Junior football formed 1886, now facing oblivion. Where did it all go wrong?

[Glenconner]

8 minutes ago, craigkillie said:

The Scottish League had vacancies in 1929, 1931, 1966, 1974, 1994, 2000 and 2008, and not a single Junior club applied for any of them.

Vacancies to a closed shop that voted on who got in or not rather than a pyramid system. Even in 2018 what passes for a pyramid system is a joke.

[GordonS]

1 hour ago, Burnie_man said:

Look at the Highland League and what they have to offer, these clubs are no bigger or better than the traditional big to medium size Junior clubs, but they all have seated stands, many have additional cover and terracing, they all have floodlights and decent toilets. They provide good basic facilities for your entry fee, and of course the floodlights allow for a workable fixture list.

Highland clubs definitely have good main stands, but they have lesser facilities for standing. Many are like Forres - a really good, decent-sized main stand with excellent sightlines, and grass banking with no cover round the rest of the ground. Deveronvale have a cracking stand and the rest is pitchside standing. I love going to HL grounds for pre-season friendlies in the summer but off the top of my head I can only think of Buckie and Keith having terraces I'd want to stand on in winter. 

Do HL fans prefer to sit? On the other side, clubs like Medda and Glenafton have stands that don't cost more than standing, and few people choose to use them - do Junior fans prefer to stand?

[Burnie_man]

2 minutes ago, GordonS said:

Highland clubs definitely have good main stands, but they have lesser facilities for standing. Many are like Forres - a really good, decent-sized main stand with excellent sightlines, and grass banking with no cover round the rest of the ground. Deveronvale have a cracking stand and the rest is pitchside standing. I love going to HL grounds for pre-season friendlies in the summer but off the top of my head I can only think of Buckie and Keith having terraces I'd want to stand on in winter. 

Do HL fans prefer to sit? On the other side, clubs like Medda and Glenafton have stands that don't cost more than standing, and few people choose to use them - do Junior fans prefer to stand?

As I said many do have additional cover and/or terracing,  Nairn, Clach, Keith, Buckie, Fraserburgh, Lossiemouth, Brora, Huntly, Inverurie, and of course the old grounds at Caley and Thistle.

[cmontheloknow]

3 hours ago, Kilbowie Benches said:

The fact that we have a guy in the West in his 80s doing the fixtures tells you all you need to know.

Saw this and thought of that!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-43962110

 

 

[GordonS]

7 minutes ago, Burnie_man said:

As I said many do have additional cover and/or terracing,  Nairn, Clach, Keith, Buckie, Fraserburgh, Lossiemouth, Brora, Huntly, Inverurie, and of course the old grounds at Caley and Thistle.

Forgot Nairn, that's a new shed and very nice it is too. But unless it's very recent I don't think Fraserburgh has covered standing. 

[Burnie_man]

1 minute ago, GordonS said:

Forgot Nairn, that's a new shed and very nice it is too. But unless it's very recent I don't think Fraserburgh has covered standing. 

I don't think Fraserburgh does, but they do have hard standing/terrace steps all the way round I think.  Anyway, getting way off topic.

[afca32]

12 minutes ago, Burnie_man said:

As I said many do have additional cover and/or terracing,  Nairn, Clach, Keith, Buckie, Fraserburgh, Lossiemouth, Brora, Huntly, Inverurie, and of course the old grounds at Caley and Thistle.

All the rest are right but replace the Broch with Rothes which has a new small one I believe.

[LongTimeLurker]

12 hours ago, Garret Deasy said:

This thread is to look at where the junior game has gone wrong in the past, where were mistakes made or even where were no decisions made when they should have been and indeed who are those responsible, currently and previously. In other words, where did it all go wrong?

Think in retrospect that the introduction of the superleagues was botched. The east superleague simply hasn't worked out as well as the west superleague did because the Tayside teams really should have combined with the North region clubs instead, but from what I remember the North and Tayside clubs were able to use their voting clout in an AGM context to avoid that and that helped force through the current east superleague format instead. To get something that was genuinely significantly better than the old east region would have involved clubs like Bo'ness United, Linlithgow Rose, Whitburn (still a very big club at the time) and Bonnyrigg Rose joining forces with the clubs in the west and a division taking in all the top junior clubs from the central belt would have blown the Lowland League out of the water and would have been much more difficult to defect from where clubs in the old East and Fife regions are concerned.  The last chance to correct that was with the recent so called superduper league proposal but the top Ayrshire clubs seem to have been deeply opposed to the extra travel involved.

[GordonS]

9 minutes ago, Burnie_man said:

I don't think Fraserburgh does, but they do have hard standing/terrace steps all the way round I think.  Anyway, getting way off topic.

