One of the finest Scottish footballers of the post-Second World War era, Ian McMillan, has died, at the age of 92.

He started his senior career at Airdrieonians (the original Airdrieonians) for whom he played for ten years before being transferred to Rangers (the original Rangers.)

In his time at Ibrox he was nicknamed “The Wee Prime Minister” for his performances (and also in recognition of the actual Prime Minister at the time) and was part of that semi-legendary forward line Scott, McMillan, Millar, Brand and Wilson (Later Henderson, McMillan, Millar, Brand and Wilson.) He won six caps for Scotland, four Scottish League titles, three Scottish Cup finals,  and two Scottish League Cups and played in the 1961 European Cup Winners’ Cup final a year after playing in the European Cup semi-final.

It’s lost in the mists of time but I believe I may have seen him play for Rangers in a League Cup game against Hibs in the early 1960s. (I was very young at the time.)

McMillan returned to Airdrie for  one season before retiring but later became manager of the club.

He has a connection to the Sons of the Rock in that his grandson Iain Russell played for Dumbarton FC in two spells.

John Livingstone “Ian” McMillan: 18/3/1931 – /2/2024. So it goes.

Sons reward for our 5-4 extra time win over Annan Athletic on Saturday (a topsy-turvy game where we went two up, then one down then all square at 90 minutes before going one down again but recovering to score twice) in the Scottish Cup* is a home draw against Rangers in Round Four.

We were second last out of the hat (which nowadays is a perspex bowl) with only us and Rangers left.

We won’t win the tie so I would have preferred the game to have been away so that we would have a financial boost from the much bigger crowd that would have turned up to Ibrox but we’ll have to make the mostof what we’ve got.

*The Scottish Gas Scottish Cup.

It was with sadness that I read last night on the club website that former Son (as both player and manager,) Davie Wilson, has died.

Davie made his name at Rangers, for whom he played 227 times and scored 99 goals. He left Ibrox in 1967 and after a spell at Dundee United he joined Sons in 1972 just in time to gain promotion in our centenary year. In all he played for us 48 times and scored twice. He also had a distinguished career in the Scottish National side.

It was as manager, though, where he had his greatest impact on Dumbarton, blooding several yooungsters who went on to become internationals in his first stint and taking us up into the ten team Premier Division in 1984 in his second spell as team boss. A measure of this latter achievement is that we haven’t been in the top flight since.

David (Davie) Wilson: 10/1/1937 – 14/6/2022. So it goes.

Former Son Graham Fyfe who played for the club in the late 1970s after appearing for Rangers and Hibs has sadly died.

He played 59 games for the club and scored 11 goals. As I recall one of those was a peach of a team move which he finished off with a glorious volley. Unfortunately I can’t remember who it was scored against. I seem to remember it was during an evening game though.

Graham Fyfe: 18/8/1951 – 19/4/2022. So it goes.

Former Rangers, Everton and Scotland manager – and sometime Sons player – Walter Smith has died.

It is fair to say his best days were with other clubs. He joined Sons from Dundee United in 1975 but in 1976 became one of the select few players ever to appear in a Sons jersey in a Scottish Cup semi-final. Arguably he and that squad appeared in two since the first game (against Hearts) ended in a 0-0 draw. We’ll draw a veil over the replay, though. 64 games for the Sons isn’t a meagre tally, though.

It was as a manager that he made the biggest impact on the football world. His Rangers teams won ten league titles in total, five Scottish Cups, six Scottish League Cups and reached the UEFA Cup final in 2008. He is also the only manager of the Scottish National side to win an international trophy (excluding British Isles only competitions,) the Kirin Cup in 2006.

Walter Ferguson Smith, 24/2/1948 – 26/10/2021. So it goes.

I’ve only just found out that former Sons player Columb McKinley died last month.

A local lad as I recall, Columb first played senior football with Airdrie before moving to the Sons in 1975. He was centre half in the Sons side that made it to the Scottish Cup semi-fimal in 1976. I doubt a Sons team will ever achieve such a thing again. Had we won that semi-final we would have qualified for the European Cup Winners’ Cup, as the other finalists, Rangers, won the league. Sadly, despite playing well in the first game, we could only draw it 0-0. Hearts won the replay 3-0.

Columb McKinley: 24/8/1950 – 6/2/2021. So it goes.

