I'd actually mulled that title over for a while earlier tonight and then noticed one of the posters on the Dundee MAD site had used it in a message but I'll stick with the royalty theme as I develop my theme – a light hearted and very much tongue in cheek view of the Bonetti revolution from down the street!
Dundee had for many years languished in the shadows of the historically smaller but laterally much more successful Dundee United team, yo-yoing up and down between the Premier league and the first division. Suddenly Ivano was catapulted on the Dundee football scene, much to the shock of the local populous, whose experience of exotic foreign footballers had so far been limited to the many visits of European teams to the city, mainly at the Tannadice end of the street of course.
True enough each team has had its selection of foreign players, and United of course won the Scottish Cup under Ivan Golac's stewardship, but from the word go there was a buzz of excitement about this particular unknown. Even Princess Grace's visit to Tannadice paled into insignificance (well it didn't really as that sparked the “Hamish the Goalie” song but it sounded good so I put it in anyway.)
“I's a gonnae make the Dees the third farce ina Scottish football”, mispronounced the great man, and so a dream was born, along with perhaps a suggestion of how things would end.
And to begin with things looked good, with the signing of Claudio Cannigia even sparking a run on the number 3 in the Dundee club shop, and soon bairns were to be seen all over the city wearing Argentinian style tops. More signings followed, with names so difficult to pronounce even the keenest linguist found it hard to keep up.
But all too soon appeared the rumours, no doubt soon to surface again, of just how Dundee were financing all these foreign players – and no-one has quite answered that particular poser to this Arab's satisfaction. Perhaps when the last year's accounts are published at the end of the century all will be revealed.
And so now it's all over – the top six place (who can forget the over–the-top celebrations when that was achieved – have they all forgotten the 5th place two years before?), the long cup runs (well actually no Dundee haven't made it as far as United in the Scottish Cup for, well a long time), the huge crowds (well actually less than United's last season) and I could go on and on.
But I won't – let's leave the Dundee fans to wallow in their dreams – reminding them of course as someone has already done that memories (Dens 1983 comes to mind) last longer!