This article is written after Saturday’s nerve shredding encounter with Airdrie but before Tuesday night’s encounter with Cove Rangers. As such it is impossible to truly gauge what the mood will be going into tonight’s match with Falkirk. Or indeed how much football we will still have to play before season 2020-2021, a season the likes of which we will surely never see again, ends.
It really has been a unique season. A season of great uncertainty both on and off the pitch and a season, despite our absence from inside grounds, that has underlined the importance of fans to the continued wellbeing of the sport that we love.
It’s a season too that draws to a conclusion with a sense hope and optimism replacing the sense of fear and anxiety that was so prevalent when football did return all those months ago.
Notwithstanding the outcome of Tuesday’s match at Cove there is hope and optimism for better times ahead for Partick Thistle but on a much wider perspective there is hope and optimism that we are starting to exit this pandemic and that the day when we will again hear the click of turnstiles at football grounds is not too far away.
Football clubs the length and breadth of the country, ours very much included, have worked incredibly hard to try and make sure that despite their physical absence from grounds that their fans haven’t felt remote from their club. Social media has been used in increasingly innovative fashions and we have had live streams to watch to ensure that our matchday experience remained in some form even if, on occasion, the camera was more interested in a passing seagull than it was the ball.
But for all that our absence has without doubt been keenly felt.
It is us fans that provide the atmosphere that the players feed off. It is us fans that provide the finances that our clubs need to survive.
The importance of fans and the power that collectively we have was brought into sharp focus with the proposal for the new European Super League.
This was a league for the richest and the most powerful clubs in Europe but it wasn’t a sudden, Damascus like, realisation from the clubs concerned that this wasn’t in the best interests of football as a whole that killed this proposed league before it had drawn its first breath. Rather it was the collective protests from the fans of these clubs that forced the radical rethink and ultimate U-turn.
If ever you wanted an example of the power and influence we as fans can have if we choose to use it then this was it.
And this was without having a seat, without having any representation, at boardroom level.
The place that Partick Thistle currently occupy in football’s global pecking order is about as far away from the rarefied air of European super leagues as you can get yet but thanks to the incredible generosity of Colin Weir we have been handed the opportunity not just to influence the direction of our club but to actually own the club and shape the direction of our club. What an opportunity that is.
The route to The Jags Foundation becoming the majority shareholder in Partick Thistle is continuing although we appreciate that the pace of this journey is causing frustration in some quarters. The hectic schedule of matches as the season nears its end has even had an impact on our activities. This evening we should have been sitting down with Three Black Cats for a further, important, meeting after which we hoped to be in the position to be able to share a more detailed timeline, and the next stages, on the route to fan ownership including the all important signing up of members to The Jags Foundation. That meeting has now been understandably rescheduled for early next month and we will naturally provide an update on our website, www.thejagsfoundation.co.uk and via our social media channels.