Scottish football’s cult indoor six-a-side tournament, the Tennent’s Sixes, returns this weekend, 33 years after its previous staging. Former players will represent each of Scotland’s 12 top-flight clubs at Braehead Arena, where an artificial surface has been rolled out over the ice rink. Group-stage matches will be played on Saturday, with a new winner decided on Sunday evening.
The event was a staple of the Scottish football calendar between 1984 and 1993, when top players were signed off for a weekend to represent their clubs in a mid-season six-a-side competition. The fact that current first-team players represented the clubs back then highlights how seriously the tournament was taken. Rangers hero Ian Durrant, involved again this time, has described the returning former players as the ‘creaky joints’ of the Scottish game. Barry Ferguson will manage Rangers with Durrant’s assistance, and his squad includes Charlie Adam and Andy Halliday. Aiden McGeady and Charlie Mulgrew are among Celtic’s squad, while Hearts legend Rudi Skacel will also be in action.
Gary Harkins, who will play for Dundee, and Scott Allan, who will manage Hibernian, highlighted how impossible the old arrangement would be now. Harkins said: ‘Imagine somebody got injured these days doing that. Your £12m striker out for the season because he’s basically played a game of fives.’ Allan added: ‘When you think that actually happened, it’s genuinely incredible. I’d love to see it now, but it would just never happen.’
The history of the tournament is full of unusual detail. 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. John Collins, arguably Celtic’s top man at the time, was part of the Parkhead club’s triumph in 1992. In 1988, when Rangers declined to take part, Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest were participants, but Clough could not add the trophy to the European Cups he had won earlier that decade. Dundee were the winners that year.
Partick Thistle have been the holders since 1993, a success achieved without manager John Lambie even turning up. The Thistle team were content with a day away from training, with tournament success an added bonus. There was no cash award; tankards from the competition sponsors were the prize. Gerry Britton, the former Thistle striker and now the club’s chief executive, recalls taking his tankard to one of Glasgow’s nightclubs, the Savoy, and asking for it to be filled with Tennent’s. Three decades on, the Savoy is still going strong, and if a group of six or so men with aching joints are leaning against the bar there on Sunday, there is every chance they have spent their weekend at Braehead.