Barcelona to Buckie Thistle E-Book

Mat Guy

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 421

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Mat Guy continues his exploration of the much loved (and much hated) sport of football. From Barcelona to Buckie Thistle he takes us on a journey across the globe. The only connection all these places have is that they host some of least known football teams in the world. This is Guy's ode to football. He looks at the grassroots movement on the grass itself; it takes the love of this sport to a different level. Guy does not focus on the celebrity teams with millions behind them, but at the real heart and soul of football.

Leseprobe

MAT GUY lives in Southampton with his wife Deb and cat Ellie. He has written about football for a number of magazines, including Box to Box, The Goalden Times, Thin White Line and Late Tackle, He published Another Bloody Saturday: A Journey to the Heart and Soul of Football in 2015 and Minnows United in 2017 with Luath Press. Barcelona to Buckie Thistle is his third book.

Another Bloody Saturday details a kind of love for the game that will resonate with all sports fans. Mat Guy’s work isn’t just well executed and intimate, it is inspiring and affirming, DANIEL CASEY

Guy has tapped into something universal when he proves again and again with his stories that the long-suffering loyalty of the sports fan is rewarded in numerous ways, RED STAR REVIEWS

Mat Guy has written a paean to supporters who have renounced their allegiance to Super Sundays and Soccer Specials. Read this and it just might inspire you to cancel thatTVsubscription, SPORTSBOOKOFTHEMONTH.COM

Guy is an endearing narrator, writing with great empathy and the genuine passion of a love affair. ‘Honest’, ‘warm’ and ‘magical’ are the buzz words throughout, THE FOOTBALL PINK

Guy reveals to the reader football experiences that the average fan in theUKwill never get to, FOOTBALLBOOKREVIEWS.COM

It’s really interesting to see how much Guy understood of both the Faroese people, our country and our football, HANNIS EGHOLM, B36 TÓRSHAVN

First published 2019

eISBN: 978-1-912387-83-0

The paper used in this book is recyclable. It is made from low chlorine pulps produced in a low energy, low emission manner from renewable forests.

Printed and bound by Ashford Colour Press, Gosport

Typeset in 11 point Sabon by Lapiz

The author’s right to be identified as author of this work under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

Text and photos (unless otherwise indicated) © Mat Guy

To Deb, for absolutely everything. And Ellie for being Huckleberry Finn to my Tom Sawyer

Contents

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE Operation Zero Points – Fort William

CHAPTER TWO The League of Nations – the Faroe Islands, Azerbaijan, Kosovo

CHAPTER THREE Locos, Chuff Chuffs, and Can Cans – Inverurie Loco Works and Forres Mechanics

CHAPTER FOUR No League of Their Own – Liechtenstein

CHAPTER FIVE It’s Grim Up North? – Wick Academy

CHAPTER SIX The Primera Divisió – Andorra

CHAPTER SEVEN Highland No More – Cove Rangers

CHAPTER EIGHT Europa No-hopers – La Fiorita, San Marino

CHAPTER NINE From Barcelona to Buckie Thistle – Buckie Thistle

Acknowledgements

Introduction

This is all one man’s fault. A man without a name, having only met him briefly on a single occasion – a book-signing.

Not any book-signing though, it was a terrible book-signing, on a cold and wet Saturday afternoon in the bar of a football club whose supporters had no idea why I, the writer, was there.

Four hours sat smiling hopefully at people as they wandered past, some pausing to try to understand what all the books, scarves, shirts and photographs neatly displayed across a table were all about. At best, there were some sympathetic nods towards me, an isolated man lost amid a sea of unsold books – a tacit support of someone clearly floundering in whatever endeavour they were attempting. At worst, there were looks of great suspicion, like this man ostracised from the rest on his own table was somehow here as punishment for some crime committed, literary or otherwise – a public humiliation enforced on some heinous offender. Either way, best steer clear.

I say it was a terrible signing, but two books sold is two more than none. Two opportunities for the people whom I met on my footballing travels to have their stories heard. Any connection made, in reality, is priceless, and well worth the daggered stares from elderly gents from behind their half-supped pints. And without this ego-sapping afternoon I wouldn’t have met the man who gave me my direction for this book.

He stopped with his companion, two men past pensionable age, fresh drinks in hand, and pointed at the colourful red and yellow Partick Thistle scarf draped across the table.

‘Partick Thistle!’ he said in a broad Scots accent. I nodded and began in on my faltering spiel about my book containing football stories far from the bright lights.

‘Do you go up to Scotland to watch football often?’ he said.

I told him of a couple of trips to Firhill, home of the mighty Jags of Partick, along with visits to Celtic, Berwick Rangers, Hamilton Academicals, Arbroath and Cowdenbeath.

‘So, where next?’ he asked, picking up a copy of the book, flicking through it way too fast for there to be any information imparted to him.

I began in on a notion I had about exploring The Highland League, a semi-professional division that was a part of the fifth tier of Scottish football. My grandmother had come from the region, I explained, though I knew little about her life, and the fact that it was the most northerly and isolated senior league in the United Kingdom appealed to me.

