The Score Doesn’t Matter

Everything changed when I began taking my son to Saturday morning football sessions at Hayes Lane. While the kids ran around on the astroturf, I had little better to do than lounge on the terraces and soak in the stadium’s ambience. Those visits increasingly sparked something in me. I was revisiting memories of going to Queen of the South games with my dad when I was a boy.

Queens, like me, come from Dumfries, a smallish town in the South West of Scotland (and a great wee town it is, too). The club was formed in 1919 after a few amateur sides combined to have a right good go at the professional leagues. The name Queen of the South was chosen by a public vote. It’s a phrase attributed to David Dunbar, a local poet who stood for Parliament in 1857. In one of his addresses, he called Dumfries ‘Queen of the South’. The locals rather liked that.

The club was formed with ambitious intent, but I think it would be fair to describe Queens as underachievers. Our day in the sun was the Scottish Cup final in 2008, where our boys ran Rangers close in a 3-2 loss. An incredible European adventure followed in the UEFA Cup. Yes, we were knocked out in the first round, but travelling to Denmark to face Nordsjælland was an unforgettable experience.

A couple of promotions and a handful of successful seasons stand out, but Queens, much like Bromley, have mostly slogged it out in the lower divisions.

Their ground, Palmerston Park, is a wonderful old stadium with terracing behind both goals. There used to be another terrace along the eastern flank of the pitch. It was covered by the roof of an old agricultural building donated by a farmer named Jimmy Jolly, who was one of the club’s founders. For many years, it was known as Jimmy Jolly’s Bull Pen, but as the years passed, fans renamed it the Coo Shed (coo being Scots for cow). The Coo Shed was replaced by a new all-seater stand in 1995.

My dad used to take me to sit in the enclosure in front of the old stand. Week in, week out, it became a familiar ritual for father and son, a ritual that was just as likely to end in defeat as it was in victory. I was hooked.

As I got older, I started going to the terrace with my friends. I have fond memories of us walking home with bags of chips in our hands, although it didn’t take long before we swapped those chips for a few pints. In time, we started venturing off on away trips, too. Getting home at 1 AM, still soaking wet after a pumping from Alloa on a cold, wet Tuesday in January? Yes, please!

Despite innocently supporting our local team, we were seen as eccentrics. This is a problem in small towns all over Scotland, where a lot of folk support one of the Old Firm, and mostly do so from the comfort of an armchair. This means clubs like Queens don’t really get a look in, and attendances suffer as a result.

Bromley, with a wealth of Premier and Football League clubs on their doorstep, have suffered similarly in the past, and I was certainly guilty of not giving them much thought for a very long time.

I moved to Bromley from Scotland in the early 90’s. Or was it the late 80’s? I’m not good with dates. I’ll hold my hands up straight away and confess that, for the majority of my time living here, I was only partially aware of the club’s existence.

Pre-plastic pitch, I played at Hayes Lane through work a couple of times, and I watched a few games in the days where you could take your pint out onto the terrace, but it never occurred to me that I might one day support Bromley. The layout of Hayes Lane has a lot in common with Palmerston Park, so I don’t know why it didn’t click.

Instead, my only football fix came from occasional trips home to watch Queens or to watch Scotland at Hampden Park. Attending a game down south was a very rare thing for me.

But when I started taking my son to the training sessions at Hayes Lane, the penny finally dropped. As a participant in a Saturday morning session, the club offered my son free entry if there was a Bromley game that afternoon. I had to take him and pay for myself (cunning), but I was happy to because I was beginning to see the parallels between Queens and Bromley, and I wanted my son to share the kinds of experiences that I’d had with my dad.

Bromley ticks all the boxes for our family. Not only can we walk to the ground, it’s also a community club that goes above and beyond. Bromley weren’t setting the pitch on fire back then (circa late 2020), but as a Queen of the South supporter, that didn’t faze me.

More specifically, I wanted my son, like me as a boy, to go to a game hoping for a win, not expecting one. I wanted him to stand on the terrace until the final whistle. I wanted him to experience the lows as well as the highs. After all, those lows make the highs all the sweeter.

It worked.

My son became hooked, just like I did all those years ago. Suddenly, he didn’t care all that much for the Premier League. Who needs Haaland when you’ve got Michael Cheek or Louis Dennis? I became hooked on Bromley, too. And as my dad lives round this way, he started coming along with us. In no time at all, we had three generations on the terrace.

“Fancy it?”

“Aye, why not.”

“See you on Saturday again?”

“Aye, grand.”

“We might as well get a season ticket now we’re coming every week.”

“Aye, sign me up.”

We’ve come full circle. Sharing Bromley games with my dad and my son (and now my brother-in-law, too) is very special indeed. When we started going to games, somewhere near the end of the Neil Smith era, never in a million years did I think Bromley would achieve what they have. It has been absolutely brilliant to witness and long may it continue.

I realise now the gift my dad gave me by taking me to watch Queen of the South. He instilled a sense of hope, not expectation, when going to support my team. That’s something you just wouldn’t get with a massive SPL or EPL club. If the lows return for Bromley, at least we’ll be prepared for them. Besides, some things are more important.

On Saturday mornings, my son plays in the pan-disability sessions organised by Bromley Football Club. I cannot stress enough how amazing these sessions are for the kids who take part in them. The club also runs 16+ pan-disability sessions for people who have outgrown the junior group. There are players of all abilities and stages of life in attendance, and it is a testament to the club’s fantastic coaches that everybody leaves with a big smile, no matter what. Those coaches are genuine heroes.

It is these sessions, for me, that sum up Bromley Football Club. They don’t have to run them, but they do, and it’s a shining example of the work they’re doing to place themselves at the heart of the local community.

The smiles on those faces say it all. The score doesn’t matter.

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Thanks for taking the time to read Graeme’s debut on From Bromley with Love.

Please note all match photographs in this article are by Martin Greig - please follow him on Twitter here

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