Quintin Jardine's blog

This is my year for reading autobiographies, Mandelson, Blair, Bush, I’ve been into them all and been interested by different people’s takes on the same events. But they’re heavy going, so  a couple of days ago I loaded on to my Kindle, ‘Hitman: my real life in the cartoon world of wrestling’ by Bret Hart.

Eh? I hear you exclaim. Wrestling? But it’s fake. Of course it is, but so what? For this book is fantastic, one of the best and most gripping autobiographies I’ve ever read. Bret Hart is Canadian and  comes from a family of eight brothers and four sisters. Their dad, Stu, was a wrestler and promoter; their mother, Helen, a New York girl, kept most of them more or less sane, most of the time. All the brothers became pro wrestlers, and all the daughters married pro wrestlers (with disastrous results). The saga is about the rasslin’ industry as it really is, and describes Bret’s life on the road, a body-breaking, hard-drinking odyssey filled with rogues, villains, heroes, lots of sex and drugs and even a little rock and roll. Fascinating stuff, and a far more interesting journey that Tony Blair’s, but where it really scores is in his description of the most dysfunctional extended family that you could ever imagine. You couldn’t make the movie, for two reasons; you couldn’t cast it, and nobody would believe it.

I note that the unloved El-Hadji Diouf enjoyed a wining debut for his new club, Rangers, against the Jambos last night.  I note also a wonderful quote by his new manager, Walter Smith, who claims that ‘serial killers get better publicity than he does.’ That’s because their PR is better, Walter, and maybe also because there’s no record of any serial killer gobbing on the public at his trial.

I am not a winter person by nature. The day which means most to me, year in year out, is the last Sunday in March, when daylight saving sees the beginning of British Summer Time. I am a firm believer that the UK should switch to Central European Time, on psychological grounds alone. That said, there are some days, even now, that are memorable. Yesterday was one. Why? Because in the afternoon, having logged well over 1000 words on my current project, I was able to take a break sit on the terrace in the sun, and read for a couple of hours. I may even do the same today. But first, the 1000+ words.

I know that Rangers signing options are constrained these days, but I can’t be the only person in Scotland to be astonished that they have been led to ease the problem by taking, on loan from Blackburn, one El-Hadji Diouf. A very good player no doubt, but this is the same El-Hadji Diouf, whose previous includes, a community service sentence in France for being involved in a road accident while driving without a licence,  telling a ball-boy at Everton to ‘**** off, white boy’, a suspension in England for spitting on an opponent, and a club fine, UEFA suspension and £5000 Sheriff Court fine in Glasgow for gobbing on Celtic fans during a UEFA Cup tie. The man is arguably the most hated footballer in England. Blackburn are off-loading him in the wake of his  latest outrage, abusing a fellow professional as he lay on the ground after suffering a double fracture of the leg. By every account, not a nice guy. Let’s face it, when Sam Allardyce, a man who has spent his entire management career going apeshit in the dug-out, considers sending someone to a shrink, that person must be an extreme case.

It may be that his latest move, to his ninth club in a twelve year career, will be the making of him. (On the other hand if he crosses Walter Smith or Ally McCoist it may well be the end of him.) But whether it is or not, and good player or not, I’m still asking myself why Rangers chose to import such a character, particularly one with a criminal conviction for assaulting fans of their great rival. Do they have no faith at all in their own youth development system?

The honour was mine, I assure you. Good luck with your studies, maybe, once you have your degree, we’ll talk about Skinner the movie.

All these things are unarguably true, but they will not deliver a  Forth tunnel crossing rather than a bridge. The problem is cost. Three years ago, John Swinney gave Parliament cost figures on four crossing options. These showed that either tunnel option would cost 50% more than a bridge. In appraising each option six criteria were used; these did not include either ongoing maintenance cost, or the estimated life of each option. In other words, the thinking behind the appraisal was entirely short-term, what will it cost now, rather than over fifty or one hundred years. We will persuade wee Alex, or the Grey Man, whoever is the decision-maker after May, only by bringing about a sea-change in this thinking. Even then, to fund the project unhindered we will have to take control of our own revenue raising, not just some of it, but all of it. With new gas fields and maybe oil, opening up west of Shetland, this would be a good time to do that.

I am overwhelmed, Mary, and I thank you sincerely. Your praise is so fulsome that I am too embarrassed to publish it. Suffice it to say that it’s an honour to be mentioned in the same sentence as Sir Arthur. So, how do we persuade wee Alex that value is more important than cost and that it isn’t too late to go for the tunnel option?

Just over fifty years ago, Motherwell, the football club with which I have been cursed from the day that my dad lifted me over the turnstile, had a side known then and now as the Ancell Babes. It was a top quality team in what was then a top quality league, not the rest home for continental wasters that it has become.  I have a gym mate in Gullane, Murray Ancell, who is the son of the manager who created it and whose name it bears to this day. A few weeks ago Murray asked me ‘Do you remember the night ‘Well beat the world club champions nine — three at Fir Park?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied ‘I was there; pissing wet Wednesday and Ian St John scored six goals.’ Ian St John was the star striker of the Babes side. ‘Sinjie’, as he was known on the terraces, was a prodigious talent who scored 80 goals in 113 games for Motherwell, and missed just as many. Three of his strikes made up what is still, I believe, the fastest hat-trick ever recorded in football, two and a half minutes against Hibs.

When he was transferred to Liverpool fifty years ago come May 2, aged 22, the fee of £37,500 was the highest ever received by Motherwell, and the highest ever paid by Liverpool. Once the deal was locked up, Bill Shankly, the driven man who built the modern Liverpool FC, confessed that he would have paid twice as much if necessary.

Yesterday, Shankly’s lineal descendant in the Liverpool family, Kenny Dalglish, paid one thousand times that amount for a striker. Andy Carroll is also aged 22, and scored 31 goals in 80 games for  Newcastle United, a 39% strike rate. He also comes with an off-field reputation that includes a criminal conviction and an impressive rap-sheet of tabloid headlines. The owners of Liverpool were able to cough up that sort of cash without blinking, and sign another player in a deal that brought their total spend up to £6om, because simultaneously they sold Fernando Torres, a sullen want-away Spaniard with a career strike rate of 47% who has done nothing more energetic this season than scratch his arse,  for a breath-taking £50m; Fifty Million Pounds. Torres is a top player, yes, and he has a World Cup Winner’s medal . . . although he did little to earn it . . . but still; Fifty Million Pounds.

Sinjie is probably playing golf somewhere today, weather permitting. Whatever he’s doing I’m sure that he will have a philosophical smile on his face as he contemplates the fee that Murray Ancell’s dad would have commanded for him, an established international centre-forward with a  71% strike rate, in the modern market.

World’s gone crazy.