He shook his head, dropping the book back on the pile. ‘Don’t bother. It’s awful. Terrible. Not worth the trouble.’ He took up his pint, nodded at the table. ‘Good luck with all this,’ he said, still unsure exactly what this was, before dissolving into the crowd of the bar, all steeling themselves for the miserable weather they were about to face. This left me stunned, alone, copies of the book that had attracted no bites that day strewn about me, my next idea dismissed so out of hand as terrible, not worth the trouble. What a day!

If I had to give it a name, my journey through football could very well be entitled ‘a series of random and mainly inconsequential acts of defiance’. From a young age, I felt compelled to swim against the tide of popular footballing opinion in the school playground. My grandfather’s love for the unknown, the mysterious, the hidden, as witnessed though hours of us both poring over his collection of old and ragged National Geographic maps detailing far-away places I’d never heard of, had a far more profound effect than even I realised at the time. Where he wondered at lost cities and temples, his excitement somehow translated in my mind into a wonder of another kind; of the unseen football grounds and kits, at club badges that may exist among these far-flung places. I loved the sport, and I wanted to explore it, but off the beaten track, just like my grandfather explored the world from his kitchen table in rural Wiltshire.

When my playground cohorts began falling in love with the FA Cup-winning Tottenham Hotspur side of 1981 and that stupendous Ricky Villa goal, or the all-conquering Liverpool, or their near neighbours, Everton, whose league win in 1985 made all the kids want that vibrant blue kit for Christmas, I found myself falling for non-league Salisbury, my grandfather’s team, absorbing all its charm, warmth, meaning (at least to the few hundred souls that would join us on bitter winter afternoons) sat next to him in their dilapidated old stand. The drama and excitement of any match at Victoria Park felt as powerful to me; the passion from the stands and terraces as tangible as at The Dell, Southampton, where I witnessed the very best of the English professional game. I held them both in the same esteem. Both, for me, were as important and wonderful as the other. They both mattered. Christmas would be made by my nan hand-knitting me a Salisbury scarf, as Southern League teams didn’t have the wherewithal or finances to produce replica kits and scarves of their own. I wore it with pride. I still do.

When the school playground came alive the glorious summer of 1982, with children trying to recreate masterful moves by Brazil at the World Cup in Spain, or Marco Tardelli’s iconic goal celebration for Italy, when the Panini sticker-swapping frenzy for him and Socrates, Zico and the rest grew to fever pitch, I had other main targets. While I wanted them for my album too, my reverence also befell the little double stickers, where two players had to share one sticker, that were afforded the ‘inferior’ teams of El Salvador, Kuwait, and Cameroon. Obscure names, hometowns, club sides, all listed beneath each player’s space in the album – they all fascinated me as I imagined what they looked like, the stadiums they played in, the kits they wore, all in a far-away land. In the pre-internet era, imagination was all I had to go on. But it was clear to me, even then, that they mattered. Just as Salisbury’s players, home ground and results did to me.

Pride, passion, belonging, identity and hope were all entangled among those obscure names and teams, knitting a mythology together that people believed in. Countless tales of last-minute winners, cup final victories, league titles, heart-breaking relegation that has become legend over time. Unknown acts of dedication and self-sacrifice to make it into the stands on match day, to make it out onto the pitch. All swirling about the ether of these distant lands, just as it does about the vast stadiums that are home to the game’s biggest names. And here they were, having seemingly achieved the impossible in reaching the World Cup finals, alongside the game’s greats, their stickers rubbing shoulders with them in piles of swapsies in excitable children’s school-bags. They were to be revered in equal measure, by me at least. All this information, along with lists of qualifying matches against equally obscure countries was all archived safely in my album. I still have it. Obviously. It is footballing National Geographic treasure. It excites and inspires me still, nearly four decades on.

When I began my love affair with football programmes, when they were the only source of reliable information in a pre-internet age, it was those of the likes of Forfar Athletic, Tranmere Rovers, Newport County and, of course, Salisbury that began to fill up boxes under my bed. Invaluable resources revealing a rich and fascinating world among the lower leagues; their grainy images, pen pics and league tables were a window into an intoxicating world rarely troubled by television cameras or national newspapers.

Now, in later life, it is Accrington Stanley and the Faroe Islands that excite more than the Champions and Premier Leagues. A simple (and inconsequential) act of defiance in the face of overwhelming public interest in the latter. Popularity never has and never will dictate importance and meaning to any footballing institution. They matter, no matter to how few, in the way that Barcelona fans care for their team, roaring with such intent and fervour at another goal that the very walls of the mighty Camp Nou feel like they could reverberate apart.

It is a towering sporting cathedral, Camp Nou, that competes with La Sagrada Familia, its religious cousin across town, for the devotion of the Catalan people and the millions of tourists that flock to both every year. It is a sporting pilgrimage for football fans near and far, taking buses, taxis, and the metro before walking the last few hundred metres along sun-baked residential streets that cower beneath the towering façade of one of the world’s most important sporting institutions.

