It's a small world

Finally got round to reading "My Father and Other Working Class Football Heroes" by Gary Imlach, sport's journalist, ex-presenter of the Tour de France and currently introducing 20 year old episodes of Match of the Day on ESPN.

The book chronicles the life and football career of his father, Stewart Imlach, who (among other career highlights) played for Forest in the 1959 FA Cup final.

The book, as one of the reviews rightly states, should be mandatory reading for today's pampered stars. An account of how, in the days of maximum wages, footballers were paid the same, if not less, than workers in other industries and had to subsidise their wages by working as well. How that made them the financial equal to the supporters who they ineveitably lived among. How the committee men who ran football clubs treated the players like slaves and how falling foul of contract negotiations could leave you with no option but to quit the game completely. The chapter describing the '59 Cup Final is absolute poetry.

The subject of the book, Stewart Imlach was born in Lossiemouth, a place I know well from my time in Scotland. The town is now over-shadowed by the RAF base, but contains a couple of really good pubs, a nice play park for the kids (including the tallest climbing frame I've ever seen) and a cracking Chinese restaurant. Back in the day, the residents of Lossiemouth either left completely or took up fishing.

A day out back then consisted of travelling the short distance to Elgin. One such trip for the young Imlach was a trip to Borough Briggs, the home of the mighty Elgin City, to see the likes of Stanley Matthews and Tom Finney play for their respective RAF teams. I've been to Borough Briggs dozens of times and the players I've seen playing in the Scottish Third Division have been more Laurel than Matthews.

Gary Imlach's grandfather never left Lossiemouth and was buried in the local cemetery at Spynie. The cemetery of the church in which my wife & I got married. My wife's grandparents are buried in the same cemetery and owing to the small community feel of that area of Scotland, it is certainly possible that they would have at least known about each other.

In conversation, I mentioned this coincidence to my dad, who then informed me that his dad (my granddad) worked with Stewart Imlach at the dairy on Meadow Lane, which is also mentioned in the book.

So it is entirely possible that, despite the fact that my wife and I were born over 500 miles apart, my wife choosing Nottingham in which to train over Aberdeen and the pair of us meeting by chance on a night out in Nottingham, my granddad worked with a man whose dad knew my wife's granddad.

Six degrees of separation, it's a wonderful thing.