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'It’s never been as bad as this’

 

Ian McCall, the Partick Thistle manager, can take his side into the final of the Alba Challenge Cup with victory over Ross County today Photograph: Steve Cox

 

Share 0 comments 10 Oct 2010

 

IAN McCall has a weakness for crime fiction.

 

But he has no desire to become Scottish football’s next victim. McCall’s sense of his own managerial mortality has been reinforced by a seven-day period which has seen one of his closest friends, John Hughes, relieved of his position just seven games into the season at Hibs, and his old Dundee United and Queen of the South assistant, Gordon Chisholm, suddenly fear for his own job amid the ongoing financial meltdown at Dundee.

 

As manager of Partick Thistle, McCall’s own popularity amidst his Maryhill constituency has fluctuated during a painful 12-month spell where the club made inroads into a debt which now stands at around £800,000, but not without turning their second-place finish in the Irn Bru First Division in 2008/09 into second-from-bottom this morning. Getting beyond the challenge of Ross County – who they beat in a morale-boosting league encounter last weekend – at Victoria Park this afternoon and into the Challenge Cup final might persuade some of the disenchanted to get off his case for a while.

 

“This is a brutal division and football in general in Scotland is brutal just now,” said McCall, who remains in close contact with both Hughes and Chisholm. “One of my best friends just lost his job the other day, which is incredible. It is not my place to talk about the rights and wrongs of it, but my feeling is just for him and his family.

 

“He is a wonderful person and for someone from his background to achieve what he has done is astonishing,” he added. “I am sure there will be more things to come in his story. The same goes for Brian Rice, who also worked for me and played for me. Maybe they will benefit from taking a wee bit of time out of it, but I am sure he will get another job when the time is right. I spoke to Chis yesterday. I guess he didn’t expect another Clydebank scenario up there [McCall and Chisholm were the managerial team when the former SFL club were in terminal financial hardship]. It is a brutal, brutal job just now, but I think the people who matter within this club know how hard it has been since January, and realise the severe constraints which we have been working under.”

 

The state-of-the-art entry system at Firhill these days involves the football manager leaning out of an upstairs window and dropping a fat wad of keys down to the pavement below. It is not the only time the keys to Partick Thistle have been handed over in the last few weeks. Around a fortnight ago, the club’s long-time chairman and vice-chairman, Allan Cowan and Tom Hughes, walked off into the sunset, leaving the First Division outfit in the hands of the oil businessman, Billy Allan, and David Beattie, the owner of McGhee’s Bakery. McCall was the man holding the reigns when Clydebank, Morton and Airdrieonians lurched into administration, but he still regards this as his “hardest period” in football.

 

“The two guys who have left are very good friends of mine,” McCall said. “Allan was my lawyer 10 years before I even became Thistle manager. I just think they were tired. They had been doing it for so long, and they wanted to take a step back. I know fans will have their own ideas, but I think that was genuinely the case. So we move on. And in Billy and David we have two pretty full-on businessmen who know their stuff and hopefully there will be better times ahead, because since January it has just been so tough. This is the hardest period I have had without a doubt.”

 

McCall was allowed to make just two loan signings this summer, Iain Flannigan from Kilmarnock and Conrad Balatoni from Hearts. There is a contrast to Firhill’s fellow tenants, Sean Lineen and his Glasgow Warriors rugby union side, for whom money seems to be little object. It has crystallised the Partick manager’s belief that some kind of enlargement of the top flight is required, even if his fatalistic streak fears that the timing might not work in their favour.

 

“I have been in Scottish football for 27 years now and it has never been as bad, it has never been as stricken,” he said. “There are a lot of good managers and a lot of good players, but it is just completely suffocating now. We have two huge clubs in our small country who we need – once they go we really are in trouble. There will be no structure there which will be perfect, but what we have right now is killing it. Fourteen or 16, there should certainly be an increase. In the back of my mind I am thinking it is typical of Partick Thistle, this weird and wonderful club, that the year that we have to cut things down to the very bone will be the year they actually increase it.”

 

McCall is only outranked in seniority as a full-time manager in Scotland by Walter Smith and Jim Jefferies, and his three and a half years at Thistle already seems like a lifetime. He was linked with, and then priced out of, the ill-fated manager’s job at Dundee and still craves a return to the top flight at some stage, but is “very content” with life at Thistle. Indeed, if everything runs to plan, he is quite prepared to stay at the club for the next decade.

 

“When you live in the west end of Glasgow, being manager of Partick Thistle makes you a high-profile figure,” he said. “I am higher profile now than when I was living in Broughty Ferry [as Dundee United manager], I assure you. I miss going to the really big games, and I hope people don’t think I have lost the desire to do that. I haven’t, it just grows. I want to make sure that people realise what happened at Dundee United was not entirely my fault. But this is a bloody hard job and I want to stay here and get it done.

 

“If the people who come up to me in Byres Road went to games we would have 10,000 every week,” he added. “But the fact is we have only got 2000 people coming each week. We thank them, whether they want to shout at me or give me and the team support then great. They still pay their money.”

 

 

http://www.heraldscotland.com/sport/more-scottish-football/it-s-never-been-as-bad-as-this-1.1060552

[The Incredible Adam Spark]

McCall was allowed to make just two loan signings this summer, Iain Flannigan from Kilmarnock and Conrad Balatoni from Hearts.

 

Wrong. I hate inaccuracies like that.

 

Anyway, the piece as a whole. You can't fail to agree that what McCall says, by and large, is true. But we've heard it so many times it reads as a sob story.

[kevin energy]

Was it really as bad as when Mcall was at Morton and Clydebank

[Jaggernaut]

At least he's not sobbing about how bad things are at Firhill in particular; it's about the state of Scottish football. And as far as that goes, he's surely right.