This winter just passed, I spent a lot of time standing around in the cold in front of a camera in Scotland, trying to stop my head shivering like a Jibba Jabber whilst engaged in conversation with a series of very serious men. It was for a documentary VICE made about Glasgow's football rivalry – on the one side, the Irish, republican, rebel club Celtic, and on the other, the Scottish-British, loyalist (and now possibly defunct) Rangers. Except not. Because it's a lot more complicated than that.
If you want the shades of grey, watch the doc in the player above. Right now, I'd prefer to talk about something simpler that (presumably) won't make anyone threaten my life on the internet.
By which I mean this:
That's the under-13s team from Drumsagard Football Academy, wearing their new kits, sponsored by VICE. If you've seen the doc, you might recognise some of the kids, and you should be especially familiar with the guy wearing black in the middle. Sandy Chugg appeared in the film to discuss the current state of the rivalry from the perspective of a man who's spent quite a lot of his life watching Rangers. And also bleeding for Rangers. Because he and his friends in the notorious ICF (Inter City Firm) casuals gang used to love nothing more than to roam Scotland and the lands beyond it attacking hooligan groups from rival clubs and countries.But that, as well as a jail sentence he was handed in 1990 for dealing LSD and temazepam, is all in the past now. Sandy had his lifetime ban from going to Rangers games overturned a few years ago, and now he's a reformed character, devoting himself to coaching the kids at Drumsagard.He's a genuinely great guy, as were pretty much all of the people we met while in Glasgow. In fact, the worst ones were those we didn't get to meet – why didn't you return our tweets, @Halda1?! We coulda made you a star.
Such a shame. But enough of that, let's have more pictures of the kids, who just won one of the cup competitions they entered. Sadly, we can't claim any credit for it, because they won it last year too, but it's nice to know we've aligned ourselves with winners.
If you don't wanna watch Rivalries: Rangers & Celtic in the player above, you can find it here. Perhaps you even made it down to the Kicking + Screening football film festival in New York yesterday, where they played it to a bunch of people. I'll be speaking to SiriusXM Radio's Pete Koury about the doc and Euro 2012 at around 1PM Friday afternoon (BST) if I haven't rammed it down your throat enough already.Follow Kev on Twitter: @kevkharasPhotos courtesy of the Daily Record (who wrote this story about the sponsorship).
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