The ties that bind us

BROTHERS IN ARMS...joy on the sidelines for Gigs and I as we beat Edinburgh City with BSC Glasgow and guide the club to the SFA Challenge Cup Final in their first season

By IAIN KING, Toronto, January 29, 2019

WE were nine years old, sat in a dingy dressing-room at The Murray playing fields glancing nervously at a bin-bag in the middle of the floor.

The famous East Kilbride Youth Club yellow and blue jerseys glinted out, caught in the light of a swinging, caged single bulb.

It was like a cell in there.

Craig Young and I had just been sentenced to a life in football.

This morning at the age of 51 I sit staring out the window of my apartment on The Danforth near downtown Toronto.

I’m 3,500 miles away from home.

My journey in The Beautiful Game has brought me to Canada and my job as Ontario Player Development League (OPDL) Head Coach for North Toronto Nitros.

I look out on 20 centimetres of snow on the ground as winter truly bites in my adopted city and I can remember that first game like it was yesterday.

Craig and I prayed for a starting jersey that day and we got them.

King in midfield and the kid they called Giggles because of his bubbling laughter up front.

Fast forward 42 years and the reverie of that 9-0 win on that red gravel pitch next to Heathery Knowe Primary School, where my love of writing was first nurtured, fades from my mind.

I think back to the summer of 2013 to a moment when my finger was poised over my iPhone screen and the name Gigs.

By now Giggles was not considered a manly enough nickname in the battle-scarred world of Scottish football.

Six years ago the chance was there to lead my hometown club East Kilbride FC into their first season in the South of Scotland League as coach.

I believed I could convince the committee of the club that I was worthy of the job but could I convince my lifelong friend?

I needed someone I could trust beside me if this was to work.

I needed someone who believed in playing the game the same way I do. The way I wanted to coach it.

Passing, possession with purpose, pressing, passion.

In his work with what was then a superb Rolls Royce Under-21 side Gigs had shown all of that. And then some.

I needed him to leave them behind, though, and say yes to this partnership. Surround yourself with strength not with weakness.

That was how I had measured editorial managers when I made my appointments as Head of Sport in The Scottish Sun in the newspaper world.

I reasoned that the same mantra should apply in football.

Without hesitation back then Craig said: “I’m in, I can’t wait to get started.”

An adventure was about to begin.

Cut to now. The idea for this month’s blog grew from a chance find as I dug through my box of coaching notebooks, searching for a session I felt could bring transition to life for my Nitros OPDL players.

EVERY DAY I WRITE THE BOOK...in these pages was the start of an idea that never quite happened. Yet now I still refer to the sessions we ran - and recall all the laughs we had

I found a beautiful but battered moleskin bound book my daughter Caitlin gave me, My Coaching Notes is embossed on the front of it.

In it I had written the start of one of many ideas I have had in my life that didn’t quite come to fruition.

I had vowed to catalogue all our wins and defeats, scale our peaks and dredge our troughs, write the story of the first season of East Kilbride FC.

Then we would self-publish it and sell it in the club shop, even though we didn’t have one of those at the time.

It was the kernel of an idea, looking back for what would become a Lowland League team with a gate of 400 fans on the best of nights, it was aimed at a niche market.

I guess then I felt, as I do now, that it was a story worth telling.

Rewind to then. Within the first month of our existence as East Kilbride FC hard work behind the scenes, and admirable ambition from the club’s owner construction tycoon James Kean, had driven us into a place in the fledgling Lowland League.

We never played a single fixture in the South of Scotland League.

Instead Craig and I embarked on hastily creating a team to compete in the feeder competition beneath the Scottish Professional Football League (SPFL).

We held our own, finished eighth in Season One and famously lifted the club’s first ever silverware.

SILVER LINING...on the East Kilbride FC team bus after winning the SFA Challenge Cup

That 2-0 victory over Dalbeattie Star in the 2014 SFA Challenge Cup Final at Palmerston Park, the home of Queen of the South, was one of those afternoons to savour for the rest of your life.

Three days after that triumph we were sacked.

Festering ill will from some within the club and, looking back now, as a rookie coach at that level my own inability to listen to other viewpoints and manage upwards cost us our coaching jobs.

We’d stood together as nine-year-old boys praying for a starting jersey for EKYC.

We stood together in the function room of a local pub and told our EKFC players, many of them in tears, that our adventure together was over.

A year later as the coaches of BSC Glasgow we led that club, also in their inaugural season, to glory in the same SFA Challenge Cup Final.

Again the scoreline was 2-0 this time against Civil Service Strollers at Ferguson Park, the hosting club Whitehill Welfare.

I reflected that day that in the wake of that departure from EKFC a phone call was made to ask Craig to become interim manager.

He was left with no doubt that I was gone but he had a pathway to stay. He politely refused and walked with me. Friendship, loyalty.

Nothing has pleased me more in the years that have passed since than to see Gigs back at our hometown club flourishing as an assistant to former Celtic and Scotland no2 Billy Stark and now guiding the younger players there. Time heals wounds.

Yet this morning, fuelled to write by my fingertips grazing over that treasured gift from my daughter, I couldn’t help but think about the nerves I felt that day back in 1976 when we played our first game together.

I can feel them tingling even now, recall the elation of winning and Gigs and I both hitting the back of the net in our victory.

He scored a hat-trick and the memory isn’t what it once was but I’m sure I must have selflessly assisted all three of them…

Players and coaches now should always treasure and respect the dressing-rooms they share with their colleagues before and after games and training.

I know from experience that the bonds that are made there will last you a lifetime, in this game they are the ties that bind us.

GLASGOW IS YELLOW AND BLUE...our victorious BSC Glasgow players with the SFA Cup