The Best You Ever Had

Albion Rovers  0  University of Stirling  1

Lowland Football League

Admission / Programme - £11 / £2.50

If someone had asked me a couple of months ago, which ground I would most like to revisit should the opportunity arise, I would have said the Cliftonhill home of Albion Rovers.

That’s right, the very same Albion Rovers who were statistically the worst team last season in the Scottish Football League, to be replaced in the Second Division by The Spartans who beat them in a two legged play off.

I took in a visit to Cliftonhill back in March 2022, they got spanked 4-1 by Annan Athletic, and I bloody loved the whole experience, but rather than recount the experience of the first visit, let’s go with the more recent one, because to be honest it doesn’t differ any!

Before we go on to describe a night in Coatbridge, let’s talk a bit more about the life and times of Albion Rovers Football Club. Founded in 1882, following a merger of Albion FC and Rovers FC, success has been fairly minimal, they’ve won promotion six times from the bottom tier of Scottish football, winning the league title on three occasions, most recently in 2014-15.

The last decade or so has been a pretty memorable one for Rovers in terms of highs and lows. In 2011-12 they won promotion from the bottom tier via the Play Off’s after finishing in second place. The final saw a victory away at Annan Athletic which prompted wild scenes of celebration on the pitch, while the 2014-15 promotion, which was secured with a victory at Clyde, saw them embark on a three season spell in League One until relegation struck.

Since that demotion life has been pretty tough, with relegation from the Scottish League into the Lowland League confirmed last season via the aforementioned clash with Spartans.

To get to Cliftonhill, it’s a twenty minute or so train journey from the lower level at Glasgow Queen Street, to Coatdyke, which sits to the East of the centre of Coatbridge. A walk down the gentle incline from the railway station stakes you to the main road that runs into town, with the first port of call being the obligatory pint or two in Owens Bar, a very nice establishment. Once you exit Owens a short walk for just a couple of minutes down the road brings Cliftonhill upon you on the right hand side.

The entrance to the ground is quite an impressive and imposing sight, with an incline up to the turnstiles and the large rear fascia to the main stand painted in the club colours of red and yellow. The pitch itself is quite a bit higher than the level of the road, so once through the turnstiles you walk up a flight of stairs at the end of the stand and it brings you out onto the wide open spaces.

So why is Cliftonhill such football ground pornography? For a start, one end is out of bounds and is just a curved grass bank, while the huge terracing on the far side from the main stand is also not accessible for spectators?

Well, I’ve partly answered it! The ground is a collection of structures and features that are both charming and wonderfully decrepit at the same time. You have to remember this was once a speedway track, so from an expanse point of view it’s a pretty big footprint.  

Let’s start with the side where you enter the ground, as I said, an imposing main stand sits at the top of the slope, and this is made up of some wooden seats, with a paddock style terracing area in front of it, with a clear distinction between the roof over the seats, and that over the terracing which clearly shows that the terrace area roofing was a later addition.

The dressing rooms and office sit in the bowels of the stand, and even though it’s not the biggest of structures above pitch level, as the rear sinks well below the pitch, I can imagine it’s pretty spacious.

Moving round anti-clockwise you’ve got the award winning tea bar / pie shop, and then as you go behind the goal you have some new terracing known as the Airdrie End, simply because if you carry on from the terracing in an Easterly direction you will arrive in Airdrie, which of course from a footballing point of view, are the deadly rivals.

Moving onto the side opposite the main stand is perhaps my favourite feature, a long bank of steep terracing running the length of the pitch, with a cover running virtually the length of terracing, with just small areas at either ends exposed to the elements. As I said earlier though, sadly it’s out of bounds so you cannae use it, but it does look proper old school fantastic.

Then at the Coatbridge End you have the aforementioned area of open space that is the biggest nod to the speedway days with the curved grass banking behind it, again out of bounds and probably the home of several yet unidentified species! If you then carry on round to the main stand side you have a club shop and what looks like some kind of community building, which in reality is a portakabin.

Oh, then there’s the floodlights, which look like they’ve been made from the framework of cranes, with a rack of bulbs placed on top, you don’t see many like that, but again, they look great and just add to the aesthetic beauty of the place.

It’s a simply wonderful arena, I love it and I know many others do as well. I’ve said this before, twenty years ago the place would have been described as a shithole, but nowadays as thoughts and opinions change, it’s thought of as an iconic masterpiece, a nod to the 70’s, a time when football was proper and good, something to be preserved and cherished. I’ve been to the Stirling Albion’s, St Mirren’s, Hamilton Accies, and to be honest, as nice as they are, they are just simply boring. Give me Albion Rovers and Greenock Morton any day over them.

Crowds are not huge at Cliftonhill, and probably less since they dropped out of the Scottish League, and while they languish in the lower reaches of the Lowland League, they do have games in hand so a victory over the University of Stirling would have done them a power of good.

The visitors scored after thirty seconds with a well taken low shot, and then, to be fair, not an awful lot really happened throughout the rest of the game. Stirling had got the lead, they were happy, Albion put the shift in, ran at them, harassed them and did what they could, but clear cut chances were kind of non-existent.

The train back to Glasgow is at ten to ten, so with game finishing close to twenty to ten these days, it’s a bit of a jog at the final whistle, and I wasn’t alone in trotting down the road, but we all made it with a minute or so to spare, which in turn meant an exit into Queen Street at around quarter past ten.

So, twice visited, twice fantastic, and you know what, if the opportunity arises, I’d go a third time. If you haven’t been yourself, I would strongly recommend it, a super club, with a real loyal but small support base, and a cracking stadium to go with it.

It doesn’t really matter that historically, they’re not really very good at football!