As a school kid at St Johns Primary School in Perth, I was completely in love with PE – for me, that was what was going to school was all about and the lessons just got in the way. In Primary 7, I played for the school football team - I was an inside forward and we often won the league but a couple of our rival teams had some very strong goalkeepers including Jim Blyth who went on to be capped for Scotland numerous times and went to the Argentina World Cup in ’78.
My secondary school, Perth Academy, was a real rugby school and I played for the school team but my two favoured sports at that time were volleyball and basketball. My enduring memory of playing for the basketball team was playing a game at the US Air Force base in Edzell near Montrose and while by that point I was 6 foot tall, these guys were 6’ 8” and 7’ 2” - they were absolute giants and it was the biggest single sporting humiliation I’ve ever experienced in my life.
I remember one of my teammates saying to these giant, African American players: “We’ll take you on at 5-a-side football”, like that would allow us to get us our revenge. A few years later, I won a scholarship to America and went to George Mason University in Virginia. For a semester, I played for the university soccer team but then the soccer coach persuaded the university to offer scholarships to the Nigerian under-18 team and so very, very rapidly, I slipped down the pecking order.
I began supporting St Johnstone nine months before I was born - my full name is Stuart John Francis Cosgrove so my initials are SJFC – and when I was studying in America, keeping track of how St Johnstone were doing was incredibly difficult. There was no internet or social media and so I’d get my mum to roll the Perth Advertiser up and send it over to me in America so it’d arrive about three weeks after the match.
All I could do was read the report and try to memorise the players but it was only when I returned to Britain that I reconnected with the club properly. To this day, I’ve got a fairly good knowledge of St Johnstone’s history but that period when I was in the US remains sketchy.
In 2012, when I was Head of Programmes at Channel 4, the channel won the broadcast rights to the London Paralympics. It was the first time the rights for the Paralympic Games had been sold separately from the Olympic Games and it was the biggest thing the channel had ever won. I was put onto the task of how we could make it cool and relevant and how could we use all the tricks in the book to make it into a statement on air as well as transform attitudes towards disability in the sporting arena.
That entire period was a real learning experience for me and I loved it. We won loads of awards for our coverage and what we did around the Paralympics remains one of the things that I’m most proud of in my life. Within Scotland, I’m known as a football guy but I have an interest and a passion in a lot of other things.
I do love football, though – St Johnstone first and foremost and then the Scotland national team – but I’m not one of these guys who watches every single match that’s on television, I don’t even have Sky. I love the game but there are definitely other things in my life that are more important to me than football.
Having said that though, football has produced some of the best times of my life – the day that St Johnstone won the Cup for the first time in their history in 2014 remains for me and for some of the people closest to me, one of the greatest days of our lives. My son has just turned five and he’s not shown an awful lot of interest in football so far. He was at the Cup final and I’ve got a great photo of him with the Cup but I’ve never taken him back to a live match because I’m not one of those people who wants to force the game on him. He likes gymnastics and is very well balanced so I’d love to see him become a skateboarder or a surfer or something like that.
My Saturday now is almost always spent at the BBC presenting ‘Off The Ball’ and so geographically, there’s only a few grounds I can reach – Motherwell, Hamilton, Ibrox and a handful of others. My mates will pick me up from the BBC at 2pm, we’ll go straight to the game and then we’ll leave right on the final whistle, or sometimes it has to be slightly before the whistle. So I’m the only guy in the country who’s hoping for a Tuesday night fixture because it means I can get to the match no problem. I go to about a third of St Johnstone matches at the moment but if I wasn’t doing the radio show, I’d be at every single one.
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