Gary Mackay: Salvesen FC rebuild going to plan with healthy sum raised

I enjoyed a marvellous day at Salvesen FC’s sportsman’s dinner on Sunday and I’m chuffed to say a good amount of money was raised to help rebuild a club which means a lot to me.

A total of £4672.55 was raised on the day, which is a useful amount to put towards the Salvesen regeneration project. It was a great day full of people who were associated with Salvesen previously and who are involved there currently. Scott Wilson, Tam McManus and George McNeill were hosts and guest speakers and they did the club proud. Everybody had a great time and raised some money for a boys’ club that is close to all of our hearts.

One table had Neil Irvine, who had been at Hearts, Callum Milne the ex-Hibs defender, plus several other guys who had played in their youth team at Salvesen. They won the youth Scottish Cup three times, while our team won it five times. Salvesen was such a successful club back then and we are all keen to see it restored to that level again in the near future.

You had ex-players there from the first Salvesen team ever to win a Scottish Cup, so there were so many different people from different eras. The atmosphere was brilliant with everyone celebrating all these eras on the day. Ronnie McCall was there and he played for Salvesen’s first every team in 1959 when he was an under-17.

The support the club received was terrific and everybody was extremely appreciative. It was a really good fundraiser but also a brilliant vehicle for so many people with a Salvesen connection to come together again. It’s fair to say there was a lot of reminiscing done!

We are hoping to make the dinner an annual thing and that’s something I think everyone would look forward to. John Robertson is another former player who started with Salvesen before moving on to Edina Hibs. He couldn’t make Sunday because he had commitments with his club, Inverness Caledonian Thistle. However, he has promised to do a question-and-answer session in the months ahead.

Hopefully there will be other things similar to that and we can get Salvesen back to where they should be in Scottish youth football. The people driving the club now are very ambitious about where they want to go.