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.