Auchinleck Talbot’s visit to Tynecastle is a landmark occasion for both club and cup

Published on Sunday 1 January 2012 01:56

TO many Scottish football aficionados, it is a match-up more than a century in the making. In the junior corner, Auchinleck Talbot, the most celebrated club within that domain.

Current holders of the Scottish Junior Cup, they have won it a record nine times. In the senior corner, home team Hearts, joint fourth in the all-time winners’ list of their Scottish Cup. At last, in the fourth season that junior sides have been competing in the country’s oldest knock-out competition, true big-hitters from their respective levels have been brought together. No wonder the fourth-round Scottish Cup tie that Tynecastle will stage on Saturday has such a sense of occasion. To those who know Talbot best, indeed, it could be the pinnacle.

“I’d say this is the most exciting game in our history,” says secretary Henry Dumigan, who became a member of the club’s general committee in 1977. “Junior Cup final wins have their own special place, but the senior Scottish Cup is as high up the Scottish football ladder as we can go. To make the fourth round and meet the country’s third best team is big. We just want to do ourselves justice and represent the junior game in the best ways possible with our play and behaviour on the field, and from our supporters off it. That is all important to us. We want to show a face of the junior game different from the out-dated one so often presented: that of battles during games, and before and after them. We’ve moved on from that.”

Talbot, three times the winners of the Scottish Junior Cup in the past five years under manager Tommy Sloan, earned their gallivant to Gorgie after victories over Lossiemouth, Vale of Leithen and, most notably, an 8-1 thrashing of Threave Rovers in the second round, a trouncing that had the Talbot fans trilling that they were “only five games from Europe”. However, it was only last February that Auchinleck’s (in)famous local rivalry with Cumnock served up serious disturbances that were positively old school. Then a league confrontation at their neighbours’ Townhead Park ground in front of a crowd of 2,000 had to be stopped after police on horseback were required to quell violent confrontations between opposing supporters who had poured on to the pitch.

“These games are sometimes attended by people who never go to watch the juniors any other time,” says Dumigan. “They were all bloody idiots who were involved in that trouble and not football fans. That was proved with the identity of those subsequently disciplined by the courts. It is our success as a football team that has brought us to the forefront, because playing in the final of the Junior Cup has got us on the telly quite a bit.”

Talbot were one of the many teams that sprung up from the mining communities dotted throughout Ayrshire. It says everything about the entwining of football and pits that one of the key years and events of their history as set out on the club’s website is the 1984 miners’ strike. By the end of that decade, the last of the town’s underground pits had closed. Yet, as Auchinleck’s industrial core was being erased, the football team made its biggest imprint on the junior game courtesy of five Scottish Cup wins between 1986 and 1992. “We still have a strong community feel about the place,” says Dumigan, who has spent all his days in Auchinleck. “The football club has become the hub of that and we draw a great fanbase from all the surrounding villages. That has kept us going.”

The population of Auchinleck is in the region of 3,500 – the same as the ticket allocation the club have been handed for their Tynecastle tie. “At the moment we have shifted about 1,700 of those and I would expect we will have anywhere between 2,000 and 3,000 fans at the game. That is good going when our average gate for home games is around 400 now, a figure many Second Division clubs would settle for,” says Dumigan.

Manager Sloan credits the tireless work of the committee for the fact that Auchinleck have remained “always there or thereabouts” when it comes to the Junior Cup. That underplays his own efforts across nine years in charge. Sloan lives in nearby Annbank, home to the junior side with which he started out his playing days. The striker ended up spending the majority of his career with Stranraer and Queen of the South, making a smattering of appearances for Ayr United and Kilmarnock in all-too-brief spells at these Ayrshire clubs along the way. “I wasn’t good enough to play more for them,” says the 47-year-old.

Sloan believes that the meeting with Hearts can be set above the three Junior Cup finals he has successfully negotiated only in certain respects. “We can’t win the Scottish Cup, so for me, the Junior Cup offers us the biggest prize we could land, and we have landed that. This is probably the club’s most glamorous game, though. If, a couple of years ago, you’d said the day would soon come when we would be playing Hearts in the Scottish Cup, folk would have thought you were off your head.

“It is a different sort of game from the major ones we’ve played in the past. There is an expectancy level when it comes to the Junior Cup that you must live with at Auchinleck and we have done all right in that respect. There may be no pressure on us at Tynecastle but I’m not one for giving it the ‘great day out’ stuff. It will be that if we acquit ourselves well. We can play a bit.”

The problem for Auchinleck is that the harshness of this winter has not allowed them to play at all of late. Their last competitive game was a scoreless draw a month ago against Petershill. “Normally it would be a concern, and it is not ideal but our boys are going to be up for the game. It is a one off and I hope our lack of game time doesn’t detract. I’m certainly not looking for excuses,” the Talbot manager says.

The club have declined several offers to go for a pre-match meal and will instead travel straight to Tynecastle from their Ayrshire base. “It meant the boys can have an hour longer in their beds, which was their preference, and that we will be following our normal routine,” he says. It will be the only slice of normality about the tie for Talbot.

Taken from the Scotsman