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Title: Heartbreakers: Celtic, Albert Kidd and 1986
Author: Stephen McGowan
Link: Heartbreakers – Amazon
Synopsis
May 3 1986: Heart of Midlothian travel to Dundee in need of a single point on the final day of the season to secure their first Scottish League title in 26 years.
In Paisley closest challengers Celtic face St Mirren in need of a miracle.
With seven minutes of the season to play the miracle comes from the boots of a Dundee substitute by the name of Albert Kidd…
Told by key figures including Kidd, Davie Hay, Alex MacDonald, Roy Aitken, Henry Smith, Davie Provan, ‘Heartbreakers: Celtic, Albert Kidd and 1986’ tells the full inside story of one of the most incredible, rollercoaster finales in Scottish football history…
Below is the ‘Introduction’ chapter to the remarkable, unforgettable story that is “Heartbreakers: Celtic, Albert Kidd and 1986”.
INTRODUCTION
‘Who, way back in August blessed with the second sight of the seventh son of a seventh son could have foreseen that Hearts, on the very last day of the season would be playing for the Championship requiring only one point?’ – BBC commentator Archie MacPherson, May 3 1986
THIRTY years since those moments, those silent moments, a question still gnaws at Albert Kidd.
The 1985-86 Scottish League season had seven minutes remaining when Kidd fired the first of his two goals into the net. For Hearts they had the impact of exploding bullets.
The first fizzed into the top corner. Moments later a one two ended with the ball being despatched past Henry Smith. The Edinburgh side were mortally wounded.
They arrived at Dens Park in a mood of buoyant expectation. They needed a point. A single, solitary point to win their first championship since 1960. Kidd’s goals stripped them bare, a 27-match unbeaten run in the league gone. Celtic, 5-0 winners over St Mirren in Paisley, snatched the championship.
Across a subdued home dressing room Kidd, brisk and buoyant, caught the eye of the Dundee manager Archie Knox.
‘He was sitting opposite me,” he recalls.
‘And he looked at me in the silence and said, ‘****’s sake wee man.
‘And I’m sitting there thinking, ‘woah.’
‘****’s sake wee man? What does that actually *mean*?
‘What was he actually saying here?
‘Was he being nice to me? Was he praising me? Or was that actually quite detrimental?’
Outside thrawn men from Edinburgh tramped around weeping and wailing into scarves. Hard-bitten working class Hearts supporters. They had travelled over the Forth and Tay Bridges in hope and expectation. Now they slumped in various states of disbelief at the violent travesty before them.
In the toilet of the away dressing room Hearts manager Alex MacDonald, an undemonstrative no nonsense former Rangers player, composed himself. He wiped a tear from his eye.
Hearts still had a Scottish Cup Final against Aberdeen the next week and it was a time for stoicism and strength. Publicly at least. But there was no way of dressing the wounds. No immediate means of healing the pain.
Dundee won 2-0 and, to them, it made little difference. Their late push over the trenches was futile as Rangers beat Motherwell to snatch the final European place. In Dens Park, as at Ibrox, victory had a pyhrric feel. No one felt much like celebrating.
No one, that is, but Albert Kidd. His season had been abject. Barren and seedless. Here was a player who, until the final climactic moments of season 85/86, couldn’t have struck a barn door with a beach ball.
****’s sake wee man.
Archie Knox knew Albert Kidd would score that day. What would happen if he stuck him on. Knocking on the manager’s door the day before the striker had told him so.
‘I said, ‘look, here’s something for you to consider. I have a very good hit rate against Hearts. Every club I have played with I have scored against Hearts.’
Dundee’s manager was entitled to turf him out on his ear.
Kidd had started a measly four games, playing 12 times in all. The management didn’t fancy him and the feeling was mutual. The forward’s relationship with Jocky Scott, the assistant manager, was toxic. A Dundee legend Kidd regarded Scott as a fully paid up member of the footballing old guard. At Dundee in 1986 it was better to be strong, silent and ferociously hard working than small, skilful and lippy.
Friends and teammates like Bobby Glennie had rallied round. They tried to keep his spirits up.
‘You’re a great player wee man.’
‘You should be in that team.’
But Kidd was desperate. He paused outside the manager’s office on the Friday after training, composed himself then knocked on the door because he had nothing left to lose.
‘Going to see Archie was never just a ploy just to get a game,’ he protests now. ‘I honestly felt I always did well against Hearts.
‘He says, ‘okay wee man, let me think about that.’
The decision was settled by circumstance. By necessity. By an injury to another Dundee striker Derek McWilliams.
‘So he calls me later and says, ‘I’m putting you on the bench,’ says Kidd.
Hearts craved an early goal. In these situations euphoria and expectation quickly gives way to anxiety and impatience. A curious paralysis comes over teams racked with inexperience of winning trophies. Their insecurities, their innermost fears, rise to the fore.
Striker Sandy Clark was hauled down in the area by Dundee’s Colin Hendry in the fourth minute. Referee Bill Crombie – an Edinburgh man and a Hearts supporter – said no.
Celtic were rattling in goals at Love Street, Paisley. David Hay’s team, a hardened, streetwise collective conditioned to win trophies, began the day two points and four goals behind. By half-time the goal difference was level. Hearts peered over their shoulders and shivered.
