Blue Brazil back in the spotlight as Deacon Blue's Ricky Ross plays part in stage play

Although he had been once before, to watch his beloved Dundee United naturally enough, he was keen to go back. He was compelled on this occasion by artistic reasons. Before anyone scoffs, let’s be clear: one of the best books ever written about football has Cowdenbeath FC as its subject.

Although it covers much else besides, including the closure of pits once liberally sprinkled around west Fife, the football club, formed in 1881 – before Celtic, Aberdeen and even arch enemy Dunfermline – drives the narrative of Black Diamonds and the Blue Brazil by Ronald Ferguson, a retired minister and one-time leader of the Iona Community. He is also a former journalist for the Edinburgh Evening News.

Although he wrote other books which accrued far bigger sales, Ferguson’s magnum opus about Cowdenbeath - which hinged on the 1992-93 season when beleaguered manager Andy Harrow’s side did not win a single home game - is lauded. It’s Fever Pitch with a Davy lamp, basically. The most recent edition even features an introduction by Sir Alex Ferguson.

Like Fever Pitch, it’s now been turned into a play. Perhaps a film starring Colin Firth will come later. As it is, the two-hander has abundant star quality, with Dawn Steele and Barrie Hunter playing the parts. The latter's football credentials are already well rehearsed: Hunter played Jim McLean in the brilliant Smile at Dundee Rep a few years back.

Ross has written several original songs for the production, hence the recent trip to Central Park to take in the sights.

“The club shop is just beside a big gate,” he recalls. “And a couple of guys came up and asked, 'Is that gate open? I said, ‘I don’t know’. They tried the gate and it was open. And they said, ‘We are just going out for a quick pint’. They let themselves out and obviously let themselves back in again for the second half. It’s a different world.

“It is like no other football ground, it really is,” he adds. “It’s probably like some big European ground, maybe one in East Germany back in the day. It’s so big.” Although Ross asked several friends to join him, none could make it. Time was running out to the extent that the game against Hearts B last month, the final fixture of the league season, was the last chance.

Ross ended up watching the 3-0 home win with Gary McNair, who wrote the stage adaptation of Black Diamonds and the Blue Brazil. He superimposed a story about a daughter coming back to Cowdenbeath for her father’s funeral onto the bones of Ferguson’s book. It aired as an audio play during lockdown in 2021 and has since been re-worked.

The new version, which was being tweaked as recently as last week, opens next Friday night at the Lyceum in Edinburgh. Ross himself will perform the songs on stage, swapping leading a band – Deacon Blue have just finished touring the Great Western Road, their latest album – for sitting behind a grand piano in the relative gloom of the back of a stage. It sounds quite liberating.

‘Who wouldn’t be enchanted?’

“A labour of love” is how Ross describes it. He got to know Ferguson after moving to Glasgow from Dundee in the mid-1980s, when songs, including the much-loved Dignity, were beginning to spill out of him. It was a fertile period, too, for Dundee United, his first love. Although the band were taking up more and more of his time, he would head up to Tannadice from Glasgow whenever he could.

Likewise Ferguson, then based at Govan, would pack his sons into a car and 'follow the Word not the Herd'. In this case, the Word was Cowdenbeath. “Of course, my two boys, attending Ibrox primary school, placarding McEwan’s Lager on their chests, professed to be Rangers supporters,” he writes in Black Diamonds. “But they were double agents, the only two young fans in Govan of what was officially the worst-supported league team in Britain”. He paints a picture of 45,000 Rangers fans swarming towards Ibrox while a single carload, the Cowdenbeath travelling support also wearing light blue scarves, trundled in the direction of west Fife.

“Living beside one of the finest new stadiums in Europe, the boys found their loyalties oddly rooted in a terracing which had many more weeds than paying customers,” Ferguson adds. Who wouldn’t be enchanted?

Ross is a football romantic and so he was always likely to be moved by Central Park’s idiosyncrasies. “I walked right round it," he says. "I came in and thought, ‘How do you get to the stand?’ So I ended up walking all the way round. I got a real sense of it.” He’d already written the songs, guided by Ferguson’s classic chronicle of Cowdenbeath, coal and football. He began flicking through the pages again several years ago, when the plan was to stage “the Great Scottish Musical”. Lockdown and budget cuts nixed that idea, possibly for the better. Ross has delivered a set of plaintive songs that sound like something Michael Marra might have written had he grown up among Fife bings.

One of them, What’s Winning, is described by Ross as “the heart of the show”. He adds: “What defines winning? What defines losing? Take a season like the one in the book, when they don’t win at home. But what’s achieved? What’s going on? It’s about the spirit, that community thing.

“Not to make it sound patronising,” he adds. “Like the mines, it’s deep stuff. It’s about life and death and faith and community,” he continues. “That’s why I relate to it so much,” Brought up in the Christian Brethren tradition in Dundee, Ross is now a practising Roman Catholic. He doesn’t pretend to know all the answers, whether about faith, family or football.

“I feel like a bit of a fellow traveller,” he says with reference to the Orkney-based Ferguson. Now in his late 80s, it’s hoped the author might attend one of the shows. “I love the book so much, just to be on the same page as Ron is an honour for me,” says Ross.

