Signing off for this season ----and moving on to the next: whatever happens, the only winner will be Shinty.

Let’s face it we all love cliches-particularly the old one about the only winner being shinty. Not sure that shinty is ever really the winner especially in such changing times. Yet we still plug away in the hope that one day our lottery will come up trumps- just as we all hope that one day the Glen will again win a Sutherland or a Strathdearn.  The Camanachd ?  Well you never know though you do really. No matter. Like eager fishermen we look forward with hope- but we also have to acknowledge and reward what has been done.

In that spirit we can report that the Glen Shinty Club has held their dinner dance and not one but two awards presentations- and though a little time has passed it is as well for the sake of posterity to preserve in print the memory of these two events. Of course, it’s a busy time with the club having its eye firmly fixed on next year which means sorting out management teams for the new season. Not a particularly easy task it would appear.

However, to more pleasant duties-the Club Dinner Dance took place on Saturday November 29^th at the Clansman, a venue which we enjoy but one which is a little inconvenient for some because of the matter of transport back and fore.

 The meal was enjoyable – and the menu is noted because the house here is so filled with ephemera that one cannot really justify hanging on to another slip of paper no matter how useful it would be in the archive for the prompting of some shinty memories.

Between the courses Mr Mackintosh, the President of the Club, organised the handing out of the annual awards co-opting whoever caught his eye to hand over the treasures.

The awards were as follows:

Men’s First Team Player of the Year- Lachlan Smith

Men’s Second Team Player of the Year -Rory Maclean

Women’s First Team Player of the Year- Ishbel Barr

Women’s Second Team Player of the Year -Rowan Brockie (trophy accepted on her behalf by her brother Doug)

Young Male Player of the Year -Glenn MacDonald

Young Female Player of the Year -Ruby Fraser

The second set of awards took place a few days later on Thursday 4^th December at the Craigmonie Centre and unfortunately the Wing Centre missed out on these since he was out of the village.

There the awards were as follows:

Player of the Year U17 (M & F) Alfie Macleod & Rowan Brockie

Most Improved U17 -Hugh Burnett

U17 Development Player of the Year -Sophie Power

U17 Development (Most improved) -David Fraser

U14 Player of the Year -Kaleb Power

U14 Most Improved Player -Sam Jones

U14 Girl’s Player of the Year - Ava McConville

U14 Most Improved Player - Katie Edwards

A Special Award to Doug Brockie was made to mark his outstanding performance/ attendance/attitude throughout the year at U17 and First Team level- and well merited it was too. 

Moving on to the other matter which caught my eye it appears that in the new year Hugh Dan is going to deliver a talk on the photographic legacy of Donald Mackay. Fair play to HD; Donald Mackay has now slipped from the memories of shinty’s most recent generation and indeed over the years since his day the sport has been blessed with a large number of excellent photographers.  However, if you were to look at today’s newspapers, you might be forgiven for thinking that no-one is bothering to capture shinty chemically or even digitally any more.

Gone are the days when action pictures of games from Phil Downie and Neil Paterson appeared regularly in the national and local press. Pictures do appear-publicity shots of sponsors and the like distributed by the CA- but action shots from games, though they are still to be found on Facebook and the like – have largely disappeared from newspapers.

I did not really know Donald at all well but I certainly admired his photographic work. He did once produce the sporting pic of the year-taken against the back drop of Ben Nevis in a Camanachd Cup final. Nearer to home- and I assume HD knows this- he was related to Glen’s own Peter English and as such produced a pile of pictures in which he captured more or less everything about the Glen’s Centenary in 1985. From a personal point of view I guess that apart from one pic which appeared in the West Highland Free Press which I assume was taken by Willie Urquhart, Donald’s pics are the only action shots ever taken of the Wing Centre during his own playing career.

The relative absence from a range of newspapers of action photos of shinty is something that another Donald, the late Donald Stewart former Vice-President of the CA, would have had something to say about- and the thing about Donald is that he would have kept on saying it until something had been done about it-one way or another. Perhaps the pics would have come back, though the economics of newspapers may have precluded it or at least they would have been argued to have precluded it in the eyes of the bean counters in charge. The present doesn’t seem to be a good time to be in newspapers given the huge haemorrhage of readership- and then again you have to ask what are newspapers in Scotland for, given that most of the titles are diametrically opposed to the views of at least 49% of the population who basically no longer read them. Some of those that do tell me they only buy them for the crossword which they have been in the habit of doing over the years.

Anyway-back to Donald Stewart (pictured above in the London Camanachd team of the late 1980s) .I sometimes didn’t like being challenged by him over some of the newspaper pieces I had written but on reflection his position came out of fierce loyalty to the CA and in particular his support of the CA’s links with the GAA. Without out going into too much detail, that did not really pay off for him in the end and it may be that shinty as a whole missed out as a result. That’s one of the great “what ifs?” of Shinty history-but like all “what ifs of shinty history “ it will mean nothing to anyone who lives outwith the boundaries of the three shires and the three Islands.

Anyway, we all look forward to the season to come- with the Lovat Cup out of the way we are all allowed to anticipate the coming season. It will be as it always is a mixed bag. However, one thing will be strange- we are going into the new year without Andy Lloyd who has stepped down as Vice Chairman. 

Andy will be missed greatly for the wide range of work he undertook on behalf of the Club and the fact that he was a calming influence on the sidelines and at committee meetings. Let’s hope he doesn’t walk away too far.