David McGregor's Forfar odyssey: Best player, sacking Dick Campbell, Rangers history and one stadium missing from card

David McGregor has called time on his Forfar stewardship.

Not an awful lot it seems. He will help out whenever needed and will still watch the team – just maybe not from his usual seat in the front row of the directors' box. "I might be in the row behind, but I won’t be standing on the terraces,” he says. “My knees aren’t up to it. Too much running between wickets!"

Cricket has been a passion, but Forfar Athletic have been his life – and will carry on occupying an important part it sounds like. But the wind of change blowing into Station Park is real and shakes the barley in the nearby field as well as the new floodlight pylons. The ones on top of the roof at the Forfar mart-side of the ground are due to be decommissioned. New lights stand in the corners prepared to be switched on beneath a harvest moon later this summer.

A lot’s changed in McGregor's time in terms of the football landscape, too. Can Forfar ever hope to get within two games, and a measly three points, of the top flight again? That’s how close they were in 1985-86.

McGregor is still entrusted with the keys at Station Park.

Hearts blowing the Scottish title that season was the big story that year. But what about Forfar, who on the very day Albert Kidd etched himself into Scottish football folklore, came up short at the home of another Athletic, Alloa.

Falkirk went up instead behind champions Hamilton Accies and the rest, as they say, is history, pretty much all of which has been witnessed by McGregor, who, at 73, has recently ended his official association with the club by resigning from the board of directors after a 40-year stint.

His involvement stretches back even longer: his first memory of attending a game at Station Park is a Scottish Cup tie against Rangers in 1959 when he was eight-years old. He has since fulfilled myriad roles, including helping run the junior supporters’ club and the main supporters’ club. He was also programme editor, having a hand in every publication produced by the club since they belatedly started providing them at games in the mid-1970s to when they stopped, shortly before Covid.

About the only thing he hasn’t done for the club is play for them.

McGregor namechecked Ian McPhee as one of the most impressive players he has watched at Forfar.

His longest held title has been secretary, a role he continued in even while also serving as chairman. Indeed, the club have only had six secretaries in its near-130-year existence. One, Jim Black, spent five decades in the role.

Managers tend to come and go slightly more frequently, and there's been the curious business of the current incumbent, Ray McKinnon, departing and then returning via a few days at Forest Green Rovers, where he had been earmarked to become Duncan Ferguson's assistant before everything collapsed with Ferguson's sacking. McKinnon will be in the dugout this afternoon for the friendly against Formartine United, with McGregor looking on from the stand as usual.

Did McGregor ever come close to playing for the Loons? “Never,” he says. Goalkeeper for Forfar Academy was as serious as it got. There were professional footballing relatives. "I had an uncle who played for Scotland, Jimmy Sharp, though I never met him,” he says.

His mother was one of nine children raised in Padanaram, just outside Forfar. "Two of her sisters went down to work in service in London and they both married Scottish footballers!" he says.

McGregor also enjoyed watching Craig Brewster in action at Station Park.

Sharp played for Dundee, Rangers and Chelsea. "My other auntie married a guy called Alex Chaplin, who also came from Dundee," continues McGregor. "I met him often in later life. He played about 300 games for Fulham. He is an institution at Craven Cottage. He was the groundsman there with my auntie – they actually lived at Craven Cottage!

“I go down quite a bit. There was a bit about him in the programme when Scotland played Nigeria there. A crowd of us went down to see Scotland play at my beloved Craven Cottage.”

Beloved it might be, but Fulham represent a summer fling compared to the all-consuming nature of his passion for Forfar Athletic. McGregor admits that it’s just as well he never married because not everyone would put up with the commitment required to simply ensure a club like Forfar’s survival, with their 300 season ticket holders and average crowds of around 500.

Garden parties have been held this week in Edinburgh to honour those who have had MBEs and CBEs and the like conferred upon them. Men like McGregor are the unsung knights of Scottish football who deserve recognition. It’s nice to think that could be forthcoming – Forfar have royal connections, after all. The Earl of Strathmore, the grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II, was a fan, as was his son.

The Forfar players mob Gavin Swankie (4th from right) after his late winner in extra time as manager Dick Campbell celebrates on the touchline back in 2013.

The well-preserved Station Park is fit for a king. The tidiness can conceal the frantic efforts required to maintain both it and its occupants. McGregor is proud of the stadium's appealing properties.

Admirers include opposition chairmen. McGregor watched one Albion Rovers chairman wander out into the centre circle before a game. “He said: ‘I am just looking around as I always do when I come here. This is what I dream about in Coatbridge’.”

Forfar rely on five lounges named after 1980s legends, including former Scotland international goalkeeper Stewart Kennedy, to keep on keeping on. They are all but sold out for the season ahead already.

“We have to continually look for investment at our level,” says McGregor. “Because I don’t think we are ever going to get more money just from playing football. Not unless you are good enough to get into the Championship, and that costs money to get there. I know Arbroath have done it and have survived for a few seasons, but it is very difficult.”

Arbroath have benefitted from outside investment. All four Angus clubs enjoy close relations but Forfar will have looked on with envy at the Gayfield club recently announcing an annual profit of nearly £240,000. Forfar once benefitted from a donation from Aberdeen amid some desperately trying financial times in the late 1930s. Such esprit de corps does not necessarily exist now.

“The top clubs – and I am not having a go at them – will never pass more money down the chain,” says McGregor. “It is just never going to happen. It needs 11 to vote for a start!

“Look at the payments from the SPFL – and I will not see them now, so I don’t have to worry about them – but if you look at what a club in the middle of the Premiership is getting. Even take away what Rangers and Celtic are getting at the top every three months. Put the other ten clubs’ payments together and then say for one payment give 20 per cent of that to League One and Two clubs, I don’t think half of them realise just what that would mean to us, just to get that wee bit extra out of the cake.

