St Andrews, Support Your Local
Ask a St Andrews student what the town has to offer in terms of sport, and the answer is almost always going to be golf-related. Ask where the local club plays its football, and you’ll probably receive a blank look. Many students don’t know that we have our own local football club. But tucked away unassumingly on Langlands Road sits the Clayton Caravan Park Recreation Ground, the home of the mighty St Andrews United FC.
Some enthusiastic football fans may have made the thirty-minute-long journey on the 99 bus to Dundee to watch some Scottish Premiership games at either of the city’s fine clubs in search of a local team to adopt. In second year, I unofficially started supporting Dundee United as one of my teams, an unprecedented move for someone who gets aggravated by the question “who is your Premier League team?” when telling someone I support Cambridge United FC. I figured the chances of the two clubs ever meeting in an official European fixture were less than 1%. However, as it dawned on me that my increasing age would soon no longer guarantee free passage over the Tay Bridge, I began reckoning with the fact I wasn’t quite practicing what I had long preached for as a support-your-local kind of guy.
That’s when I started watching St Andrews United FC — surprisingly, our most local team. Founded in 1921, it’s a club with a rich history and a story largely unknown to students. In 1960, the club won the Scottish Junior Cup, beating Greenock Juniors 3-1 at Hampden Park in front of 34,603 fans. Two goals were scored by club legend Romeo Borella, who defied doctors’ orders after having broken his jaw in the semi-finals. The club went on to win the Fife League in the same year.
The club now plays its football in the East of Scotland League Premier Division, having moved from the Junior Leagues in 2018. Without going too far into the intricacies of the Scottish Football League Pyramid, that puts the Saints in the sixth tier of Scottish football. In recent years, the club has won two promotions from the lower leagues and won the Fife Cup after a 105-year wait in April. Are the glory days of the 1959-60 season being re-lived by Greg Shields’ team in the club’s current chapter?
Knowing I wanted to write this piece about the club, I (of course) attended the club’s most recent league fixture against Thornton Hibs last Saturday. I arrived, teeming with interest to see my first game since last term, nice and early to see the opening of two new enclosures at the club — a positive sign of the continued investment from the club into its facilities. I somehow missed the fact that I could’ve got in for free as a St Andrews student for this particular fixture, but I can’t really complain about the £5 ticket.
The game was nothing to write home about, apart from the extreme wind which appeared to give the ball a life of its own. The Saints stole a point from the visitors with a messy goal following a long throw in the 93rd minute, trailing from a mistake in the second.
It was a moment of pure limbs for the few hundred of us in attendance who had just endured 93 minutes of what can only be described as a wind-induced scrap fest. Ross Kavanagh, the goal scorer for the Saints, secured his fourteenth goal in all competitions this season. Although this game in particular was hilariously dull, my experience of the multiple preceding matches I’ve attended is one that I am hugely grateful for.
Speaking to a third-year student that I bumped into after the game, he put it better than I have: “You can’t have your big national teams and European tournaments without your local clubs; that’s why I love to come down and support the Saints.”
The club is welcoming to students and full of the same energy and community spirit of my home club. It is an immense source of pride for the people who have invested so much of themselves into it. As student football and sports fans in the St Andrews community, perhaps we should consider what role we can play in contributing to our local club, in the same way we do our other St Andrews locals like the Keys Bar, Aikman’s, and my favourite, Rendezvous.
Photo Credit: Joe Hall
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