New Statesman Scotland
Football in the year 2000 means satellite television, share flotations and foreign players commanding telephone number salaries. Many believe the game is in danger of putting itself out of reach of the ordinary fan. No such danger exists at Albyn Park, home of junior club Broxburn Athletic. It is the sort of ground God must have had in mind when He created Scottish junior football.
Corrugated iron features extensively, railway sleepers abound and furlongs of rusty railing enclose the pitch. Recently Grassroots saw a Scottish Cup tie there between Athletic and Cumbernauld. Grey sheets of horizontal rain came howling along the A8 on the back of a storm-force wind and right down the pitch. Shale bings and their lunar landscapes provided the backdrop on the far side of the park. The solitary dugout on that side looked like a checkpoint on the road to hell. The scene was one of unremitting bleakness.
Junior football is for those who like their game spiced with thrills and spills. This did not disappoint. After 40 minutes all hell broke loose in the Cumbernauld goal. Broxburn's attempts to bundle the keeper and ball over the line failed and the subsequent kick on the prostrate keeper earned Broxburn an expulsion.
The second half spluttered into life with the players virtually bent double. Suddenly, Del-boy, a Broxburn favourite, committed a crude foul; in a flash the Cumbernauld coach jumped from the dugout and ran protesting to the touchline, giving apoplexy a bad name. Del, clearly contrite, demonstrated this to the coach by mysterious movements of his hands and genitalia, followed by a 180-degree pirouette and a blatant pointing of his posterior. How the 350 hardy souls present loved this! The coach implored the linesman for support, but was ignored. The home crowd's sense of fair play surfaced with their appeals to the same linesman - "Time to sort that c--t oot!"
The worse conditions got, the better for Broxburn's commercial arm - sales of pies and Bovril did a roaring trade. Pies were drenched in brown sauce and washed down with fags. The punters loved it. Broxburn won 2-1, by the way.
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