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Personal
Fullname: John Mark Colquhoun
aka: John Colquhoun
Born:14 July 1963
Birthplace: Stirling, Scotland
Signed: 21 November 1983 (from Stirling Albion)
Left: 24 May 1985 (to Hearts)
Position: Winger/Striker
First game: Hearts away 3-1 league 17 December 1983
Last game: Dundee home 0-1 league 4 May 1985
First goal: East Fife away 6-0 Scottish cup 18 February 1984
Last goal: Dundee away 3-2 league 29 September 1984
Internationals: Scotland
International Caps: 2
International Goals: 0
Biog
His father (also né John) was on Celtic’s books from 1957-59 but didn’t play for the first team. After Celtic, his father went on to make his name with Oldham.
John Colquhoun made his debut for Celtic on Saturday 17th December 1983 in a 3-1 win at Hearts, aged 20. In his debut game he had impressed tremendously and had set up Brian McClair for a spectacular goal. Thankfully, he later lost his dodgy tache (I’m sure he must still cringe at those old photos).
He had been bought as cover for Davie Provan and only seemed to play when Provan was injured. His best spell was in the 1984/85 season when he had a fine game against Aberdeen in a 2-1 win (October 6th), and then on New Years Day 1985 he had a memorable day at Ibrox during Celtic’s well deserved 2-1 victory.
The writing was on the wall though when Provan displaced him in April 1985 and John Colquhoun was not even on the bench for the 1985 Scottish Cup Final against Dundee United the following month. He didn’t even get to play in any of the matches to that final, so sadly was to leave Celtic without any major medals. It was a competitive and tough time in Scottish football, some say a golden period of competitiveness.
In total, he made 25 league appearances for the club (plus 6 as substitute), scoring 4 goals.
Hearts moved in for him in the summer of 1985 for £60,000, and in his first ever appearance for Hearts he scored against Celtic at Tynecastle in a 1-1 draw on 10th August 1985. He went on to have a successful time with Hearts where he is regarded as one of their greats.
He played for Hearts in their dream-turned-nightmare season when they lost the league on the last day (ironically to Celtic) and then the Scottish Cup a week later. As much as the Celtic support enjoyed their pain, we should at least feel a modicum of pity for John at least.
There were many within the Celtic support who were sorry to see him go when he went, and his speed and direct style were greatly appreciated, although there was a feeling that he was wasted on the wing and would be more of an asset through the centre, where he became a big hit for Hearts.
Later on, short spells at Millwall and elsewhere followed before a return to Hearts.
However, it was off the pitch where John Colquhoun excelled. He was definitely one of the more cerebral footballers, and whilst others were goggling over the red tops he’d proudly read the broadsheets. A keen interest in politics, he was an active player in the national players’ union and later was elected Rector of the University of Edinburgh.
He later etched out a short journalism career, where he wrote some quality opinion articles for amongst others the “Scotland on Sunday” newspaper, and became a notable football analyst on radio and TV on football. He easily outshone most of his peers with his analysis (not too difficult you might argue) and became a well-respected commentator on the game. In addition, he didn’t just sit on his backside talking about the game, but also served as a member of “Sport Scotland“, the sports funding body for Scotland to help promote the game.
At time of writing, he is a successful football agent, and is a director of a sports agency.
Regardless of moving to Hearts, he is a man we can all respect and can proudly claim to have been part of the Celtic family. A man other players should definitely look up to and a role model for all.
Quotes
“Footballers don’t have a high IQ to start with, so it would be difficult to gauge the effects of heading the ball too much.”
John Colquhoun
“I walked off a building site in 1983 to go and sign for Celtic. I was a painter and decorator, but since that day I walked off that site to go and play football, I feel I’ve never done a proper job since. That’s not to say that you don’t wake up and try to work really hard, especially in business. I’ve had some tough, tough times. You even try to ‘work hard’ as a footballer. But it’s not like real work, like what I was doing on a building site. It’s not like waking up five days in a row and hating what you’ve got to go and do. So I feel eternally grateful.”
John Colquhoun (2018)
“I was in awe when I went to Celtic, I felt like a little boy. That jersey’s heavy, it’s difficult to wear.”
