SPORTSDESK COMMENT WITH MARTIN DOWEY: Is football finally coming home?

The rollercoaster storyline of the Weaponness Sports Village finally looks to be coming to an end.

Departing council leader Tom Fox this week vowed that the plans are now firmly in place for football to return in time for the 2016-17 season.

Excuse me if I don’t jump around with excitement.

It has been almost eight years since the full-time whistle was blown on higher-level football in Scarborough.

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Since then much has happened. Clubs have been formed - and folded.

Promises have been made by all and sundry, including an initial timeline that would have seen the project finished a number of months ago.

But mainly, a sense of frustration and resignation has built up while the town’s previous football shrine crumbled into a pile of bricks and nettles.

Many of us sampled what it was like to have a club in town at a decent level of the game.

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When I started my job as Boro reporter, following the untimely passing of Tony Smith in 2003, I didn’t realise how much of a treat I was enjoying.

Boro may have been lurching from one financial disaster to another, but at least they had a ground within marching distance.

The nomadic lifestyle doesn’t suit a football club, especially when your home has to be a 40-mile round-trip away.

Many of the luxuries that come naturally to most football clubs are lost.

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The key one of these being the link with the community, something that is so hard to maintain at the best of times.

Plenty of people will now be thinking that they’ll believe it when they actually see it.

Many others will have filled their Saturday afternoons with other past-times - eight years will give plenty of chance to do that.

So because of this unwanted gap, which has allowed a stadium to decay and interest to wane, it will take much more than just building a sports village on Weaponness to bring football home.

Bridges, faith and a number of other elements will need to be built as well before we can sample the memories that brought us all so much joy while standing on the terraces of the McCain Stadium.

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