Queues form outside the gift shop, while other lines snake patiently in the heat, waiting for their turn on the stadium tour. Hundreds of people – possibly thousands – pass the time, slack-jawed, staring up at the vast oval walls that rise up to the heavens. Visualising the steep nosebleed-inducing banks of claret and blue seats that defy gravity, clinging to these walls along with their 100,000 other brethren, one can only imagine the fervour, the swaying passion of a sold-out Camp Nou on match day. Because this isn’t a match day. In fact, it isn’t even in season. The throng of souls milling about the base of this great building are doing so in the full knowledge that there will be no magic from Messi today.

But still they come, so strong is the pull of this place. They wait patiently to experience walking in the shadows of giants; through changing rooms, a chapel, the players’ tunnel and out into the blinding light pitch-side. A final stop – right at the very top of the main stand, looking down at the tiny dots milling about taking photos by the dugouts – hammers home the majesty of the place. No matter your footballing allegiances, you can’t help but leave a little bit of your sporting heart behind in such an overwhelming tribute to the beautiful game.

The Highland League currently has 17 mini Camp Nous dotted about the Scottish Highlands, miniscule in stature by comparison but equal in meaning, spiritual and physical, to the weather-hardened souls that call them home. There may be no queues for stadium tours and non-existent gift shops but these 17 Highland grounds encompass history and community, belonging and meaning across scores of decades, just as the Camp Nou does. Trophy cabinets and pictures on clubhouse walls detail achievements, friendships and adversity overcome in the face of relative obscurity. Lovingly maintained stands (albeit some past their sell-by date), pitches, turnstiles and clubhouses suggest that there is something worth the trouble here, there, and wherever a small patch of ground devoted to the beautiful game is treated with similar reverence. They are all Camp Nou, in meaning if not stature, if only to those loyal few.

In truth, there was no way one person, though probably representing a great many more in opinion, was ever going to halt a lifetime of progress exploring football on the roads less travelled. Too many trips taken, people met, experiences absorbed and words written to prevent any doubts from lingering much past the car park and the journey home that cold, wet, book-laden winter’s day.

The knowledge that 125 years of the Highland League could not be so easily dismissed, in my mind or others’, fortified what had been a demoralised soul.

125 years in which two clubs – Clachnacuddin and Forres Mechanics – have remained ever present. Another two founding members, Inverness Thistle and Caledonian, merged to form Inverness Caledonian Thistle, a team who have frequented the Scottish Premier League in recent times and have dispatched Celtic in cup glory in years gone by. Premier League Ross County and lower league Elgin City and Peterhead have also gone on to represent the Highlands within the professional ranks.

The league that is not worth the bother has also caused Scottish Cup upsets. In 1959, Fraserburgh dumped out top-flight Dundee, who fielded Scottish Internationals Bill Brown in goal and Doug Cowie on the wing, as well as another three players who would go on to represent their nation and to become the first ever Highland League team to achieve the feat. In 2018, it would take Rangers to stop ‘The Broch’, as Fraserburgh are known, in the fourth round. A hat-trick by Josh Windass, a player admired from the terraces when he wore the red of Accrington Stanley, saw off The Broch in front of a home crowd of 1,865.

Cove Rangers and Brora Rangers would go one round better the same year, equalling the Highland League record of reaching the fifth hurdle before being defeated by Falkirk and Kilmarnock respectively. Both Rangers, one from the far north, the other from the eastern extremities of the league, had also recently fallen at the final play-off hurdles to enter the professional leagues above, Cove being edged out by the odd goal in five in their attempt to replace Cowdenbeath in Scottish League Two a few months before my Highland adventure began.

Fortified with these statistics, and the knowledge that there is a wealth of stories, experiences and characters to explore, so begins the latest round of acts of footballing defiance, though they will by no means be restricted to just the Highland League. Other much maligned leagues completely dismissed out of hand have bolstered this Highland odyssey like the lower reaches of the UEFA Nations League via the Faroe Islands. The mini premier leagues of San Marino and Andorra, and the absence of any league at all in Liechtenstein due to insufficient numbers, will assist the Highland League in proving a point that the beautiful game instils just as much magic and passion among the lesser lights as it does at the very top.

This journey is not a two fingered salute to my book-signing friend, more an outstretched hand, an open invitation to explore an intoxicating, mysterious, passionate and ultimately soul-enriching road less travelled. And you never know, these little acts of defiance may become contagious to a precious few. Because we all need a little adventure in our lives. And where better to explore than the communities and clubs hidden among the folds of football’s own vast National Geographic map? They may be leagues apart in some respects, but with their all-pervasive sense of community and belonging, their celebration of identity and meaning, those that populate them just might, in fact, be leagues ahead.

CHAPTER ONE

Operation Zero Points – Fort William

AN ENTRY LEVEL act of defiance this is not. More a Hail Mary pass of convictions that could just as easily end up in the long grass as in a glorious last-minute winner. There would be no trip to mid-table security, or safer yet, to table-topping hopefuls. No, the Scottish Highland Football League would live or die, in the first instance, on its perceived weakest links and a mid-week match among the Munros of the West Highlands. Home to one of the remotest and, in footballing terms, most forsaken outposts in the division, if not the country – Fort William.

