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[Germinal 27]

Dumbarton away would be a shocking introduction to Scottish football for Mark Warburton.

 

He'd walk out and look at that pitch and just go....

 

 

You have to admit, it fires the imagination. As one gazes out across the pitch, eyes momentarily caught, like some failed escapee from East Germany, by the wire fences which surround three sides of the ground, one's vision is assailed by the unlovely remnants of Scotland's industrial heritage in the shape (from r to l) of a horrible bit of waste ground which used to house a factory, a horrible new scheme of legoland houses, and the evil smelling, mysteriously sludgy deposits washed up on the shoreline of the Clyde estuary, a slime every bit as redolent of historical industrial effluent as the wheezy denizens of the asbestosis ward in the new hospital on the South Side.

 

Senses reeling by this brutally condensed history of Scotland's problems, and always aware of the Castle Rock lurking behind, a grim revenant of alternative Britons, one's gaze falls upon the pitch, so often the escape for West of Scotland man. Alas, even here, there is no respite; the land with over four centuries experience in producing flat greens for golf and bools has failed to tame wild nature for here, in darkest Dumbarton, the pitch slopeth markedly in the corner. One hopes at least that we avoid an Easter away fixture there, lest the right winger collide with some local kids rolling their eggs down it.

 

Perhaps the club's next appointment should be a psychologist.

Edited June 18, 2015 by Germinal