We have a plethora of floodlights for #Floodlight Friday this week from one of the all time great fanznes, The Absolute Game with its legendary numbering scheme; issue 2nd Round 1st leg appearing to cover August and September of 1989.

Front page news is that Rangers have signed a player from Nantes for the first time in their history plus there is news of medals for Scotland at a world football tournament. Surely it’s all downhill from there? Absolutely not.

The medals will be covered when we get round to our forgotten tournaments blog with the JVC or World U16 Cup being covered in a few fanzines back in the day. For the purpose of this mini blog however here is a surprisingly good photo of about 15% of one of the pylons at Tynecastle as Portugal and Argentina probably negated each other with massive shithousing in a 0-0 draw.

Next we have Clyde playing at Partick’s old haunt Firhill after their disastrous move from Shawfield. Magnificent floodlights, installed on the roof of the shed in 1955 and first used in a game against Spurs in the Anglo Scottish Cup. There is a fantastic article about George Morris, the guy who installed the lights on Partick’s website, you can read it here. https://ptfc.co.uk/ptfc-news/george-morris-the-man-who-turned-on-the-lights-at-firhill/

You can only assume the surrounding report/diatribe was written by a Killie fan, bitterly describing as it does his version of Clyde’s fortuitous survival at Killie’s expense at the climax of the 88-89 season. Then there is Eraserhead..

Staying with Killie we move to Rugby Park’s equally spectacular lighting set up in an article about an EGM at the club. I’ll spare you all the details but suffice to say, there are a lot of them in a full sheet of A4.

Staying in the greater Ayrshire area there is a piece about Ayr being once again at a crossroads with about 31% of Somerset Park’s floodlights and pylons on display. I assume the picture wasn’t taken just before a game but you never know.

The article is not happy with Ally McLeod and stretches to 1.5 sides of A4 and is called “The Honest Thoughts of an Honest Man” and says things have become so bad that a FANZINE has started, imagine that. I’m thinking that the author of this piece was editor of Ayr fanzine The Honest Truth which came after 4-1. He criticises 4-1‘s cosiness to McLeod but if a manager like Ally McLeod agreed to be interviewed a fanzine would have been mad to turn it down.

The fact that 4-1 called itself that to celebrate and taunt beaten local rivals Kille is brilliant but this is then revealed to have unleashed karma as Ayr were beaten by the same score by Partick, Airdrie and Hearts within 6 weeks!

Now so far I think you’ll agree the floodlights in this week’s journey have been prolific but also, of quite high quality relatively speaking. Never fear because next we have the home of Albion Rovers, Cliftonhill and a quite spectacularly bad photo. Once again the article is too long to carry here but I have saved it in my “reasons why we set up a fanzine” file, full as it is with bitterness, recrimination and quite brilliant gallows humour and written by the editor of Albion rovers Over The Wall, Rab Crangle (produced in New Maldon, Surrey!) Here is a photo that proves that there were in fact 4 or 5 sets of floodlights along one side of the ground in 1981 anyway.

I will leave you with the fanzine listings from this issue of TAG, 1989. Already we have this quite amazing bunch of publications available in Scotland, the golden era of fanzines was in full flow.