John Colquhoun
”I love Hearts and I’m Celtic through and through”
John Colquhoun (2018)
Playing Career
| APPEARANCES | >LEAGUE | SCOTTISH CUP | LEAGUE CUP | EUROPE | TOTAL |
| 1983-85 | 31 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 37 |
| Goals | 4 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 4 |
Honours with Celtic
No major honours
Pictures
Interview: Life on the left wing for John Colquhoun
>http://www.scotsman.com/sport/football/latest/interview-life-on-the-left-wing-for-john-colquhoun-1-3926512
by AIDAN SMITH
updated 23:08 Friday 23 October 2015 published 00:00 Saturday 24 October 2015
A right winger on the pitch, off it John Colquhoun’s politics lay in the opposite direction. Today, his passion for Labour remains undimmed, as do memories of a football career with Celtic and Hearts he wouldn’t change for the world
John Colquhoun is getting nostalgic, but this time not for his days as a footballer of considerable vim and vigour. He had a spell as a columnist on The Scotsman’s sister paper and greatly enjoyed the scribbling life, the brainstorming sessions with time-served journos over what he insists were only coffees – and the fact the pub used for these confabs had previously been a bank which could no longer sustain itself must have amused this lifelong opponent of the capitalist ideal.
“Yes,” he says, “there’s one piece for Scotland on Sunday that I wouldn’t mind seeing again. It was after the 1996 Scottish Cup final [Rangers 5, Colquhoun’s Hearts 1]. I had to write it in the changing-room, still in my strip, and then nip up to the press box to dictate my copy over the phone before running back downstairs to catch the team bus. The reason I want to read it again is to have confirmed my firm belief that it was the biggest pile of ***** to ever appear in a Scottish newspaper!”
I don’t have Colquhoun’s column to hand although I am absolutely sure it wasn’t. For this is a man with finely-tuned antennae for the guffiest of football clichés, entirely capable of holding a discussion on whether the perpetuation of the hoary new-signing-holds-aloft-scarf image is ironic, post-ironic or – and this is JC’s theory – “just plain laziness” on the part of photographers, club PR departments, everyone.
“I had to do that shot when I signed for Celtic from Stirling Albion and there was a race for a bus that day, too. The team were leaving for a Uefa Cup-tie at Nottingham Forest and Alex Smith, my great old manager, just got me to Parkhead on time. I wasn’t going to be playing in the game – for one thing I hadn’t been registered and for another I plainly wasn’t yet good enough – but the superstars on that coach like Danny McGrain, Paul McStay and Roy Aitken must have thought: ‘Who the hell’s this two-bit punk from Stirling?’ ”
Was he disappointed his nickname hadn’t been more inventive? “Well, you can’t really add an ‘i’ or an ‘o’ to Colquhoun so I suppose JC was inevitable.” Pity that notorious 1980s moustache wasn’t exploited for a moniker, I say – especially since being framed so spectacularly by his mullet and the silver away strip favoured by Hearts in that skin-tight decade. He pretends to be offended, then chortles. “One of the tabloids used to have a lookalikes spot and I don’t remember anyone else getting into it twice. Once they paired me with John Francome, which pleased me, and the other time with Tony Ferrino, Steve Coogan’s crap latin lothario alter ego, which I wasn’t so happy about. But I wore all my shirts with pride. Listen, I’m at the stage in life when I wouldn’t be too fetching in spray-on silver. Back then, though – worked like a dog by Alex MacDonald and Sandy Jardine and with only 5 per cent body fat – let me tell you that I looked okay.”
