Home Sweet Home: An Ode to Cappielow Park and Greenock Morton

 

Home Sweet Home- An Ode to Cappielow Park and Greenock Morton

Cup football, particularly in the British Isles, has a habit of allowing us to hark back to a bygone era, when clubs who don’t normally attract much by way of nationwide media attention are suddenly thrust into the limelight, as they seek to upset the odds against more celebrated opponents. See hundreds of parka-clad kids charging round the Edgar Street pitch in 1972 as Hereford knocked Newcastle out of the FA Cup, or the grainy footage of Berwick Rangers knocking their Glasgow namesakes out of the 1967 Scottish Cup.

The recent Scottish Cup fifth round tie between Greenock Morton, my own favourites, and Premiership stalwarts Motherwell, was one of those occasions, although the gulf between the teams was far more modest than the examples I’ve provided. Played on a Friday night under the gaze of the BBC Scotland cameras, it was a match that Morton, through their social media channels, hyped up from the minute the balls were drawn out the hat. Playing in Scotland’s Championship, the second tier, they have risen from the foot of the table in early December to the promotion play-off places off the back of a terrific 12 match unbeaten run, their best since the year of my birth, 1979.

The Morton fans show their appreciation for manager Dougie Imrie ahead of dumping Motherwell out of the Scottish Cup.

Morton haven’t seen top-flight football since 1988 and haven’t progressed as far as the Scottish Cup semi-finals since 1981, so it stands to reason that Cappielow Park, the club’s home hasn’t seen too many big games in recent times. Motherwell’s visit though, was one of those nights that has been yearned for by the club’s long-suffering support.

Cappielow is Morton’s third home, but as the club celebrate their 150^th anniversary this year, they have spent 145 of those years (on and off, they played at Ladyburn Park in Greenock in 1882 and Love Street in Paisley and Ayr’s Somerset Park in 1948) at their current location, having originally started off on an open field between Morton Terrace and Grant Street in Greenock’s East End in 1874, before moving to Garvel Park a year later. The club were to relocate to Cappielow, only a few hundred yards away, in 1879 though, to allow for the construction of James Watt Dock, which opened in 1881, providing employment to generations of Greenockians.

While shipbuilding, like many of Scotland’s other manufacturing industries, has seen a massive decline in recent and no-so-recent years, the Titan Crane on James Watt Dock provides a quite iconic backdrop to Cappielow to this day.

Originally built as a multi-sports facility, Cappielow in its early days hosted athletics meetings, cycling and dog racing- quite unthinkable for those who know the stadium in its current guise.

The early days saw a pavilion erected on the southeast side of the ground, and Morton had the honour of hosting international football in 1902, as Scotland resoundingly disposed of Wales with a 5-1 victory in front of a 12,000 crowd. With the running track long gone, the west end of the stadium, and current away end, is affectionately known as the Wee Dublin End, a nod to the Irish immigrant community of the nineteenth century who settled in an area that is now an industrial estate.

The Wee Dublin End, now consisting of bench seating, was expanded in 1965, and is the traditional away end of Cappielow.

It was on the final day of the 1921-22 season that the ground hosted its record crowd, conservatively estimated at 23,500, as Morton, who had won the Scottish Cup only a fortnight previous, hosted a Celtic side needing a draw to secure the title. Celtic got their draw, 1-1 in the end, but their celebrations were marred by crowd trouble as the locals didn’t take well to their celebrations, attacking the visiting fans with rivets from the nearby shipyards.

 As the years went by, the ground began to take shape to what most modern-day fans will recognise it as- the current main stand was opened in 1931, and the covered terrace opposite, home to Morton’s hardcore support, in 1958.

Previously a steep embankment, the Cowshed has seen good days and bad, as Morton’s fortunes have fluctuated down the years. Success in the sixties owed much to the charismatic Hal Stewart, whose magnificent team of 1963-64, with the free-scoring Allan McGraw, won promotion to Scotland’s top-flight as early as February that year, and this was followed up by the Danish invasion in subsequent years, as Stewart raided the then-amateur Danish League to supplement an already formidable Morton team, who eventually qualified for the Fairs Cities Cup, losing 0-5 to Chelsea in 1968 at Stamford Bridge before a far more narrow 3-4 reverse in Greenock.

The late seventies and early eighties saw another great era, as Benny Rooney’s fantastic side were promoted in 1978, staying in Scotland’s new ten-team Premier Division until 1983, with current club ambassador, and Scotland’s greatest ever uncapped player, Andy Ritchie, the undoubted star of a team that fans of a certain vintage are very quick to regale to young pups like me with tales of at any given opportunity!

