Amateurs plan for summer competition

Stirling Albion were back in action on Saturday for the first time since January 2.

And now eight amateur local sides are hoping to follow in their footsteps with a summer league competition.

The easing of Covid restrictions last week gave the go ahead for minor grade football to start on May 17 which is too late to for any meaningful amateur football this season.

All clubs are hoping that the new season will get underway in August and with that in mind eight localteam - four from the Caledonian League and four from the

Stirling and District AFA - will play in a summer league tournament subject to Scottish Amateur FA approval.

Beechwood Albion, Braehead, Cambusbarron Rovers, Doune Castle, Dunblane Thistle, Dunipace, Milton Amateurs and Riverside will play each other twice, home and away, each Saturday and Wednesday starting on June 12, subject to restrictions allowing games to be played.

Cambusbarron Rovers secretary Gary Grahamslaw said: “We ran the idea by the teams last week and all immediately agreed to take part which shows how desperate we all are to get back to playing football again.

“It’ll mean 14 games for each team which is a bigger than normal pre-season but we are all looking forward to it. We’ve played once since March 2020 which is probably the same as the others so getting the players in shape to restart will be a challenge.

“With this being all local teams competing we won’t have any travel issues and that hopefully will help get everybody back up to speed.

“Once we get the SAFA approval we plan to get a fixture list issued to give everybody something to look forward to and plan towards.”