St Mirren 0 Motherwell 0: Emotional farewell before lights go out at Love Street

HAVE you ever been to Love Street? If the answer to this question, an opening line in a song by World Party, is no, then consider the chance gone, bud. And having had 115 years in which to sample the delights of Cairters' Corner, the haunted boot room and a main stand known to some as the Shoebox, then you have no-one to blame but yourself.

Inexplicably, the song Love Street by World Party (which includes a highly appropriate sentiment about dreams coming true on Love Street) was left off the last ever pre-match playlist. The better-known Love Street by the Doors was present and correct, however. It includes the lyric: "There's a store where the creatures meet... on Love Street," later to lend itself to the name of a St Mirren fanzine. No longer, though, will the people of Paisley congregate on these sweet slopes, as they have done since 1894. No longer will the noise of studs on concrete echo out from the players' tunnel. Clack, clack, clack – the sound which for over a century has heralded the marching in of thousands of Saints.

"If you want to be emotional big man, be emotional," one Buddy encouraged his pal, as many engaged with the problem of maintaining an image while wrestling with surges of emotion. For some, it meant forcing back tears. This is Scotland, after all. This is Paisley.

But football grounds can do strange things to people. To avoid the anxiety of displaying emotion in public, many took themselves away at the end, and snatched a few moments of thought in 'their' seat, or 'their' old spot on what was once vast sweeps of terracing. This followed a rather routine attempt by the club to do something to mark the old lady's passing. Fireworks were an obvious idea, but, alas, proved a totally redundant concept. Such a day required no artificial stimulant.

The fans were already fired-up like Catherine wheels, and didn't need fiery propulsions exploding above them – obscured for many in any case by the roofs of the stands – to heighten the sensation. Inside the heads of most fizzed more explosive memories, such as Ian Scanlon's long-range raker against Celtic in the early Eighties. Now, that was a rocket.

More successful was the conga-line of legends which snaked out onto the pitch, led by 1987 Scottish Cup-winning skipper Billy Abercrombie. "Aber's gonnae get you," sang the North Bank, another echo of a time gone. He gamely took the microphone from the PA announcer, perhaps having briefly considered one last shoulder barge on the sacred turf. The other 39 former players in this dream squad followed on behind. As applause rang out across the ground it was impossible to avoid concluding that there are St Mirren heavyweights, and then there is Mark Yardley.

But this was about the fans as much as anything else, and about an old, cherished ground. One visitor was Hans-Peter Hauck, a German with no emotional connection to Love Street, save for a desire not to see it bulldozed. He left his home in Aschaffenburg, near Frankfurt, on Friday, and returned there yesterday. "I read about how Love Street is about 115 years old," he said. "So I had a wish to see this last game.

"The atmosphere in Scottish grounds is so intense, and I am fascinated by them because they are normally in the centre of towns, cramped-in by rows of houses and with lots of pubs around them. In Germany the grounds are now all on the outskirts."

The footballing landscape in Scotland, too, is changing, regrettably. Love Street is destined to become dust, and joins a growing list of those we have lost in just the last 20 years, and which includes such resonant names as Broomfield, Bayview, Annfield and Boghead.

"No way would have been the right way to say goodbye," said fan Nicky Giannini, as he reflected on the last game – a 0-0 draw with Motherwell. For yes, it must also be recorded that a match featured on this significant day. Poor though it proved, it was perhaps representative of the majority of those which have swept across this park. For every humdinger of a comeback against Celtic, for every extra-time victory over Slavia Prague in the Uefa Cup, there have been countless afternoons like Saturday, ridden as it was with poor control and fresh-air swipes. It's just as well there was plenty of reading in the excellent 52-page souvenir programme.

Given the goalless nature of Saturday's game, the honour of Last Ever Goal at Love Street had to be retrospectively awarded to an unwitting Craig Dargo, who struck in last weekend's 1-0 win over Hamilton Accies. "I never even thought about it until you mentioned it there," he told reporters. "Of course it's nice. But it would also have been nice to end it with a goal from someone from St Mirren today, and with a win for the supporters."

It could have been worse. Many had been fearful that St Mirren, perverse to the end, would contrive to lose this last, historic game, having won their previous four matches. Included in this group, it seemed, was referee Alan Muir. He stood accused of being afraid to award Motherwell a party-pooping penalty in the final minute, after Stephen McGinn had appeared to upend Paul Quinn in the box. Instead, seconds later, with the clock reading 4.50pm and the ball bobbling around harmlessly in midfield, time was called on Love Street's association with football – in the league that is.

There remains the possibility that we might have to go through all of this again if St Mirren draw their Scottish Cup fourth-round match with Brechin City on Saturday, hence several desperate pleas being issued across the Tannoy to refrain from dismantling parts of the ground. Permission was granted to pilfer the speakers, "because they are rubbish anyway".

But most fans only seemed to want one last stroll across the pitch. At about the place where Scanlon drew back his foot against Celtic, Graeme Reid reflected on what the ground meant to him. "The game itself was rubbish, but that was secondary," he said. "It is difficult for some people to understand how emotional it can be. Try and imagine how many hundreds of times I have been in this ground. At a football match you go through so much emotion – you pour it all out during a game. And to leave that all behind and close it down, and build flats or whatever here, is quite sad."

Top of the memory tree for him was the frosty day when Alex Ferguson's side dismantled an emerging Dundee United side 4-1 in the Scottish Cup. "They were Premier Division and we were First Division, and we hammered them," he recalled. Dreams came true on Love Street.


MAN OF THE MATCH: Tony Fitzpatrick

Given the need to salute the prevailing nostalgic mood, and because the emotion of the day seemed to inhibit the present-day St Mirren players, the Love Street stalwart is, perhaps, the only choice.