Pure Filth

Pollok  5  Kirkintilloch Rob Roy  1

Scottish Juniors Western Region – Championship

When it comes to buying magazines, WH Smith and the like are ok, if you went relatively mainstream stuff and the odd speciality issue about wood turning or making model trains.

But, if you want the more edgy material then you need to go and have a chat with Dave round the corner, who has a few contacts and can get you pretty much anything you want, legal or not. It’s not always glossy and well bound, but by crikey, it’s eye-watering material by anyone’s standard.

I’m talking porn of course, the days of a top shelf in your shopping centre being stockists of such material seem to be long gone, you need to dig a bit deeper nowadays. It’s a sign of the times, the kids of today, sadly, can no longer point to the sky and say “Mum, what’s Razzle?”

Myself, like many others, have a thing about porn, but I’m talking porn of a different kind, I’m talking football ground porn. Football grounds that if they were a magazine, they would not just be top shelf, they would be under Dave’s counter and served in a brown paper bag.

The Scottish Juniors is the capital of this kind of porn, the epicentre of all things pure filth, the kind of material that can mentally scar someone of innocence and inexperience. It’s for the few, not the many, the connoisseurs if you like, the chosen ones, the ones that simply cannot be satisfied by an Atcost stand, a nice barrier and floodlights.

The dirtier, the dingier, the more dangerous, the better. I’d heard about it, but I only discovered this porn for myself just over a year ago, and now, I simply cannot get enough, it’s worth five and half hours on a train, just for that ninety minutes of footballing eroticism.

In that year, I’ve had an overwhelming urge, and that urge was to go to a game at Pollok’s Newlandsfield Park. The problem is of course, outside the months where we’ve got the light nights, you can forget a visit to the vast majority of Junior grounds, Pollok included, as they simply don’t have floodlights, and I only go up in the midweek.

But, this time round, after convincing the boss that we needed to move our meeting for August back by a week, it just so happened that it now coincided with a full Western Juniors programme and indeed a home game at Newlandsfield. The boss knows about my football obsession, after he discovered I went to a game at Kilwinning back in May, I was affectionately referred to the following day, quite publically, as ‘The Kilwinning Prick’. I took it as a compliment, especially after a more recent meeting when a colleague was simply called ‘Prick’, so I guess that makes me a bit more special……!  

So, after landing in Glasgow Central just after 4pm the plan was straightforward, dump the bag at the knocking shop that pertains to be a hotel, and then head round to Spoons for the obligatory Pizza and Pint deal.

With this consumed it was onto the train for the twelve minute journey to Pollokshaws East, which just so happens to be slap bang outside the ground. It was a touch early, on a pretty wet evening, to enter the ground so I decided to set up camp for a short period in Lok’s Bar which sits right outside the stadium, almost directly behind the goal. Like a number of Junior grounds, Pollok don’t have a social club on site, so a nearby pub ends up becoming the unofficial home of the supporters, and it seemed to be that Lok’s met that criteria.

Ok, so the ground, did it reach the parts lesser grounds simply couldn’t reach?

Well of course it did, and despite the weather preventing a more detailed poking of the nose around it’s various nooks and crannies, it simply oozed character and history.

Seats? Forget them, to be a proper authentic piece of Junior Porn, seats are a no no, because proper football fans stand up. Cover? Absolutely, because it pishes it down on an almost permanent basis in Scotland, so you need lots of that, with terracing steps underneath, and a cavernous roof that allows the cries of “Gae Tae Feck” to echo beautifully around the arena.

I’d better describe this middle paged spread hadn’t I?

You go in through the turnstiles in the corner, and immediately to your left, almost on the corner flag, is the club building that houses the dressing rooms and the offices. Moving around behind the goal the area is terraced from one end to the other but minus any cover.

The opposite side of the ground is where the cover stands. Painted in the club colours of black and white, it’s an iconic structure in Western Junior football, with the club name written into the fascia. The terracing steps are deep, steep and plentiful, and with pretty much all of the crowd, of which I would estimate 250-300 under it on the night, it made for a great atmosphere.

The other goal also has open terraces behind it, while the side opposite the stand is also terraced, but with the relatively newly built residences right behind it, it does create both an enclosed and an inner city feel to the ground. If ever a ground does not need modernisation, then this is it, and as the area around the ground does fall victim to the developer, all it does is allows the timeless character of the stadium to ooze out even more.

If ever there were an argument for the Juniors to remain just that, and not do what their counterparts in the East have done in terms of jumping ship to the Senior ranks and becoming subject to licencing, then Pollok is that argument.

We did have a game, and on the night it was a pretty one sided affair.

Pollok won 5-1 against a forlorn Kirkintilloch Rob Roy (possibly one of the greatest club names in football after Deportivo Wanka and Fotballaget Fart), who themselves finished with just nine men on the field.

It maintained Rob Roy’s 100% losing streak and left them at the bottom of the table, while Pollok were nestled nicely at the top of the pile with four wins and one defeat from their five fixtures.

Have they got what it takes to crack Auchinleck Talbot this season, bearing in mind the Ayrshire side 

are erecting floodlights and that may mean something sinister may be afoot? It’s hard to say but the early signs are very positive.

So that was Pollok, I was satisfied, it was the sort of football ground you simply won’t find in WH Smith…………

Go on, you know you want to, but be careful, you may need to start paying Dave a visit!