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The 'talk o' the toon'? An examination of the Heart of Midlothian and Hibernian football rivalry in Edinburgh, Scotland

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posted on 2017-11-20, 14:35 authored by John Kelly, Alan BairnerAlan Bairner
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 Society

Citation

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 Francis

Version

  • 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

2017-03-26

Publication date

2017-11-10

Notes

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

1466-0970

eISSN

1743-9590

Language

  • en

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