Played pretty well, too. Reminding myself of Colquhoun’s pomp – performed occasionally in silver; silverware remaining tragically out of reach – I happen across Jambo reminiscing on a fansite. Supporters remember his goals – big-match strikes, far-out ones and the odd freak – and his urgent running, a trait of the entire “nearly” team of 1985-86. They swap tales of how they cried when their favourite left Tynecastle for England (though he would return later) until someone panics: “Christ, I thought he was potted heid!” Satisfied he’s not, the faithful resume their reverie: “Shirt tucked in at the front, hangin’ oot at the back – loved his style… My mum used to fancy him… Remember the day three Falkirk players were sent off for kicking him?” Then they finish with a song: “The runaway train came over the hill, all the way from Abbeyhill, Colquhoun, Colquhoun, Colquhoun… ”
Now 52, JC is indeed still with us, although right at this moment he’s 5000 miles from Gorgie. My text confirming that Scotsman expenses would still stretch to buying him a coffee is answered like this: “I’m standing outside my favourite cinema, just about to see Steve Jobs –can you afford the plane fare to Southern California?” The whole family has made the trip to Palm Desert: wife Anne, daughter Jade, granddaughter Poppy. It’s a holiday although Colquhoun is also fitting in a bit of business, having recently given up the bulk of his work as a players’ agent to buy the rights to Box Soccer, a football development programme, from Ian Cathro, training guru of Ryan Gauld and others.
It’s another interesting diversion in a well-rounded life, not just a round-ball one. A right winger on the park but a left winger off it, his passion for politics meant that Neil Kinnock was keen to meet him on the former Labour leader’s visits to Scotland – and, having campaigned during elections to help others win seats, Colquhoun even contemplated running for parliament himself. Though he didn’t ultimately challenge Malcolm Rifkind in Edinburgh Pentlands, that passion remains undimmed, as it does for music. “Back in the day I used to make pilgrimages to the Hacienda in Manchester, also Sheffield’s Crazy Daisy, and the Smiths were my favourite band. I can’t have too many regrets because I’ve had the most fortunate of lives, but one is that I never saw them play. Would I go now if they reformed? Doubt it. Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart was my favourite song and it still is. But I try not to be an old fart and listen to new stuff. I like Frightened Rabbit and First Aid Kit.”
Box Soccer, he says, isn’t tricks for tricks’ sake. “There’s no point mastering Cristiano Ronaldo’s rainbow flick if you don’t know when to use it.” What was Colquhoun’s trick? “I don’t think I had one. An eight-year-old kid nowadays can watch all the highlights from La Liga on TV and, down the park, keep consulting his tablet to learn all the fancy-dan stuff whereas my generation was self-taught. I think I had a decent first touch and could put the guys up against me on the wrong foot. But, really, I was a painter and decorator from Stirling who got lucky. The view I’ve got of Southern California right now, in this lovely heat, I know that to be true.”
As Colquhoun mentioned in an essay he wrote for The Scotsman in the run-up to last year’s independence referendum – stating the case for a No vote – he was conceived in Oldham. But, after a tortuous, ten-hour car journey, he was born in his parents John and Susan’s home town of Stirling, just in case he turned out good enough to play football for Scotland – which he was. “The nationality rules were changed later, which would have meant my mum could have had me in the hospital across the road from Boundary Park. Dad played for Oldham Athletic, a left-winger. I only saw one of his games and this is sad: Oldham were thumped 5-1 by Southport and he scored an og. But he took me to see Man U when Oldham weren’t playing – in the era of Best, Law and Charlton. The house was always full of football folk – Jimmy Frizzell was his big pal – and I was never going to do anything else with my life. He saw all of my career right up until that 1996 cup final which he was too ill to attend. I scored that day but it’s the only one of my goals that I’ve never watched back.”
Colquhoun had an interest in what he calls “the wider world”. Although – by then back in Stirling for good – he left school at 15, some classic texts for inquiring young minds, including JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road had made a big impression on him. But not as much as The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists would.
At the time he was working as a housepainter, often doing up big homes like author Robert Tressell’s characters, and the book politicised him. “The stuff in it about how beyond capitalism there had to be another way really resonated with me. I worked with a journeyman who was fond of saying how he would paint these swanky houses but never be able to afford to live in one. And what was interesting to me was that when we had a job in a well-to-do area like King’s Park in Stirling we took our breaks outside, sat on paint pots with our sandwiches, sometimes in minus five. But we were better treated in the schemes like Coalsnaughton in Alloa and would be invited in for a bowl of soup by folk who were struggling to make ends meet.” So he must be handy with a paintbrush, then? “Actually, I’m horrendous. Once I stuck the wallpaper in a mate’s kitchen upside down – no one asked me to do another ‘homer’ after that. We’re having our house back in Scotland re-decorated right now – by a professional with me far away.”
