A Little Light Football

This retirement thing is opening up a whole new world of experiences. I’ve been living in Troon for over thirty-five years now. Back in the days when I first arrived in the small, pleasant if slightly dull town I was a big fan of the Beautiful Game. Well, a big fan of football at least. As a supporter of Huddersfield Town it was only rarely beautiful. Being a fan of an English club whilst living in Scotland presented a few problems back in the day. It’s hard to believe but in the pre-Sky days you couldn’t watch English football. You might get to see a few goals from the Match of the Day games played after the Scottish highlights on Sportscene but that was about it. There was one solution, however, and I invested in a big TV aerial which would pick up the broadcasts from Northern Ireland. Despite them not being English broadcasters either, BBC Northern Ireland and Ulster TV showed the English football programmes. Reception was dependent on climatic conditions but it was that or never ending games involving Rangers and Celtic. Scottish football wasn’t a total no-go area though, for a couple of seasons I went fairly frequently to watch Ayr Utd. It was quite entertaining too. One of those seasons they won whatever league they were in, the Scottish Division Two and a Half or something, and scored a shedload of goals in the process, most of them by a bloke called Henry Templeton. Of course the early nineties saw the dawn of the English Premier League and Sky TV. For the cost of a subscription, English football was available three or four times a week. It even included the lower leagues where the club I supported resided. This was great for a footie mad English exile. By the mid-nineties though I started to fall out of love with football.

The main reason for this was that I discovered Ice Hockey and your average hockey game is way more exciting than a normal football match. There were other contributory factors though, the main one being that football was turning into more of a soap opera than a sport. I still maintained an interest in Huddersfield Town and would watch any England games I could but the idea of watching something like Arsenal v Liverpool as a neutral no longer featured in my life. A couple of years ago Town started to be quite good which revived in me a modicum of interest in the sport as a whole but not too much. Whilst I’m glad they got to the Premier League the hype, money and over the top reporting still turns me off from any game that doesn’t involve them. There is, however, a whole world of football that doesn’t live in this over-hyped world. Some of it takes place a mile or so from my house. For the first time in those thirty-five years as a Troon resident, I went to watch Troon FC.

Troon FC play in the Scottish Junior Leagues. I’ve always wondered if they deliberately use the word ‘junior’ to confuse those not in the know. ‘Junior’ in this context does not mean children/youth football. The players range from seventeen to forty+ and come in all shapes and sizes. It’s broadly equivalent to the English non-league set up but is affiliated to rather than run by the Scottish FA. The game I paid the princely sum of £6 to watch saw Troon facing a team called Lochee Harp which Google informed me comes from a suburb of Dundee called either Lochee or Harp, I’m not sure which. It was a Scottish Junior Cup game. The leagues are regionalised and Troon’s usual opponents are from the West of Scotland so this was a rare opportunity to see them play a club ffom the East. Portland Park is Troon FC’s home. Apart from the pitch it doesn’t consist of much – a clubhouse, changing rooms, a tiny covered terrace and a single turnstile is about it but you don’t attend Junior football for comfort. The action on the pitch was actually quite good. As a spectator you can’t afford to be of a prudish disposition though. Many years ago I worked in the building industry which didn’t teach me much about bricks and mortar but I did learn how to swear quite effectively. Even the brickies and labourers of J G Minter Ltd may have blushed at the amount of ‘fuckings’ that were being bellowed out during the game. Not by the crowd you understand, but by the players and coaching staff. Aimed at teammates, opposing players, the match officials or occasionally some higher power, the profanity flowed like Prosecco and gin at a hen do. The Troon goalie, a surprisingly agile chap considering his ample girth, almost exploded in a raging apoplectic torrent of abuse aimed at his defenders when he conceded a goal. This despite the fact Troon were still held a four goal lead. The thing is, apart from the word ‘fucking’, repeated many, many times, I had absolutely no idea what he was actually saying. Anger seemed to have reverted him to an ancient dialect of Scots that was indecipherable to me. The sentiment was quite clear though.

The crowd, which I estimated probably wrongly at 120 or so, seemed largely oblivious to the profanity and in fact some of them were quite oblivious to the football too. The clubhouse serves larger at £3 a pint and there is a kiosk selling a surprisingly wide range off pies which seemed to be more of a draw than the game. I had been informed that the Onion Pie was the half-time snack of choice and it was indeed quite tasty thanks to the afore mentioned onions that were mixed in what can best be described as minced meat of indeterminate origin. Those comestibles are an important little earner for the club as it is the sort of business that walks a fine line between solvency and oblivion. The profits of today’s game were likely wiped out when the match ball was kicked onto the adjacent Ayr-Glasgow railway line. Numerous other balls were kicked between the fence and the railway embankment, landing in the bushes. There is a designated getter. This poor bloke has to get on all fours and crawl under a gap in the fence and risk getting cut to shreds by the brambles to retrieve the latter-day sheep’s bladder. Almost inevitably, as soon as he has returned the ball to the dugout at the opposite side of the pitch one of the players has displayed his limited talents by booting the replacement ball back amongst the blackberries. The Ball Getter is almost certainly a volunteer who has loved the club for years. After the sixth time he crawled back under the fence it looked as if that love was wearing a bit thin.

The game ended with Troon winning 5-1 and progressing to the next round of a competition where the ultimate prize is a place in the Final at a glamours stadium like Partick Thistle’s Firhill. I quite enjoyed the experience. No electric scoreboard, no music blaring out when a goal was scored, no Neymar-like play acting, no VAR, no million pounds a month contracts, just two sets of players booting a ball around to the best of their abilities and swearing a lot. Will I go again? I probably will. I might even not leave it thirty-five years.