The battered cage descends into the bowels of hell. A day of back-breaking, life-threatening work awaits, the smell of impending doom pollutes the air; it’s a precursor to the noxious dust that fills the nostrils as daylight disappears up the mineshaft.
Faced with the prospect of a shift carting slag, it’s no wonder so many footballers sprung from the furnace of mining communities. Few did so more prodigiously than the now-defunct village of Glenbuck in East Ayrshire, erstwhile home to a slew of young men who would go on to become professional footballers, the most famous of whom was Bill Shankly.
There were 12 fatalities recorded in Glenbuck pits between 1884 and 1928. The causes of death differed but shared one trait: each was as gruesome as the next. Roof collapses accounted for many but other miners died as a result of being run over by haulage carts, or plummeting to their deaths when the chains hoisting lift cages snapped. 
It is why Shankly’s famous misquote about football as a matter of life and death can only be viewed through the prism of a man who experienced the callous, cruel realities of an existence in a mining community where the inhabitants were no strangers to daily danger and family tragedy, not to mention strikes and the endemic poverty which they were precipitated by.
The mines closed for good in 1931 and the last remaining inhabitants moved out of the village in the 1950s but the Glenbuck story is as relevant now as it was when Shankly was imparting his particular brand of football psychology at Liverpool’s Melwood traning ground as the Merseyside club claimed three league championships, two FA Cups and a UEFA Cup during a 15-year spell.
Shankly was not as prolific as his successor Bob Paisley but he laid the foundations for a playing-style and imbued the club with an air of invincibility that served Liverpool for three decades; it was an ethos that was born on the village pitch at Burnside Park and honed by the two teams that carried the village name: Glenbuck Athletic and Glenbuck Cherrypickers.
In these navel-gazing times of scrutinising Scottish youth football and its concomitant failures, it is worth pausing to consider the details: Glenbuck, forged by iron and fuelled by coal, was a natural conveyor belt. It churned at a prodigious rate of more than one professional footballer a year. In total, 50 men escaped mine work from a population that never surpassed 1700. In Shankly’s Village, the authors claim that it’s the per capita equivalent of a non-league club in London producing 250,000 professionals during the same period. 
“The importance of the story is universal,” says Adam Powley, co-author along with Robert Gillan of an absorbing new book on Glenbuck, entitled Shankly’s Village. “It transcends club loyalties and that was why I was drawn to it. I was moved by it. The players emerged in the face of numerous challenges; the coal industry was as difficult as it could get but they were still able to produce this hot house of talent over a 40-year period.”
“There’s something to be said about the link between community and football. It’s a lost environment. It occurs across Britain, that bond between work and football has been broken. It was something that we could see and it eventually became obvious that there was a link between the Glenbuck teams and the work they did in the mines.

The Herald:

The high piles of slag left by the mining works at Glenbuck

“Scottish teams pioneered a different kind of football to that played in English universities. You had to look after your neighbour because it would soon be his turn to look after you. The five-a-side games that were so popular in the village were taken to Liverpool by Shankly. You can see the direct link between how the football was played in the clubs and how he inculcated his Liverpool team with the ethos of Glenbuck.”
A further four Shankly brothers enjoyed playing careers, George Halley, was an FA Cup winner with Burnley in 1914, and the two Sandys – Tait and Brown - were members of the Tottenham side that won the FA Cup in 1901, the first and only non-league side to do so. Local legend has it that the trophy was later sent north and was displayed in a Glenbuck shop window to celebrate Brown and Tait’s role in the victory. 
The authors have a vision of the future, one that Gillan describes as “ma baby for the past 10 years”. The plans are certainly ambitious and include the restoration of the Glenbuck pitch, a museum, an academy for young players, accommodation and perhaps even a geo-park on a site that has been identified as an area of outstanding geological interest. He has the backing of the Scottish Mines Restoration Trust and specifically its head, Professor Russell Griggs.
He tells the authors in the book’s closing chapter, Rebirth: “There are daft ideas which turn out to be not so daft. I think there is a market, if that pitch is restored, for people to come and play football matches at Glenbuck again. You could build two rows of cottages where players could stay over the weekend, a restored pitch, somewhere to eat – who knows maybe you could have Everton ‘teams’, some from Liverpool, all sorts of different teams coming to play on the pitch and stay in the village.” 
The obvious barrier is money. In the post-industrial era, the old Glenbuck site is accessible only by a single track road in need of repair and there is uncertainty over the state of the ground. The area on which the village once stood is a picture of desolation, the skyline pockmarked with open-cast mining holes that resemble a Celtic backline on Europa League night. Even to the untrained eye, it will require a massive site clearance operation before building work can commence.
There are further obstacles. Not everyone shares Gillan’s and Griggs’ fervour for the project. Local residents believe it is an invasion of privacy and say the Shankly memorial that sits at the entrance to Glenbuck Estate – a distinct entity from Glenbuck village – has become a “mini-graveyard”. 
“I realise people are indebted to him and that he was a great man but I have cars here all the time,” says one. “Some come at all hours of the morning – anytime between 2am and 5am – they have the doors wide open blaring You’ll Never Walk Alone out of them.
“It’s a memorial to Bill Shankly but it’s being used like a shrine. It’s a bit concerning that we’re getting ashes scattered, plaques put up and rose bushes planted. It’s becoming like a mini-graveyard. It’s not consecrated ground, I don’t care that it’s not consecrated ground but it’s a public highway. That’s not right to me. It’s an infringement of privacy.
“I don’t see how they can put in all the things they say they are going to. It’s going to cost tens of millions. There’s a whole open-cast mine site that needs to be cleared for a start.”
Powley, an English journalist who has specialised in books about Tottenham Hotspur, is mindful of the need for local interests to be taken account of but thinks any regeneration plan and the subsequent change it would bring can only be a force for good.
“It’s a lovely place but it needs some kind of regeneration. In that part of the world, they need jobs for young people. There needs to be redevelopment but it needs to be done with sensitivity and sustainability. When we spoke to the Scottish Mines Restoration Trust we thought it was a wonderful idea to resurrect the pitch in the village."

 

“I’m supportive of Robert’s plan. I came in to help study and research the book but, being a football fan, we talked about sensitivity in regard to players, in regard to getting kids an education in the game and a purpose in life. Glenbuck seemed suitable for that. I understand local concerns because people there have seen what happened to the coal industry, seen what’s happened post-industrialisation, the despoliation that has gone on. But – as we say in the book – at the moment these are just plans . . . something to get the village going again.”