(The following is a guest piece, written by my good friend Jamie Donald)
After weeks of speculation, scaremongering and frantic scrabbling, it looks like Dunfermline Athletic’s protracted wasting away will finally be brought to a terminal conclusion in the coming days.
If it’s the hope that kills you then we Pars fans have died a thousand times since the turn of the year, with every mooted door to salvation being slammed shut, often at the last moment.
For the past few weeks the club has felt like a beloved family pet on its last legs, with potential investors swithering whether to pay for surgery to remove a small tumour when the whole thing is riddled with cancer anyway.
But now it’s come down to it, now that months of uncertainty have clarified into stark reality, I don’t really know how to react. With administration looking like the absolute best-case scenario, I’ve been forced to come to terms with the fact that the club I have followed for nearly 20 years, that I have poured so much of my time, cash and heart into, is in real danger of disappearing.
I hesitate to use the word “dying” for fear of sounding callous, but much of this feels a lot like grief – the denial, the rage, the questioning, the sick feeling in the pit of the stomach.
My wife’s been supportive, but I know she doesn’t really understand. She can see that I’ll be bored on a Saturday afternoon, but it’s the more intangible reasons that are the things I can’t imagine living without; the almost primal tribalism, the us-against-them, the sense of belonging to something even when that something generally gives you more misery than joy.
Much has been said and written of owner Gavin Masterton’s role in the whole sorry affair. He has been painted as everything from the benevolent fan who just flew too close to the sun, to a cynical tycoon seeking liquidation for the club so he can flog the stadium for real estate. As ever, the truth seems to be somewhere in the middle; certainly he has invested heavily, too heavily, in the club, but it’s the lack of transparency that many fans have been unable to stomach, or forgive.
There have been plenty of rumours flying around for months, even years, but it’s only in the past few weeks that the severity of the situation has been made clear outside the four walls of the boardroom. If more details had been revealed to fans earlier, would things have been any different? It’s impossible to say, but the steering group hurriedly cobbled together and headed by folk hero Jim Leishman has expressly stated it simply ran out of time to find an answer.
What is clear is that the Pars are having to reap a harvest that they could never afford to sow. The recent successful period of the mid-noughties brought three cup finals, a fourth-place finish and two (albeit brief) ventures into Europe, but it is becoming increasingly clear that we had a golden team built on clay foundations.
Of course, Dunfermline weren’t the only club to attempt to live far outwith their means. Such was the feeling of invincibility and permanence around football, even Scottish football, a decade ago that clubs assumed the cash flow would continue to increase ad infinitum. The humbling number of supporters from other clubs at Saturday’s 4-3 home defeat to Dumbarton was perhaps testament to the acknowledgement that the Pars aren’t the first club to be staring into the abyss, and the knowledge that they almost certainly won’t be the last.
I’ve never been a fan of the cliché, “It’s not the winning but the taking part that counts”, but on this occasion it rings strangely true. We all love a good cup run, beating our local rivals or getting it right up the Rangers, but now it’s not about the winning, or indeed the losing, but the existing. I’d rather sit through a season of gubbings than not have a stadium to sit in, or a team to shout for. It’s a truth that’s just beginning to sink in.
When not cheering on his beloved Pars, Jamie Donald is the chief sub-editor at the Evening Express newspaper in Aberdeen. He became friends with Narey's Toepoker at Aberdeen University and they watched the early rounds of the 2002 World Cup together on a tiny TV in Crombie Halls.
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