Stenhousemuir

On a Friday night in 1951, Ochilview Park staged a friendly against Hibernian under floodlights — the first fully floodlit match played in Scotland. The lights went up in a village in the Falkirk district, at a ground the club had already occupied for six decades.

By then Stenhousemuir had been playing for 67 years. The club took its name from the settlement it came out of in 1884, and for most of what followed it worked the lower reaches of the Scottish game, picking up what was within reach: the Midland League in 1896, the Qualifying Cup either side of the turn of the century, the Stirlingshire Cup 11 times across more than a hundred years, the last of them in 2015.

The bigger nights came singly. In 1903 the club reached the semi-final of the Scottish Cup and lost to Rangers. In 1972 it went to Ibrox in the League Cup and beat them 2-1. In the spring of 1996, the Challenge Cup final against Dundee United went to penalties and Stenhousemuir won 5-4.

The league title took considerably longer. Stenhousemuir won League Two in 2023/24, 140 years after the club was formed, and the women's side took SWF League One in the same season. Two years later the men went up again through the play-offs, into the Championship.

Ochilview holds 3,746, of which 626 are seated, and the maroon and white sides that play there are known locally as Stenny, or the Warriors. The ground once took 12,525 people, for a Scottish Cup tie against East Fife on 11 March 1950 — a figure that says as much about the crowds of that decade as about the village, which has never been large.