Black Diamonds and the Blue Brazil review – a daughter waits to fulfil her football fan father’s final wish

Black diamonds are what they used to dig up from the Fife coalfields. The Blue Brazil is the unlikely nickname of Cowdenbeath football club. Together, in the 1993 book by Ron Ferguson, they represent the bittersweet hopes of a downtrodden town: the coal that brought work, fatal accidents and unemployment; the team that brought moments of joy and a litany of loss. You would call it a triumph of the underdog, except this team never triumphs.

“Some things are more important than winning,” is the catchphrase of the ex-miner and diehard Cowdenbeath fan (Barrie Hunter) who haunts this warm-hearted adaptation by Gary McNair, first aired as an audio drama in 2021. More important, the playwright would argue, is a sense of community, of shared experience, of learning not to be defeated by pit closures, job losses, relegation and death. It is about “how to lose and keep going with hope”.

That is a hard lesson to learn for the fan’s daughter, Sally Venters McAlpine (named in honour of 1930s inside forward Alex Venters), an aspiring lawyer who has escaped a home town that, for her, symbolises only defeat. After her father’s death at 53 from black lung disease, a consequence of inhaling coal dust, she feels duty-bound to fulfil his final wish: that she scatter his ashes at Central Park stadium the next time the Blue Brazil win.

Surely that cannot be long, she thinks, not banking on the competition from Clydebank, Dunfermline Athletic, Meadowbank Thistle and the rest. As Ricky Ross sings from behind the piano in his set of reflective folk-blues songs: “It’s going to be a long, long season.”

Long, yes, but in James Brining’s gentle, minor-key production, Dawn Steele never makes it seem so. In what amounts to a monologue with occasional interventions from a wise and placatory Hunter, she is an excellent narrator of her own tale, a woman both repelled and attracted by the place she grew up. As the defeats pile up, she charts Sally’s transition from outsider to insider with subtlety and grace. It is not a play of grand emotions – the undulations are slight, the stakes low – but of quiet, personal victories.