In the nine seasons since Strathspey Thistle joined the Highland League, there have been only three teams to pick up the wooden spoon in Britain’s most northerly senior division, the Strathy Jags being one of them. Rothes is another. Representing the town of the same name (population: 1,200), the football club stands on the banks of the River Spey deep inside whisky-distilling country. From there, a cluster of world-famous Scotch whisky producers stretching from the foothills of the Cairngorm mountains to the south, up to the storm-battered coastline in the north, manufacture their fiery magic.

The Speysiders, as they are known, suffered the fate of coming last in 2015 and 2016, before recovering and moving up into the lower reaches of mid-table, from where they had fallen. Strathspey Thistle, a 40-minute drive south past the mouth-watering Aberlour and Glenlivet, also sits on the River Spey. Their Highland League baptism of fire came in 2009, and a season with only three wins and a goal difference of -90 saw them come last out of 18. Two wins the following season and a goal deficit to the tune of -95 was, however, enough to see them climb off the bottom to 17th. Their perennial basement bedfellows, Fort William, propped up the league that year with two wins and -112 goals conceded. In their nine Highland League campaigns, the Strathy Jags have finished last twice, second-last four times, and third from bottom twice. Only in 2012/13 did they escape the bottom three, finishing fourth from last with five games won and 73 goals conceded. It is an unenviable record. Unless you are Fort William.

The Fort are an anomaly. Geographically they are not easily compatible with any league anywhere. Where most of the Highland League congregates along the northern coastline to the east of the Highland capital of Inverness, stretching south toward the Cairngorms and south-east to Aberdeen, they do not. The only contradictions to this general Highland League trend are Brora Rangers and Wick Academy, who can be found along the long and winding road that links Inverness to the most northerly points of the Scottish mainland, and the ferry to the Orkney Islands. Their relative isolation – Wick Academy needing a ten-hour round-trip to face Aberdeen-based Cove Rangers – means that a simple hour-long jaunt between the two results in some feisty derby matches.

For Fort William, overlooking Loch Linnhe on the west coast, it is not only their footballing pride that sits out on a limb. Known primarily for its proximity to Britain’s largest mountain, Ben Nevis, where it is used as a base camp for most of the 100,000 who climb its slopes every year, Fort William is the epitome of isolation. Two and a half hours by car from Glasgow, and two hours from Inverness, Fort William is on the way to nowhere for most and is often bypassed in favour of the more picturesque Oban to the south. It is, however, the West Highlands’ Mecca for climbers and hill-walkers, as it marks the beginning and end of the 96-mile long West Highland Way, which traverses spectacular scenery amid vast, looming Munros (mountains with a height over 3,000 feet), and rugged valley floors that wend their way between the town and Loch Lomond to the south. Fort William also hosts the start and finish of the Great Glen Way, which weaves north between equally beautiful landscape for 70 miles until it reaches Inverness via the banks of the infamous Loch Ness. For even hardier explorers, it is also the last staging post before the long road to Glenfinnan and the Western Isles beyond. Apart from these walkways and narrow roads, the odd village sheltering in the lee of a mountain pass, there is precious little else to suggest humanity ever ventured this way.

Such isolation meant that a significant settlement didn’t manifest itself until 1654, when Cromwell had a wooden fort built there to house English troops in the region. Their aim being to pacify the Clan Cameron after the 12-year War of the Three Kingdoms between England, Scotland, and Ireland. In 1688, after the overthrow of King James II of England by William of Orange, the settlement was named Fort William in honour of the Dutch Prince who ruled not only the lowlands of what is now Holland, but also England, Scotland and Ireland until 1702. In 1745, Fort William was besieged for two weeks by Jacobites, a group following a political movement which aimed to restore a Roman Catholic King to power. But while regional neighbours Fort Augustus and Fort George fell, Fort William held firm.

Modern-day Fort William (An Gearasdan to the 700 or so Gaelic speakers that live here, the derivation of which is unclear, but most likely an approximation of the English ‘Garrison’) is home to some 10,000, who rely on tourism to fuel the economy, populate the shops on the high street, guest houses and camping grounds and fill sightseeing boats and local fish restaurants supplied by the handful of fishing boats tied dockside. It is an idyllic setting for an antidote to modern living, but hard work for a football team competing in senior football.

Just as location is against Fort William’s football team, so too is history. While Fort William FC were formed in 1974, playing friendly matches and cup games in the North of Scotland Cup and the Inverness Cup until 1983, when they joined the North Caledonian League, their main sporting competitor, shinty, had close to 2,000 years’ head start.

Shinty is a game that was once popular the length and breadth of the United Kingdom. The Olympic sport of hockey is a more sedate variation of the Gaelic form that continues today in Ireland as hurling, and in Wales as bando, along with its Scottish cousin. Thought to originate from the Legend of Cùchulainn, a hero in Celtic mythology and son of the Celtic God Lugh, shinty has been ingrained in Highland tradition for millennia. No surprise then that Fort William’s two shinty clubs, Kilmallie and a side named after the town itself, dominate sporting proceedings here. Even now, more than 30 years on, the thrill and wonder as a young boy catching a shinty match in Kingussie, a small town within the Cairngorm National Park, while on holiday with my family remains vivid. Flailing camans (sticks) creating a blur amongst players fearlessly facing them down, all in the pursuit of a small hard ball and a sight of goal. Blood curdling body checks, industrial-strength swings, a hurtling ball, all set to the familiar cries of sportspeople at war; it was intoxicating stuff, even for someone already committed to football. That an ambulance was already parked up pitch side, its driver sitting idly with the rear doors open waiting patiently for the almost inevitable call to action from the battleground, made it a memory that would last. The ferocity of play was worthy of the great tales I would tell on the playgrounds back home after the summer break, a new addition to the mythology of the sport that grew from Celtic Gods.