“I don’t want to go out on a sour note,” he continues. “But (SPFL chief executive) Neil Doncaster with all his wonderful words about how it all goes down the chain – what, an extra couple of thousand pounds a season? It does not pay for your youngest player.

"The continual financial pressures of the club begin to wear you down," he adds. "And we are not alone in that. But just living as we do and as we have done for some number of years now, just trying to finance the running of Forfar Athletic is an incredible job without a sugar daddy or a mystery company or man pumping money into the club. I decided I have had enough sleepless nights.

“Don’t get me wrong. The club is not in any danger of going into any major financial problems. But I’m 73, there is a time and a place for everyone.”

He leaves – or doesn't, as the case may be – with precious memories, including two close-season tours to Canada in the 1980s. As the team drove down the freeway into Guelph in Ontario they spotted a large banner on a bridge: International football at the Oak stadium this Friday night: Guelph Oaks v Forfar Athletic. “I still have a photo,” says McGregor.

Then there were the times they came close to humbling Rangers at Hampden, which, on the first occasion, in February 1978, would have derailed what eventually became a Treble-winning season for the Ibrox side. The League Cup semi-final was postponed on the Saturday due to frost and staged on a Monday night in front of just 12,000. Second Division Forfar led 2-1 but the Premier League leaders scored a late equaliser through Derek Parlane to take the tie into extra-time, though even then Forfar might have won it.

"We had a third goal chopped off for offside, even the grainy Scotsport pictures of the time proved it was certainly not offside," says McGregor.

Four years later the same teams met back at Hampden in a Scottish Cup semi-final. "Rangers were not going that well, there were just 15,000 at Hampden," recalls McGregor. "It was 0-0 and then we had this chance for a potential penalty in the last minute and did not get it. Kenny Brown was sent off early in the replay and we were never going to beat Rangers at the second time of asking with ten men." Just 11, 864 attended the replay. Another memory – albeit agonising also – was letting slip a 2-0 lead over Rangers at Dens Park in a last-16 League Cup tie in 1985, with Ian McPhee passing up the chance to win the tie when he missed Forfar's fifth penalty.

What about best player? “The most gifted player I have seen in my time at Forfar was undoubtedly Craig Brewster," he says.

“I always quantify it by saying Ian McPhee has to be the most consistent player I have seen here. No one will ever play 530 games for Forfar again.

"So many players of that era were terrific legends. The team that won the first league title in 83-84. And then there’s David Bingham more recently, Alan Morgan… The veterans of the early sides... Alex Rae.

“And managers – what a combination it would have been if you could have put Archie Knox and Doug Houston together. And you can’t leave out Dick either. He would kill me otherwise!”

Although, as detailed earlier, they had come close on several occasions, Dick Campbell led Forfar to their only victory over Rangers on a memorable afternoon in 2013. A Gavin Swankie double over the Ibrox side earned a 2-1 win in the League Cup.

"Dick had a bus load of his pals over from Fife for the game, most supporting Rangers!" recalls McGregor. "Dick led us all down the town that night like the senior gladiator leading his men up the middle of Castle Street.”

McGregor had the heart-breaking task of sacking Campbell in 2015 after seven-and-a-half years in charge. “It still niggles him,” says McGregor. “But one win in the previous 15, second bottom in league, lost to Cowdenbeath at home. Dick conveniently forgets that! But he knows he is always welcome here.”

Everyone is welcome at Station Park. McGregor himself was there to greet The Scotsman on Thursday. “They still trust me with a key!” he says.

The only grumbles from visitors now involve the post-match grub. It’s been a decades-long tradition for opposition players to put a red ring around trips to Forfar on the fixture list. A pitch that used to reflect the fertile loamy Angus fields stretching out beyond the main stand, opened with a match against Rangers, was one attraction. The stand remains, the pitch does not.

It was ripped up ten years ago and replaced by Astroturf. Even a traditionalist like McGregor concedes it’s been a positive development, with only two games having been postponed due to weather since, one of them because of wind.

But the greatest change upsetting both home and away players is in the post-match dietary department. Footballers’ nutritional needs must be heeded, even at this less rarefied level. “The players don’t get bridies anymore here after the game,” notes McGregor. “They get pizza or pasta.

“I still hear some of the opposition players moaning about it! We still sell bridies in the refreshment kiosks and there are some on the boardroom table. That’s part of the folklore. You get a bit fed up when you go to away games: 'Not brought any bridies with you?' We do eat other things you know!

“It’s still the biggest seller in the ground even though they’ve diversified into hot dogs and things.”

Forfar are an equal opportunities' employer. They are sure to deal with both main suppliers in the town: Saddler's and McLaren's.

The former's semi-circular delicacies are sold in the kiosks, the latter’s are served in hospitality. It's an adroit way of dealing with the town's great bridie divide. All the same, McGregor must watch what he eats for one very good reason: he wants to live long enough to complete Scottish football's bingo card.

“I have never seen Forfar play at Pittodrie,” he says. “And I have not seen them at one other ground, but, hopefully, as long as I live another three weeks, I will tick that one off because I have not seen them play at St Mirren’s new ground, not that it is that new now."

Forfar are due there in the League Cup on 29 July. "After that, it will move to only being Aberdeen again," says McGregor. "Ian McPhee missed the bloody penalty here against Airdrie that cost me a trip to Pittodrie in the Scottish Cup. One of his many famous penalty misses!” Forfar haven’t played Aberdeen at Pittodrie since 1923. “And even I was not born then,” he says.