It’s not been great. Two 1-1 draws so far. Nothing like as good as last season. But that start was a mirage.

Tomorrow we have a Challenge Cup* tie away to Kilmarnock B. It’s a game we could do without. Fair enough the competition is a supposed chance to make progress in a national cup but our record in it is seriously poor.  One final apart, we have never made any deep inroads into it. And B teams should be nowhere near it. We might as well not bother. I doubt many of our fans will. We would be much better preparing for our next league game.

*SPFL Trust Trophy.

SPFL Tier 4, Station Park, 14/1/23.

Well, this is a disappointment.

Mind you, you can’t expect to win a game when one of your centre-halves is sent off after 12 minutes. It also doesn’t help that he’s barely had a game in almost two years due to injury and the form of our other choices.

Plus Forfar have been our bogey team of late.

It would have been nice to extend our lead to seven points. As it is it could be down to one after the postponements get played. (Or worse if we lose to Stirling Albion.)

Free hit next week with our cup game against Kilmarnock.

The reward for Sons win at Clyde in Round 3 of the Scottish Cup on Saturday is an away draw against Kilmarnock.

Not a tie likely to see us progress I fear, but there should be a fairly decent share of gate money to be had.

https://almax1.files.wordpress.com/2022/04/gayfield-1.jpgGayfield is the home of Arbroath FC.

In May 2018 Sons played Arbroath in the semi-final of the Tier 2 relegation/Tier 3 promotion play-offs. We won there 2-1 and drew 1-1 at home to reach the final where we lost in extra time to Alloa.

Since then it’s fair to say the two clubs’ paths have taken very different courses.

The next season Arbroath absolutely strolled to promotion. Their sojourn in Tier 2 has been even more successful than ours. They have already reached the promotion play-offs this season and might even finish first being only one point behind with two games left – one of those a difficult one away to Kilmarnock, the only team above them.

It’s a magnificent achievement for a part-time club in these times but their performances this season should make them able to approach the game with no trepidation – and the pressure ought to be on Kilmarnock as favourites and a full-time team.

As for us, we could easily be relegated to Tier 4 in our forthcoming play-offs.

The photo below, showing Gayfield in all its lower league football ground beauty, is taken from a private blog I frequent.

Edited to add: the embedding of the photo no longer works.

But you can view it here.

Scottish League Cup*, Rugby Park, 14/11/20.

Not as bad as I’d feared, even if we were on for a hiding in the first half but Ryan McGeever got injured which we could have done without.

It’s a long time since this Cup has been a happy hunting ground for us. The group this year always looked a stiff test. Too stiff as it turned out.

The table makes for unhappy reading but I suppose this competition is never a priority for us.

Back to league business next Saturday.

*Betfred Cup

Scottish League Cup*, the Rock, 10/11/20.

Well, the least said about this the better.

Down to barer than the bare bones for various reasons (injuries, suspensions) we could only put two subs on the bench.

In that context and with players having to make shift, it’s not too dreadful. Thankfully it wasn’t a league game.

But. Expect the same – or worse – on Saturday in the last of this season’s League Cup ties at Kilmarnock?

*Betfred Cup if you like.

Football? What football?

Saturdays are empty at the moment, no trepidation in the run-up, no joy or despair at 4.45.

It seems an age since I posted news about Dumbarton FC.

Still, Sons’ opponents in this year’s League Cup (Betfred Cup) have been announced.

Kilmarnock, Dunfermline Athletic, Falkirk and Clyde make for pretty stiff opposition.

Something to look forward to, though. (Or perhaps, dread.)

So Alan Gilzean, whom Jimmy Greaves said was the greatest foootballer he had ever played with, has gone.

I never saw him play in the flesh, his time in Scotland being before I started watching football regularly and he was in any case in a different division to Dumbarton but he was a byword for accomplishment.

Before his move down south to Tottenham Hotspur Gilzean played for a great Dundee team, so great it won the championship of Scotland in 1962 and a year later reached the semi-finals of the European Cup. That was, of course, in the time when other Scottish clubs could compete almost on a level playing field with the two Glasgow giants. That success came in a remarkable 17 years when Hibernian (1948, 1951, 1952,) Aberdeen (1955,) (Hearts 1958, 1960,) Dundee (1962) and Kilmarnock (1965) became Scottish Champions. An incredible sequence: between the wars only Motherwell, in 1932, had broken the monopoly of Rangers and Celtic on the League Championship and subsequently only Aberdeen (1984, 1985) and Dundee United (1983) have performed the feat.

The power of money and the lucrative nature of European competition for the big two brought all that to an end. We’re unlikely to see anything like it again.

I’ve strayed somewhat from the point.

Gilzean was a great player, one whose movement on the pitch (from televisual evidence) was deceptively effortless looking, he seemed to glide over the ground in that way that only accomplished players manage to achieve. His scoring record isn’t too mean either; 169 in 190 games for Dundee, 93 in 343 for Spurs, 1 in 3 for the Scottish League and 12 in 22 for Scotland.

Alan John Gilzean: 22/10/1938 – 8/7/2018. So it goes.

This didn’t take long in coming round.

Not even a fortnight after the play-off final Sons now know who they will play in next season’s League Cup*.

And it’s a tough draw, with two top tier sides in the section in Kilmarnock (whom we played in the same competition last season) and newly promoted St Mirren (familiar to us from the last two seasons in tier 2) alongside Queen’s Park, just relegated to the bottom tier, and non-league Spartans.

This will be Sons’ first competitive fixture against Spartans and might be a chance for me to pick up yet another Scottish football ground I’ve not yet visited. That depends on whether the game will be at home or away. Each team only plays the other once.

*Betfred Cup if you must

Scottish League Cup, Rugby Park, 29/7/17.

So that’s our League Cup participation over for another year.

Played four, won none, drawn one, lost three, for two, against eight.

Inspiring.

Can’t wait for August 15^th when we get pumped out of the Challenge Cup.

Hope our league form is better.

Just at the minute I’m not holding my breath, though.