It seems Sons will be back in action soon as the Scottish Government has agreed to tiers 3 and 4 of the SPFL (and also the Scottish Cup) resuming.
Our Cup game against Huntly has already been scheduled for Mar 23. That only leaves twenty days to get back to training and up to speed for a full ninety (or heaven forbid, 120) minutes.
How the rest of the league season will be finished is anyone’s guess. There’s not enough time I would have thought for the full 27 games agreed before the season’s start to be played now. Sons completed nine before the shutdown so that would be 18 to be fitted in by May. Maybe the clubs will agree to reduce the total to 18 games which would certainly be manageable.
On our visit to the town last March we also had a look in Dumbarton town centre. The Artizan Shopping Centre has seen better days. That day many of its premises did not have tenants. Covid can only have made that worse.
Some of the empty units had been brightened up though by having huge photographs of Dumbarton Rock pasted onto their frontages. These are crops of the photos I took of those huge photos.
The Rock is a beautiful sight, isn’t it?. And that’s a lovely sky.
This cracking shot of Dumbarton Rock and Dumbarton Football Stadium (aka The Rock) was posted in 2020 in a blog I follow:-
And this view was in a newsletter from Dumbarton FC:-
I see from the club’s website that Sons’ centre half from that otherwise immortal team of the 1972 promotion, Jack Bolton, has died.
The line-up for most of that – and the preceding – season is imprinted on my memory as I heard it annnounced so many times over the Boghead tannoy:-
Williams, Jenkins and Muir;
Ferguson, Bolton and Graham;
Coleman, C Gallacher, McCormack, Wilson and B Gallagher.
Substitute, Donnelly.
Jackie, as we fans knew him, played 111 times for the club overall but unlike many of his centre half successors I can’t remember him ever scoring for us. (In those days centre halves moving upfield was still pretty much a novelty.)
As I recall he was about the last piece of the team-builidng jigsaw that manager Jackie Stewart put in place. Certainly without his influence in defence I doubt promotion would have been achieved that season, notwithstanding that side’s formidable attacking prowess.
John McCaig Bolton: 26/10/1941 – 22/2/2021. So it goes.
Before the game we met up with my younger son and his wife, who were making a day of it, in a pub in Aberdeen city centre for some lunch. The pub had also attracted other Sons fans:-
They don’t half make a fuss before a game at Pittodrie.
Razzmattazz prior to Scottish Cup tie, Aberdeen v Dumbarton, 18/1/20:-
Teams coming out:-
Sons players:-
Apart from the result it was a good day out.
I wonder when I’ll be able to have another away day.
I was looking forward to actually seeing a Sons game again tomorrow.
However today’s suspension of Scottish football below its top two tiers means that it will now not be until February 13th when the home game against Montrose is due – or just possibly the 9th if the Cup game against Huntly is scheduled for then – that I will have that pleasure.
With the coronavirus now spreading at a higher rate than ever I suppose this was an inevitable decision. People’s safety must be the main priority.
So 2020 continued to be a miserable sod right till the end, when it took Tommy Docherty away from us.
The Doc was probably most famous for being manager of Manchester Uinted though he had previous spells at Chelsea and other clubs, plus as Scotland manager. After Man U he managed seven more clubs.
His senior playing career began at Celtic but he could not displace Parkhead legend Bobby Evans from the team and moved south to Preston North End and later Chelsea.
He played for Scotland 25 times including in the 1954 World Cup (but we’ll swiftly draw a veil over the 7-0 defeat to Uruguay – I read once of a player’s recollection that the Scotland team were in heavy woollen jerseys as if playing in winter rather than the heat of a Swiss summer and were shod in big old-fashioned boots – with the Uruguayans in more modern footwear he described as like slippers in comparison. We were lucky it was only seven was the verdict.)
It was as a manager that The Doc made the most impact, taking over a very declined Man United and not able to turn the club’s fortunes round till after a relegation but leading them to a swift – one season – return to the top flight and then to an FA Cup win against Liverpool (denying that club what would have been a first ever treble by any English side.) Who knows what might have transpired if The Doc had not had an affair with the wife of the club’s physio Laurie Brown and as a consequence got the sack? (I note from the obituaries that Docherty was still married to Mary Brown when he died.)
Despite plying his trade mostly in England Docherty, like most of his ilk, remained a proud Scot.
There was a tale told – I think it was of Joe Donnelly, Dumbarton’s perennial substitute in the 1971-1972 season (only one sub allowed in those days and that for injury) that the player had once been involved in an altercation with an English team mate who had called him a “Scottish b*****d.” Docherty, as their manager, took them into his office, got them to settle the matter reasonably amicably then let the Englishman leave the room. Whereon he immediately turned to Donnelly and said, “You didn’t hit him hard enough.”
A character, then.
Thomas Henderson (Tommy) Docherty (The Doc): 24/4/1928 – 31/12/2020. So it goes.
Just in case you (and I) had forgotten what a football ground looked like, these are pictures taken at Sons’ first game of last season, the League Cup tie at Galabank, home of Annan Athletic FC.
Ground as seen from road from town centre:-
Entrance:-
Annan Athletic Club Logo on Galabank’s gates:-
Galabank From North. Ground is in background beyond gates at the left of the picture:-
Pitch at Galabank, from northeast:-
From northwest corner looking south, showing pitch-side stand:-
