‘Two and a half Tinnies’: Edinburgh trio visit all 42 football league clubs in Scotland in less than 24 hours in charity fundraiser

Edinburgh acting trio ‘Two and a half Tinnies’ have raised over £1,000 for charity by travelling to every professional league football club in Scotland in less than 24 hours.

The three friends – Alex Fleming, Calum Johnston and Shannon Mackenzie, all 24 – set off at noon on Sunday, June 27, from Ross County Football Club in the Highlands and arrived at Hibernian Football Club on Easter Road, Edinburgh at 10.02am today, Monday, June 28.

Mr Johnston told the Edinburgh Evening News: “It was absolutely fantastic, we’ve been so excited about this for so long now so to finally just get on the road and go for it was amazing.

"We decided we were going to do it way back in 2019 when we were looking for ways to expand the work we do together, but the pandemic meant that we had to cancel three times over the last year.”

After kicking off the challenge at Ross County, the trio made their way to Inverness Caledonian Thistle where they were invited onto the pitch while they stopped for their visit.

They hit the third club on their list, Elgin City, at 1.23pm on Sunday, which was followed by Peterhead and Aberdeen.

The original fundraising target for the challenge, named ‘42 in 24’, was £500, but the team have more than doubled it with the total sitting on over £1,000.

Mr Johnston continued: “We decided to do this for charity because even though we all really wanted to do a challenge like this anyway, raising money for something important gave us all the extra motivation.”

The final total will be divided between three charities; Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM), Cardiac Risk In The Young (CRY) and the Les Hoey MBE Dreammaker Foundation.

Mr Johnston added: “It didn’t really matter to us how much we made, even the smallest amount would make a difference and give us the incentive of knowing that we had supporters who were rooting for us to get it done.”

The group formed in 2018 as an acting, performing and stage trio but since then their work has developed and adapted to online mediums, including a YouTube channel – where they will be releasing a film documenting their 42 in 24 challenge – and a podcast which launched in May 2020 called ‘The Tincast’.

The trio arrived at their final stop, Hibernian FC at Easter Road stadium at 10.02am on Monday.

Mr Johnston said: “We decided that we should branch out a little bit to become more of a general entertainment trio and we wanted to keep people interested during the pandemic while we were dealing with all of these delays.”

Around 12 hours into the challenge, they reached club number 25 on their list, Celtic, making it to Rangers half an hour later.

At 6.49am on Monday they reached club number 36, Annan Athletic, and by 9am they had made it to Livingston.

The final three clubs were Hearts, Edinburgh City and Hibs at Easter Road.

They trio set off at noon on Sunday from Ross County FC.

Mr Johnston added finally: "We bumped into a few fans and it kind of brought the importance of football to the forefront, especially with everything that’s been going on over the last year.

“The whole challenge reminded us how great Scottish football is, it was a really memorable experience.”

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