THEY were milling about in the park, kicking the ball with a self-consciousness that suggested their last game had not been yesterday. They were the boys of the 1970s. The final whistle had sounded on their careers some

time ago.

They were not quite the Last of the Summer Wine, more The Dregs of the Winter Buckfast. They were gathered for a reunion game. I scanned the faces. All the players from St Ninians Thistle seemed to be there. But not quite. There was at least one missing. This match was in memory of Bobby Clydesdale, player, miner, road tarrer, and friend.

Hundreds lined the touchline at Beechwood Park, less than a mile from the heart of Stirling, and bought raffle tickets or simply threw cash into a bucket. Thousands of pounds were raised for Stobhill Hospital, where Bobby received treatment for an illness before his sudden death in his early forties this year.

Beechwood Park had not changed. The personalities were recognisable. True, there were a few grey hairs and the odd pound of excess weight, but that's enough about the wives. The players and the fans were back in their usual positions. It was as if the match was broadcast on UK Gold, so authentic was it as a throwback to the old days. One player even adopted the guise of a German pop star, big hair and bushy moustache, as a homage to the seventies and early eighties.

That was an era when the Jags drew bigger crowds than the Albion and the entertainment was as much on the sidelines as it was on the park.

The match for the Robert Clydesdale Memorial Trophy was not just a game, more a pilgrimage for the spectators and players alike. The footballers made a game of it, manfully resisting both age and a burning sun. There was little surprise that a strawberry-blonde centre still couldn't finish in front of goal 25 years on. I was asked to award the players stars for performance and was tempted to give him Dale Winton.

But the others made the game surprisingly easy on the eye. Old-timers remarked it was played in ''a good spirit'', remembering the days when the ferocity of Stirlingshire amateur football used to make the Ayrshire Juniors look like Come Dancing. There were flicks and nutmegs, slips and sclaffs, bags of goals, and a penalty shoot-out.

Its importance may seem restricted to those who knew and loved Bobby. But in the reverie of a sunny afternoon, a deeper meaning suddenly leapt to the front of my brain. Admittedly, that's not much of a journey.

It was this. Bobby, like thousands of others in Scotland, was a fitba' man. He played it, watched it, and argued about it. He supported Rangers passionately but drank, laughed and enjoyed the craic with Celtic fans, or any other fans for that matter.

Football was not the most important aspect of his life or, indeed, the lives of his friends. Bobby was too close to his family for that. But football was the glue that kept all of us together.

We played together, watched games together in crowded pubs or on overflowing terraces. We saw Maradona together on a beautiful afternoon at Hampden. We stood at Beechwood together, sheltering from the rain under the huge trees or stamping our feet and watching our breath cloud the wintry air. Our mates played and we watched or we played and our mates watched.

We did all this with a fervour that suggested football was important. And it was. The cash crises will come and go, the mercenaries will toy with our favours and jump ship, the game at the top level will fascinate and infuriate. But football is not just about the big league. In fact, the big league is football at its most showy and ultimately at its most inconsequential.

The importance of football to me, to Bobby, to the hundreds who stood and watched at Beechwood on Saturday, and to millions throughout the world, is that it is a shared experience. It provides the opening gambit in conversation. It prompts the slagging on a Monday morning. It provides the backdrop to many of our lives. It is the subject of our memory. On Saturday, it had an irresistible attraction for the community of St Ninians.

The sun shone. The crowd had a laugh. The players had a run out. A hospital will get a couple of grand.

But the day was made complete by one, simple, communal realisation: Bobby Clydesdale would have loved it. After all, he was a fitba' man.