A grounded approach that can still reach for the sky

TMOSPHERE is said to be everything at football now and the one existing at Cathkin Park, in Glasgow, today is frequently described by visiting nostalgists as eerie, even ghostly. Where once stood crowds of roaring men (few ladies then) today stand only silent trees.

To take a metaphor from the seas, the empty terracing has something of the Marie Celeste about it, lacking only a hastily discarded halfeaten pie and a barely sipped Bovril to complete the picture.

Now all of this could change, with life beginning anew for Third Lanark Football Club, in an imaginative initiative that seeks to involve the wider, multicultural community of Govanhill, not least forming a sporting partnership with local cricketers.

Third Lanark, known as the Hi-Hi’s (supposedly after a ball was booted skywards in the 1890s) was once a great name in Scottish football.

Formed in 1872 by members of the Third Lanarkshire Rifle Volunteers (who trained on Cathkin Braes), the club went on to win many domestic honours and drew a record attendance of 45,455 for a game against Rangers in 1954.

In 1967, the year Celtic won the European Cup and Rangers were narrowly defeated in the Cup Winners Cup Final, Third Lanark went bust.

But that was the past. And here is the future: the stadium rebuilt and the club re-established as a community-based football and wider sporting body. In truth, the club never went away, with a team still playing in the city’s amateur league.

Now, after talks with Glasgow City Council, which owns Cathkin Park, the omens are good for rebooting a great brand name that will embrace the area’s Asian and Eastern European communities.

In a week when big-league football showed its brutal face, with the sacking of popular Leicester City manager Claudio Ranieri, this Third Lanark initiative reminds us of, as it were, a more grounded approach to the game, one that is based in a community and not in an investors’ portfolio. Good for Third Lanark: never day die, say Hi-Hi.