We are firmly in countdown territory to another World Cup, when Scotland will take on the proper, yellow Brazil. Cowdenbeath exist in a different universe. Their World Cup is played every year and the goal is survival.

“The game is quick at forgetting you,” their then manager Maurice Ross – no relation to Ricky despite also hailing from Dundee - told me a few days before engaging in what already seemed a perilous task in the Pyramid play-off final against Bonnyrigg Rose in 2022.

Cowdenbeath lost 4-0 on aggregate and finally slipped through Scottish football's trap door following two narrow escapes in the previous two seasons. Bye Bye, the Blue Brazil. Had it really only been a few seasons earlier when Steven Gerrard stood on the snow-dusted sidelines at Central Park as his Rangers team secured a hard-earned 3-1 win over the hosts in a Scottish Cup tie?

The Liverpool legend stressed that he’d heard more about Central Park in the run-up to the tie than before he played at the Nou Camp for the first time.

“Clubs like Cowdenbeath, which have faced extinction several times, may not last too much longer,” Ferguson wrote in the original introduction to his book, nearly 35 years ago. “These twilight teams with a one-great past are regarded as a dragging anchor on the Scottish football ship of state. There are those who would like to cut them loose.”

Cowdenbeath finished 11th in this season’s Lowland League, a point below Celtic B and a couple of places above Albion Rovers, another club deeply woven into Scottish football’s fabric but who are finding that history counts for little. The game really is quick to forget. It’s a long way back. One wonders whether either side will ever return to even the modest heights of the lower end of senior league football. “If the wee clubs are squeezed out, more than football will suffer,” Ferguson noted, presciently, in 1993.

Somehow, Cowdenbeath are hanging on. Colourful senior advocate Donald Findlay is in his 17th year as chairman. Born in the town and a grandson of a local miner, the former Rangers vice-chairman could never be accused of walking away. He has striven to turn Cowdenbeath into a true community club. They have become used to groundhoppers visiting, attracted by Central Park’s dual-purpose existence as a venue for both football and stock car racing. A warm welcome awaits.

That’s certainly what Lyceum director James Brining encountered when he and his wife turned up for a game against Stirling University in February that had already been postponed due to a frozen pitch. “We got there about ten past three, and there was a guy, Alex (Haddow), locking up the ground,” he recalls. “He spent about 90 minutes showing us around. He took us to the dressing room, the referees’ room, the boardroom and onto the pitch. He told us about the pies. He was like a character from the play, he spoke so powerfully. He did it without any sort of boasting. He just said this was something he needed to do, for the community and for the young folk.

"He talked about being on the board, being the mascot, ordering the pies, and dealing with what to do with the pies when a game is postponed.”

Are these local heroes, responsible for the day-to-day realities of running a football club where crowds can fall below 150, interested in the stage show? “They are across it,” says Brining. “They are coming to the first night. We have been in touch.

“I am interested in what they make of it,” he adds. “Because it’s a sort of celebration of Cowdenbeath and everything they stand for and everything that clubs like Cowdenbeath stand for. It’s might be about a disastrous season, but we are not taking the mickey. It is done with real love, and I say this as a Leeds fan.”

Brining explains that it hasn’t always been easy being a Leeds United supporter, particularly one brought up in the post-Don Revie era. He is pleasantly surprised to be informed of a Leeds-Fife link – the Kingdom is where Revie lived out his final years, something many people, Brining included, are surprised to learn. The legendary manager’s wife, Elsie, was born in Lochgelly and they retired to the area.

Although Cowdenbeath are already two weeks into their close season, it’s crunch time for some neighbouring clubs. East Fife are facing a nervy finale as they seek to retain their place in the third tier while Dunfermline are warming up for a fight on two fronts. A remarkable double is within Neil Lennon’s side’s grasp: a first Scottish Cup since 1968 – they face Celtic in the final on 23 May - and promotion to the Premiership through the play-offs.

“Dunfermline fans will not see it this way, but they (Cowdenbeath) see their rivals as Dunfermline,” says Ricky Ross. “I am sure Dunfermline now don’t even think about Cowdenbeath. They’re not equal partners anymore. But the book – and one of the songs - obviously slags off Dunfermline, because that’s their enemy. I’ve since realised that we are actually going to be on stage doing this as Dunfermline are playing in the cup final!”

The spotlight might be on the Pars, but it’s guaranteed to be on Cowdenbeath too. The club are preparing to revel in a new form of stardom, where coal dust is replaced by grease paint and ‘break a leg’ is not a threat delivered from the mouth of a rugged centre half but an expression meaning good luck.

Ross even detected some rapport towards the currently upwardly mobile Dunfermline, whose semi-final shootout victory over Falkirk was confirmed shortly before Cowdenbeath kicked off against Hearts B. The singer-songwriter was still making his way around the ground as the penalties started. “There were people sitting around watching (on phones),” he recalls. “It actually felt like there was a bit of goodwill towards Dunfermline.” Maybe it’s to be expected if Cowdenbeath fans are now turning into luvvies.

Black Diamonds and the Blue Brazil runs at The Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh from Friday 8 May - Saturday 23 May 2026. Tickets can be found here.