about.
And it is stories like this which warm the heart in this coldest of football worlds and are a reminder, as Manchester City win the league again – with all that is behind that victory – that not all is lost, not all is wrong or evil and the somewhere in the glorious north, the heart of football remains beating warm and strong.
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