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Date: 3rd October 2025
Mining your heritage
By Donald C Stewart
I can neither confirm nor deny the truth of it, but I was once told that the Auchinleck Talbot /Cumnock Juniors game was the only game in Scotland where squad cars had been used to break up a riot in the middle of the pitch.
This was during the time that I was manager at Cumnock Community College and stayed there for seven years but what I can confirm, however, without any doubt whatsoever, is the fierceness of the rivalry between the two is absolutely like shared hatred.
We may think of the Old Firm as the top of the rivalry tree, but former pit villages, both in Ayrshire and up in Fife, as well as in Lanarkshire, have a very strong connection to football. That connection means that the pride shared between villages over their pit teams which has transferred, over decades, into the juniors and Scottish football is a running seam, not of coal or of diamonds made, but of intense rivalry.
And so, on Friday the 26th of September, the records will show that the Bot managed to get past Cumnock Juniors and progress into the second round of the Scottish Cup.
It was the first time that both met each other in the Scottish Cup proper and therefore was a milestone, even though they are only just a mile apart in the Ayrshire countryside.
Down in Ayrshire, when I was at Ayr college, the principal at the time, did not quite understand the vagaries of Scottish football, so expressed to me her absolute horror that two teams who happen to be filled with children should have such an intensity of negative emotion. I had to tell her that the fact that they were juniors did not mean their age, but which part of Scottish football hierarchy they sat in. When Ayr United got to the Final of the Scottish League Cup, for the first, OK and only time, she also refused to have the college bedecked in black and white, claiming it was sectarian because of our intense rivalry with Kilmarnock. Tribal, yes, sectarian, not.
When Kilmarnock got to the Scottish Cup final, Kilmarnock College had less of a problem in bedecking, rightly so, their entire college in blue and white to support the local team.
Scottish football has always had rivalries whether it be Hearts and Hibs or potentially Stranraer and Queen of the South or any of Dunfermline Athletic, Falkirk, Raith Rovers, Stenny etc. These are the backbone of our seasons and league campaigns.
It was exciting the many times when there was the possibility of Kilmarnock falling into the Championship or us going into the Premier League to have derby matches four times a year. Four times a year is too much for anybody but the idea that we could have such rivalry played out once again in Somerset Park was an enticement that went beyond the winning of a title itself or gaining promotion through the playoffs.
It meant something much more and for supporters and fans the length and breadth of Scotland that rivalry is so incredibly important. And so on that Friday night as the taps came off and the young weans were whirling their scarfs and their shirts above their head on BBC Scotland it was delightful, brilliant, wonderful, exceptional, exciting to see. That passion from children and young people who are engaged with the local community is because both Auchinleck Talbot and Cumnock have very strong connections and ties to their local communities. They have done an incredible amount of work in supporting their communities in one of the most deprived areas in Scotland.
It is those hidden aspects of rivalry and the work that is done in local communities that sometimes get lost in the fervour of 90 minutes. But as the penalty went in in the 91st, the Bot who have been romping away at the top of the West of Scotland Premier League hoping to emulate Clydebank and get promotion into the Lowland League with the pathway towards the SPFL laid out in front of them, people went totally bananas.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see junior clubs like Auchinleck Talbot perhaps even Pollock Juniors and many others graduate through the pyramid structure to show that getting from a very small town up into the upper echelons of the SPFL is achievable?
Course it would.
You’ve got to hope that they’re more Ross County than Gretna in that progression but with a very strong connection to their communities they can rest assure themselves they are in with a very decent chance of making things happen.
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Tags: ayrshire, juniors, oor Donald, Scottish fans, Scottish footbal