Gala Fairydean. Inverness Caledonian Thistle. Auchinleck Talbot. Hamilton Academicals. Hawick Royal Albert. These are names to send shivers down the spine (quite literally if you were ever to attend a game around this time of year). There are names like Crunchie McCracken who played for an always doomed East Stirling team that isn’t even in Stirling. Harry Haddock who was a 1950s legend for Clyde a team who now play nowhere near that particular river but in Cumbernauld, an open prison in Lanarkshire.
My father used to take me to the odd junior football match. Calling it ‘junior’ gives the impression of a juvenile pursuit practised by fresh-faced innocents when this was anything but the case. ‘Junior’ simply denotes that it was not ‘Senior’ football. Its teams were populated with could-have beens, has-beens, and might-still-have-beens and it was not football for the faint-hearted, in fact sometimes it was barely football at all but barely-legal thuggery.
He took me to see Pollock Juniors down at Newlands. They were playing Langside Institute for the Criminally Insane Thistle. I swear there was a wide burn with prams in it running through the middle of the pitch and at least one of the full-backs had a gun. Ten minutes into the second-half there was a loud scream as Pollock’s centre-forward, an ex-Nazi named Martin Bormann, attempted to amputate the opposing goalies head with a flick-knife.
It ended in a boring nil-nil draw.
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