Lights, camera, action as writer salutes magic of floodlit football in a celebration of the unsung beauties of the beautiful game

Scottish football’s less glamorous but no less passionate grounds and the fans that go there are celebrated in a new book by writer Daniel Gray and photographer Alan McCredie.

Their pilgrimage around Scotland captures the everyday – or every Saturday – beauties of the beautiful game.

In this excerpt from Snapshot, Gray hails the magic of action under lights.

It is faint but it is there, a mere clipping of memory. I am sitting on a terrace at Ayresome Park, Middlesbrough, beneath the blood red crush bar, looking upwards.

The game grunts ever onwards, but I do not watch. My eyes face the night sky. I am nine years old and have never seen it looking like this before. It is 8pm, late autumn and all above should be slate black in this grim march towards winter in north-east England; instead, it glows bright as if God has poked a hole in the sky so that he might watch the match.

Night did not look like this anywhere else. There were hazy satsuma streetlamps and shimmering Christmas decorations, and blinking cinema signs or cosy moonlight – all exciting and comforting, but nothing like four pylons brightening a football ground. Floodlights turned their pocket of town into a travelling circus or a fairground, the centre of attention and the only place to be. They transferred areas that were dingy or unremarkable by day into showbiz venues exuding unlikely glamour, as when an impossibly attractive woman enters a stinking and gloomy pub. Floodlights turned football into something else altogether. It was the same sport with its bawling and huffing, its elation and exasperation, but now it felt somehow inverted or enhanced, as if it had been reimagined by Roald Dahl. Yet here is the greatest part of this sorcery: it still does, and floodlights are still enchanting.

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They still glow from afar, beckoning us across town or city like the Three Wise Men and their star. They still smother surrounding streets in the pale gold of Easter egg wrapping foil. They still illuminate and dramatise the rain that swarms past them, adding horror film melodrama absent on a Saturday afternoon. They still hover above the happy tumult in that precious half-hour leading to kick-off, shrouding stage lighting on the theatre of programme sellers, ticket queues and old pals worshiping statues. They still blind you when you follow a high clearance, and linger on the backs of your eyelids as you lay awake later, gleeful and frenetic like a kid on candyfloss. They still paint the pitch the colour of a chocolate lime sweet, making grass, somehow, an abstract work worthy of a prize. They still throw shadows on players, who sometimes are pursued and mimicked by a whole quartet of dancing pickpockets. They still change the atmosphere in grandstands and terraces, so that the noises from the seated and the standing are fresher, crisper, more audibly now. They still lend the feeling that you, the supporter, are doing something secretive and contraband – while most of the country watches television and yawns towards bed, the fan is wide awake and illuminous. They still leave you enraptured and besotted, so that the next day, when you talk about the game, you follow all your yarns with those magnetic words: “It was under the lights.” Floodlights are there for you from Dingwall to Annan. They gleam upon Aberdeen, Ayr and Coatbridge. Their breeds are many: the lustrous and leggy old pylons and egg-yolk globes of Cappielow; the handsome and confident corner landmarks of Palmerston, sure and prim as sea captains in a storm; the incandescent prize-boards of Pittodrie, which must tempt North Sea mermaids; the roof joint prongs of Stark’s Park, standing to attention and fixated on the pitch; the smart beanpoles of East End Park which radiate like welcome search helicopters; the crooked-necked wonders of Tannadice, keeping a watchful and caring eye

On it goes, through the modern lamps clamped to stand roofs, and the standard issue poles, not everything beautiful, but all of it useful. Beneath the transfixing rays of the new and the old, happy hearts rumble for floodlit football. Floodlights make children of us all.