Omar's moving finger writes.....

A couple of weeks ago I touched on one of my favourite ‘grumbles’, the decrepit opposition grounds we must visit and the toilet facilities or to be more precise, their lack of toilet facilities. Since then I’ve heard a jackanory (for any morons from the defunct Ballymena United official site who have just by accident looked at this article, ‘jackanory’ is rhyming slang for story), that Glentoran plan to provide toilet facilities and improve spectator facilities generally. What improving spectator facilities means I just don’t know, but hopefully it’ll mean the removal of the beams holding the roof of the ‘visitors’ stand up, so as spectators would have a clear view of the majority of the playing surface. At the moment one has to ‘skelly’ round beams or miss that bit of the action and as for the near touch line, forget about it. Since then we have visited Ballycastle Road and Inver Park and neither of these grounds have too much to crow about I can tell you. Take Coleraine for instance, true they did offer us half of their grandstand, but it’s a grandstand which faces the setting sun and the view is somewhat poor to say the least, otherwise it’s covered terracing behind the goals or uncovered terracing level with the last third of the pitch. From this uncovered terracing, you have a really ‘jaundiced view’ of the proceedings as looking to your left only a half of the pitch is visible from the halfway line. Then looking to the right, the last third of the penalty box was invisible, although the banners displayed by United fans didn’t help in this respect. The toilets were, to put it mildly, an utter disgrace, no bars on the doors of the cubicles, no hook to hang your coat on and at least one was blocked. The only plus in their favour was the supply of decent toilet paper, but it didn’t make up for their shortcomings. Larne’s facilities aren’t the best either, again they did gave us half of their grandstand and half of their terracing, but once again there was a restricted view of the touchline. Added to this the toilets, correction, the only toilets, were located within the home section of the ground. I cannot comment on the cleanliness of these toilets as I used the ‘makeshift’ ones, an adjacent fence. This state of affairs in this the 21st century, is ridiculous, to put it mildly. Okay 30 years ago we didn’t expect much else, but we have moved on since then, but Irish league grounds obviously haven’t. There’s no point in calling ourselves a Premier league, while retaining ‘amateur league’ facilities. It’s time for action, just think what a visitor from another country must think of us, as this reflects on everybody, let’s try to act civilised. I wonder what sort of homes these ‘club members’ come from? Hopefully these conditions aren’t a reflection on their own home life!