With such competition and history, it is a wonder that football managed to claim any kind of purchase at all. But it did, and enough to register three cup wins and a runner’s up spot in Fort William’s first season in the North Caledonian league. In the Fort’s second and final season in the league, they won it, as well as managing to retain two of their cups from the year before.

After two years of success, Fort William were finally admitted into the Highland League, the competition they had been trying to enter, but had been rebuffed every time, since their formation. Highland League life began with a 1-0 home win over Clachnacuddin, their nearest rivals based two hours away in Inverness. The 1985/86 season continued to see Fort William break new ground with a record home game of 1,500 witnessing them play Stirling Albion in the second round of the Scottish Cup. A goalless draw meant that record crowd left Claggan Park happy, before a 6-0 defeat in the replay. A creditable 12th place finish in their debut season was followed by 11th the season after. But momentum began to stall, maybe as the club’s novelty began to fade among the town’s population, and more than 30 years of doldrums descended.

With a limited pool of players to choose from, the history and popularity of shinty and arduous away trips to the other side of Scotland to face established Highland League teams began to see results turn for the worse. This geographical isolation, coupled with the fact that Fort William has always worked within a non-existent budget (even today, players receive no more than a nominal fee per game to play), saw a set of statistics build that might crush a less hardy bunch. In their 33 seasons in the Highland League, the Fort have come last 17 times, and finished in the bottom three on a further 11 occasions. In the nine seasons since fellow strugglers Strathspey Thistle joined the Highland League ranks, Fort William have finished last five times, and second last another three times, the only respite being the heady campaign of 2014/15 when the Fort finished in 13th place, with eight wins to their name. Indeed, in 2008/09, the year before the Strathy Jags came on board, Fort William set another unwanted record, finishing the season with a solitary point, the worst tally in the league’s 125-year history.

With cold hard statistics like this, and year on year of long, fruitless and often humiliating trips to play – and lose heavily – games far from home, it is a miracle of passion and perseverance that Fort William keep on doing what they do. However, as the 2017/18 season drew to a close, it was announced that all six Fort Directors would be stepping down, their energies having run their course. Very real doubts began to surface as to whether Fort William Football Club would, or could, keep on keeping on.

With no Board, it seemed more likely that a club so down on its uppers would simply call it a day and bring an end to more than three decades of struggle. Who on earth would want to take on what on the face of it looked like such a thankless and soul-destroying enterprise? Logic should have dictated that Fort William FC withered and died during the unseasonably hot summer of 2018, becoming a footnote in Scottish football, and the answer to numerous cruel pub-quiz questions on the worst football team in Britain. The odds of finding replacements in the few short weeks before league constitutions needed to be formed and confirmed seemed to have sealed the Fort’s fate.

Seemed to. But didn’t. Because from out of the shadows of the supporter’s club bar, a few unlikely hands found themselves raised at one final meeting, being propelled up into the air by heart rather than head. And from those smattering of hands, a new Board was quickly formed before they could be lowered again, before the enormity and insanity of their task could sink in. They would be assisted by the old secretary and treasurer, who would stay on for a short while to show these novices the ropes. Or at least as many of them as they could.

And with that, remarkably, Fort William set off on a new chapter. A chapter that would, in the first instance be a slightly chaotic one, with the club being five or six weeks behind its Highland League colleagues in preparing for the season ahead. Fixture lists were released, and Fort William found themselves planning for an opening day away trip to Rothes on the last weekend in July, despite the attendance of the first training session being so low that they could not field a five-a-side team.

Regardless of their two poor seasons a few years ago, Rothes would not be Fort William’s main rivals during the season ahead. Raising a side to face them would be the Fort’s first major hurdle, and they managed it, just. With a side comprising four trialists and only two makeshift substitutes, just making it across the white line ready for that opening whistle in Mackessack Park was victory in itself for the new Board. Just as well, as the Fort fell to an 11-1 defeat, triallist Liam Taylor scoring the consolation goal for the new era Fort William.

Victories would remain of a similarly ethereal nature in the following weeks. A 16-0 hammering at the hands of a strong Inverness Caledonian Thistle side in the North of Scotland Cup would open proceedings at home. Hailing from the professional ranks of the Scottish Championship, the second tier of Scottish football, Caley Thistle were embarking on only their second season at that level for 13 years, having previously made themselves a fixture in the Premier League. It was a game the Fort were never meant to win, but with only one sub, and barely three days to recover from the trip to Rothes, it was a bruising experience.