Yes and no - people have said facilities are a cause of the decline of the Juniors, someone else said the facilities in the HL are better, but they're not better for standing.

FWIW Fraserburgh doesn't have any hard standing or terrace, just grass and maybe a narrow strip of something firmer behind the goal at the town end.

[GordonS]

16 minutes ago, afca32 said:

All the rest are right but replace the Broch with Rothes which has a new small one I believe.

No, Fraserburgh doesn't have cover or terracing.

[GordonS]

Is one of the major reasons for the decline of the Juniors not that, until literally the last couple of years, the Juniors had the vast bulk of the biggest and best non-league clubs south of Aberdeen? They had no interest in joining the seniors but they didn't adapt, and they definitely didn't market themselves, so they stagnated through complacency?

Another factor could be their almost complete disinterest in development. In the Netherlands a town the size of Linlithgow would have one football club with sections at every age grade, sometimes with scores of boys at each, and increasingly with girl's/women's teams too, all overseen by at least one UEFA licensed coach. Here, in both male and female football,  we now have senior clubs who started out as development clubs and have added a senior teams, such as BSC, Cumbernauld Colts and Bonnyton Thistle. With some notable exceptions the Juniors don't offer the SFA anything in terms of player development - who was the last capped player who had played Juniors as a kid? or who played European football? - so their money goes to those with development set-ups. Junior clubs have always spent their money on the park. 

[Jason King]

Gordon Greer for the cap at a rough guess.

[superbigal]

4 hours ago, Kilbowie Benches said:

The fact that we have a guy in the West in his 80s doing the fixtures tells you all you need to know.

Also possibly living in the 80s

[Kilbowie Benches]

30 minutes ago, superbigal said:

Also possibly living in the 80s

Not even as up to date as that,still a pencil a rubber and a bit of paper I bet.

[cmontheloknow]

46 minutes ago, Jason King said:

Gordon Greer for the cap at a rough guess.

Yeah would agree with that unless anyone obvious is evading my mind. A few genuine (as opposed to former loanees) ex Juniors in top flight just now though - Darian Mackinnon, Darren McGregor, Kris Doolan, Chris Erskine and Dougie Imrie for starters. But none in for international honours.

[cowdenbeath]

7 minutes ago, cmontheloknow said:

Yeah would agree with that unless anyone obvious is evading my mind. A few genuine (as opposed to former loanees) ex Juniors in top flight just now though - Darian Mackinnon, Darren McGregor, Kris Doolan, Chris Erskine and Dougie Imrie for starters. But none in for international honours.

Darren was senior and played in our first team before he moved to Arniston.

[cmontheloknow]

8 minutes ago, cowdenbeath said:

Darren was senior and played in our first team before he moved to Arniston.

Yep,  wasn't meaning to imply they all started off in Junior football.

[cowdenbeath]

Just now, cmontheloknow said:

Yep,  wasn't meaning to imply they all started off in Junior football.

Sorry picked you up wrong I thought that's what you meant,

[cmontheloknow]

Just now, cowdenbeath said:

Sorry picked you up wrong I thought that's what you meant,

No just that those players were signed Juniors rather than players that had a loan spell from a bigger club. It was prohibited for a while though for top flight teams to loan Juniors (apparently) so those instances have dried up. Accies put a number out to Bo'ness last season after the rules were changed.

[Goalie Hamish]

18 hours ago, Garret Deasy said:

We already have an active thread on the future of junior football with discussions on the various leagues, pyramids, and in the current state of chaos and confusion trying to work out how it will all look and what role if any the junior game and the SJFA will have when the dust settles. 

This thread is to look at where the junior game has gone wrong in the past, where were mistakes made or even where were no decisions made when they should have been and indeed who are those responsible, currently and previously. In other words, where did it all go wrong?

Why did the junior game not move with the times? How effective was the leadership of the junior game in establishing itself as something different from the senior game? And who within the leadership tried to do something different than what had been done for 50 years?  Did they really work to deliver what was best for the clubs generally or did they just concentrate on what was best for themselves or their own club?

"It's better to have tried and failed than to live life wondering what would've happened if I had tried."

Junior football was formed in 1886 with a  rich history.  412 clubs entering the junior Cup in 1922. Democratically run, clubs traditionally owned by their supporters, electing volunteers to run the clubs, Regional committees elected by clubs and an elected management committee to oversea it all. All this will soon disappear, perhaps totally but at the very least will become increasingly irrelevant.  The current position is a sad betrayal of the hard work and enthusiasm put into the junior game by so many for over a hundred years.

 

 

What went wrang?

Tam Johnstone, Isa Goudie, Dipplebevvy, Glenafton1793, Glesgaboy, Daleboy1969, Santheman, fowk like this and theres loads mair out there in juniorland.  They are whats went wrang and they betrayed the game