The young club whose juniors brought the Juniors back to Airdrie.
If you like a bit of football ground-bagging, don’t be fooled by the lack of cover and terracing at Gartcairn Juniors. It’s a venue where the foundations are everything.
100 Football Grounds Club Member 191: Ground 155, Match 31.5 of 2019–20:
Sat 11th January 2020;
MTC Park, Airdrie;
SJFA West Championship:
Gartcairn 1–3 Whitletts Victoria
Entry £6.00
Bovril £1.00 (NO PIES — everyone was on the Pot Noodles)
No programme
After years of barely one junior game per season, this was the third new ground in four straight Saturdays of SJFA West action for this lazy list-ticker.
And, after three consecutive League One venues, this weekend I moved up to the Championship. That meant three proper officials, a whopping pound extra at the gate and, in this case, nae seats, nae turnstile and nae cover:
Not that I cared. Gartcairn are a relatively new phenomenon. I’ve now “done” 54 of the current 61/62* West venues yet this was my first time seeing Airdrie’s Junior club play anywhere. But it’s strange how a ground consisting merely of one side of hard standing — a complex of Portakabins at one end suffice for changing rooms and committee hosting — can still feel tidier and more vital than many of the more established, more characterful venues in the Juniors.
And, frankly, the committees of all but the behemoths of Scotland’s non-league game deserve nothing but praise for keeping these clubs running at all. The crowd here was barely three figures.
What’s also strange, however, is to attend a ground with no raised viewing areas which itself sits in such a hilly expanse of land, surrounded by natural, grassy bowls. MTC Park isn’t just Gartcairn Juniors — it’s a massive sports campus (with ample excellent parking as a result), complete with indoor sports centre and attendant facilities (i.e., that’s where you go for a pee).
Behind the fenced-off Gartcairn ground is a skate park and beyond that a dog-walkers paradise of shallow grassy inclines and rough paths. You feel there must have been a pitch & putt course here at one point.
Behind the other end lies another fenced-off, synthetic pitch used by a neighbouring school. On the other side of the car park is an open, grass football pitch with red blaes running track and seating built into a hillock. Apart from the lack of a perimeter fence, this looks the more likely location of a Junior Football operation.
But the hard standing around Gartcairn’s little section of the MTC was, I soon found, beautifully paved and afforded each spectator plenty of room, even if the rain meant the few dozen travelling up from Ayr were all doing their emperor penguin impersonation for much of the game. There’s no coo shed? Well, that’s what brollies were invented for. Bring your own cover.
Basically, Gartcairn Juniors at home is an experience which reduces the concept of the enclosed football ground to its very essence. In the middle of an open field a full size synthetic pitch has been laid and, around it, a uniform, ten-foot green mesh perimeter fence, strategically bedecked with one continuous strap of advertising hoardings, compels anyone over three feet or under seven feet tall to pay in for a decent view of the game.
And eight basic but modern floodlights rise above it all to cut through the gloom of a rain-swept January afternoon in North Lanarkshire.
Those hoardings are often just that. Many were blank, most were advertising the sign company who obviously erected them. Adverts for a comms company rendered in graphics the same colours as Gartcairn’s strip, might well have shown the main sponsor. A couple of other ads, in the same colours, for an accountancy firm, hinted at how some of this tidy wee operation has been bankrolled.
I loved it. MTC Park gets it so right. It’s basic but it’s new and it’s tidy. Its location is dramatic — its logistics cute. And it facilitates far more than mere membership of the Scottish Junior Football Association.
As is common with modern, Astroturfed venues established for continual community use, yellow lines of confusion cut across the white 11-a-side markings on the synthetic pitch. They mark out three smaller pitches for seven-a-sides and kids’ games.
This now standard four-pitches-in-one setup requires the equally ubiquitous extra sets of goals strewn around the place. But, rather than having them on rollers, slung behind the by-lines next to the full-size goals, creating an untidy aesthetic, MTC Park has three fenced-off bays, one for each of the small-size goals, evenly staggered down each touch-line.
On the nearside these bays cut into the spectators’ boundary fence/crush barrier. On the far-side, where the female assistant ref ran the line, they sink into the line of the ground’s perimeter fence.
This, however, is no mere accommodation and absolutely not an inconvenience. This is a ground where the kids’ games are as important as the one I’m watching. Gartcairn are a club built on the fact that, without the former there would be no latter.
Both central goal bays, for the middle seven-a-side pitch, have a tarpaulin thrown over the crossbar and down the outside of the nets which, with a few folding chairs chucked in, create a covered technical area for each team. It’s cheap but it works perfectly and — bonus — keeps each club’s subs and management on opposite sides of the pitch.
Another such bay on the near side has been temporarily vacated of its goalposts and is occupied by the dinky little wagon pleasantly supplying hot and cold drinks, sweets, crisps and your Pot Noodles.
The only other SJFA West venue I remember not stocking pies (and I’m sure it was a one-off supplier failure) was Lugar’s Rosewell Park, years ago — and it did glorious home-made soup and rolls in slice to compensate, amply. But if MTC Park proves you only need a pitch and a perimeter fence to have a football ground, their caterer proves you only need an urn and a smile to keep the punters warm.
I saw a couple of those punters wearing Gartcairn’s Arthurlie-esque colours in scarf and bunnet form. The lady taking your entry dough at the top of the steps which lead grandly to the gate in the fence, sported a club coat.
There may be no brick-built facades or wooden stands with the club name painted in three foot high letters, but this is a club formed from a youth development operation established as recently as 2007 which, nevertheless, by 2015, brought Junior football to Airdrie for the first time in almost a century: Gartcairn know all about making tiny acorns grow.
Like fellow Juniors Rossvale, from Bishopbriggs, and senior side BSC Glasgow — recently hosting Hibs in the Scottish Cup — Gartcairn, their name a portmanteau of two areas of Airdrie, are embedded in a very local desire to have kids play the game as much as enable adults to watch it.
This isn’t about making money. That’s reflected in the plethora of parties — from schools and councils to local businessmen and football charities — who worked together to get this club a home. It’s about football for football’s original sake — physical, mental and communal health.
I’m sure, if Gartcairn keep on their enthusiastic, upward trajectory, taking hundreds of local kids with them each year, they’ll soon have a nice cover erected and/or a sleeper or two of terracing built. I’ll watch with interest.
Whitletts, in their Mario Kempes’ Valencia kit, dominated the first half to lead 3–0 at the break but by the end, after a second 45 where the Vics could only hit on the counter and Gartcairn struck woodwork for a second time, it was clear why these sides were so close in the mid-bottom portion of the table. Both keepers were on fine form and, most enjoyably, both had to be.
A great game, in horrible weather, at a venue made all the more intriguing by the new kind of community football it epitomises.
*Rossvale are playing out of Benburb’s New Tinto Park while in the top tier, but their own Huntershill ground — another lovely new venue — is fit enough for most other levels of Junior football.