Following relegation in 1983, there were two further promotions in 1984 and 1987, which were followed by swift and brutal relegations, the latter of which has never, to date, seen Morton return to the top flight.

As the club settled in the First Division, derbies with local rivals St. Mirren on their visits down to Scotland’s second tier provided Cappielow’s biggest days, along with the odd high-profile cup game, with visits of Motherwell in 1991, and Kilmarnock on three different occasions between 1994 and 1997, in the Scottish Cup proving a step too far for the Morton teams of their era.

Relegation to the Second Division, as Scottish football was reconstructed into four divisions of ten clubs, saw Morton in Scotland’s third tier for the first time. But their return was aided by another Nordic invasion, as Morton, now managed by club legend McGraw, with the signings of Finnish internationals Janne Lindberg and Marko Rajamaki supplementing a young side who had the star quality of Derek McInnes and Alan Mahood, won the league at the first time of asking, claiming the title with a penultimate day victory over Dumbarton, the ensuing pitch invasion providing an incredible thrill to those of us at fifteen years old who had absolutely no regard for the instructions to stay off the park!

The Cowshed, complete with segregation fence in its 1980s heyday.

The following year was to see Morton come so close to a second successive promotion, only failing to win the title or gain a play-off place on the final day as injuries caught up with them and they failed to beat fellow promotion contenders Dundee United in front of a massive Cappielow crowd.

Following that sliding doors moment, things went downhill for Morton, and for Cappielow. In the summer of 1997, they were bought by a property developer by the name of Hugh Scott, a move that very nearly saw the death of one of Scotland’s oldest and proudest clubs.

In his early years, Scott made all the right noises about redeveloping the old ground, and taking Morton into the 21^st century as a Premier Division club. In hindsight, he didn’t appear to have any intention of doing anything of the sort. Whether as a result of Scottish football’s landscape at the time, which made it extremely difficult for those out with the newly formed SPL to compete, or through what the fans saw as Scott’s deliberate attempt at downsizing and asset stripping, Morton hit the skids, and the most graphic example of the club’s decline came in the appearance of Cappielow.

Scott wasn’t the only one at fault- his predecessor John Wilson and his board should have done their homework in the first place, but with the Taylor Report into the Hillsborough Disaster forcing clubs to upgrade their stadia, and grants available through the Football Trust, funded by the pools companies, Morton weren’t pro-active enough. While they stalled, others upgraded and moved forward- clubs who were of comparable stature at the time, such as Partick, Kilmarnock, Dunfermline, Raith Rovers and  St. Johnstone made strides, while newbies Inverness, Ross County and Livingston came from nowhere to overtake Morton.

The Cowshed though, was a massive victim of Scott’s brutal destruction of the club. It had until 1999 boasted a quite magnificent fence separating the home and away fans, which provided opportunity for a great deal of insults, goading and projectiles to be exchanged between the Morton fans and their guests. Under the pretence, or unrealised intention of fully seating the Cowshed it was closed that summer and for two seasons, the majority of Morton’s now dwindling support was now exposed to the elements on the open terrace of the Sinclair Street End of the ground.

With Cappielow crumbling, Scott did eventually invest in the ground, putting up boards to prevent boycotters from seeing into the ground from the car park on the final day of the season as a protest march was staged and tensions reached boiling point. Morton were eventually placed in administration that Christmas, and after eight months of struggle, and a second relegation to the Second Division, the club was finally wrestled from Scott’s grip, with local businessman Douglas Rae riding in to the rescue.

With Morton going through financial strife at the turn of the millennium, the condition of Cappielow deteriorated greatly, with the Cowshed having to be renovated after its neglect during Hugh Scott's reign of terror.

Everything about the club however, was a mess, and how Cappielow even got a Safety Certificate in those dark days is a mystery to anyone who visited. A second successive relegation would quickly and predictably follow, and Morton found themselves in the fourth tier for the first and only time in their history. But Rae did realise the importance of re-opening the Cowshed. This was done in stages, with a section of rubble left by Scott’s aborted redevelopment converted into a seating area at the front, and Cowshed now used exclusively by the Morton fans.

It was to eventually fully re-open, and Morton won the Third Division on the final day of the 2002-03 season, a day that will never be forgotten by my own generation as one of the greatest of the club’s history, despite the modest level at which success was gained.

The Rae era though, was not to prove a successful one. Unlike his loathed predecessor, nobody would doubt his intentions were well meaning, but Morton operated at a loss in almost every one of the twenty years of his family’s stewardship of the club, and once operational, improvements to Cappielow were few and far between.

