Darvel a club on the rise... with a baker’s dough
With facilities ‘better than Wembley’ and stars scooped from senior leagues,
RECREATION PARK, Darvel FC. A couple of workies are surveying pallets filled with red bricks at the pitch’s perimeter. Earmarked for a fundraiser, there are plans in place to lay a thousand of them, but foundations have been dug for many more.
Metaphors are rarely more apt. Darvel have been putting building blocks in place for some time. If you are a frequenter of social media, you can’t have missed the club’s activity on Twitter in recent weeks. When it was announced they had signed 27-year-old midfielder Ian McShane, previously of Ross County, St Mirren and Falkirk, they had more than 125,000 views of the tweet.
Those figures have been bolstered further by an aggressive spending spree. In June alone, visitors to their channels surpassed 2.1m. Over the course of the past year, Jim Wylie, the de facto general manager, and Michael Kennedy, the first team manager, have signed a slew of impressive names from senior football.
These aren’t just veteran journeymen merely winding down their careers in the lower reaches. The age of the new arrivals has raised eyebrows. They are late twentysomethings, some with top-flight experience, and all with plenty of mileage left on the clock.
If McShane is the biggest ticket item, there are others with similar pedigree. Former Scotland Under-21s Ross Perry, who made 35 appearances in the Rangers first team, and Jason Marr, who began his career at Celtic before making a name for himself at Alloa, were signed last season. Jordan Allan, recently named in the League 1 team of the year, has arrived from Stranraer while Jordan Kirkpatrick, boasting top-flight experience from his time at Hamilton and St Mirren, is another new face. Paul Paton, recently released by Dunfermline, has held preliminary talks and, well, the list goes on.
Come October, Darvel will start in the penultimate tier of the Scottish football pyramid following the formation of the West of Scotland League but this is a club on the rise. There is that pre-season feel in the air on a warm summer’s day in East Ayrshire as Kennedy, who won the Scottish Amateur
Cup three times in four years at previous club Colville Park, talks about his plans for the campaign.
They are expected to be among the title challengers when the season finally gets underway in October but, for Kennedy, it’s about “managing expectations” among a squad and in a town that is beginning to bubble with anticipation.”
Wylie, Darvel born and bred, is among those who can’t wait for the season to start.
“We are excited about the players that Michael has brought in, ” he says. “Now that we have joined the pyramid, the plan is to be in the Championship in the next 10 years. We want to do a Salford but we know we have a lot of work to do to get there.”
Before coronavirus brought a halt to proceedings, they led the way in the nowdefunct SJFA West Region Championship, eventually earning their place in the newly formed West of Scotland Football League, where they will battle for promotion with the likes Auchinleck Talbot, Pollok, Irvine Meadow and Kilwinning Rangers.
They will do so with a squad capable of challenging for League 2, never mind the sixth tier of the pyramid. This promises to be the future for Scottish football at this level, one of upwardly mobile teams backed by investors keen to take advantage of a perceived stasis in the SPFL’s lower reaches.
Fittingly, in Darvel’s case, the man providing the dough is John Gall, the owner of Brownings the Bakers. He has not so much prised open the biscuit tin for Wylie and Kennedy as emptied out the whole cookie jar.
Gliding past Recreation Park’s 19th century main stand, the groundsman is pushing a £12,000 lawnmower that looks and sounds more like a vacuum cleaner brushing up carpet pile than a grasscutter slicing blades. It’s the same type of machine used by Tottenham Hotspur and
Aston Villa. Gall drew a line at that kind of outlay so the committee members raised the funds themselves. There is no expense spared here. Jealous onlookers say this is a Gretna in waiting but it is a claim dismissed by Wylie, who points out that contingencies are in place should Gall ever lose interest one day.
“John funds the club and the major things but, trust me, the rest of the stuff [is done by the committee]. We
We won’t be another Gretna. Darvel is very, very tightly run