Colquhoun, who would later lead the Scottish PFA, remembers being stopped by police manning road-blocks around one of the Lanarkshire collieries involved in the miners’ strike. He told them he was on his way to training at Celtic, which was true on that occasion – but this became his “cover” for subsequent trips to lend support to the picket-line.
A Celtic fan from a long line of them, he was thrilled to be at the club but was “forced out the door” after just 18 months. Hearts had wanted to sign Davie Provan but were offered his understudy instead. You’d struggle to find a Jambo who thinks their club didn’t come off best. Colquhoun reflects on his time in hoops: “I was in awe when I went to Celtic, I felt like a little boy. That jersey’s heavy, it’s difficult to wear. Even though I had my best days at Hearts, even though I love the club and the Hearts supporters were fantastic to me and still are, Celtic were my team and I cried when I walked down the steps for the last time.
“But the king is dead, long live the king. I arrived at Tynecastle which was this amazing place full of cast-offs and kids, a Rag, Tag & Bobtail crew. Alex MacDonald and Sandy Jardine were new to management and didn’t really coach: they just told you to go out and do what you were best at. And look what we almost achieved.”
Colquhoun’s two clubs meet in the League Cup quarter-finals next week, a tie which hasn’t a hope in hell of matching the drama of 30 years ago, final game of the season, last seven minutes. Up until that moment Hearts were drawing at Dens Park and winning the Premier League. After it, with Celtic scoring the requisite number of goals at Love Street, there were tears on the terraces, tears all the way back down the motorway – and right through to the following Saturday when the Gorgie boys lost the Scottish Cup final as well.
An incredible season, one which makes just about every other football reference to “rollercoasters” redundant, and which some of the fans are still getting over. Mind you, it was a campaign that at exactly this stage three decades ago, seemed to promise nothing but relegation.
Colquhoun had scored on his debut for his new club, a season-opening 1-1 draw at Tynecastle, and he netted another in the next game at Love Street, but Hearts would lose that one 6-2, the first of five away defeats in a row. “We’d been some people’s favourites for the drop, hadn’t we? And we proceeded to play like it.” But then they won at Celtic Park and wouldn’t lose again, until you-know-when.
> As a young reporter, shadowing manager MacDonald for a day in the build-up to Dens, I was allowed a sneak peak of the changing room before being hustled out of earshot of the team meeting – and this was long enough to note that it was red-tops all round apart from Colquhoun who had his head buried in The Scotsman. A former rector of Edinburgh University, he laughs at this. “If I played badly, which was quite often, wee Alex’s jibe was: ‘Stop reading these big papers and start concentrating on your football’.” What would he have been reading? “Well, if it wasn’t the late, great Ian Wood on the sports pages it would have been the politics pages to find out what catastrophe Margaret Thatcher was inflicting on Scotland. The Conservative government at that time used to make my blood boil and I actually think it motivated me [in football]. By the time I put down the paper, I was raging.”
>
So how did he get on with Wallace Mercer, the Hearts chairman and one of Edinburgh’s most flamboyant Tories? “Famously,” he says, and there’s more chuckling as JC recalls the time the bold Waldo gatecrashed his first meeting with Kinnock. “Remember those footballer questionnaires? Car: ‘Ford Capri’. Favourite food: ‘Steak and chips’. Person most like to meet: ‘The Queen/the Pope/the bloke who hands out the big pools wins’. Either because I was different or thought I was – probably the latter – I answered ‘The future Labour prime minister of Britain’. Then Pilmar Smith, Hearts’ vice-chairman who was a big Labour man, arranged a dinner with Neil at the party conference in Perth.
“But there’s no show without punch and Wallace invited himself along. ‘I’ll be your designated driver’, he said. On the journey, with Pilmar and I so excited about this great socialist event, Wallace was regaling us with the story of how he’d just secured himself a prime Edinburgh parking space for the ‘bargain price of £75,000’ and not really understanding the irony.”