Three further double digit defeats to Buckie Thistle, Turriff United and Inverurie Loco Works in August were interspersed with a 6-0 loss at Huntly, and an 8-2 defeat at home to Formartine United. Another triallist, Alan Kerr, scored the Fort’s second and third goals of the campaign. Despite the tough start, there was no lack of passion, on or off the pitch. It was always going to be tough, having had six weeks less than everyone else to get the club back up and running and to get a team together. But what was lacking in expertise, this small band of football brothers made up with pride. A pride and passion that sometimes got a little carried away with itself, as witnessed through Fort player Ryan Henderson, who found himself red carded against Formartine for a late challenge. So incensed was he that a string of expletives aimed at the referee as he trudged toward the changing rooms resulted in him being sent off, again, for abusive language. A second red before he had even left the pitch! Not exemplary behaviour, for sure, but an indicator that Fort William was an institution worth fighting for.

And just as Henderson displayed it on the pitch, so too did the paying faithful who parted with their seven pounds, week in and week out. Regularly amassing well into three figures, they populated the touchline, cheering on their team even in the face of a certain battering. Moral victories sustained all concerned, given how close they were to having no team to support come 3.00pm on Saturday.

But when it came to tangible victories, victories that could be registered on a league table that could chunter through a vidi-printer and into homes up and down the country, it would be Strathspey Thistle that Fort William would aim for, just as they had done for close to a decade. With the fixture computer throwing up a mid-week home tie against the Strathy Jags for matchday seven among the last days of August, both teams knew that, for them, this would be the true beginning of the Highland League season.

Like their basement rivals, Strathspey Thistle’s record that season had been ‘played six, lost six’ though defeats had only come by five or six goals instead of by double figures. A couple of consolation goals and a 2-0 defeat to Rothes was as good as it had got thus far. Indeed, looking at both teams’ results in the nine seasons since Strathspey joined the league, there was little to separate them. While Fort William had won just 27 of the 306 league fixtures in that time, racking up a goal difference of -852, the Jags had won 31 and conceded 780 times more than they had scored. Despite the season being barely two months old, and the year not even out of the summer months, there was no doubt that this fixture between the two would probably go a long way to deciding who finished up bottom of the pile come May. Or it would have, had a bombshell not been dropped just a few days before…

There is kicking someone when they are down, and then there is booting them in the head over and over. And for a lesser team, for a lesser collective of proud souls, this could well have killed a club dead in its tracks. For any team, a points deduction is a crippling blow to a season. For a team who managed just five the season before, it is catastrophic. And in the days leading up to the Strathspey Thistle fixture, days that had been for Fort William a real tonic – with the feeling that a corner had been turned with a better performance against one of the leagues strongest sides in Formartine, notice came down from the Highland League:

The matter of Fort William FC fielding an ineligible player on three occasions was considered by the League Management Committee at its meeting yesterday evening.

In forming its conclusion, the League Management Committee took into account the fact that the club had agreed that this amounted to a breach of Rule 8.9.4 and that the terms of clause 8.9.13 provided for a mandatory penalty.

Consequently, the meeting decided that Fort William FC be fined a total of one hundred and fifty pounds and deducted nine points with immediate effect.

When it came to regulations, there could be no wriggle room, no matter the unanimous sympathy from across the league. With everyone aware that a small band of new volunteers, with little to no experience of running a football club, had kept one of their own afloat, this felt like overkill. But the integrity of the competition had to be maintained. Rules are rules.

For Fort William, the mountain to climb in being competitive for the season had grown to monstrous proportions. Just as Ben Nevis loomed over their Claggan Park home, so too would that misplaced envelope with a player registration form dominate the next eight months, and beyond. Already holding the unwanted record of lowest ever points tally in the league, the Fort faithful found themselves looking down the barrel of becoming another pub quiz statistic: Who are the only senior team in Britain to have ever finished a season on minus points?

It would take unbelievable resources of courage, determination and pride to face down a plight many would describe as hopeless, pointless, terminal, and a league table in the local and national papers that read: Fort William, last, played six, goals scored, four, conceded 56, minus nine points. A laughing stock to all except those within the Highland League, surely you would check your plans to undertake a thousand mile round-trip for this now sub-basement match against the nine-points-clear Strathy Jags?

The road from Glasgow wound along an ever-narrowing path north to the banks of Loch Lomond. There was a chill on the air, thick with the smell of pine from the forests that choked the shoreline, rolled in off the vast, still, slate-grey waters. Rain cloud drifted, snagged among the dark mountains beyond. As the Highlands opened up, the road crept among scenes more breathtaking than the last. From the Bridge of Orchy, the peaks of Black Mount and Meall a’ Bhùiridh rose up. Up and on toward the pass of Glencoe and the Munros – though that word doesn’t seem to possess the awe needed to evoke their vast, staggering beauty – that began to rise and close in on the ribbon of road threading its way across valley floors, which shrank beneath the sheer, bleak rock faces of Stob Coire Sgreamhach and Meall Dearg, forcing cars to slow, sometimes stop dead on the road, their drivers lost in wonder at their timeless awe.

