Date – 13 May 1995
Venue – Forthbank Stadium
Competition – Bells’ Scottish Second Division
Fixture – Stirling Albion 0-2 Dumbarton
Kick Off – 3.00pm A tremendous late run of results saw Stirling claiming 24 out of a possible 30 points to push them to the brink of promotion. Only 90 minutes of football stood between the Albion team and a spot in Division One…there was only one catch, 90 minutes was all that stood between Dumbarton and Division One too. It was to be a shoot out to the death at Forthbank. A full house of 3,808 packed into Forthbank that day with many more unfortunate fans locked out from proceedings. As only a ten year old boy at the time, my memories of the game are very much reduced to a few snapshot images of Dumbarton players and fans celebrating their two goals. Both came in the second half when the whole home stand of Forthbank was hoping that the Kevin Drinkell’s Binos could hold on for at least the draw which would’ve meant promotion. It was not to be. Dumbarton held on comfortably and would claim their place in Division 1 along side Morton, who would go up as Champions albeit only just by a couple of points. As the horsemen of the apocalypse saddled up outside Forthbank at 4.45pm that day and the dust settled on another season it was clear that it was Albion’s home form which had let them down; they suffered 6 home defeats, 12 overall, which generally is not good enough for a team fighting for promotion. In fact it was trips to, now disappeared, venues such as Boghead and the Commonwealth Stadium that tended to prove more fruitful for the Binos that year. Looking back at the fixture card of that year teams like Meadowbank Thistle and Airdrie were to be played; eight years later it’s incredible to think that these teams and stadia are all but memories fading into the mists of time. As Meadowbank went down that year and rose from the ashes as Livingston it signalled the end of an era in Scottish Football, the age of franchise and commercialisation was truly upon us. The SFL has never really recovered from the big spending of the mid-nineties and that period could yet claim more clubs. Hopefully, in another eight years time we will be able to watch the same sides as today, still in existence, playing in a flourishing Scottish Football League. At the time though these thoughts were all very much at the back of the mind of Albion fans but some twelve months later, however, the feeling was to be a very different one. Drinkell built up his squad in the summer to great effect as we see next time… | 