Unique touches of famous Scottish football stadium remain – 20 years after being sold to Morrisons
IT used to have a kitchen window looking straight out onto the terracing.
Now it has a whole aisle full of kitchen essentials.
Falkirk’s Brockville Stadium is no more and was replaced by a supermarket two decades ago.
Where teams used to park the bus and defend their box, shoppers now park the car and fill their bags.
But there is no forgetting just where they are with relics of the historic stadium of old still on show outside the town centre Morrisons superstore.
A cast-iron turnstile is planted permanently outside the front door as testimony to the football folklore that went on before.
On that town centre site was the first televised night-time game under floodlights when the Bairns hosted Newcastle in a friendly some 70 years ago.
Their rickety old ground hosted the great and the good of the Scottish game before the club eventually moved out to the Falkirk Stadium.
But from the Lisbon Lions to greats like Gazza, Laudrup and McCoist – plus Sir Alex Ferguson and many more in between, the hostile and claustrophobic Brockville welcomed them all.
But Brockville, for all its historic significance, also worked against Falkirk.
The Bairns were denied promotion to the SPL on account of their home not having the required 10,000 seats.
A ground-sharing bid with Airdrie was denied which spared Aberdeen and Motherwell from relegation in 2000 and 2003 withj the Bairns barred from the top flight.
That forced the club’s hand after financial troubles in the late 1990s and they moved to a purpose-built ground on the Grangemouth edge of town, spending a year at nearby Stenhousemuir in between.
Fans were able to buy up various memorabilia at a club auction with the dugouts, turf, street signs and folding wooden seats from the stand all up for grabs.
And while they left a turnstile and team pic for the new supermarket, the club took their own memento – the ‘Brockville Gate’ is still on display at the mouth of the tunnel of their new ground pre-match before every home game – just as it was ‘back home’ at Brockville.
The final game saw emotional scenes when current Dundee assistant Stuart Taylor scored the final goal against Inverness Caledonian Thistle.
The bulldozers moved in and so did the supermarket and changed the face of the site that had hosted football since the Victorian era.
However with the old turnstile and various other nods to the games it hosted the legend of Falkirk lives on as visitors do their Saturday afternoon shopping.
Where Chelsea and Hibs came to buy club legend ‘Crunchie’ Kevin McAllister – the bars he’s nicknamed after are on sale at the tills.
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