JOHN HUGHES was out tramping the fairways last week, enjoying relief from the pressures of the relegation battle, when a golfer he had never met before sidled up to suggest that they play together. The young man, barely out of his teens, didn't know much about football, but he had heard all about Falkirk.
He knew a lad who played for them once, a boy at his school who had signed a two-year contract. Two weeks later, the boy was dead, victim of a tragic accident.
It's a small world, says the Falkirk manager. For eight holes, a good hour an
d a half, they talked about Craig Gowans, the club's 17-year-old apprentice, who was electrocuted during a training session nearly four years ago. Hughes' partner for the day said that he and the young defender had been pupils at Stewart's Melville College in Edinburgh, each of them as promising in the classroom as they had been on the sports field. A scratch golfer who had been to Georgia State University, he said that he had given up hope of turning professional, and that he was now pursuing a career in business and finance.
His promise, his natural talent, his integrity reminded Hughes of the player he lost in 2005. He has long vowed never to forget Gowans, never to stop working in his honour, but fate seems to have made doubly sure of late. Before the Homecoming Scottish Cup semi-final against Dunfermline Athletic, the Falkirk manager asked his players to win it for Craig. Not only did they succeed, the goals were scored by Tam Scobbie and Scott Arfield, team-mates of his at youth level. In Saturday's final at Hampden, where Rangers stand between them and the trophy they last won 52 years ago, they will have the player's initials stitched on to their strips.
Hughes doesn't mind talking about it. In fact, he steers the conversation that way at every opportunity, just as he did after Falkirk's semi-final triumph, which was dedicated to the player. The manager regards it as his mission in life to keep alive the memory of a boy no longer with us. "It's something that's dear to me," says Hughes. "That's the reason I keep going on about Craig. It was on my shift, on my watch. In our success of getting to a Scottish Cup final, I feel that he is with us. I will always remember him."
Gowans was killed on 8 July 2005 when the 20ft net poles he had been carrying at the club's former training ground in Grangemouth came into contact with an overhead power cable. As players and staff looked on in horror, he was taken to Falkirk Royal Infirmary, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. Any life lost is an awful waste, but this was a boy, growing into a man of many prodigious talents.
At Stewart's Melville, pupils compete for the Craig Gowans Memorial Prize for All-Round Academic Ability and Sporting Achievement. There is also an award for art, another of his natural gifts. He had hoped to train as an architect until Falkirk came along. He represented Scotland at cross-country running, but there was more to his football than stamina. Hughes says he was an elegant defender who strolled through games, like Alan Hansen. "His main asset was possibly also his weakness. He wanted to go and help everybody. If he was playing centre-half, he wanted to go out there and help his right-back. If he was playing right back, he wanted to tuck in and help his centre-half."
While his death was a devastating blow to the family, the club were also affected, on and off the pitch. Not only did the accident bring about their move from the old training ground, it had a demoralising effect on the squad, which even Hughes struggled to lift. "It took us months to start smiling again. I had to have a meeting with the players. I had to say to them, look, we need to get on with it. I want to see smiling faces. Do it for Craig. Anything you go and achieve, make sure his memory is your driving force. That's what I do."
Although Falkirk now have better training facilities at the University of Stirling, and their purpose-built stadium on the outskirts of town continues to grow, the boy who lost his life remains the club's heartbeat. His strip, with the number 37 on it, hangs in the tunnel, where players can touch it on their way past. Hughes say that some of the men he bought last summer, experienced pros such as Jackie McNamara, Neil McCann and Steven Pressley, have gone out of their way to familiarise themselves with his story so that they can better understand what makes the club tick.
Hughes has "no doubt whatsoever" that Gowans would have been involved on Saturday. That is why he said after the semi-final that he would be asking the player's father to lead them out at Hampden. So far, there has been no response from John Gowans. "He's contemplating it," says Hughes. "It would be great if John could take the team out because I'm quite sure he would be walking in Craig's footsteps, 100 per cent sure of that. If he decided to do that, and we won, I'd love to see him going up to lift the cup with Darren Barr. I think that would be only fitting and right."
Although tempted to walk where his son should have walked, Gowans has said it is not something he would look forward to. "You have to respect the family's wishes," says Hughes who acknowledges that it is a sensitive matter. In November 2005, Falkirk were fined £4,000 after pleading guilty to breaches of the Health and Safety at Work Act. The Gowans family have since complained that there has been no fatal accident inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Craig's death.
Nothing will bring him back, but in an effort to ensure that he remains a force for good, a memorial fund was set up two years ago. Run by SFA referee Tam Carter, it has raised thousands of pounds for charity. An annual five-a-side tournament is held in Portobello, and a memorial match is to be staged on Saturday. Among the projects to have benefited is Craig's Rainbow Room at Edinburgh's Royal Hospital for Sick Children, a play facility designed to comfort youngsters traumatised by mental illness.
Hughes would like Falkirk to formalise their support of the memorial fund, but for the time being, he can offer them only that which he does best. He will wheel out the usual soundbites ahead of Saturday's final – the buzz in the camp, the butterflies, the need to focus – but if his team pull off one of the biggest shocks in Scottish Cup history, it will not have been at the expense of perspective. "It's great for the club, a great day out for the fans," says Hughes. "We will all go and enjoy it – I want the town to be empty, everything like that – but it's very important that we do not go out there and forget what happened on that tragic day."
