Gray Skies Over Leith By Donald C Stewart

Date: 18th September 2026

Gray Skies Over Leith

By Donald C Stewart

A sketchy and humorous look at the outpourings of the great, the good and the not so good of Scottish fitba’ by Donald C Stewart. Readers are warned that if they take this seriously then therapy is available – just let us know where you find it so we can pass it on to others…

Hibs manager David Gray said that he could take the flak. One presumes that he had been down at the Army and Navy stores and got himself a wee green and white flak jacket.  As Gray went into the weekend fixture in the quarterfinal against Ross County up at Dingwall, Gray opined that it’s all part and parcel of the job, just taking the flak from the terraces, the pundits or whoever feels that they have the necessary qualifications to criticise.

It led me to wonder who else should have a flak jacket on.

Should there be one on the peg in Cove Rangers given the beginning to the season that Paul Hartley has had after fighting off relegation last year?

Of course, there are the well-documented issues around both Aberdeen and Kilmarnock (so for the mental wellbeing of both Killie and Dons fans we shall not repeat them here) which would suggest that Neil McCann and Stephen Robinson need to make sure that their wardrobe has one of them jacket-y things in it.

We suspect McCann left his flak jacket at home when he got rather spiky over Jonathan Sutherland challenging him about his awfy leaky defence…

Or should flak jackets be sold down the High Street of Greenock as Greenock Morton face an uncertain future? Perhaps they are constantly on the phone to the people behind Hamilton Academical and Inverness Caledonian Thistle to find out how they managed to get through their fiscal challenges…

Or would it be in Dumbarton, just across the Clyde from Greenock, where there are rumblings of discontent over where the club is heading, as it sits uncomfortably in the bottom half of League Two.

Or maybe at Edinburgh City where their charge up the league has faltered with them sitting in 10th at the bottom of the entire Scottish Professional Football League structure?

Flak jackets are probably being retired for the moment at places like Clyde and Hamilton where their beginning to the season has seen them flying high, though at what point will Clyde supporters start to murmur more discontent given that they are still homeless.

They certainly will not have flak jackets anywhere at Stenhousemuir because their beginning to the season has been not only miraculous but built upon the type of structure that other clubs should emulate. This is a club that doesn’t have so many prawn sandwiches but has the real nuts and bolts of how to build a successful community enterprise.

And so, as David Gray returned from Dingwall with a 3-0 massacre of the mighty Ross County, the flak jacket he bought clearly had a hole in it…

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Tags: Hibs, Scotland, Scottish football