IT'S JUST three months since I bumped into the Queen of the South football team. I was on one of those tough assignments which journalism throws up every so often, sent to cover the preliminaries of the Miss Scotland competition and I'd grudgingly made my way to the swanky hotel in the centre of Glasgow where I was to meet the girls.
Well, would you Adam and Eve it? This same swanky hotel turned out to be the very place where Dumfries' No.1 football team was staying. I was able to watch at noon on cup final Saturday, as 12 astonishingly beautiful women sashayed into the lounge,
just as a group of athletic young men, with red faces and their jaws on the floor, were reluctantly shepherded out of the door by the club's coaching staff and bussed off to Hampden.
You'll know by now how the results went that fateful afternoon. I got to spend a few hours with beautiful Stephanie from King's Park and her 11 mates. The lads went off to meet craggy Walter from Ibrox and his band of ne'er-do-wells. Ultimately we would all end up as losers, those Doonhamers and me. But I forged a bond with the team which has endured the weeks in between.
Nothing I saw on television on Tuesday has weakened that connection. Queens were outstanding in their second leg tie against Nordsjaelland of Denmark. And not only that. This is the column that dares to say that the thoroughly enjoyable coverage from BBC Scotland did something like justice to their unlikely invitation to "Come and join us as an unfancied Scottish First Division outfit sets off on a European romance."
It started with that magnificent thumping free-kick by Bob Harris – he's changed a bit since the Whistle Test – which put Queens right back in the tie. With the net still billowing, commentator Paul Mitchell hit double top for his line, "A certain Danish brewery don't make starts in Europe, but if they did … " And the game was on.
Things just got better and better. Queens played well, aggressively, but adventurously when they could. To help the Scots along, Morten Wieghorst, the Nordsjaelland manager, had sportingly fielded a useless defender and the rest of his side looked terrified by the spirit of the opposition. At half time an elderly farmer from Galloway was herded on to the pitch to explain the significance of the tie. It turned out this was Davie Rae, Queens' chairman, and watching the football was "better than pulling tatties".
The cumulative effective was powerful. Halfway though the second half, every punter in every bar in Scotland was shouting for Queens and sensing the inevitable failure which was coming. "I didn't expect this much tension in the game tonight. It's wonderful," said Mitchell just before the curtain fell, and he was right.
Compare and contrast with the following night's coverage of Liverpool's tie with Standard Liège.
ITV's production was built on two very shaky foundations. The first was an assumption that the majority of viewers actually give a toss about Liverpool. They don't. Not even the bulk of Merseyside is rooting for the mighty Reds, so it's probably unwise to use artwork which announces 'Liverpool in Europe' at every commercial break, as if the TV audience is a branch of the fan club.
The second problem compounds the first, the hopelessly partisan performances of presenter Matt 'the lads' Smith and commentator Clive 'the Reds' Tyldesley.
What a disastrous pair they are, producing a soundtrack so brazenly biased it's enough to make a man switch to Alan Green. For any neutral who had been nourished by the previous night's action, Liège were the side to shout for in this game: the underdogs, young, fit, talented, well-drilled and good sportsmen. And without an unusually high calibre performance from Pepe Reina, the Liverpool goalkeeper, they would have scored the goal that took them through.
Of course, it didn't happen. "Kuyt. Champions League. The Reds are coming," declared Tyldesley with an excruciating 'I told you so' finality in his voice as Liverpool scraped home. Up in the studio, Koppite Matt hadn't been so sure: "Good grief, they make you sweat in Europe don't they?"
Liverpool, like Nordsjaelland and ITV, won ugly. But then, since when was football a beauty contest?
The full article contains 743 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
