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The 'talk o' the toon'? An examination of the Heart of Midlothian and Hibernian football rivalry in Edinburgh, Scotland
Heart of Midlothian (Hearts) and Hibernian (Hibs) Football Clubs are historic football rivals based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Both clubs have past and present connections to sectarian identities resulting in their rivalry often being reductively labelled “a mini Old Firm” (a mini Rangers v Celtic rivalry). This reductionism misunderstands the genuine ethno-religious (sectarian) connections of both Edinburgh clubs and overlooks other significant factors that underpin and sustain the rivalry in 21st century Scotland. Hearts have British and military-related ‘remembrance’ signifiers and Hibs have Irish-Catholic signifiers and these do continue – under quite specific and sporadic conditions - to linger today. Yet both clubs also have additional aspects to their identities which underpin the rivalry and these relate to a failed take-over of Hibs by Hearts, to playing style, social class and geographical place. Utilising semi-structured and unstructured interviews and observation, we conclude that the Hearts-Hibs rivalry has entered a post-sectarian period where lingering sectarian signifiers sometimes reveal themselves - often when the two clubs play the Glasgow clubs Celtic and Rangers – but where more often, largely overlooked elements constitute the rivalry to a greater extent for large sections of both respective groups of supporters.
History
School
- Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Published in
Soccer and SocietyCitation
KELLY, J. and BAIRNER, A., 2018. The 'talk o' the toon'? An examination of the Heart of Midlothian and Hibernian football rivalry in Edinburgh, Scotland. Soccer and Society, 19 (5-6), pp.657-672.Publisher
© Taylor and FrancisVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2017-03-26Publication date
2017-11-10Notes
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Soccer and Society on 10 November 2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/14660970.2017.1399610.ISSN
1466-0970eISSN
1743-9590Publisher version
Language
- en