Salt and sauce vs salt and vinegar. The castle vs the city chambers. Trams vs the tube. And now Clydesdale vs Heriot’s.
The latest edition of the enduring Glasgow versus Edinburgh rivalry will unfold on a cricket pitch in Uddingston at high noon today as the two form teams in the country meet to compete for the Scottish Cup.
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With no national league since 2011, matches between east and west are fairly rare these days, with clashes cropping up primarily on high-profile occasions like this one.
This is the third meeting between Heriot’s from the north of Edinburgh and Clydesdale from Glasgow’s south side in the past 12 months, with Heriot’s winning last year’s grand final – a sort of annual Super Cup idea between the winners of the Western Premiership and the Eastern Premier League – and the recent T20 final.
No team from the west has won the Scottish Cup since Clydesdale last lifted it in 2016, while Heriot’s victory last year was their sixth overall since the competition began in 1966 when Paisley club Kelburne were the inaugural champions.
Heriot’s will again start as favourites, their side awash with Scotland internationals like Matthew Cross and Mark Watt, as they again look to work towards another domestic clean sweep.
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“Looking at our team I don’t think it’s too far off an international team to be honest with you,” said Watt. “We’ve got a lot of internationals playing – it’s a ridiculously good club side. It’s got to be up there with one of the best in the UK.
“Everyone tries to field their best team against us and I think that’s a really good thing that people are wanting to compete against us to try and do us over. It keeps that edge about us that you need in any successful team.”
Watt’s bond with Heriot’s is a strong one, having first joined the club as a teenager. Now a Scotland regular with 200 wickets to his name, the 29-year-old credits getting an early chance to shine for his subsequent progress.
“It’s the people that make Heriot’s,” he adds. “Everybody wants everybody else to succeed and they take a lot of pride when people go on to play for their country. I was one of the youngsters that they brought through the system and that’s led on to international honours and 150 plus games for Scotland.
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“So, they take a lot of pride in things like that and I like to reciprocate that by playing as much for them whenever I’m available as my connection to them goes back a long way.
“I didn’t really start playing cricket until I was 13 or 14. I started out at Leith but I used to also go to Steve Knox’s cricket camps so from there I went to Heriot’s as he was one of the coaches. In the first two weeks that I was there Knoxy told me to stop bowling leg spin and bowl left-arm orthodox instead. And since then it’s just really clicked for me.”
Another Scottish Cup final – this time back in 2012 – would prove pivotal in Watt’s development as a 16 year-old eager to impress. “We were playing Watsonians who had Craig Wright in their team at that time but I had no idea who he was,” he says of the then Scotland veteran who would go on to coach Watt in the national team set-up.
“I had always grown up watching football so I didn’t know who the international cricketers were at that time! I bowled 10 overs 1-30 in that final and all my team-mates were telling me I was going to get called up for Scotland under-17s because I’d done well against Wrighty.
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“And sure enough he messaged my mum and dad after that asking if I could go for trials and that was the start of my international career. But I’d had no clue who I’d been bowling against that day which was maybe just as well.”
Watt will be up against another Scotland captain this afternoon, this time the current one. Richie Berrington is the star name in the Clydesdale side who will look to upset the odds and win this trophy for the first time in nine years.
“After we beat them in the T20 final I asked Heriot’s if I could bring the trophy into Scotland training on the Monday and they said no,” he laughs. “I was going to go and shove it right into Richie’s face! But he might do the same to me next week if things go their way this time!
“It’s just good banter as we all love playing club cricket. We all want to play in it to try to make standards better. We’re all competitors and want to win trophies for our team and have those bragging rights throughout the summer and winter that we are the best team in the country.”
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Watt, Berrington and co will have plenty of time to chat about the domestic season when they board a flight to Canada later this week for the next instalment of Scotland’s Cricket World Cup League 2 campaign. It marks the first bout of competitive action since the team failed to qualify for the T20 World Cup and Watt admits that still stings.
“We’ve just kind of let the dust settle on that one but obviously all the boys are really disappointed and we’re still hurting. It will be tough especially when that World Cup comes round and it’s on TV and we’re all gutted that we’re not there. But to be honest we didn’t play anywhere near the capabilities of where we can play to and so didn’t really deserve to go in the end.
“We should be beating Italy and we should be beating Jersey pretty comfortably and we didn’t so you just have to bite the bullet and use that as motivation to come back stronger.”