I've played football with my Livingston FC supporter mates for a decade, it's more about camaraderie than cups

On the way, we’ll spend the journey discussing tactics like two ginger Guardiola’s - somehow I’ve found myself in a player-manager role for our team this season, and there are scant better scouts in the game than Bowman. We’re low on numbers but we beat this team, a group of Partick Thistle supporters, 9-1 two weeks before, but we still need to go through a full tactical breakdown.

The week has been filled with frantic calls and texts to friends of friends, anyone who might possibly own a pair of football boots, a set of shin pads and hopefully a couple of working knees. Somehow we’ve got ourselves a starting XI and a couple of subs, we had to relax the fitness criteria to get that far.

I’ve been playing Saturday amateur football on and off since I was 16 years old. I was never going to be a contender, but it was absolutely never about that. I just absolutely loved the game. Don’t get me wrong, when I was growing up I dreamt of playing for Scotland, hoped I’d pull on the amber and black of Livingston Football Club.

But in reality, that dream died about halfway through my first season of playing under 9s football and I realised that it wasn’t actually as easy as they made it seem on the telly. I was unceremoniously dumped as the goalkeeper for Whitburn FCA under 10s. Who’d want to be a goalkeeper anyway?

For much of my teenage years I fell out of love with football. The game just didn’t hold my interest. I tried to find things to fill that gap. I played in bands, grew my hair out and started skateboarding. I would spend hours trawling around music shops looking for the next obsession. But I could never really forget that first love.

The bright red boots gave a false impression of any talent I might have posessed | Supplied

I started playing again at 16, still pretty hopeless but enthusiastic. Beanpole thin, absolutely no first touch and most frequently spotted hiding behind the opposition hoping no one would pass to me. I had no aspirations to be a match-winner. My involvement in football was about the camaraderie. It was the feeling when you are sitting before the game talking about nothing in particular - I was 10-15 years younger than most of the team but I still felt part of something.

I’ve played with the same group of guys, all of us Livingston supporters, for almost a decade now. Ten years of sitting in changing rooms around Scotland at 9am talking about your week, almost never actually talking about the match in serious terms. I’ve travelled across the country with them playing against teams filled with other men in almost exactly the same situation.

There is an inherent bond that is formed between you and your teammates. You spend 90 minutes on a pitch together, spending just as much time encouraging each other as bemoaning each other’s many footballing shortcomings.

And at the end of the day, you’ll be counting down the days until the next fixture just so you can sit in a cold changing room on a weekend morning waiting to fight over the only pair of team kit shorts that fit a group of guys with ever expanding waistlines.

Cups are great, and we've won a few, but it's about much more than that. | Supplied

The emerging reality is that the local community game is dying out for guys our age. It’s harder to get players, harder to secure local pitches. Costs are going up and I don’t know if there’ll be a team next season. I don’t know if I’d want to join another team if this one comes to an end - I don’t know if my aching joints would sign off on the idea anyway.

If that is the case, then I’ll miss the mornings spent on muddy pitches, but I’m happy in the knowledge that I can look back over the years and know that I spent those mornings with some of my best mates.