one4review | On 14, Aug 2026

Rowan Hackett makes a low-key entrance, and glows like a ginger lighthouse, radiating a Scottish warmth and welcoming that puts the audience at ease.
The show is deeply personal. Hackett takes us through a childhood populated by a father with a bewildering CV of various jobs, the man appears to have accumulated more secrets and lies than most people manage in a lifetime. Was he really a stand-in drummer tech, and why, exactly, was he ever held at His Majesty’s pleasure? Hackett drip-feeds these revelations with just enough information to make you want to start your own investigation.
The cleverest part of the show comes when she draws parallels with her father to Celtic in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the club wasn’t exactly at its peak and she honestly admits neither was her dad. The description of the relationship is a time capsule of those times, from the obvious references to the football terraces of that time where you can almost smell the pish and Bovril running down the concrete.
It’s the football lack of greatest-hits package nostalgia is its strength, because underneath the stories is something much more personal: how our relationships with teams, parents, and childhood obsessions get passed down, reshaped, and occasionally inflicted on the next generation.
There are lovely female reference points along the way, from Hazel Irvine to Gregory’s Girl, as Hackett works out what football means to her and where she fits into its often overwhelmingly male landscape.
There’s plenty of love here too, particularly in Hackett’s and her father’s affection for the comics and cultural touchstones of the era. Her modern-day experiences of taking her own kids to matches provide another lovely layer, contrasting the football she inherited with the considerably more sanitised experience they get today with seated stadiums and VAR.
Hackett is clearly still figuring out what all of this means, and that gives the show its charm. There’s no grand declaration of what football, family or fandom should be. Instead, she offers up the contradictions, the memories and the people who shaped her, allowing us to find our own way through them.

Overall, it’s a lovely, touching, heartfelt show, funny without forcing the laughs and packed with enough personal history to make you care regardless of football allegiances or time period.

****
Reviewed by Steve H

Venue : Just The Tonic, The Caves 14:55
Date : 7th to 12th August