Fans of visiting clubs, particularly those who don’t bring so many fans to require being accommodated in the Wee Dublin End, are often extremely critical, with one side of the main stand used to house them and having its issues. Legroom is far from generous, toilet and catering facilities aren’t exactly lauded, and the pillars don’t afford the best of views of the match. It’s often been a stick that has been quite rightly used to beat Morton, something that is unlikely to change at any point in the near future.

Cappielow's Main Stand is dated, provides limited scope for revenue and attracts criticism from many away fans.

Those concerns and complaints aren’t exclusive to visiting fans though- the legroom issue also affects those in the home support who use the main stand, while the Sinclair Street End, like the Wee Dublin End it faces, is still open and exposed to Greenock’s often inclement weather.

In this modern era in which clubs look to maximise their revenue seven days a week, facilities don’t really allow Morton to do so. Hospitality capacity is limited in comparison to other, more modern grounds and has little room for expansion.

In the event of televised games, the TV gantries take up a large section of the Cowshed, displacing regulars and obstructing the view of others in Cappielow’s most vibrant area. In 2017, then CEO Warren Hawke, a former Morton striker, authorised the installation of a new turnstile system, that has proved to be nothing but trouble to the club and their fans, but now, under new ownership, the club are working to address those problems and by re-commissioning the older turnstiles that had been forfeited in the name of progress for the Motherwell match, all went smoothly.

When Douglas Rae passed away in 2018, his son Crawford took over as Chairman, but with his family not sharing the same passion for the club, they were keen to offload Morton at the earliest opportunity. With losses of around £300,000 a year, the Rae family were not prepared to continue to fund the late Mr. Rae’s passion and a supporters’ group, Morton Club Together, was founded a year later to help contribute to the running of the club by way of monthly contributions from the fans.

With the scheme proving a success, the Rae family were eventually opening up to the prospect of handing over to the fans’ body and writing off a debt in the region of £2 million, which in fairness owed to their own largesse and failure to run the club at a profit over the years.

Their initial attempts to retain ownership of the stadium and charge the club a modest rent were met with fury from the rank-and-file, but eventually they relented, retaining ownership of the adjacent car park, while the club kept ownership of Cappielow, with the deal finalised in September 2021.

With Morton narrowly avoiding relegation by winning the play-offs the previous season, and manager Gus MacPherson’s eye-bleeding style of football not impressing the locals as another relegation battle looked a certainty, the new regime took action and relieved the beleaguered boss of his duties, and in doing that, made one of the most significant positive steps Morton have made in generations, by appointing Dougie Imrie as his successor.

Since the appointment of the former Morton frontman, a figure who fans of his many opponents down the years love to hate, Morton have gone from strength to strength- avoiding relegation with ease in 2022 before narrowly missing out on last season’s promotion play-offs. At the time of writing, the prospect of further progress, while not inevitable, shouldn’t be written off.

An apathetic support has gradually grown, and has been galvanised by the snarling Imrie, who has, with his high pressing, in-your-face style of play, upset many of his peers as a manager, much as he did in his playing career. He’s unfairly criticised outside of the club for that style, and after two years, it is only now he’s beginning to get the recognition he deserves. But when playing against re-gens of the 2011 Barcelona team in the Scottish Championship, such as Raith Rovers and Inverness Caledonian Thistle, I suppose it’s difficult to shine in such an environment.

The Cowshed has seen changes since administration, but is still a popular spot amongst Morton's most vocal fans.

Back on the main subject of Cappielow though, the Motherwell match showed the old ground in its best light- a raucous, intimidating cauldron that is as unwelcoming to visiting teams as it is homely to its regulars. Morton unapologetically market evening games at Cappielow by emphasising the attraction of a night “under the lights” and it’s easy to see why. With the Cowshed almost full an hour before kick-off, and the Morton support not stopping for breath all evening, it can’t have been difficult for a team already brimming with confidence to perform against their more fancied opponents, something they did with aplomb. As the fireworks that greeted the final whistle went off, a new generation of Morton fans celebrated a team they have every reason to be proud of.

And the team should also be proud of their fans. In these days of sanitised atmospheres, and clubs trialling singing sections in attempts to improve the “matchday experience”, there was something raw about Cappielow on Friday night, and about the relentless noise generated by a support that gave everything, just like their heroes in front of them.

As long as I’ve been going to football, Cappielow has always had its detractors, and probably always will, but while tradition is of course the enemy of progress, it will be a sad day when one of Scotland’s finest old grounds is either replaced or renovated. I look forward to a few more great days and nights on the steps of the Cowshed, starting with the quarter final visit of Hearts.

Thanks to Chris McNulty (@Chrismcnulty75) for providing the photos to supplement this article.

You can join to Morton Club Together here: https://mortonclubtogether.co.uk/members-tc