…the Lionel Messi route to footballing fame?… yeez don’t know the half of it…

 …spot the footballing whiz, Master Gallacher…

…any Scottish sports fan will understand the meaning of the WURD, ‘Junior’ as it relates to the Leagues’ set up in Bonnie Scotland… it certainly does not refer to the relative ages of the players who participate, but merely that the Junior League is a level down from the Premier League and its partners, the Championship, and the other Senior Professional Leagues north of the border… as a ‘feeder’ league for the ‘big lads’ in the paid ranks, it has a terrific mixture of professional and amateur players in its roster… back around half a century ago, when this ol‘ Jurassic was a budding Maradona with a funny accent, and before I signed-on ‘upstairs’ with the redoubtable Third Lanark F.C., I played with a local Docklands Govan team in Glasgow, called Benburb F.C. (the ‘Bens’)… the mixture of men who had played in the senior leagues and we young studs coming through full of wind and dribbling skills (with the ball, that is, Mabel) made for excellent paying fans’ entertainment… the changing rooms in that league were of the finest (not!)… some clothes hooks pinned against the wooden shack walls, and if yeez were wise, yeez took yer belongings with yeez out to the field and handed them to a non-playing mate to hold until the end of the game… latrines (generally in the singular) had buckets of water at the side to use post-lavatory activity … and the finest sheets from the local newspaper hung on an adjacent nail as toilet paper… the Lionel Messi route to footballing fame?… yeez don’t know the half of it…

…my first ever goal scored for the Bens was a thing, not of beauty, but more of wondrous accident… during my debut League appearance, our captain blootered (Eng: kicked very hard) a shot goalward which the opposing keeper had well covered… I happened to stumble in the way of its flight and the ball bounced off the inside of my boot to loop majestically out of the goalie’s reach and into the top corner… of course, in long-standing Scottish footballer’s Flashman fashion, I claimed the strike to great acclaim from my team mates… the Bens captain even said (unsarcastically), ‘nice intervention, that man, great placement skill’… the local newspaper, the Govan Press, had a sports journalist at the match, and the headline, ‘Gallacher’s superb strike, first of many?’ greeted me the next day… how to become a legend in yer own lunchtime… magic stuff… on another occasion I’ll share with yeez the unreported incident of my being hit full in the face by a half-eaten mutton mince pie whilst racing down the wing in a Cup tie in Ayrshire… ah, the mem’ries, Mabel… betcha a young Cristiano Ronaldo never had any of these glorious moments… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…

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