Lights, Camera, Cue the Pipe Band

Petershill Park provides the perfect spot for an opening day bonanza as both Partick Thistle and champions, Glasgow City get their season's off to winning starts.

There’s few things quite like the start of a brand new football season. Pre-match music has your internal rhythms snapping that little bit sharper, the coffee is neither too hot or too cold, but just right and the colours of orange, red, yellow, blue and green shirts that take to the pitch appear more vibrant and vivid as they shimmer in the glow of Scotland’s intermittent sun.

A vehicular meltdown late on Friday evening enforced a change of plan on what was one of the Scotland’s busiest Sunday’s of recent times. Edinburgh and Glasgow in particular have both become cultural and sporting hives of activity as both the Edinburgh International Festival and the UCI World Cycling Championships come to Scottish shores.

It’s made for a competitive landscape for the SWPL to champion itself as one of the world’s fastest growing and competitive leagues, a challenge also hardened by a World Cup competition that has the rest of the globe fixated on its drama. Coverage has been good, a bustling launch day felt infused with the energy that a new season brings, and the opening weekend saw three matches broadcast live on national free-to-air platforms. There is a new title sponsor, Scottish Power. New bespoke balls, supplied by Puma, and even a jazzy new shirt font with the SWPL logo emblazoned at the base of each and every number.

Having juked out of the slipstream and navigated my way through Glasgow’s city centre peloton, following a morning where I wondered whether or not para-cycling is in fact the most dangerous sport in the world, I hit the basement levels of Queen Street station to take the short train ride out to Springburn, and Petershill Park.

When the internal combustion engine let’s you down, Petershill Park rarely does. I’ve seen games contested in blazing sunshine, frost tipped winters, amongst biblical rain and with winds that would have the three little pigs nervously thumbing through their nearest tradesman directory there, but almost always it is game on.