Alloa’s official song is ‘The Boys In Black & Gold’ (the team colours) by The Utopians. The band was founded in 2007 by front man Jason Westall and guitarist James Shaw.
Alloa Athletic
Nickname: The Wasps
Ground: Recreation Park
Stadium Capacity: 3,100
Song: The Boys In Black & Gold by The Utopians
The band toured in January 2008 to support the release of its debut single ‘There’s a Train’, which gained good reviews as well as Radio One airplay. ‘The Boys In Black & Gold’ was released as a B-side.
It’s appropriate that the song was a B-Side as, while many clubs are known as perennial runners-up, Alloa Athletic has made a career out of coming second. It holds the record for finishing runners-up in the third tier of Scottish football a record eight times, most recently in 2012/2013 when Alloa clinched promotion to the First Division via a play-off.
Many clubs hate playing Alloa Athletic, not because of a fearsome reputation, but rather because its pitch is made of artificial turf. This had one benefit – in 2010, Alloa was the only club in the country to play football after a cold snap meant every other Scottish game was postponed due to freezing weather conditions.
One of its greatest players was Willie Crilley, affectionately known as “wee Willie Crilley”, “Electric Spark” and also “The Mighty Atom”, a free scoring striker who played for Alloa in the 1920s and was considered to be one of the best strikers in the league. He still holds the record for the greatest number of goals scored by an Alloa player in a single season.
Willie’s nickname was not ironic. At best he measured 5 foot 3 inches but some records say he was smaller. He was so small that even the club’s official history recounts an apocryphal story that during one game he ran with the ball between an opponents’ legs before scoring. He subsequently joined Celtic but his heart was with Alloa, and he only lasted a few months before returning.
Injury meant his career was, ahem, cut short and he emigrated to the United States to start a new life. He played for a number of US clubs but, after marrying a US girl and taking American citizenship, a dream return to Alloa was foiled by immigration. In 1929, Willie had returned to Scotland with the intention of re-joining Alloa but as he was a US citizen, he was deported back to America before he was able to play for the club.
In 1934 he returned to Scotland for a final time to try and re-join his beloved Alloa but time and injuries meant he was not the player he once was and the club’s directors turned down his offer to play.
If Willie had played today every time he scored he would have heard ‘Life is Live’ the 1985 hit by Austrian pop group Opus. ‘Life Is Live’ has been adopted by a number of sports as an anthem, particularly in Europe, and in 1994 they released a new version for the World Cup that year, which was held in Willie’s adopted homeland, the United States.
And a dancing Maradona (who doesn’t even tie his shoelaces – that how good he was):
He’s a part-time comedian and in 2014, he supported Eddie Izzard in ‘Please Don’t Go’, Izzard’s show about Scottish independence and worked with BBC Radio Scotland as a weekly guest on Referendum Tonight.
