Saturday 16th March 2024 ko 16:45

East of Scotland League Premier Division

JEANFIELD SWIFTS 1 (F Smith 5)

DUNBAR UNITED 1 (Hendry 90+2)

Att 385

Entry £7

Programme £2.50

We stayed in Perth for the third game of the day, and arguably the club I was anticipating visiting the most. The reason for that was pretty arcane, I’d been very taken by them being willing to help the event back in 2019 by playing on a Saturday evening at Linlithgow Rose. It felt like a major undertalking on their part; I was and am grateful, and their fans did add a new beverage to the groundhop lexicon, namely “Dragon Soop!”

If you take the River Tay as being the border between the territories of the Highland and Lowland Leagues, then I’d say Jeanfield’s Riverside home is as close as GroundhopUK have ever been to a Highland Hop, but 3 games into our Saturday, I was just grateful that groundhopper/ meteorologist Chris Garrett had got his forecast spot on. He’d predicted no rain for the first two games, with us getting wet after 6pm. I spotted the covered terrace on the near side and made a mental note, yes the rains did arrive at exactly 6…

Jeanfield of course are another former Junior club that moved across to the Seniors, I did reflect that when we negotiated the first Scottish Hop for 2015 we’d never thought we’d end up watching the host clubs on this hop- very much a case of being in the right place at the right time.

Just like the other clubs this weekend, Jeanfield were excellent hosts, and the steak pies are rightly the stuff of legend. But this was an afternoon to be interviewed by the local media without having to metaphorically look over my shoulder at what the club was doing.

It was good to see Dunbar United again, and at least this time round they managed to get something out of the game! That said, they did spend the vast majority of the game trailing courtesy of Fraser Smith’s thunderbolt, but fought back to steal a point with a late penalty.

I managed to shelter, and the club’s new floodlights got an outing. They were and are fascinating low hanging to keep the neighbours not too unhappy, although I bet the hoards of cars were more of a concern here! But as good as it all was, we were soon on our way, passing the site of St Johnstone’s former ground Muirton Park, now an Asda as we did. I was aware we’d been collectively lucky so far, but could that luck hold?