Tuesday 20th December, 2016 at 1:48pm
I have allowed myself a little bit of what could be loosely described as poetic licence with my choice of fixture. We play Celtic(away) on 20th December at Parkhead. Well, my featured match is an away fixture against Celtic right enough, but it was played at Hampden Park instead of the normal venue, which was unavailable and to renovation work being carried out there.
Celtic started brightly and dominated the opening exchanges. The combative Peter Grant opened the scoring after 20 minutes and we thought – here we go again! However, the scorer’s namesake Roddy equalised three minutes from the interval, so the half time cuppa tasted all the sweeter. At this point in the Boardroom, Fergus McCann declared, in view of the fact that Celtic had enjoyed most of the play in the first-half, that if it had been a boxing match it would have been stopped (presumably to avoid further punishment being inflicted on the opposition). This turned out to be quite comical, because Thistle went to town in the second-half and scored through Wayne Foster in 55 and 85 minutes, to run out 3-1 winners. These were three very valuable points, going a long way to enabling Thistle to retain their Premier Division status. In season 1994/95 there were only 10 teams in the league. Thistle finished 8th, with Aberdeen in the play-off spot and Dundee United relegated.
The Thistle team which pulled off such a great result was as follows: Nicky Walker, Kevin McKee, Steve Pittman, Alan Dinnie, Steve Welsh, Tommy Smith, Wayne Foster, Albert Craig, Roddy Grant, Ian Cameron, Chic Charnley.
There were a lot of big names in the opposition ranks, and I don’t just mean Van Hooijdonk, although that’s a pretty big name, don’t you think? They also fielded Bonner, Boyd, McKinlay, O’Neill, Mowbray, Grant, O’Donnell, McStay, Falconer, Collins.
I’ve just had an idea. How about getting tonight’s game switched to Hampden. What do you think?
