Читать книгу Notorious: The Maddest and Baddest Sportsmen on the Planet - Richard Bath - Страница 23

A long-term manager of Glasgow’s ‘other’ side, Partick Thistle, John Lambie is a singular man of outrageous contrasts and mind-boggling inconsistencies. He’s a bornagain Christian who brings a chaplain into the dressing room before matches and then goes on to deliver prematch tirades with a ‘fuck’ quotient that would have Peter Reid scurrying for cover. He’s a die-hard Rangers fan who is a living legend at a club which has a rejection of the Old Firm and their sectarian attitudes at its core value. He’s a renowned disciplinarian who hands out more fines in an average week than the Strathclyde constabulary’s motorised division, yet is a father figure who once served his players champagne before they went out to play Rangers at Firhill in 1992 (beating them 3-0).

Lambie is defined by the unique sense of humour, one which saw Partick become a haven for loonies of every hue during his tenure. His ready wit is legendary, but there’s one story which beats all the others. It dates from the day when striker Colin McGlashan was involved in a clash of heads and emerged from the Firhill turf dazed and confused. Told by the physio that McGlashan had concussion and didn’t know who he was, Lambie replied: ‘Great. Rattle that sponge about his face, tell him he’s fucking Pele and get him back on the field.’

Lambie comes from the hard former mining town of Whitburn, in the heart of the area known as Wild West Lothian. Hewn from the same background as men like Matt Busby and Bill Shankly, he qualifies as a true berserker mainly because of his penchant for signing players with (at best) questionable approaches to discipline. ‘Former Clydebank chairman Jack Steedman says that whenever he wonders where all the nutters in Scottish football have gone, that he looks at Partick Thistle and realizes I have them all under my roof,’ said Lambie in the mid-’90s. ‘There would be nothing worse than goody-goody players sitting in the dressing room like dummies. That’s not my way. Guys like Chic Charnley, Albert Craig, Allan Dinnie, and Don McVicar kept me alive. They had that bit of badness about them that all winners must have in their make-up.’

It’s no surprise that Lambie should mention Charnley in particular. In an episode as famous as Lambie’s Pele outburst, Charnley (who was sent off a record seventeen times in his career) secured his status as Scottish football’s premier league nutcase during a training session at Ruchill Public Park off Glasgow’s Maryhill Road, an area which is very much in the wrong part of town. Halfway through the warm-up, two samurai sword-wielding hooligans invaded the park intent upon sorting out the Partick players. In one of the most chilling manoeuvres since the Charge of the Light Brigade, Charnley rushed headlong at them, armed with nothing but a bad attitude, dodgy tattoos, a row of missing teeth, and a traffic cone, seeing the interlopers off before insisting the session was restarted. The legend of Lambie’s crazy gang was complete.

A compulsive gambler in his youth (‘if I won at the horses, I was away to the dogs at night and if I won at the dogs, I was away at the horses next day’), Lambie knows all the tricks. He has levied so many fines that he once took the team for a pre-season break on the back of the previous season’s fines. But Lambie does whatever works, no matter how unorthodox. He has left players fighting in the changing room at half-time, employed a club chaplain to talk to the players and drawn inspiration from American self-help guru Joyce Meyer, a regular on Evangelical TV programme Godslot.

After one particularly dismal first-half, fanatical pigeon-fancier Lambie unveiled a revolutionary concoction designed to re-invigorate flagging doos (the Scottish word for pigeons). Under duress, each player swallowed sachets of the rancid brew. It was a placebo, but they won. Nobody fancied taking the stuff the next week. Then there was the attention-grabbing episode when Lambie became celibate in protest at the team’s limp form. Only when they started scoring did Mrs Lambie start smiling again. Lambie had a bulldog poster on his door which said simply ‘Piss Off’. No wonder his players thought the sun shone out of him.