GLASGOW SPECIAL

There’s only a handful of pictures here and mainly story. Sorry about that. I’ve detailed the actual grounds on separate pages, it seemed only right to give a brief summary of the afternoon’s events in general though.

It started in Glasgow city centre at 12pm. I was doing an afternoon show with fellow comics Lee Kyle and Nick Cranston. Our next show wasn’t until 8pm, giving us a lot of time to kill. And I don’t want to be critical of Glasgow’s tourism hotspots, but given the choice between taking in as many football grounds as we could inside 5 hours or visiting, erm, other stuff, there was only one thing for it.

We strapped ourselves into Nick’s shitty little car and headed off to Partick Thistle. After a slight delay whilst armed police stopped the road as they staked out a bookies with machine guns, we reached Firhill Stadium, on the recommendation of fellow comic Ray Bradshaw, who also gave us the lowdown on a rough order to visit the stadiums.

Obviously there’s more detail on the grounds on each page but from fantastic Firhill we hot-footed it to Airdrie United’s Excelsior Stadium. I’ll be honest, I didn’t even notice the name until we got home, but if we’re talking about grandeur, they’re absolutely deluded. The area around the stadium seems one of the grimmest settings I’ve ever seen for a football ground. Ordinarily we’d hang around, have a wander round the ground and get some snaps. This place was so grim it seemed a chore to get out of the car.

And so onto Albion Rovers. We drove through more of grim urban Glasgow scenery until we reached Cliftonhill Stadium. I say reached, we had to stop at a B&M Bargains to check we’d not driven past it. It took all of two minutes to survey what was in front of us before we hit the road in search of a Hamilton Academicals mug.

We’d desperately wanted a cup from a lower league Scottish team but no grounds we visited that day even had a club shop, let alone being open. However Hamilton advertised a shop that was open till 5pm, so when we arrived at 4pm and figured out how the hell to get to the ground from the Morrisons opposite, it’s safe to say we were livid at the sight in front of us. Shutters down.

No Hamilton mug, and hailstones, meant only one thing. With Celtic Park briefly visited the night before, and the prospect of Shieldfield Park, the home of Berwick Rangers, on our way home, we were easily able to hit half a dozen grounds within 24 hours. That deserved a carvery. And so we headed for warmth and meat.

But no fucking cup. Bastards.