By Mark Dingwall

I’m a football romantic – I admit it.   I love football, all football – just Rangers a bit more than other clubs.  I enjoy Junior games, FF admins used to regularly go to odd Scottish Cup clashes when we had a spare Saturday – Girvan v Forres Mechanics being a fond memory where I bought a model trawler for my mum out a seaside shop!

As a kid a group of schoolmates and I were semi-regular at Clydebank when Rangers were away from home or midweek in the cups.   Some pals were Thistle fans and pre-season games in the sun or early season matches when Rangers were away from home and I was working in the pub  were not uncommon.

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Likewise I’ve always loved the history of the game in Scotland and the tales of how clubs were founded and their great days.   I like to think that I’ve never forgotten that everyone loves their club in the way that we love ours.  Different strokes for different folks.

In the past this website has support Dee4Life when Dundee were in trouble – advertising their raffles and so on.  Likewise Livi when they were going through their problems many moons ago.  

And then came 2012.

You normally only hear the loudest voices and those are normally the most deranged and hysterical at every club.    You can pick any team in Scotland and get a story of why they should be hated.   Yet, when it came to the vote for us to get an SFL licence only one club – and no-one knows who it was despite several pointing fingers to different clubs – voted to exclude us.

And so we come to Albion Rovers.

A small support, often identified as Catholic Coatbridge compared with Protestant Airdrie.  Yet even that reality is not quite what it seems.  A few years ago I visited a Bluenose in East Kilbride who kindly gave me a 1970s Rangers cartoon poster.  His other passion was Albion Rovers – it was his local team and he had for decades popped in to see them with his mates and started collecting their programmes even for games he didn’t attend – his hall cupboard was stacked with stuff from ceiling to floor all neatly indexed and boxed.  Quite a collection.

All clubs have that – we as a bigger club have more collectors and obsessive travellers and stats guys and history guys than most.  But it’s the same feeling that real football fans have.   

Scotland has more professional and semi-professional clubs than any other country in Europe.  That’s not a weakness – it’s a strength.

The way I always looked at it was that  those Dundee and Livi fans frantic about their club’s potential demise were not to blame – it was the directors and corporate leeches that do the damage.  They were the same as you and I, and so I helped a wee  bit.

The poison we saw unleashed in 2012 was born in the hearts of haters not football fans.  I can fully understand those with a “sink or swim” attitude towards other clubs but there’s a part of me that thinks that the destruction of any football club (bar one)  is not in itself a good thing.

So whether or not you want to lend a helping hand to Albion Rovers is up to you.   But I’d say there are probably more deserving targets for distaste.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/albion-rovers-football-club