Date: 5th January 2025
Honours Even
January is always that time of year when you start to wonder about whether or not the year before, has been a golden one or a disaster. As the bells are ringing out for Christmas Day, we are beginning to look back, as Liz Lockhead would have it, on nostalgia, the Scottish favourite pastime, to work out whether or not those who have spent the last 12 months attempting to delight us by hitting the touchline and crossing for that vital score or have managed to be the best shot stopper we’ve ever seen or indeed just been a rock in the centre of midfield or just the centre of defence or even a marauding left or right wing back going up towards the golden opportunity will be worthy of us turning up in the freezing cold to glimpse their majesty once more.
It is also a time that we look back a bit longer than the previous year and consider whether or not the gongs that have been given out to the various legends of our game are well deserved. As Alan Hansen and Duncan Scott are named in the New Year’s Honours list join people of the past like Alex Ferguson and Kenny Dalgleish – of whom there has been another retrospective in their careers over the BBC’s airwaves. This has been an interesting one because Kenny Dalgleish was interviewed by none other than his own daughter who has made her own very creditable career independent of her father as a broadcaster.
For Hansen, of course, he is remembered fondly within Glasgow for his various senior career performances for Partick Thistle before in 1977 going down to Liverpool to spend the next 14 years managing to win First Division titles, European Cups, FA Cups and a number of caps for Scotland. In that time, he contributed to our excitement as Scotland supporters watching a golden age slip us by without getting past anything more sparkling than a group stage. For some, Hansen’s punditry was more interesting, especially when he claimed, as he did at the beginning of one season, that you could win nothing with kids. As Sir Alex Ferguson went on to prove him completely and utterly wrong, managing to do just that with the class of 92, what was admirable was the way that at the end of the season Hansen made fun of himself. Although by that point he was very much at the end of a queue of many others who had made the joke that somebody who thought he was able to predict the future was indeed no tartan Nostradamus!
But as we kick back and are beginning to put nostalgia back in its box for another year, a little plea on behalf of the Scottish Football Supporters Association to make sure that you don’t put that away just yet. Please nominate and vote for the many categories that we have for the awards highlighting the best in Scottish football over the last 12 months.
The categories this year are, as always, for, Fan of the Year, Scottish Men’s Player of the Year, Scottish Women’s Player of the Year, Scottish Manager of the Year, Scottish Grassroots Hero of the Year, and the Scottish Referee of the Year.
Please, make your contribution known and submit your votes in the online survey through our link here (https://app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/s-f-s-a/scottish-football-fans-awards-2024 )and in through our website.
Whether it be the Houdini of the Year for Ian McCall or the James Grady Award for managing to eventually win the title for Stenhousemuir, it is an opportunity for you, the fans, to make a contribution to Scottish football.
And perhaps, you never know, get people mentioned and noted who may in the future at this point in, say, 2030 or beyond, be recognised by the powers that be with one of those shiny gongs that Alan Hansen will go off to get around his neck or pinned in his lapel at some point in the near future.
Posted in: Latest News
Tags: Aberdeen, Scottish fans, Scottish football, Sir Alex Ferguson