Richard Gordon

Tonight’s encounter with Hamilton brings back a few memories for me, as the first away match I covered as a part-time reporter for Northsound was against the Accies at the old Douglas Park way back in 1987. I was still working with the Clydesdale Bank at the time, but Ken McRobb had taken me on as his weekend Dons ‘correspondent’ and after some pretty intensive training, I was deemed ready to venture out alone into the big wide world.

I do recall feeling incredibly nervous; even the thought of driving on my own all the way to deepest, darkest Lanarkshire was somewhat daunting, and that was without thinking about the potential technical nightmare that lay ahead.

These days, the equipment broadcasters bring to the games is pretty reliable, high-tech and easy to use; it’s just a case of plugging your box into what is essentially an enhanced telephone line, dialling in, and 99 times out of 100 you’re ready to go.

It wasn’t quite as easy as that almost three decades ago.

I had two cases on that trip. The first was jammed full of all sorts of cables and connectors, pliers and screwdrivers, the unit with which I was intended to broadcast to the north east, headphones and microphones. The second was my ‘mobile’ phone, a small suitcase sized contraption for which the handset doubled-up as the handle, and which weighed a bloody ton! It was to be used “should there be any problems” with the line. Should there be?

The first hurdle I had to overcome was finding our point. It wasn’t a case of looking for a clearly marked socket as it is these days, back then my instructions were to locate a pair of wires which would be hanging out of the wall, or from under a seat. Having done so, I should then attach these to the back of my box, screw them firmly in place, fire the unit up, and buzz the radio station.

Having finally found the stadium, and after some negotiation been permitted to enter, I wandered forlornly up and down the old main stand until I finally uncovered the wires in question, but no matter what I tried, could not get the line to connect.

An engineer tried talking me through the procedure, but he may as well have been speaking Serbo-Croat for all I understood, and as had seemed inevitable pretty much from the off, my reports were called in using the oversized phone.

While much of the day has remained burned into my consciousness, I could not have recalled a single thing about the match without the assistance of the brilliant www.afcheritage.org website which tells me the Dons won 2-0 thanks to goals from Jim Bett and Ian Porteous. Really?

After the game I had to go down to interview the boss, Ian Porterfield, to gather his reflections, not with a tiny handheld digital recorder as is used now, but using a massive reel-to-reel tape machine which was nearly as heavy as the phone!

Of course, I had no way of relaying that interview back to the studio, and the journey home involved getting lost at least twice, so the first Northsound listeners heard from the manager was during the following morning’s early news bulletins.

Kids today…? Don’t know they’re born!