Football Crazy

There are bad seasons and then there are bad seasons. The club in question has been losing for a while, but the really alarming stat isn't in the league table. It's the number of its employees who keep dying. A football club with a body count is a story no press officer can spin.

Jardine and the team are called in over the murky goings-on behind the scenes, and the case spreads out across the whole institution, from the pitch to the boardroom to the medical room. Players, administrators, medical staff, everyone connected to the place starts looking at the others sideways. The higher the death rate climbs, the harder it becomes to call any of them accidents. The show has a bit of fun with the club's futile struggles on the park, but the joke wears thin fast, because a death count that high isn't funny.

Glenn Chandler and Peter Mills wrote it, with Ian Knox directing. James MacPherson is DCI Mike Jardine, Blythe Duff is DS Jackie Reid, John Michie is DI Robbie Ross, Colin McCredie is DC Stuart Fraser, and Robert Robertson is Dr Stephen Andrews. Paul Barber plays Jimmy McEvoy, Dominic Mafham is Alan Hamilton, Tony Roper plays Morris Murray, Brian Pettifer is Sir Archie Drummond, with Brian Cowan as DCS Brian Holmes.

There's a very Scottish flavour to the whole thing, the gloom of the terraces meeting the grind of the incident room. But the episode's real subject is how easily an institution people take for granted can go rotten from the inside, and how long the rot can go unnoticed. Football is supposed to be the game of the people, and this one has been quietly burying the people it employs. Nobody connected with the club wants to talk, because in football, silence passes for loyalty until it doesn't.