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Favourite quirks of Scottish stadiums.


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First dugouts were at Pittodrie:

The Dugout and Technical Area In Football

dugout
By Jimbo online at English Wikipedia [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Is there a more random thing in football than the ‘dugout’? Nowadays it’s referred to more commonly as the technical area, but that doesn’t make it any weirder, when you think about it. There is no way that the side of the pitch is the best place to be when trying to make out what’s happening on a football pitch. It’s why television companies don’t use the steady-cam view for the entire broadcast of a match, for example, and it’s why the most expensive tickets are ones that offer a full view of the pitch from higher up rather than the ones just in front of the hoardings. Yet if a manager dares to sit up in the stands then they’re lambasted for not being on the sideline and in touch with their players.

Where, then, did the idea for a dugout come from? Why was it developed in the first place and how has it become the area that it is today? There are certain aspects to football matches that we take for granted. Why are the pitches outlined the way that they are, for example? What’s the point in corner flags? Where did the idea of showing yellow and red cards come from? These are all questions that we’ve answered elsewhere on this site, so it seemed natural to take on the question of dugouts as the next thing on our list. We’ll do our best to explain the logic behind one of the strangest aspects of a football match, though we can’t promise to explain why managers continue to use them even in the day and age of developing technology that would allow them to communicate with their coaching staff easily enough from a more elevated position…

 

Who Invented The Dugout and Why Did It Catch On?

dugouts on a pitch
By Jimbo online at English Wikipedia [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Donald Colman was born in a small village in Scotland on the 14th of August in 1878. He was a football fanatic, falling in love with the game from an early age and having to lie to his parents about it in order to sign up for his local team. He was born as Donald Cunningham, you see, changing his name to Donald Colman in order to stop his mum and dad finding out that he’d be playing football every weekend.

He went on to play for Aberdeen more than three-hundred times, got four Scotland call-ups and might have been more successful if he hadn’t been called up for World War One. He continued to play briefly when he returned from the War but had also developed an interest in coaching and eventually got a job as a player coach for Dumbarton.

 
It wasn’t just Dumbarton where Colman earned his stripes. In the summer he would travel over to Norway to work with football coaches there and learn some ideas from them. It was here that he first observed the idea of managers being stood under a shelter, with the Norwegian coaches standing in what were essentially open-fronted bus shelters as they watched their teams play.
neglected dugout
By grassrootsgroundswell (Crediton United v Teignmouth) [CC BY 2.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons

As a coach he began to believe in the importance of watching a player’s footwork closely, so when he was invited back to Aberdeen as a coach in 1931 he decided to see if there was anything he could do to help him watch the players even more intently. He asked the groundskeepers at Pittodrie Stadium to literally dig out the ground at the side of the pitch, covering with an open-fronted shelter similar to those that he’d seen in Norway.

From his new vantage point, Colman could watch the footwork of his players during the match and get a real sense for whether they were doing in real-life what he’d been working with them on in training. He also realised that the roof meant that he could make notes about his players without them getting wet in the miserable Scottish weather.

Later in the 1930s, Everton Football Club played against Aberdeen in a friendly and the club staff liked the idea of a sunken dugout so much that they installed one at Goodison Park when they returned to England. So it was that a football-obsessed Scotsman helped to create one of the most iconic and, if we’re honest, bizarre aspects of a football pitch and spread it around the United Kingdom and, eventually, the world.

taken from this site: https://www.football-stadiums.co.uk/articles/the-dugout/

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11 hours ago, Glenconner said:

Hampden 

That's what I was going to say - old newsreels show the terracing there below ground level, plus there are two members of what appear to be a pipe band implying that it's a cup final.

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19 hours ago, Flybhoy said:

Can any older posters name the ground Jock Stein is at here?

My guess-timate is Somerset Park, Ayr but could be Brockville as well maybe?

FB_IMG_1555360766018.jpg

Your ageism is second only to your Celtic photo spamming.

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2 hours ago, Salvo Montalbano said:

As artistic a photo as that is, I'm failing to see a quirk of a Scottish football ground there.

Celtic flog 'restricted view' seats that are located in the tenements

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Guest Moomintroll
As artistic a photo as that is, I'm failing to see a quirk of a Scottish football ground there.
They're still trying to claim it is Paradise even when Hell is freezing over?
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