Small patches of scree at the side of the road played host to cars and people, halted and staring up, watching mountains fade and drift among banks of mist and cloud, breathing in the sharp air. The spectacle is topped out with the black walls of the Three Sisters: Gearr Aonach, Aonach Dubh and Beinn Fhada, all well over 3,000 feet in height, all menacing the road enough to send chills down the spine.

The bridge connecting Ballachulish and North Ballachulish traversed a boiling mass of water. The calm of Loch Leven to the right met the chop and current of Loch Linnhe to the left – a vast body of water emanating from the Firth of Lorn and the Sound of Mull, the fathomless Atlantic Ocean beyond. The result was a near perfect line separating the two, where the swell and chaos of one attempted to swamp the benign lulling of the other. A protective loch bank, acting as a natural harbour kept eternal parity. The road went on, snaking the contours of the Loch’s edge, until finally Fort William began to appear.

Sat among such rugged countryside, the town almost looks a disappointment, especially if tourists have just come from the picture-postcard Oban to the south. But unlike its cousin, Fort William can’t afford to be anything other than multi-purpose. Yes, there are enough old buildings, tea rooms and shops selling souvenirs to keep the day-tripper happy, but there is also a workmanlike edge to the town. It feels like a staging post, a base for some significant endeavour. Groups of climbers, hillwalkers and other expeditionary forces decked out in some serious gear stock up on food, maps and other bits among gaggles of coach-tripping pensioners and foreign school children. Whether heading west to Glenfinnan, out on the walkways to the north and south or straight off the beaten track and up into the Munros, serious outdoor pursuit shops supply all manner of kit that could save someone’s life out among the wilds beyond.

One complex at the far end of the high street seems to have got the town’s multi-faceted persona down to a tee. Wooden steps lead up to a tea shop, postcards, cuddly Nessie toys and shortbread. Turn a corner and there are serious-looking maps and equipment, crampons and survival rations. A narrow staircase leads down to toilets and the entrance to a dark pub littered with regulars tired of watching lost sightseers stumbling upon their refuge. Beyond, a large bus station and connecting train station bustles to the warning horns of reversing vehicles and conductors’ whistles. Among it all, a lone bagpiper brings the high street to a hush as a funeral cortege pulls up outside the church, a reminder that Fort William is also just a place where people live, and die, and have done so for more than 350 years.

Sat in pride of place just off the high street behind the bus station is Fort William Shinty Club. Overlooking the loch beyond, the pitch is a pristine, manicured swathe of emerald green. Hours of painstaking devotion are needed to create such a billiard table out of grass. Lining it, a stand of immaculate benches that could seat 500 waits patiently for the next match, and another chapter in the battle to gain promotion back into shinty’s top-flight, the Marine Harvest Premiership. With little to separate local rivals Kilmallie and Fort William at the top, it would be an exciting end to the season for the town. If ever there was needed a physical manifestation of what shinty means to the Highlands and Fort William, the care and attention to this ground is it. A sport so ingrained by millennia deserves such immaculate shrines.

Fort William Football Club, however, being the new team on the block, doesn’t enjoy a similarly prominent outlook to their caman-wielding cousins. The turning to Claggan Park is easy to miss on the Inverness road out of town. A sharp right sends you weaving between a small estate of council houses and a run of industrial units huddled along an ever-narrowing tongue of macadam. The ground is on you before you realise, first time travellers often having to double back past the brutalist back wall of a concrete stand fighting for prominence amongst a row of large, clawing fir trees.

It seems like Claggan Park is on a road to nowhere; fitting for a club with the eternal struggles of the Fort. However, just as this road deceives – thinning out among rough-hewn stone walls and steep sheep pastures, eventually ending in a small, exposed car park, and an Inn to fuel those wanting to take the hikers tracks across the spectacular foothills and valleys of the Nevis mountain range beyond – so too does the home of Fort William FC.

The thick wall of firs that encircles the ground looks like it was planted in the early 1970s when the club moved here. Too tall now to be topped out without the aid of a significant cherry-picker, they screen the club from the rest of the world, save for a small break and a sliver of a view rarely beaten by any other sporting venue the length and breadth of the country. At the foot of this break, a Narnia-esque entrance beckons. Between the branches, a narrow gate, a little hut, and then the Nevis mountain range rearing up behind the far goal: a silent Holt End, The Kop, Gallowgate End. It takes a moment to sink in. Thankfully there isn’t a queue. A mountain range is an impressive natural 12th man. This awe-inspiring view must have drawn an error or two from a visiting keeper, not through intimidation like its constructed brethren of Birmingham, Liverpool and Newcastle, but through a simple distraction and wonder as clouds ripple and dapple, changing complexion and contour like a geological chameleon.

Cut adrift to the right, that concrete stand beckons. Dislocated from the dimensions of the pitch when the white lines were rotated 90 degrees a few years ago to try and aid drainage (Claggan Park often falls foul of waterlogging) it now stands a forlorn figure. Too full of memories to simply tear down, this smaller version of the one at the Shinty Club, and no less loved in its time, now slips into dereliction. Fenced off to prevent the failing roof from falling in on similar lovers of sporting architecture, it and the ghosts of crowds gone by crane from afar to view modern-day matches. Where it was once centre stage, distance and unkempt weeds and shrubs now obscure its view. Saplings and bushes replacing supporters on the crumbling terracing, commemorating favourite spots, regular haunts among friends. With failing rafters once reverberating with the roar of that famous cup game against Stirling Albion, an inaugural Highland League win over Clachnacuddin, it now cuts a sorry sight, although at least it remains, of sorts, a memorial to the past, looking on jealously at the two small pre-fab stands either side of the reconstituted halfway line, beginning to come to life as game night begins.

