Dec 172010
 

Last week Aberdeen Voice brought you our first ever prize competition, and the time has come to announce our two lucky winners; each of whom will receive a copy of Stuart Donald’s excellent book ‘On Fire With Fergie’.

Voice’s Dave Innes reviews here. https://aberdeenvoice.com/2010/08/on-fire-with-fergie/

We asked: Against which European opposition did fallen idol Mark McGhee score a Pittodrie hat trick in 1984’s European Cup-Winners’ Cup?

Of all the entries offering the correct answer ‘Ujpest Dosza’, the two winners selected at random were:

Alan McGowan, and Brian Murison.

Aberdeen Voice would like to thank everyone who entered our first competition, and  offer congratulations to the winners. To the unsuccessful entrants; better luck next time! Here’s hoping, whoever you support (other than Motherwell), that Saturday afternoon brings some consolation.

Dec 102010
 

David Innes presents Voice’s historic first online competition….

Thanks to a generous offer from publishers Hachette, we have two signed copies of Stuart Donald’s rather wonderful book On Fire With Fergie to give away as prizes, just in time for Christmas.

We reviewed it here https://aberdeenvoice.com/2010/08/on-fire-with-fergie/ after attending the book launch https://aberdeenvoice.com/2010/08/stuart-donald-charms-the-richard-donald/

We liked it a lot. So will you. In fact, why haven’t you bought it already? Time’s a bit tight, so the competition will be open for entry for one week only. Just use our contact form and send to the competition address,  with the subject of Footie Competition

So that we can remember him in happier circumstances:

Against which European opposition did fallen idol Mark McGhee score a Pittodrie hat trick in 1984’s European Cup-Winners’ Cup?

You’ll need to include a home address so that we can post the book to you if you’re a winner. And no, we can’t post it down the fibre optic cable, you gype. We won’t publish details other than your name, of course.

There, easier than Fix The Ball.

Two winners will be drawn from all the correct entries, and we’ll announce the winners next Friday (17 December), give the publishers your details and hope that Santa arrives early.

All the usual rules apply – family members of Voice regulars aren’t eligible to take part (sorry, Granny, you’ll have to buy your own copy) and we’re not open to bribery or coercion.

Good luck.

Aug 132010
 

On Fire With Fergie – Me, My Dad and the Dons – Stuart Donald.

Hachette Scotland 338 pages £12.99

As promised last week, when Aberdeen Voice appeared to be unique in giving media coverage to the launch of this and the Heritage Trust’s books, Voice’s David Innes, rises from his settee where he’s been glued to On Fire With Fergie since he took it home.

Stuart Donald’s three-pronged approach in writing On Fire With Fergie, documenting his personal rites of passage story of falling in and out of love with the 80s Dons, recording those incredible victories and celebrations whilst paying tribute to his late dad, Gordon Donald, “The Chancellor” to whom the book is dedicated, is beautifully successful.

Although of much older vintage than the author, I can identify with almost every sentence of Stuart’s narrative. The childhood naivety, the swelling hope, the tears, the tantrums, the eventual realisation that The Man in the grotesque guise of the Old Firm will flex his financial muscle, call in old favours and render our spike on the success graph as a temporary and unsustainable blip. But by hookey, it was fun while it lasted.

This is much more than a fitba book – it’s a well-written tale of familial relationships, adolescence, quiet rebellion and growing up and it’s among the best terracing-derived accounts of club football that I have read.

The passages of reported and remembered conversations, especially those featuring Donald senior are rib-tickling and have display stout granite-like profundity typical of wise NE Everydad. That they are reproduced in Doric renders them all the more relevant to the Dons and all the more pointed. I think that most Dons fans would have been able to relate to the sage but passionate Chancellor. It would surely have been a pleasure to have known him.

It’s heartening too that Stuart Donald is unafraid to say what he (and most Dons fans) thought thirty years ago – in turn describing in scornful terms Old Firm violence and bigotry, peer jealousy, despicable Dundee United’s status as a minor irritant to the Dons with whom they were always crazily bracketed by lazy hacks and who always crumpled, papier mache-like, in the face of the Old Firm when the chips were down. I trust he has not mellowed on any of these scores, for these have not changed much.

This is much more than a fitba book – it’s a well-written tale of familial relationships, adolescence, quiet rebellion and growing up and it’s among the best terracing-derived accounts of club football that I have read. I recommend it to anyone who lived through those sweet, heady days or to anyone curious about how fans viewed the most glorious period of our shared fitba and community heritage.