Massive Hibsteria

The Euros are still two entire months away, but they can wait. Foul Play has more than enough to obsess over in the meantime, and no, I’m not referring to Man City’s just-about-still-breathing title hopes. A few hundred miles to the north, in a city in which I spent vast stretches of my childhood, something astonishing is afoot.

Hibernian FC – an entity to whom my entire existence was more or less devoted throughout my teens and early 20s, until Real Life took over – have snatched a place in the Scottish Cup Final, thus presenting them with the opportunity to win the thing for the first time since 1902, when my dearly-missed grandfather wasn’t even a glint in his daddy’s eye.
To get one’s head around the sheer enormity of the occasion which awaits, it might help to bear in mind that the world’s last surviving First World War veteran passed away two months ago, and she was a bouncing one-year-old when Hibs last lifted the Cup. There is, surely, nobody alive who can remember it happening. Generations since have come and gone; infinitely better Hibs teams than the 2012 vintage have failed to scale this particular Everest; and yet now, after a season which can only be described as horrific, they are 90 minutes away from eternal immortality.
The semi-final against Aberdeen was straight out of Roy Of The Rovers, involving a ridiculously brilliant start (1-0 up after three minutes), followed by an hour of abject terror as one awaited the inevitable hammer-blow of an Aberdeen equaliser, duly delivered round about the hour mark by a preposterously wonderful long-range strike from the Dons’ Rory Fallon.
The half-hour that followed was one of unrelenting torment as the action swung wildly back and forth; then, with five minutes of normal time left, an astute through ball from Garry O’Connor found Leigh Griffiths, who was surely doomed by the weight of a hundred years’ history to trip over his own feet, or sky the ball a mile over, or at best, unleash a magnificent strike sweet and true into the net only to watch in horror as the linesman raised his flag.
He held his nerve, and pinged the ball home. The flag stayed down. The goal stood. (There was no earthly reason why it shouldn’t have, and not even a hint of offside, but years of agony have conditioned me to accept that at times like this, one must always assume that the referee is almost certain to intervene and wreck the euphoria). I believe I involuntarily let out a roar that could be heard as far away as the Antarctic, ran out of the room, down the staircase and onto the street, before just about getting it together to scramble back to the TV set in time for what has to go down as the most nerve-shatteringly tense few minutes of sport since Ireland and Spain faced off in the Suwon shoot-out of 2002.
The rest is history. We are in the Cup Final.
In one of those extraordinary twists of fate to which the footballing gods subject us, the following day’s semi-final saw runaway Cup favourites Celtic dumped out by the black Hearts of Midlothian, my eternal tormentors during those childhood years, merciless maroon-clad exterminators who without fail would seem to massacre us by an average scoreline of 4-0 every single New Year’s Day, while my alcoholic loyalist uncle crowed with maximum callousness and the Union Jacks waved and danced gleefully in the icy, biting Edinburgh wind. These sort of scenes stay with you, and it is not at all illogical that the unanimous feedback from my friends and relatives over there was that they would far prefer to have faced Celtic on the big day, and were all roaring in agony when Hearts upset the apple-cart.
At first glance, this may seem perverse: the League table confirms that, by any measure, Celtic are a stronger side than Hearts and their elimination hugely increases Hibs’ chances of winning the thing. But the point is that losing to Celtic as massive underdogs seemed a more acceptable fate. By contrast, the prospect of losing to Hearts is intolerably unbearable, and would certainly do much to ruin the entire experience of getting there. The flipside is that, if the dream is to come true and Hibs do the business on May 19, there would be no sweeter way of doing so than beating the old enemy.
Objectively, on all known form, it would be daft to do anything other than prepare for the worst. It is in the nature of Cup runs that they can and often do bear no resemblance at all to the week-by-week narrative of the League season, and Hibs have been a black joke for much of this season, finding themselves embroiled in a deeply unpleasant relegation battle.
They appointed Dubliner Pat Fenlon – whom many of you will know from his exploits with Shels and Bohs – as manager back in December, and the ship appears to have been slowly but gradually steadied since then, as his wintertime recruits have started to find their feet and the crass defensive howlers have diminished in frequency. With a seven-point safety cushion between ourselves and the drop zone, the team no longer looks like a ghastly footballing accident waiting to happen every time they take the field. Nonetheless, the improvement has been relative rather than dramatic, and the team could not yet be favourably compared to impressive recent vintages such as the 2001 and 2005 incarnations.
But, on May 19, concepts such as recent form will lose all relevance, and all will boil down to 90 minutes (or more) of death-or-glory heroics. If Hibs win this one, we can expect statues of Pat Fenlon to be erected on Princes St., the players will carry haloes above their heads for the rest of their lives, and Foul Play will be able to die a happy man. In the name of the dead generations, here we go…