Bring Me the Sports Jacket of Arthur Montford

An Adventure Through Scottish Football

Aidan Smith

• Publisher: Arena Sport
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781909715561
• eBook ISBN: 9781788850933
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

AScotland on Sunday Sports Book of the YearTake a hilarious romp through the best and worst of Scottish footballing history.The Scot who won England the World Cup. Macaroon bars and Bovril. When Dixie Deans met Bob Marley. When Davie Robb met Olivia Newton-John. When George McCluskey met the Stones. When Rick Wakeman filed match reports for Meadowbank Thistle. Triumphs and disasters, submarines and rowing boats, War and Peace (who's read it). The Cowdenbeath kettle. The Brechin hedge. Morton's great Danes. Icarus at East Fife. The dead pigeon sketch and the amazing technicolor booze-coat. The can girls. Those who flogged ice cream and licked Hitler. The world's oldest conjoined twins. Inside the half-time scoreboards. Our greatest goal, our greatest assist, our keepers. Scarlett Johansson! And of course Arthur Montford - commentator, curator, favourite uncle to the nation.In Bring Me the Sports Jacket of Arthur Montford, Aidan Smith mines Scottish football history for quirk, strangeness and charm. On a journey that takes him to Albania and also Albion Rovers, great players are celebrated and so are great characters. Rediscover old legends (not told this way before) and maybe learn about new ones. If there's a running theme it's that our game, its participants and those who watch in the rain are one and the same thing - indomitable.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. ‘The strolling narrator of the dark blue saga’
• 2. ‘The pan loaf-fed, ginger-haired, bandy-legged exemplar of Scottish gallusness’
• 3. ‘Scarlett Johansson’s a Hibby’
• 4. ‘Like a magician revealing where he’d hidden the rabbit, the ace of spades and the sawn-in-half woman from the audience’
• 5. ‘The featherweight nation with the massive and furious pride’
• 6. ‘The greatest crap golfer in the world’
• 7. ‘Let’s see what’s going to happen in the next 28 minutes!’
• 8. ‘Who’s that with Davie Robb?’ (Oh, just Cruyff, Beckenbauer, Pelé …)
• 9. ‘The original home of soccer madness’
• 10. ‘Don’t you remember I awarded you a shy in your own half in the eighth minute?’
• 11. ‘Dive! Dive! Dive!’
• 12. ‘A burr to soothe a growly old dog’
• 13. ‘Long bangers between garage doors under a single, sparking street lamp’
• 14. ‘Dan Brown vs the brown drink’
• 15. ‘We were warned not to get off with any footballers … I ended up with Chick Young’
• 16. ‘Quinty-whit?’
• 17. ‘A double-headed sixpence wrapped in a mystery inside a clootie dumpling’
• 18. ‘I grabbed the pigeon and threw it at the clown’
• 19. ‘Like a Mellotron on top of a piano on top of a Hammond organ on top of a double-necked guitar’
• 20. ‘What country, no matter how desperate, sticks a goalie outfield during a World Cup?’
• 21. ‘eight Flumps, twelve Bubblies, four Fruit Salads, six Flying Saucers …’
• 22. ‘Cod-classical codswallop in codpieces’
• 23. ‘I suppose they were expecting me to drop down dead’
• 24. ‘My first taste of alcohol, almost-black industrial descaler, disgusting and beautiful’
• 25. ‘Baldy! Baldy!’
• 26. ‘’Cause every little thing gonna be all right’
• 27. ‘I was given away as a baby, passed right doon the street’
• 28. ‘My boys are professional sportsmen, not performing seals – how dare you!’
• 29. ‘One Tillicoultry, there’s only one Tillicoultry’
• 30. ‘Death smiles at us all. All we can do is smile back’
• 31. ‘erra Protestant macaroon bars!’
• 32. ‘Hunkering down in the long grass with The observer Book of Birds? That was pervy’
• 33. ‘Sticking it to them’
• 34. ‘A goal to have Space Race kids dreaming of exciting planets waiting to be explored’
• 35. ‘Seven oaters a year, all of them stoaters’
• 36. ‘There is nothing like a Dane’
• 37. ‘Like being told I had a nice wee car or a nice wee penis’
• 38. ‘Obsession by Calvin Klein, lager by Tennent’s’
• 39. ‘Always laid-back, always “unroughled”’
• 40. ‘The curious incident of the dog just after half-time’
• 41. ‘Wallace and Vomit’
• 42. ‘The parka-clad schoolboy stampede across a quagmire’
• 43. ‘This yellow 2CV screeched to a halt and out tumbled Mick Jagger’
• 44. ‘Impassive, inscrutable, inviolable, unbuyable’
• 45. ‘Casey Kasem ripped him off, copied his ironed hair’
• 46. ‘Like a penny banger exploding in a cast-iron dustbin’
• Acknowledgements