Steelmen-mad Craig made mammoth trip to Hampden all the way from north Sydney
Craig Tyrie embarked on a 21,000-mile round trip from Australia hoping another boy from Down Under failed to turn up.
The Motherwell buses only had a half-hour journey from Fir Park to Hampden yesterday.
But for Tyrie, a Well fan living in Oz, it started four days earlier in the departure lounge at Sydney Airport.
A 14-hour flight to Dubai was followed by another long-haul trek to London and finally a 450mile drive from his mum and dad’s in Kent up to Motherwell.
The trip cost 35-year-old Tyrie upwards of £1000 – once he’d emptied the Fir Park club shop. The superfan left girlfriend Nancy and five-month-old baby Marshall in Australia although he is heading back on Wednesday.
And the dad is dreaming of being able to take his son over to accompany him on another long-haul trip to Hampden in the future.
Tyrie said: “It’s one of them, it doesn’ t happen often in our lifetime. Since I’ve been in Australia this is the first time I’ve come over for a game. “I’ve got a five-month-old baby and I’ve left him at home because it was potential history. It might not ever happen again. “And the next time they get to the final he will probably be old enough to come. I had to b e here as I couldn’t miss the opportunity to see it if they had won.
“I wanted to come over in November but Marshall was due two weeks later so my partner Nancy said, ‘ You’re not going’.
“I said I’d go for four days, fly in on the Friday and come back on the Monday and she said no.
“Now he’s five months old, I said, ‘It doesn’t happen often, this is a miracle, I need to go’. She just about let me go with gritted teeth.
He’s a Well Society club member already. He’s got all the babywear – I ordered it for Christmas.
“And my two friends in Kent got him the other sizes so he’s got from zero to one year, the full babygrows, T-shirt, the bib.”
While Craig crossed the globe to see his team, it was a wizard born less than 200 miles from where he lives in Chatswood, New South Wales, who threatened to curse the homecoming.
Celtic’s Tom Rogic ran the show Down Under as the Aussies made it through the final qualifiers for this summer’s World Cup. His fine form for club and country didn’t continue yesterday as the 25-year- old failed to make the kind of impression that saw him rewarded with a new five-year contract at Celts.
But Tyrie enthused: “I went to watch the two World Cup games where he played in Australia.
“He’s a good player from what I saw of him. When he was playing for the national team, he was the best player on the park.” Craig has lived Down Under since January 2016 after meeting Nancy while living in China before they relocated together. Now working as
a coach for semi-professional team Northern Tigers in the Sydney suburbs, he was hunting down tickets as soon as Well downed Aberdeen in last month’s semi-final.
He said: “I was straight on looking at flights. I didn’t have time off work because the football season is on at the moment so I had to get time off from the club.
“They said, ‘OK but you need to find other coaches from the other teams to cover your work’.
“I was cal l ing in favours, asking, ‘Can you do two games at the weekend, can you cover my training session?’ “When I said I wanted to go to the football, they were like ‘great,
go, we’ll definitely do it’. Tyrie was at the National Stadium seven years ago when Celtic defeated Well 3-0 in their last Scottish Cup Final.
But the chance of a repeat of their famous 1991 triumph over Dundee United, which his dad Alan was at while he stayed at home to watch it with his grandpa, could not be missed.
Tyrie said: “My dad went with his brother in law and his nephew to the 1991 game.
“My grandpa is not here any more or my uncle but I’m at this final with my dad, my cousin and his boys so it’s still a family thing.
“Even if the football hasn’t gone how I would have liked it, the family get together is something special.”