Pining for Scots’ leaders of old
Notwithstanding the odd win in the autumn internationals and the three tries against France in Paris this year, their international side has been struggling in recent seasons and their club teams have provided cannon fodder for the big guns in the European Cup group stages.
In addition, there were a meagre three Scottish accents heard on the last Lions tour if you take Ian McGeechan’s ever-present burr out.
But it hasn’t always been a matter of slim pickings for the Scots. In the 70s they provided one of the great Lions tourists, for instance, in the late Gordon Brown, ‘Broon frae Troon’, who is remembered in these lines.
That when some District prop in his narrow pride
Stamped on your head and legged it into touch,
Those lines come from ‘Gordon Brown’ by the great Scottish poet Mick Imlah’s book The Lost Leader, published two years ago. It’s a book which has Scotland’s history in its headlights — the lost leader of the title is Bonnie Prince Charlie, while John Knox, Mary Queen of Scots and William Wallace also appear.
Scottish rugby is both the subject of some poems and a presence in others. Imlah, a huge fan, saw no reason to keep his passions separate. ‘Gordon Brown’ records a chance meeting between Imlah, then with the ‘fourths or thirds’ with London Scottish, and the international second row, who fell in for a training session and handled their encounter gracefully:
Poems would outlast what the British Lions did,
‘London Scottish’ is itself the title of another poem in the collection — an account of how all of the players from that club volunteered for service in World War I in 1914:
‘Feet, Scottish, Feet!’ — they rucked the fear of God
Which just goes to show that a high-tempo rucking game has always been a Scottish speciality, going back 100 years.
Well, some things never change.
Imlah was born near Glasgow in 1956 and attended Magdalen College in Oxford. His love for rugby wasn’t a pose: he cared deeply about the game, as his friend, fellow poet Bernard O’Donoghue — Corkman and Gaelic football fan — explained in a recent email exchange.
“Mick Imlah played rugby and cricket a lot, for West Wycombe (his home village) and for Magdalen College here, where he was captain.
“He had a totally passionate commitment to the team, and he had the most phenomenal knowledge of the personnel of Scottish rugby.”
Imlah wasn’t shy of sharing that passionate commitment, either. O’Donoghue remembers the Scot leaving a phone message for him when the Scots ran up a hefty early lead against Ireland in Lansdowne Road during their 1990 Grand Slam season.
That season gets another airing in ‘Stephen Boyd’, a lengthy poem in The Lost Leader addressed to a friend of the poet’s who died young.
Imlah recalled how they met, when he assumed football would be Boyd’s game — ‘not the perversion I was public-schooled in’ — until one evening, Boyd responded to Imlah’s provocative advocacy, the poet having ‘prophesied aloud the ‘greatness’ of some teenage Border prospect, Saviour of Scottish rugby and so on’, and the two men found they shared an interest in the 15-man game.
From there on the poem is a spotter’s paradise for those who remember fine Scots teams of the late 70s and 80s.
My mother’s favourite, ‘out of Heriot’s’;
The hooker Deans, pent-up, belligerent;
The steep kicks of our out-half, Rutherford
(’That one’s come down with snow on it, I’ll tell you’);
Paxton the number eight who, on the box
Was always ‘thumping on’ or ‘smasing on’;
In the poem the two pals mark their meetings with reference to sporting events, a calendar system that will be familiar to many readers.
For instance, Imlah referred to a night out in the ‘warm deceptive spring [which] followed the March of David Sole’s Grand Slam in 1990’, which ends up in an Indian restaurant.
To murmur, like an arch-conspirator,
(Before there’s a rush of outrage at this overpraise, it should be recorded that Imlah himself offers a pretty clear-eyed evaluation of Cronin’s career soon afterwards in the poem:
In and out of the side till his knee gave way
Boyd died in 1999, which explains the unanswered questions Imlah raises towards the end of the poem:
Your standpoint on the new Cronin, Scott Murray,
Whose jumping in the line-out begs comparison
OTHER sports nudge into view elsewhere in the book. A poem set in 1966 is frank in its depiction of Scottish antipathy towards its southern neighbour, even among World War II veterans: ‘The whole of our street was rooting for Germany — West Germany — even my Dad’.
A youthful Imlah recognised sporting pragmatism then; England boss Alf Ramsey had mentioned his ‘novel formation’, ‘which anyone knew meant Stiles kicking the pants off the dark-skinned Eusebio’. However, there’s no doubt about the Scot’s real sporting preference.
His countrymen haven’t had as much success in rugby lately, but then again, in ‘Stephen Boyd’ he concedes that even three decades ago the Scots were used to the wilderness:
As for the earlier prediction that that Rutherford kick would have ‘snow on it’ when it came down — that was one of the trademark terms of the late Bill McLaren, doyen of rugby commentators, who died last year; Imlah says his friendship with Boyd was based on ‘little more than aping’ the broadcaster, ‘and spelling out again that sport matters because it doesn’t’.
A solid enough basis for any friendship. Or an approach to any sport, for that matter.
In November 2007 Imlah was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, and the news spurred him to gather the poems slowly accumulating over two decades. The resulting volume was rushed into print in 2008 and duly won the Forward prize. Mick Imlah died on January 12 2009. He was 53.
