Thinking the unthinkable

WHILE I was growing-up in an Ayrshire mining village, there was "the store", ie the local branch of the Co-op, the sub-post office - a typical example of such, with the essential postal business supplemented by selling greetings cards and the likes, while Annie Kelly ran a sort of micro Spar shop from the big room in her typical two-roomed cottage in one of the miners' rows.

Then, as the miners were moved out of the rows into the new scheme, and very much as an after-thought, they built a row of shops: the Co-operative "supermarket" (in reality about half the size of a present-day Spar), the new sub-post office, an ironmonger's, a paper shop and a bakery.

But, already, as more and more of the miners could afford cars, the weekly big shop was done in the nearest towns and the wee corner shops were struggling.

Today, we all shop in Asda, Tesco, Morrison's or Sainsbury's; what small, local shops that are left are either owned by Spar or one of the lesser such chains, or are boarded-up - and hundreds of guys are now, from the local opencasts, producing more coal than the thousands of their fathers and grand-fathers ever did.

What's this got to do with Scottish football? You ask. Simple, Scotland's long-established way of life has changed enormously in the past 40 years - so why should football be immune to these changes?

Wee Eck Salmond is throwing his weight behind Henry McLeish's still to be published review panel's plans for change to the way the game is run here. The probability that Henry will suggest that the SFA, SPL and SFL merge is already being widely trailed. Of course, this makes sense. But since when did sense have anything to do with Scottish football?

McLeish and Salmond might be experienced in navigating the treacherous schoals of Scottish politics - these are calm mill ponds compared to the in-fighting which goes on in Scottish football. I suppose, as ever, it will come down to whatever suits the Old Firm, if they back it, change will happen - if not, forget it.

Time now to think the unthinkable. Might it not be a good thing, were Dundee FC to fold, Dens Park be flattened and houses built there?

I know, the ghosts of Bobby Cox, Billy Steel, Bill Brown and Alex Hamilton would rise up and terrorise us. The big club in Scotland's fourth city must not die; I've heard all the arguments.

But think on this: if all these wee corner shops that have vanished over the past 40 years, all those local butchers, bakers, individual clothing shops, paper shops, dairies, sub-post offices and the like, once considered essential to local life, can be allowed to die - why should a football club which can no longer garner the support of sufficient numbers of the population of Scotland's fourth-largest city be allowed to carry-on.

Dundee has been mis-managed for years, certainly; the club has lived beyond its means, surely; the football which a succession of managers have coaxed and cajoled from players not fit to lace the boots of the icons mentioned above has not been good enough.

The suspicion has to be that the club has, for years, been run by a bunch of chancers. Dundee doesn't deserve to survive. The City of Discovery should maybe make the discovery - it can no longer support two full-time professional sides and allow one to die.

It will be very sad, particularly for the remaining hard core Dens devotees who will still turn up to watch the club during its death throes, but Dundee FC is a basket case - shut that basket and move on.

Liney/Slater; Hamilton and Cox; Seith, Ure and Wishart; Smith, Penman, Cousin, Gilzean and Robertson will never be forgotten - likewise Brown, Steel, Cowie, Boyd, Gallagher, Geddes, Wallace, Hendry, Robinson and hundreds of others.

But, better to kill-off the club now and allow a single club to represent Dundee - in today's Scotland, that city cannot support two.