Tennent's Sixes returns: Rangers and Celtic legends dust off the boots as cult six-a-side revives after 33 years
Tennent's Sixes return to Braehead after 33 years
Scottish football's most gloriously eccentric tournament is back. The Tennent's Sixes — a mid-season, indoor six-a-side competition that ran from 1984 to 1993 — returns this weekend, with former players representing all 12 of Scotland's top-flight clubs on an artificial surface laid over the ice rink at Braehead Arena.
Group-stage matches will be played on Saturday before a new winner is crowned on Sunday evening. It is the first staging of the event in 33 years, and the men taking part are the first to admit their bodies are not what they were.
"The creaky joints of the Scottish game," is how Rangers hero Ian Durrant describes the returning cast.
Ferguson and Durrant lead Rangers, McGeady and Mulgrew for Celtic
With the assistance of Durrant, Barry Ferguson will manage a Rangers squad that includes Charlie Adam and Andy Halliday. Celtic will be represented by the likes of Aiden McGeady and Charlie Mulgrew, while Hearts legend Rudi Skacel is also set to be in action.
That current first-team players once turned out in the competition illustrates just how seriously the tournament was taken in its heyday. Davie Cooper, regarded by some as Rangers' greatest player, scored the first-ever Tennent's Sixes goal during his peak years in the mid-1980s, and John Collins — arguably Celtic's top man at the time — was part of the Parkhead club's triumph in 1992.
'Imagine somebody got injured doing that'
Try to imagine the modern equivalent: Callum McGregor and a few Celtic team-mates knocking off for a couple of days to play sixes. As the piece notes, good luck finding a sports scientist who would sign that off — or guessing how Martin O'Neill would react if a big-money summer signing returned to training with an ankle the size of a golf ball after tripping on a poorly laid green rug.
"Imagine somebody got injured these days doing that," says Gary Harkins, who will play for Dundee. "Your £12m striker out for the season because he's basically played a game of fives."
"When you think that actually happened, it's genuinely incredible," adds Scott Allan, who will manage Hibernian. "I'd love to see it now, but it would just never happen."
Clough, tankards and the Savoy
The tournament's lore is as bizarre as it is revealing of how much the game has changed. In 1988, when Rangers declined to take part, Brian Clough's Nottingham Forest were among the participants — a notion that boggles the mind when considering what it would take for a modern Premier League side, built on vast wealth, to send a six-a-side team north of the border. Clough was unable to add the trophy to the European Cups he had won earlier that decade.
Dundee were the winners that year, but it is Partick Thistle who have been the holders since 1993 — and they did it without manager John Lambie even turning up. The Thistle team were content with a day away from training, with success an added bonus.
With no cash prize on offer, tankards from the competition sponsors were the reward — and they were put to good use, as former Thistle striker Gerry Britton recalls.
"I remember we went to one of the Glasgow nightclubs, the Savoy," Britton, now chief executive of the Firhill club, tells BBC Scotland. "I've got memories of us standing at the bar with our tankards and asking for them to be filled with Tennent's."
Three decades on, Glasgow's Savoy is still going strong. If you spot a group of six or so men with aching joints leaning against the bar there on Sunday, there is every chance they have spent their weekend at Braehead.