Friday 15th November, 2019 at 10:14am
Scottish Second Division
19th August 2000
Stenhousemuir 4 Partick Thistle 0
No, your eyes are not deceiving you. I gave a lot of thought to whether I should choose this particular game or not, in case I might cause any unnecessary embarrassment, but I went ahead because we Jags are resilient enough to take it on the chin, so to speak. I don’t think I have ever witnessed a match in which one team outplayed, outgunned, outclassed, outmaneuvered the other and yet managed to lose 4-0! It was just one of those days. Goalkeeper Garry Gow was brilliant on the day, simply unbeatable, so much so that Thistle thought they had better sign him!
It was a fairly quiet first half-hour and then all of a sudden the roof fell in. Stenhousemuir scored after 31, 33 and 38 minutes. To rub salt in the wound and compound our misery, the second goal was scored by Isaac English, one of our former players! Goal number 4 arrived in 76 minutes, but by that time we were too stunned by it all to be over-worried. Strangely enough, we went back to Ochilview the following February and lost again but the score-line was only 2-0 this time. As someone once said about football, it’s a funny old game. To bring things onto proper perspective, we beat Stenhousemuir 4-0 and 3-0 at Firhill that same season and won the league by a massive 17 point margin to move back up into the First Division. After just one season there we went back up to join the Premier League elite. The horrors of Ochilview were but a distant memory.
There were some interesting names in the team on that ill-fated day:- Kenny Arthur, Steven Docherty, Des McKeown, Martin Hardie, Stephen Craigan, Alan Archibald, Derek Lyle, Ian Cameron, Scott McLean, (the late) Paul McGrillen, Jered Stirling.
Sitting on the substitutes’ bench for the home team was Steve Pittman. He remained there during the entirety of the match. Seeing the combative Steve coming on to play against us would have been too much, don’t you think?
Robert R.
