Football

I grew up about half a mile from Ibrox Stadium. This was in the 1950s. Not just a different century but a different way of life. Every other Saturday, men (it was always men then) at the end of a game either walked up to Paisley Road West to get the bus home (via the pub) or walked down Copland Road to get the bus at Govan Road (ditto). I don't know what happened at the Paisley Road end, but at our end of Copland Road, us weans would wait for likely-looking soft touches and ask: 'Mister, did ye win?' I'm happy to fess up to garnering a few pennies that way, which we then shared out and spent in the sweetie shop down the road. I don't know if our parents knew we did this. You wouldn't do it now. Social Work would be all over you like a rash.

Despite living so close to Ibrox Stadium, neither my father nor my grandfather went to the football very often. My father tried introducing my mother to the joys of football. On the terracing, she watched the teams come on and commented: 'They players are awfy wee.' 'They're the ball boys,' said my father. That was the end of her career as a Rangers supporter.

Football's gone downhill since then. We should probably draw a veil over the recent woes of Rangers FC. My pal Alex and I deliver books to the homebound and our late and much lamented library customer, Archie Allan, aged 97, used to worry us by getting quite agitated at the mention of the shenanigans going on a couple of hundred yards from his flat in a local sheltered housing complex. He often predicted that a certain so-called businessman would appear in court on charges of fraud - you know who I mean - and he was right.

Recently, my only contact with the Gers has been through my bro in law and a nephew and wife who have season tickets. I don't share their despair. I just ignore it. I prefer to remember the halcyon days of Jim Baxter, Willie Henderson, Davie Cooper and John Greig.

That's when I think of football at all. Which isn't often.

All I see when I switch on the TV at the moment is that ponce Gary Lineker and his wee beard. He's now a pundit, it seems. The BBC's leading football commentator. Guys like Kenneth Wolstenholme and David Coleman were the leading pundits back in the day. If I remember correctly, these guys commented on Formula 1, the Boat Race, boxing - any kind of sport. I can remember my grandfather watching the boxing and waiting for Wolstenholme to say: ' And that seals the match for X.' Pop would then swear loudly: 'Christ, I wish the bookies were open so I could put my money on the other guy!' And he was usually right. It was even better when Harry Carpenter appeared on the scene: he was the specialist boxing commentator on the BBC and he always got it wrong.

These days I don't take football seriously. I love watching the likes of Wayne Rooney and Gareth Bale in action, but to get to see them I would have to sit through hours of garbage. If I could make a couple of changes to football they would be:

- Give the pundits a kitchen timer set so that each of them gets no more than 2 minutes to pontificate on what they have just seen - well, we can see it too and we're pretty bright so we don't need hours of analysis

and

- Write into the contract of every single professional footballer a requirement for them to get involved in schools or youth football, so that local talent gets brought on and footballers don't have too much time on their hands for gambling, fornicating and generally getting into bother.

Or maybe there's a third change I would make:

- Cut footballers' wages so that ticket prices can be cut and more fans can afford to go to the game.

And maybe a fourth change:

- Get football fans on to pundits' panels on the telly instead of ancient players, so we get honest opinions, not the views of people with advertising contracts to worry about.