It’s 2025 – exactly 40 years since the formation of my old football team Bank Street Albion, who played in the Dundee Sunday Welfare League.
I’d already played a couple of Welfare League seasons with Tayside Athletic, from Beechwood.
I had some great times with them. Real good lads, pictured above.
That 1985 season, the Dundee Sunday Welfare League had five divisions – 60 teams – on a Sunday afternoon.
I wrote a weekly report on the league in The Sporting Post.
I’d get Welfare managers to phone, telling me who’d scored or played well the previous Sunday.
The team names conjure memories.
Bank Street Athletic, Albion and Accies, Menzieshill Thistle, Harrison, Annfield Road Motors, DCC, Ninewells, Whitfield Hawks, Taybag, St John’s FPs, Lochee Ri, Tartan Star, Cactusville, Drum Vale, Lawside Rangers and many more.
Just names now, but red-hot rivalries then.
‘Monsoon’
The Sunday Morning League had a further three divisions – GJs, Gunners, Nine Maidens, Smugglers, Dolphin, Admiral, Tavern, Strathtay, Rosebank, and the like.
Each team had around 15 signed players, so between the two associations nearly 100 teams.
That’s 1,500 players every week.
Winters were colder. Playing at Riverside with the wind hurling sleet at you horizontally like machine-gun fire was character-building.
Referees got full tariff (£10 from each team) only if the game was played.
So they’d declare any surface “gemme on” to get their beer money.
I’ve played in a shin-deep swamp in a monsoon. I’ve played on a pitch with a 20-yard pond, a foot deep, in one half.
The instruction was: “Ach, just run round it”.
I’ve played on flint-edged tundra, in a gale, in -10 degrees, and been told gloves were for weak fellows (that wasn’t exactly the term used).
The cold was as hard as the players.
I wasn’t a very good player. But I was fit and relatively fast, and I hugely enjoyed playing.
Players turned up in the same clothes they’d worn in Teasers or the Coconut Grove the previous night, not been home (possibly soon to be a new dad, too early to tell) and not sobered up.
And I’ve spent many a frustrated 15 minutes chapping on a door and shouting through the letterbox: “Get Ronnie oot his scratcher and get his boots on.”
Injury hell
It ended for me at Claypotts Park, 10 years later, when I broke my leg. Or, to be more accurate, someone broke it for me.
It was two committed players going for a loose ball. Snapped my tib and fib in five places but it wasn’t even a foul.
The lad who did it, Paul, played for Bartons Athletic.
But I hold no hard feelings. It nipped a wee bit but it was just part of the game.
All the best Paul, hope you’re doing fine these days mate.
We all got injuries. Blokes in their 60s in Dundee, the ones who limp, played in the Welfare League.
Men’s Sunday football barely exists today. Our city is poorer for it.
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