I see that Celtic’s failure to win today means that Rangers are now Scottish Football Champions.

So Dumbarton’s achievement of winning champioships at the top four levels of Scottish football (the last being in 2009 when we won the then Third Division of the SFL) has been matched.

Rangers fans will no doubt say they did this in 2016 when they won the second tier for the first time having previously won tiers 3 and 4 in 2014 and 2013 respectively.

However those three lower league wins all came subsequent to their administration and reformation as a new club and some would consider they do not add to the 54 championships Rangers FC won prior to their financial melt-down but that this is in fact their first as overall champions of Scotland.

There is no doubt now, though, that they have equalled Dumbarton’s record.

Congratulations to them.

…. five boys from the town nearest to where I live went off to watch a football match.

And never came back.

They were caught up in the crush on Stairway 13 at Ibrox Park – as it was then known – in which 66 people died.

No one in Markinch knew their fate until the last buses and trains through the town that night had come – and gone. And then they feared the worst.

The incident is still a sore memory in Markinch, it is almost as resonant, perhaps even equal to, Remembrance Day in importance.

The loss struck the town hard. Many of the present inhabitants were at school at the same time, if not the same year group, as the five, whom they remember vividly.

In the years after, one of the mothers would run down the street from her work every lunch time to be beside her boy.

The last big anniversary – the fortieth – saw a refurbishment of the town’s memorial, which till then had been a plaque lying on the grass overlooked by both the streets in which the boys had lived. An appeal to raise funds for refurbishment was inundated within days with contributions coming in from all over the world. So much so that the memorial was added to and made into a pair of stones one atop the other.

I posted a photograph of the upgraded memorial here.

There was a programme about the disaster on BBC Scotland on Monday 28^th December, available on iPlayer for 11 months.

The disaster was also the subject of a piece in the Guardian earlier in December, mentioning previous crushes on the same stairway (ten years earlier one of these had resulted in two deaths) which ought to have brought about remedial action.

Sadly, it took the 66 deaths fifty years ago for Rangers FC to start upgrading the stadium.

As well as the memorial stone in Markinch there is a bench in the grounds of the local Kirk, St Drostan’s. Since St Drostan’s is on a hill the bench overlooks the town.

Names of the five boys:-

I couldn’t help recognising the scene in this photo from Saturday’s Guardian Review:-

It was illustrating an ensemble piece about various writers’ relationship with Europe.

The photo brought back memories of that wonderful trip we took down (and up) the River Douro from just that jetty in the picture and which I featured in this post:-

And this one:-

Curiously an item on Reporting Scotland on Thursday? night about the trip of Rangers to Porto for a Europa League* game also showed scenes of the same jetty. Synchronicity.

*So-called.

So Alan Gilzean, whom Jimmy Greaves said was the greatest foootballer he had ever played with, has gone.

I never saw him play in the flesh, his time in Scotland being before I started watching football regularly and he was in any case in a different division to Dumbarton but he was a byword for accomplishment.

Before his move down south to Tottenham Hotspur Gilzean played for a great Dundee team, so great it won the championship of Scotland in 1962 and a year later reached the semi-finals of the European Cup. That was, of course, in the time when other Scottish clubs could compete almost on a level playing field with the two Glasgow giants. That success came in a remarkable 17 years when Hibernian (1948, 1951, 1952,) Aberdeen (1955,) (Hearts 1958, 1960,) Dundee (1962) and Kilmarnock (1965) became Scottish Champions. An incredible sequence: between the wars only Motherwell, in 1932, had broken the monopoly of Rangers and Celtic on the League Championship and subsequently only Aberdeen (1984, 1985) and Dundee United (1983) have performed the feat.

The power of money and the lucrative nature of European competition for the big two brought all that to an end. We’re unlikely to see anything like it again.

I’ve strayed somewhat from the point.

Gilzean was a great player, one whose movement on the pitch (from televisual evidence) was deceptively effortless looking, he seemed to glide over the ground in that way that only accomplished players manage to achieve. His scoring record isn’t too mean either; 169 in 190 games for Dundee, 93 in 343 for Spurs, 1 in 3 for the Scottish League and 12 in 22 for Scotland.

Alan John Gilzean: 22/10/1938 – 8/7/2018. So it goes.