They still had control of their own destiny. But a photographer shouted the Paisley score to keeper Henry Smith as he left the field, planting the seed of doubt.
‘Big man, Celtic are 4-0 up…’
‘Bollocks,’ said Smith dismissively.
Manager Alex MacDonald asked his scout Ian Cruickshanks to provide bulletins on goals from Love Street. The messages never came. The Hearts players learned of Celtic’s goalscoring feats in dribs and drabs.
‘No, they’re 4-0 up…’ insisted the snapper.
‘Oh, are they?’ asked Smith. ‘Right okay….’
There were radios dotted around the Hearts support and press box. At Love Street the scene was replicated. The atmosphere amongst supporters of Hearts and Celtic was becoming edgy. Fraught and eerie.
In contrast Dundee were content with how thing were shaping up.
‘At half-time the manager was reasonably happy with how everything was going,” says Kidd.
‘I’m saying to myself, as you do as a player, ‘I have no chance of getting on here.’
‘But something happened to Tosh McKinlay and the manager turned to me and said, ‘right you are on. Go do your business’
‘Within seven minutes? Bedlam.’
What happened during that seven minutes was Scottish football’s equivalent of the JFK moment.
Kidd hooked his first goal high into the net in 83 minutes after a Robert Connor corner created confusion. The second was a stunning piece of football, the striker shuttling the ball inside from the halfway point, playing a sublime one-two before thrashing the ball past Henry Smith for 2-0.
Some Hearts supporters railed against the wind. Most were prostrate. Frozen in time.
At Love Street, Paisley, the news was met with ecstatic acclaim by Celtic supporters.
There had already been two false alarms. Some held back, seeking absolute confirmation.
Saints goalkeeper Jim Stewart had the ball in his hands and looked visibly startled by the outbreak of euphoria. Celtic’s Davie Provan, ill and unable to play, signalled to the teammates from the bench with a Churchillian two fingers. A Parkhead team, stuttering, porous and unconvincing that season, had victory within their grasp.
When the final whistle went Celtic players bolted for the tunnel. It took police 15 minutes to get the away support back onto the terracings at time up so the team could do a lap of honour. At Dens the Hearts dressing room was a scene of desolation. The league had gone; with it all talk of a domestic double. A Scottish Cup Final against Aberdeen the following weekend suddenly held all the appeal of a package trip to the Siberian Steppes.
Kidd, a skilled but undecorated Scottish footballer who played for Brechin, Arbroath and Motherwell before returning to play in his native city had no concept at the time of how it would change his life.
‘I was feeling really good about myself. No question.
‘But honestly.
‘I don’t think anyone at the time realised just how big a thing it was.
‘I went into the player’s lounge and John Robertson is there and Gary Mackay and all the Hearts lads.
‘I’m giving it, ‘sorry, but….
‘They were totally shot through. Devastated.
‘Me? I was good as I’d been in months.’
Kidd moved to Adelaide in 1988 to try his luck with the Greek run club West Adelaide and established a joinery and construction business with offices in his adopted city, Melbourne and Perth.
But those seven minutes never leave him. There were death threats from Hearts fans. Excrement in sealed envelopes. Donations of cash from grateful Celtic supporters and invitations to Hibs supporter events in Australia.
He is besieged on holidays. The Lisbon Lions were his boyhood idols and Kidd has become a Celtic legend despite never kicking a ball for the club or working for them in any capacity.
Neither would he be asked to buy a drink in the vicinity of Easter Road again. Scottish football’s local rivalries are petty, but they are deep-rooted and tough as teak.
A radio analyst covering the A League games of Adelaide City he is a ‘name’ of sorts in his adopted homeland. But it doesn’t come close to what he has in Scotland. Fame. Cult status. Notoriety.
Kidd is remembered, celebrated, regaled and cursed everywhere he goes.
He remains bemused and occasionally pissed off by the bizarre, surreal, unsought level of attention seven minutes in Dundee brought upon his head.
Celtic scored five goals that day. They had recovered from an up and down season to win their last eight games. Their third, from Maurice Johnston, is surely the finest passing goal any Parkhead team have scored in recent times.
But it’s not that goal people remember most.
It’s the image of Albert Kidd, fist pumping towards the sky after his second. Seven minutes in Dundee which changed the course of a season. And altered his life.
There had been last day drama before. Plenty since. Hearts losing the title to Kilmarnock on goal average in 1965. Ten-man Celtic edging Rangers in 1979. Martin O’Neill’s Seville team finishing 2003 trophyless in the final seconds. Scott McDonald of Motherwell forcing a helicopter to perform a 180 degree about turn in mid-air in 2005. The exhausted, weary collapse of Walter Smith’s Rangers in 2008.
But what happened in 1986 carved an indelible imprint on the psyche of Scottish football.
If Hearts had won Alex MacDonald and his players would have been sainted. Honorary men of the maroon cloth.
What actually happened served as a stark, brutal reminder of football’s ability to trigger the most ferocious, contrasting emotions. The euphoric disbelief of Celtic. The crushing, shattering, post-traumatic side effects on the other side.
This is how it happened. The story of a staggering finale to a Scottish league season when Albert Kidd and Celtic became Heartbreakers.
Link: Heartbreakers (eBook) – Amazon