As floodlights splutter to life, slowly growing stronger, deepening shadows among the firs and the recesses of this derelict temple, Sam Lees, dressed smartly in a shirt and club tie, walks proudly to the little hut by the entrance. Setting out his tin for the gate money, he stands patiently, expectantly, peering out into the car park for any signs of activity while the Fort keeper and trainer amble out onto the pitch to begin their pre-match rituals.

Cutting a diminutive figure, Lees looks younger than your average community club committee member – much younger. Indeed, you would assume that the club, only 44, had a good few years on one of its latest custodians. Traditionally the preserve of pensionable men, his infectious smile is almost disarming, so used to the weather-beaten gruff of old-timers who had seen more seasons than they cared to mention from their little ticket booth. Being one of the few who found himself raising a hand to save his club in the summer, you would have maybe thought that the baptism of fire he had recently endured might have dented that smile. But none of it. Perspective saw to that.

‘I really thought, leaving one meeting, that that was that last season. That the club was gone.’ He shook his head. ‘It was terrible. But here we are.’ He beamed with impeccable timing as his pride and joy – the rest of the Fort William squad – jogged out onto the pitch to join their keeper. ‘I’d never done anything like this before, but when it came to it, I had to step forward, to keep our club going. It has been a steep learning curve, and we are still learning all the time.’

Case in hand manifested itself when one of the Highland League Committee peered their heads round the line of firs – a jolly old man with a broad Aberdeenshire burr. ‘Is it safe to come in?’ he only half joked, having been one of the decision makers on the Fort’s nine-point deduction a few days earlier. ‘It is unfortunate, certainly, but we are right behind these lads.’ Nodding at Sam, he added, ‘and the club. They are one of our own and we are happy to have them. Now, where is that tea hut? I am parched.’ And with that, the Highland League set off, shaking hands warmly with anyone and everyone in his path.

‘We thought we had done everything our end,’ Sam said as we watched him on his way. ‘We thought we had the player registration in the post in good time. But it never arrived at the league’s office.’ He shrugged. ‘We should have checked I guess, but with so much going on, we didn’t. And here we are, on minus nine!

‘No matter. The club is here and in the long run that is all that matters. Points and results aside, just seeing a Fort William team cross the white line on match day is victory in itself for us, given how close it was to never happening again, and how little time we had to get everything ready once the decision was made.

‘Even with the decision to take it on confirmed, we didn’t know where to take it,’ he said as I offered him the admission fee and he rummaged about the tin for change. ‘The club had already indicated that they would be leaving the Highland League toward the end of last season and dropping down into the amateur ranks of the North Caledonian League. We weren’t sure if, one, that could be undone, and two, if there was an appetite to stay.

‘But at one meeting there were some home-truths spoken about the struggles to maintain senior football in the town over the years. How we couldn’t take the easy route, and just give up. It would be as good as not keeping the club afloat in the first place.’

Sam spoke with passion, and a certainty that the right path had been taken. ‘We are the only side offering senior football in the West Highlands. And that means something. Those that really want to test themselves at the highest level, they come here. It gives the kids in the junior teams something to strive for. Not having that would have killed football in the town. And, to be honest, dropping into the North Caledonian League wouldn’t have solved any of our problems. It would have compounded them.

‘We would still have been a good two hours from our nearest rivals in Inverness Athletic and would still have had to travel vast distances to face Thurso and the Orkneys. No, we knew that we had to stick with where we were, even though we knew it would be a rocky start.’ Sam alluded to the early season results. ‘We were a good six weeks behind every other club in preparing for the season. All the uncertainty about what league we would be in, and if we would be in any at all meant that we only had four players to our first pre-season training, and no manager!

‘Getting to that first league match at Rothes with a team and a boss was such an achievement, and it continues to be every single match. Even getting beat 16-0 by Caley Thistle in the cup had to be taken with a pinch of reality: we only had one sub, and they had a full-strength professional 11 that had recently been playing Celtic in the Premier League. Sometimes results on the pitch aren’t everything. We are just glad that the community have their club still.’

As he spoke, that same community began to trickle through the gates, depositing their seven pounds into Sam’s tin before either heading for a pint in the lovingly tended clubhouse, or joining the cheery Highland League committee man at the tea hut. Kids take up a spare ball to have a kickabout adjacent to the pitch and the limbering Fort squad. A quintessential image of a community club.

‘They all know the score,’ he said, nodding at the club’s stalwarts, young and old, coming through the gate; fading Fort scarves that had whipped in the winds of many winter storms laying limp across their shoulders. ‘They all know that our players do this for the love of it. They all know that our lads get 15 pounds a week, while they are facing sides some of whom are paying their players hundreds of pounds every game.