Falkirk born and bred, but David Weir will lead out Rangers with pride at HampdenONE THING can be stated with certainty about captain sensible David Weir. The Rangers skipper will never, not ever, seek to explain away any wildness with Wildean prose inked into his arm – as has deposed captain Barry Ferguson, whose new tattoo reads "every saint has a past, every sinner has a future". Yet 39-year-old Weir is intent on making his own indelible mark this week. The means, though, will simply be confronting a past in the hope of securing a future.
Weir is more Falkirk than anyone he is likely to face down at Hampden in Saturday's Homecoming Scottish Cup final. He was born and raised in the town. Falkirk were his first senior club. He went along to "enjoy the day" as a spectator when they last appeared in the final, 12 years ago. His mum, dad and sister still live in Falkirk and he goes back to see them "every opportunity" he gets, and at least once a week. Indeed, his sister's husband and bairns are Falkirk fans desperate to see the club defy the odds and snare a first trophy in 52 years. If he wasn't up against them, Weir too would be rooting for his old club. Especially management pair John Hughes and Brian Rice, friends since they played together at Brockville in the early 1990s.
However, the pull of Falkirk for the centre-back doesn't extend to football fandom. His dad brought him up a Rangers supporter and it is the chance to lead out his boyhood team at Hampden that, above all else, makes the final "massive" to him. When in January 2007 he became Walter Smith's first reinforcement in his second spell in charge, it seemed enough for Weir finally to land a chance to play for his club as a six-month stop-gap signing. Two-and-a-half years later, he could be on the verge of becoming a double-winning Rangers captain.
Weir accepts he has been the beneficiary of an ill-wind that seems set to blow Ferguson down to England. But he is honest enough to admit that, if he leads the Ibrox side to wins over Dundee United today and Falkirk next Saturday, he won't feel other than chuffed to bits to be the man who gets first dibs on the Scottish Premier League and Scottish Cup trophies. "It is something I never thought I'd have the opportunity to do," he says. "The circumstances of me being captain aren't ideal, but I'm very proud and genuinely enjoy it."
Asked if "a bit of him wouldn't feel bad for Barry" should all go to plan for Rangers in the next seven days, Weir contended "you can't think like that in football". "I'd rather Barry was the captain and all the things hadn't happened. But they have, and you can't change the past. Barry's had great experiences as Rangers captain. He's won trophies and leagues, so you can't take that away from him. I'm sure he'd wish circumstances were different but Barry's been excellent with me. There's not been an issue and that says a lot about him because it must have been hard for him."
It is forever assumed that it must be hard for Weir to loosen his ageing joints and hard for the family man to spend the week up in Glasgow while his wife and four children remain at their home in England. No doubt it is, but the centre-back has always given the impression that the day he does not have gainful employment at a major football club will be hardest of all. If Weir – who has looked fresher in the closing stages of this campaign than towards the bitter end of the 69-game, four-trophy chasing season of 12 months ago – is setting off fireworks with some silverware shaking this weekend and next, it would seem unlikely either he or his manager would be rushing to end their third working relationship. Smith took him to Everton from Hearts in 1999 and persuaded Weir to end his exile from international duty when he became Scotland manager in 2005.
"I've genuinely not spoken to him (Walter Smith] about the future," Weir said. "I'm sure we'll have a conversation at some point. I've not got any expectations. If there isn't anything for me then that's that. I've loved the time I've been here and I understand that he has to do the best for everybody."
Weir is currently taking his coaching badges but cannot countenance anything being better in the game he loves than playing it. "I know I want to play next season, I just don't know what the options will be; what I'll be doing or where I'm going to be," he said. "Maybe I won't get the opportunity to play, but that's my number one choice."
Only when his "body" or "somebody" tells him he "cannae do it" on the field anymore will that change. But he isn't arrogant enough to believe he could then "plan a route" into management. The circuitous route of his playing career would have told him that. It has taken him until he is an age not even young for a coach to end up at a club that has supplied a richness of experience eclipsing his periods at Falkirk, Hearts and Everton. Even in losing the league and the UEFA Cup at the final stages last year, the winners' medals in Scottish Cup and League Cup brought him rewards beyond his entire previous haul. That amounted to the Scottish Cup win with Hearts in 1998. Weir was last week indignant at the suggestion the 2-1 victory for Jim Jefferies' side over Rangers at Celtic Park 11 years ago represented the last Scottish Cup final upset. It showed, to his credit, he has not become Old Firm-centric. "We (Hearts] wouldn't consider that an upset," he said. "We were doing well in the league and thought we deserved to win that."
Protective of his past, he is equally protective about his pal Yogi (Hughes]. Encouraged to throw out any anecdotes about the practical jokes played on him as a young Falkirk right-back by Hughes – regarded as the prince of pranksters and a mix of Wimbledon's Crazy Gang with a dash of Jeremy Beadle – he punctures these perceptions emphatically.
"He never did anything to me," Weir said. "Everybody remembers the daft times but they were few and far between. He was the same back then as he is now: he was serious about his football, enjoyed his football and worked hard at it. For me, that is the overriding thing looking at him now, how much of his life the game takes up and how much he wants to learn and get better."
Jefferies has often said that on bad days he didn't need to go into the dressing room at half-time because Hughes would do the bawling out of players for him. "I don't know about that," Weir said. "He was a leader and if something needed to be said, he would say it. But I've no great recollection of him digging people up. Jim Jefferies didn't need help doing that. He was more than willing to do that himself."
Weir, meanwhile, can certainly think for himself. And for now he will be thinking how he could well prove to be a leading figure in his club's best week for nine years.
