RAINDROPS which keep falling on the head of Cliftonhill Stadium turn to acid drops. Bitter words stick to it. Saying harsh things about the old place is one of football's more agreeable blood sports. It gets played by everybody outside Coatbridge. Making mock of the home and heartland of Albion Rovers, the big team of the 'Brig, has long been a grand game to the rest of the world. Seldom, however, has the boot been put in so sorely as this season.
Even this early, Cliftonhill has taken a kicking.
''That building site,'' one visitor miscalled it in The Herald's sporting enclosure for readers' letters. It happens he's a Partick Thistle fan. He wrote with local knowledge. A quirk of the fixture list has given followers of the Jags twice as much experience of Cliftonhill as has so far been enjoyed by Albion's own loyalists.
At a night game last week envoys from Maryhill took a dim view also of what passes for illumination in the 'Brig. When the floodlights go on on a summer evening, it can feel that the field grows darker. One dome-headed Thistle philosopher delivered a treatise on the subject. It's gist was that Cliftonhill's candle power was more to deter burglars than to bathe the arena in spectacular brightness. ''Call them floodlights?'' he scoffed. ''They're security lights.''
Although harsh, both comments were fair enough. Thistle aficionados have grown accustomed to posh comfort at their own place. They have forgotten already when their beloved Firhill was a plantation of weeds.
Cliftonhill has retained its flora. As a botanical garden, it's environs are richly empurpled by buddleia shrubs. Therein lies some of its elusive magic, that it can be a butterfly kingdom as well as a sporting circus.
Cliftonhill was a flower patch. When Albion Rovers in 1919 chose a new home, they picked the hillside garden attached to the baronial house of a Coatbridge ironmaster.
Earlier, the Wee Rovers had played in the coal-mining village of Whiflett beside the railway line. Robin Marwick, the club's historian, insists: ''When the wind blew the wrong way when a steam train went by, they had to stop the football because of the smoke.''
Cliftonhill's capacity is anything it wants to be. It has been a speedway track. Cossack riders once used it for a cavalry display (and wrecked the drainage). It has been a track for stockcars. There has been dog racing.
Even in its plain use for football it is versatile. When Albion Rovers play at home there are always, or nearly always, more people at Cliftonhill than in it. A second secret ingredient is the trick the stadium knows about how to grow smaller, while at the same time it gets bigger. Both phenomena need some explaining, but later.
Another Cliftonhill secret is its location. Many of this season's travellers may not remember where it is. They will arrive to watch games against Hamilton Academical, who are again Albion's lodgers. When the Wee Rovers are away, the Accies will play. It was the same last year. This time, though, they have loftier opponents from bigger places - Dundee, Greenock, Kirkcaldy, Paisley, not to mention metropolitan Maryhill.
Coatbridge has revived its old joke that it expects hordes of lost strangers to wander about North Lanarkshire looking for a town called Albion.
Cliftonhill has had the civilised custom of allowing rival supporters to mingle. For today's meeting of Hamilton and Raith Rovers accommodation has been doubled from the 1238 allowed in by renovating the shed across the field. This twofold increase has been achieved despite the sale of a strip of the original six acres of the park to a house builder. So has littler become larger. So also has Cliftonhill proved itself more adaptable to change than might any contemporary fortress of concrete and steel.
Gone with the top of a terracing for the few houses is old-time Cliftonhill's offer of free viewing. Up to 200 skint fans used to watch the action for nothing from hillocks outside the perimeter wall. Coatbridge called it the Aberdeen Gate. Although redevelopment has left room for only a tenth of that many non-payers, with luck a hallowed tradition will die hard. May a Cliftonhill crowd always be more than its official attendance, if only by a handful of Paisley enthusiasts at a Hamilton game.
As for the illumination, Andrew Dick, the chairman of Rovers, attended the auction of the relics of Cardiff Arms Park and bought #150,000 of extra lighting. It could be a bright enough Cliftonhill winter to please even Partick Thistle purists when the wherewithal has been found to put them up.
