In our tenth anniversary year we will be interviewing some of the key people who helped launch and grow Hong Kong Scottish. We will be hearing about how the Club first started up and has evolved over the past 10 years – with some interesting stories along the way! This week we are chatting to the head of the Football section, Myles Winter.
1. Tell us about your role within Hong Kong Scottish!
My current role at the job is Chairman of the Football section and a seat on the Club’s board. The chairman role is a position I think the football committee came up with to make sure there is someone to attend the long league reviews each year!
But having this position alongside the board involvement has been great in getting a voice from the football section into the Club as it grows.
2. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and what brought you to Hong Kong?
I was born in HK after my parents moved here from Kenya in 1987. Back then HK still had more grass pitches than AstroTurf, so growing up I remember playing on old pitches in Happy Valley where there were normally only a couple of meters of grass along each wing left, and a baked mud basin in the middle! It made for some great matches through which you’d see the heatwaves before you felt them, and the torrential rain really could make it a game of two halves!
I went to Manchester Uni and played there before moving back to Hong Kong after some time in Australia, and then London with work.
3. How did the idea of introducing a football section to HKS come about?
When I moved back, my now wife Niki was playing netball for HK Scottish so I enjoyed going along to some of the first HKS socials – as chaotic as they still are now!
At the 2014 end of season gig I found myself sharing a wee dram with Steward Saunders (then Chairman) and discussing a mutual affiliation with Raith Rovers of Kirkaldy, and why a lot of clubs use ‘’RFU’’ without having the ‘’F’’ element in the club…it may have been a few drams for us to be debating this!
So, there and then we said ‘why not set up the Football section and represent the F in RFU?’
4. Who else was involved in the idea?
Immediately I approached Ali Shutt, who was a friend from school here and an equally social-minded footballer. He was to be in charge of a lot of the social and sponsor side of things, and I would focus on the matches and pitch days etc.
We were very lucky to have a structure from day one with the set up, whereby the existing HK Scottish Club showed the league that we applied for that we were serious and wouldn’t be just a one month pipe dream.
As well as help from the board – particularly Steward Saunders, Dave Bruce & Roy Kinnear – we had a lot of help from the then GM, Dave Whiteford whom I knew well. A lot of our first recruits were either friends, or friends of friends who we knew from the amateur leagues in Hong Kong (Yau Yee & Legal League), and happened to also frequently visit what was to become our section sponsor, Joe Bananas.
So, we had a sponsor from day one which was a massive help and remains loyal to us to this day. We made sure we had a committee from the start so players such as Scott Hughes (Club Secretary), David Masberry (Manager & self appointed Player-Manager) and Bob Chapman (Treasurer) helped myself and Ali massively.
6. Last year was the first year that HKS introduced a second Football team, The Eagles. How did their debut year go?
As we grew, we knew it would be a great addition to have a second team and in the 2019-20 season two of our long time players Bob Chapman & Jamie Hill led the setup of the HKS Eagles.
They had a great first season in the 2nd Division of the Legal League, competing and narrowly missing out on promotion and ending the season with more players than they started with which is no easy feat in HK football, adding to the social side of our football section. The additional players and new team have given the section a new lease of life in an otherwise disrupted season.
With a second team, it makes the section much more of a ‘’section’’ as opposed to just one squad. We’ve had players move within the teams, joint socials (not just within the section but also with the Club) with the help of the HKS office and other section social reps. Football teams require large squads in Hong Kong because everyone picks up injuries throughout the season, or…people have things on fairly often at the weekend! So, the fact we have two squads is a great achievement and shows how well the managers & captains of the two teams have done, especially recently.
8. How do you see the Football section progressing in the future?
We are reformatting things at the moment to get the football section into a more organised ‘’tiered’’ setup so that players are matched with similar level players and in the right leagues etc. – which isn’t always easy at an amateur level, but so far so good!
We’ll be getting more and more involved in the annual Club days so that football will become a feature in those events, be it five-a-side mixed corporate games or section vs section fun matches. Football is an easy sport for all to have a go at, so we’re excited for that.
Last season was a bit disrupted with COVID and protests, so the focus is to have a good full season this year with two squads. Hopefully we can add another team – whether it’s in the same league, a women’s team or a vets team – in the coming years!
If you want to become top scorer, just start a team and make sure you play longer and more matches than anyone else! If you ask the guys, I’m sure they’ll explain that I’m not the most technical of footballers – I like the idea that if you put yourself out there enough and go for pretty much every ball your body can take, the goals will come!
I remember an old Nike advert where Thierry Henry says ‘’a turn of pace can beat your opponent.’’ Ruud Van Nistelrooy says ‘’a good touch gives you the edge.’’ Then Wayne Rooney chimes in saying ‘’I just kick it as hard as I can’’……I quite like that matra!
10. The HKS Football teams are notorious for attending social events. What is the most memorable HKS event you have ever attended and why?
There have been a lot! HKS is well known for throwing some of the best socials, some of the best are the most unmemorable!
But I think it was maybe 2018; we did our first football section Christmas party in Rio’s (Joe Bananas’ sister club) where Ali Shanta Claus-Shutt made his first of now annual appearances. We then carried on to join the Club Christmas party so it was a solid twelve hours of HKS Christmas fun and I have good memories of a lovely birthday drink being given to me from our now manager Tommy Bartles and then GM Bryan Rennie, as well as scenes of Jamie Pincott and Danny Moussa in scantily clad attempts of polar bear outfits, dancing on the table to win the Club fancy-dress competition in Jaspas.
