garrellburn

I have to accept some blame for this fake news, jumped in too quick without checking when I heard it. Especially since I had visited him just a few days earlier and he was fine then.

A big apology due to everyone. A huge mix-up resulting in fake news of Walters demise. He is still with us; a request to a local church to handle his funeral whenever it may come about was interpreted in the wrong way and the rumour went round the town. Not only that apparently amother similar case has happened with someone else and a funeral notice went up for the wrong person, heads will roll!

SJFA cannot speak to him in any meaningfull way, The referees are totally independant and operate their own system of monitoring performance by way of sending observors to games. They are usually easily identifiable and most are open to listening to your comments which may or may not be communicated back to the refs in question.

You won't be getting rabbits on the pitch now that its no real grass.

Just heard the sad news that our oldest supporter, Walter Jarvie, has died in the Village Nursing home, Cumbernauld. At 89 he had been a supporter since the 1940's and was attending games, both home and away, up till almost the end of the season just finished. He was a very well known figure at grounds throughout the West region and beyond, accompanied by his black labrador, Meghan, She was very well behaved, usually off the lead but almost never strayed on to the field of play except for the one occasion when she chased a rabbit across the pitch at Dunipace. Walter was a great character and will be much missed at Duncansfield. No word of funeral arrangements at present

Are any of them women? Or thinking of becoming one?

They've gone soft, they certainly played over the winter when Cumbernauld Ladies used our ground.

As always, by about the bottom of page 2 the thread gets hijacked by Darvel/LL/EOSL nuts and goes off subject. Womens football is not going to go away and perhaps the best thing is for junior clubs to engage with it and see it as a way of expanding their income and making more use of their facilities. After all many clubs have the advantage of owning their grounds and can either make a charge for use of it, or fully embrace the ladies section and use it as an opportunity to get more income and help in running and maintaining the facility. It is a different game and in my experience causes a lot less wear and tear on the surface even in the winter months. It may be that the existing generation of club officials and league administrators will have to give way before it is fully accepted though.

The question is, will womens football ever attract the sort of audience that junior football still does for a number of clubs. I mean actually turning up at ordinary league matches, rather than highly publicised representative games with thousands of free tickets handed out? Absolutely nothing against women playing the game but would you rather watch it week in, week out, unless you have a personal connection to those playing, or a junior game with football being played the old fashioned way which for me, and I'm sure many others, is its main attraction. We had Cumbernauld Ladies team playing at our ground for 5 or 6 years, they were the top Scottish ladies team at the time and they had virtually no followers other than friends and family, even their Scottish cup final at Forthbank only attracted a few hundred spectators. Juniour football is still a great product, as they say nowadays, but the marketing of it is almost non existant.

It will make a refreshment stop somewhere, but don't be even 30 seconds late back past the stated time for leaving otherwise you will be left behind. It happened to four of us left in Stonehaven on our way to an AGM in Aberdeen a few years ago. Guess who was in charge of the bus.

Looking at the publicity and coverage being given to womans football over the past few months it has now totally eclipsed the junior game here in Scotland. It would have been hard to forecast that this would be the case even just a couple of years ago. Where has it all gone wrong? It is all falling apart with more than a quarter of clubs already gone and looking like the west will soon follow suit. OK, the clubs will still exist and playing one another, at least in some sort of regional league setup but the excitement of away days to Aberdeen or Tayside or the east clubs has gone. Maybe I'm duplicating another thread with over 16000 posts here but why have we allowed this to happen, internal squabbling has chased away the big sponsors and to a certain extent the almost total domination of our flagship tournament by one club has taken away much of the excitement. Certainly not blaming them, they are just doing what all other clubs should be aspiring to, but in a better way, I wonder what will be said at the upcoming AGM concerning our future, do we have one?

Shock Horror! Defeats? On this thread? Never! A draw mught just about be admissable providing it was a dodgy penalty for the opposition in the last minute.

I have an SNLR booklet with reprinted articles from 1932-33 Saturday Pink edition of Evening Times and it says of Strathclyde moving to New Springfield Park 'the holding capacity is "estimated" at 45000' I only remember visiting it once around 1955 and my admittedly very vague memory is of being quite confined with very few facilities. Certainly a crowd of zero could very easily be overlooked in a ground of that size! No recollection of whether it was a red, black, green or tartan surface.

Less than a quarter of the crowd at the womens international the other night. Admitedly there were thousands of freebies given out for that game but just shows how the appeal of the junior cup final has declined over the years . Probably due in part to it being a foregone conclusion Talbot supporters seeing it as just another game hardly worth getting excited about. If TJ and his fellow officials don't see this as a real crisis then they are not doing their job, I don't have any real answers either but it cannot be allowed to continue.

This was printed in Private Eye so it must be true.