It is closing in on 70 years since I first saw Dens Park from the inside.
Until then, all I knew was the view from the top of the Law. You had a good view of the pitch then, that splash of bright green, for the only stand was on the far side.
Otherwise, the only pitches I knew were in Lochee Park and there were five or six of them, all in the one park.
The idea of a park being entirely taken up by just one pitch was a kind of luxurious dreamscape.
All I knew then about my famous grandfather was that he died when I was a one-year-old, that he had lived in Lochee and had been Dundee’s goalkeeper impossibly long ago, before the war, not the war my father fought in but the war before that.
So the view of the pitch from the top of the Law was a glimpse of something other, where people could become famous all through Lochee from the end of Logie Street to the top of the High Street.
Such was the landscape and cultural history of childhood inheritance, and it was all rolled up in a leather ball, with a lace.
‘Dens Park pitch is insult to memory’
When Bill Shankly said that football “isn’t a matter of life or death, it’s much more important than that”, this is what he was talking about.
And now, once again, the pitch at Dens Park is something other.
Not the hallowed ground of the fondest of memories but the worst pitch in Scottish professional football, and something of an insult to memory.
How could that happen?
So if you can imagine the accumulated weight of almost 70 years’ worth of the mixed blessing that is the mental condition of the Dundee supporter, here is how it looks on an April day of 2024 at the top of the Law, looking down.
First of all, the American owners of a football club that is much more mine than it is theirs [Tim Keyes and John Nelms] don’t know what I’m talking about.
There are two reasons why that is the case.
One is that they’re American and have no knowledge of the ethos that underpins the attachment of the native Scot to the football club of his birthplace.
They can’t have, in the same way that I am not in thrall to Fenway Park of Red Sox fame, even though I know and love James Taylor’s song, Angels of Fenway.
‘Property developers – not football fans’
The other is that they don’t want to look after Dens Park, modernise it, nurture its traditions and protect the supporters’ memories.
They are, in my opinion, property developers – not football supporters.
They likely want to sell Dens Park so that it can be knocked down and the ground can be used for housing.
Then they want to build a completely new stadium with money-making add-ons like houses and a hotel and a crematorium (or has local ridicule deleted that absurd notion from the equation yet?), because they are property developers (did I say that already?) and that’s what property developers do.
Given the progress that has been made towards the new stadium development (not a sod dug, not a brick laid), and if and when planning permission is ever granted, a reasonable estimate of how long it will take before the first ball is kicked is between three and five years [note – managing director John Nelms last year said Dundee could be at Camperdown in 2025).
Their solution to the Dens Park crisis – and it is in a state of crisis – appears to be Dundee ground-sharing for the duration.
‘My greatest Dundee FC fear’
Right now, the ground is an embarrassment, and the owners of the club must shoulder the responsibility for that state of affairs.
It deteriorates on and off the pitch season and after season, and particularly for those of us with long memories of the place it is frankly hurtful.
There are – there should be – two groups of people in any football club whose interests constitute the top priorities of those who run the club, and these are the players and the supporters.
It is that simple. Whatever the commercial complexities of keeping the club in business, the club exists so that the players can play the game and the supporters can watch them.
Compromise that essential truth and sooner rather than later, you have no club.
And right now, that is my greatest fear.
What I consider to be the incompetence of the current ownership and their indifference to the effects of that incompetence on the players and the supporters and the traditions of which they themselves are a part…right now, it is choking the life out of the club.
So, it’s closing in on 70 years for me, and it’s well over a hundred years since my grandfather kept goal for Dundee the day they won the Scottish Cup for what is still the only time.
Put a price on that if you dare.
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