Some final thoughts on ’85-’86, at least until next May’s anniversary of the great collapse: “There was no rocket science. Every week if we’d won we got Sundays and Mondays off. Tuesdays we were battered on the running track, then it was up to Brown’s gymnasium, a place which nowadays Health & Safety would close down. Wednesdays were rest days – we needed to recover – and the first time we saw a ball would be Thursday.
> “So we didn’t win the league. If we had, who knows, maybe we’d have gone on to win even more things but there was mental scarring and a fragility after that. Losing it the way we did was devastating; there were no more tears on
>the supporters’ buses than on ours. You try to find the positives, and they’re there. Didn’t we have a bloody brilliant go at it? And when people say to me I must wish I played football now, with all the money in the game, I say that I couldn’t have enjoyed my time any more than I did.”
John Colquhoun – Times interview
It has been a long journey since John Colquhoun came out in support of the striking miners in 1984 and stood on a picket line at a Lanarkshire colliery en route to training with Celtic. Back then he was 21, an angry young man, politically impassioned, with a fascinating life ahead of him. Today Colquhoun, now 55, is a successful businessman and a confidant of the Hearts manager Craig Levein but age has mellowed his world view.
“Back then I saw right and wrong and I believed I could help change the world,” he says. “I really felt I could make a difference. When you are young you have a load of energy and enthusiasm. I had great excitement when I was in my twenties and I was convinced that I could change the world. You have that belief as a younger man.
“Today I still see things that I believe are wrong. The difference is, now I am convinced that I can hardly change anything.”
He has had an eventful life to date. Colquhoun was a footballer with Stirling Albion, Celtic, Hearts, Millwall and Sunderland, a players’ union chairman, a rector of Edinburgh University, a newspaper and TV pundit, and then, for the past 15 years or so, a successful businessman. Five years ago he sold his football agency business for the sort of tidy sum that might embarrass any sworn socialist, so I don’t probe him too much on that. But it was interesting, back in 2000, when Colquhoun was the Michael Stewart of his day, a well-known and well-employed pundit who turned his back on it all. “In the end, punditry didn’t satisfy me,” he says. “When you finish playing football, as I did back in 1997, you don’t really know what you are going to do. You’re kind of floundering in a way. I was dabbling in journalism, writing columns for Scotland on Sunday and the Daily Record, and doing TV punditry. I had plenty going on.
“But, if you are a pundit or an analyst, it’s pretty easy. I was going on Scotsport and talking about things, some of which I didn’t know a lot about, and I now realise I was talking about people — football managers — who were doing pretty tough jobs. I was sitting there in the studio telling them how to do it, without actually having tried it myself.
“It didn’t satisfy me enough. When you finish with football, I knew there was nothing that was ever going to replace it. The challenge is to make sure that things like drink or gambling don’t replace those adrenalin rushes. So I did punditry and I thought that was what I wanted to do. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the journalism side of it, I loved the writing. I actually miss writing today more than I miss playing.
“But I just got fed up with it. I couldn’t continue to tell people what to do, when I hadn’t tried it myself. So I left it and went into business.”
Colquhoun is unsentimental about his playing career. He was a big favourite with the Hearts support, where he spent ten seasons of his career in two stints, but it all seems years ago now, he says. The memories of it don’t clutter up his life.
“I was a decent player, not a great player. I reached a decent enough level. But when I played in really big games, you don’t enjoy it as much as people think you do. I played in some big games — cup finals — in front of huge crowds and people would say to me later, ‘Wow, that must have been amazing’. But it wasn’t. You are too focused, too absorbed, to let yourself go. It is only later in life, when you look back, you realise how enjoyable it might have been.
“I never kept any football memorabilia from my career. Years ago, when I was moving house from Stirling to North Berwick, the only thing I found from my career among my stuff was a football article I had written in The Guardian. There was nothing else around to do with my career.”
He became an agent, and worked with and for Levein, his great friend. Colquhoun is fascinating on the subject of the career and character of the Hearts manager.
