Quintin Jardine's blog

I couldn’t help noticing on BBC Reporting Scotland that the kids in the sports centre in Motherwell were wearing Barcelona shirts. Says it all.

On hearing the news that Mark McGhee has been reappointed as manager of Motherwell Football Club, my lifelong team, my instant reaction was, ‘You can’t cross the same river twice.’

This morning, it still is.

As of next year, twelve months earlier than planned, continuous coverage of the Open Championship begins on Sky.

That will mean, farewell Hazel Irvine, hello Sarah Stirk; not an exchange that this golf viewer will welcome. In fact, it really gets on my Colin Montgomeries!

The West Ham vs Newcastle game was on  telly last night. My dear wife is from Tyneside; she was so underwhelmed she went off to bed.

Paradoxically, after losing 0 -2, Steve McClaren, the Newcastle manager,  declared that the result had been ‘a wake-up call’.  Okay Steve, now you’re awake. So WTF are you going to do?

So Scotland lost in Georgia? No surprise, but we’ve come on since the dark Bertie Vogts days. As a nation we are so perverse that we’ll probably win our last three games and qualify.

This in my in-box from the European Tour:

‘Quintin, win a Paul McGinley Singed Ryder Cup golf bag plus 25% off PAR Skincare’

Five red cards in the English Premier League yesterday, three of them nonsense. Another soft one today at Southampton, inside 45 minutes.

Are refs on a mission to ruin football for spectators?

Sky want me to pay £20 to sit up in the middle of next Sunday night to watch something called SummerSlam: grown men in tights pretending to fight.

England’s women’s Test side are in the process of folding against Australia. If the rout is completed, I wonder whether they’ll receive the same savaging by the media that the men would in similar circumstances.

Many, many, many years ago there was an (I assume) apocryphal tale about Jimmy McGrory, in his incarnation as manager of Celtic. When asked why he had signed his ninth centre-forward, he is said to have replied, ‘Why not? If we don’t some other bugger will.’

Looking at the back pages of today’s Scottish press, it seems that transfer policy still applies.

Dodgy investment of the year; Saturday tickets for a Test Match

August 1 and we’re playing league football in Scotland today. The play-off (Motherwell 6 – Rangers 1) that ended the 2014-15 season seems like only yesterday, yet here we are on the treadmill again, Motherwell fans looking fearfully at the fixture list and hoping for a 10th place finish at worst.

Meanwhile in Europe, only two Scottish sides are left in the qualifiers and I would not put money on either of them making it to the competitions proper.

Our international side may be enjoying its best spell of results in recent years, but domestically our game is goosed. I’d rather watch fly-fishing.

Settling Down Again.

An insider view of the Open by Eddie Pepperell, the thinking person’s golfer.

If you haven’t seen the BBC documentary, ‘An Evening with Peter Allis’, I urge you: find it on iPlayer.

Sad screw-up by BBC golf. In their piece about Ben Hogan, they showed Max Faulkner instead.

My eternal gratitude to my friend Dougie Donnelly, Scotland’s peerless sports commentator, now broadcasting to a global audience with the Golf Channel, for  inviting me into the commentary box yesterday to see how it all fits together. Thanks also for the priceless opportunity to meet Denis Hutchinson, former Open champion of both South Afrivca and France, and the Voice of Golf in South Africa for the last two decades. The icing on the cake was the discovery that, like Dougie, Hutchie is a Bob Skinner fan. Bob and I are honoured, gentlemen.

Dear Rory McIlroy

I’m writing this in Gullane, having just returned from a walk around the golf course and through the village. It’s quite a sight, with scaffolders still at work, and marquees being equipped in readiness for the Scottish Open Championship. The event begins on Thursday morning, but there are players on the course already, getting to know its quirks, working out their yardages, and preparing a game plan for each hole. You should have been one of them.

These golf events don’t just happen by magic.  The four days of the tournament are preceded by weeks and months of preparation by European Tour staff. It is funded in part by sponsor cash, much of it in this case coming from Aberdeen Asset Management, (Why is an investment house which handles billions in client money funding something as spurious and transitory as a golf tournament? Don’t ask me, but I’ll be reviewing my portfolio, that I can tell you.) and the inevitable Emirates airline, which is everywhere.

But even the professional input would be pointless without the work of hundreds of volunteers, the men and women who will be buggy drivers for players from practice ground to first tee, who’ll follow them as official scorers, or who’ll marshal the crowds to ensure that the tournament takes place in a safe and proper atmosphere. (By the way, I’m marshalling on a couple of the playing days and I promise you that anyone who shouts ‘Get in the hole!’ is liable to have trouble extracting my ‘Quiet’ board from up his arse.)

I know people who have been busy for weeks preparing for the next few days, and I know the work they’ve put in, all of it voluntary and unpaid. They were happy to do this, just as the Gullane Golf Club membership is happy to give up three weeks of visitor income, and offer the courtesy of its newly refitted clubhouse, because it feels privileged to be hosting some of the best players in the world, for a week of unpredictable Gullane weather.

Top of the list, or course, is you, Rory. You are the Number One golfer on the planet, the game’s standard bearer, its shining example. You, and the defending champion, Justin Rose, are the poster boys for Gullane 2015.

So, how did you acknowledge this status, and express your thanks for all the selfless work that has gone into giving you another payday? You put yourself at risk with days to go by having a pointless football kick-about with your mates, a session strenuous enough to see you tear an ankle ligament and put yourself out of action. Stupid, selfish, and cretinous, are three words that come immediately to my mind; you can add irresponsible too. I hope they’ve come to yours also, as you contemplate the disappointment you’ve caused, and the number of people you’ve let down.

Am I being harsh? I don’t believe so. I doubt that Nike, Jumeirah Estates, or any of your other multi-million pound sponsors would think that either.

Yours sincerely

QJ

In three weeks, the Scottish Open comes to Gullane. Golf Club members have been asked to act as volunteer helpers, and I’ve put my hand up. The Chief Marshall wants me to do two shifts as a buggy driver, taking players and their caddies to the first tee.

When the proper Open came to the village two years ago, and Phil Mickelson won, I was pleased for old FIGJAM, as were most serious golf followers. I didn’t rate his long-term sidekick, Bones Mackay, though, for his on-course attitude.

Traditionally the caddy has three duties, turn up, keep up and shut up. Phil’s bag man was fine at the first two, but it isn’t part of his brief to shout rudely at the galleries, as he did from the very first hole. I won’t mind having Lefty in my buggy, but I may be  tempted to run over Bones’ foot.

I watched a little of the coverage of the US Open first round. My immediate reaction was that golf normally involves things called ‘greens’. Dunno what they have at Chambers Bay, but green they are not.