Letter from Kirkcaldy: Will they be dancing in the streets of Raith?
THE SAN STARKO – home of the mighty Raith Rovers is a football ground like no other. Google a football stadium must-visit bucket list and the recurring venues will be the Nou Camp and Santiago Bernabeu in Spain, Milan’s San Siro, the Maracanã in Rio, maybe the German titans of Bayern Munich’s Allianz Arena and the yellow wall of Dortmund’s Signal Iduna Park. Wembley, Old Trafford and Anfield get a few mentions too.
For me, a dream was finally realised when I ended a 45-year wait to be one of the fortunate 3,579 In attendance as Raith beat Ayr United 2-1, at little old Stark’s Park.
We are talking Scottish Championship (second tier) standard football, played in a homely three-sided venue, on an artificial surface, in a wind so fierce to dissuade a professional kite flyer. Hence, a feast of free-flowing football it was not, but as football experiences go it was as warming and fulfilling as any I have experienced. Dancing in the streets of Raith with the best of them.
That is, of course, an in-joke for all local and long-distance followers of Rovers who have never even walked in Raith’s fine stark coastal avenues, let alone had a jig on the seafront. The reason being that the home of football club founded in 1883 has and always will be Kirkcaldy.
This is the proud East Fife town that gave us former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who put his hand in his own and not the exchequer’s pockets to keep the club alive in not-so-distant testing times. Kirkcaldy has also given us Brown’s fellow politician, the ex-Liberal leader David Steel, philosopher/economist Adam Smith, architect/designer Adam Smith, David Danskin, the founding father of Dial Square, the football club we now know as Arsenal and darts behemoth Jocky
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