“We always got on really well, Craig and I. We were in a group at Hearts — me, Craig, Kenny Black, Robbo [John Robertson] — but Craig and I were pretty tight. We’ve got the same contrary sense of humour. We’ve both probably got a prickly side to us, shown outwardly, which might make people think that we are, for want of a better word, arseholes.
“I’ve always known that quirky side to Craig that people are seeing much more of now. I’ve seen it since I first met him. He is a bit irreverent, he doesn’t take things too seriously. Maybe the difference is, he is showing it now much more than he did before.
“Winding people up is what he does. It’s just a bit of fun. But, consciously or unconsciously, Craig has kept that hidden from most people for a long time.”
Colquhoun has witnessed all Levein’s highs and lows. He negotiated his friend’s contract when Levein became the Dundee United manager in 2006, but then saw the bleak times when Levein took over as Scotland manager. I asked Colquhoun how bad some of these times had been for his friend.
“I can’t answer for Craig, you’d have to ask him,” he replies. “But it was obviously a difficult time for him. Craig is known for one thing, isn’t he? It’s 4-6-0. It’s always there, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter how many Kosovo peace agreements, or Good Friday deals, or minimum-wage policies that Tony Blair achieved, he is remembered for one thing: the Iraq War.
“I’m not comparing Craig Levein to Tony Blair but it is the world we live in now — you are remembered for one thing. It becomes what you are known for. I thought Scotland were OK under Craig, and there was that night in Wales [when Scotland lost 2-1 in Cardiff in 2012] when it could have gone either way. The margins of it are incredible. Plus, you speak to any player, to the really senior players, and they’ll tell you Craig is one of the best coaches going.
“OK, I’m his pal, so people will say, ‘He would say that, wouldn’t he?’ But my view is, I think the Scotland job is undoable. It can’t be done. It is impossible as things stand. I don’t care if it is Gordon Strachan, Alex McLeish, Pep Guardiola or Craig Levein, that job is undoable.
“Until we sort out our development of young players, that job cannot be done. I’m a big believer — I wrote about this once — that a nation doesn’t stop producing talent, all it stops doing is developing it. I said that round about 1997 and I still stand by it. In Scotland, we have not stopped producing talent, but we are not developing it.”
Colquhoun will watch tomorrow’s Betfred Cup semi-final at Murrayfield between Hearts and Celtic with a melting pot of emotions. Both clubs, he confesses, are dear to his heart.
“I love what Hearts are currently achieving, and I love that football club,” he says. “But I’ve never hidden from the Hearts supporters that I was a Celtic man through and through. That’s what I am. But I take immense pride in what Hearts are doing right now, and it hurt me when they were going badly, when they were going through certain things with Vladimir Romanov.
“In terms of who I want to win on Sunday, I would rather stay out of that argument. I don’t really think in those terms. I’ll just watch it with fascination. It’s a difficult one for me, I admit that. Ultimately, Celtic will win the league, so Hearts can win the cup.”
Having sold his football agency, Colquhoun’s big passion today is football coaching and the grassroots game. He bought Box Soccer, the football coaching template, from Ian Cathro, its creator, and is now rolling it out in different venues across Scotland, and even in Spain. It is also about to go digital for schools and youth clubs.
“If I had £50 million of my own I would happily give it all out to grassroots football — that’s how strongly I feel about it,” he says. “It is something I have a passion for, trying to get it right, trying to create better players, trying to give people a chance in life. That is now my sphere of influence and I love it.”
Colquhoun says that he feels “eternally grateful” for his life. “I walked off a building site in 1983 to go and sign for Celtic. I was a painter and decorator, but since that day I walked off that site to go and play football, I feel I’ve never done a proper job since.
“That’s not to say that you don’t wake up and try to work really hard, especially in business. I’ve had some tough, tough times. You even try to ‘work hard’ as a footballer. But it’s not like real work, like what I was doing on a building site. It’s not like waking up five days in a row and hating what you’ve got to go and do. So I feel eternally grateful.”
Colquhoun then laughs. “That said, I look back now at some of my columns from the 1990s. Dearie me. They are absolutely unreadable now. Totally unreadable.”