NO excuse is ever needed to retell the story about that time Chic Charnley fended off a Samurai sword attack with a traffic cone during a Partick Thistle training session although as it happens yesterday presented a perfect platform for the yarn.

This was the 1990’s when John Lambie’s rag tag band of scoundrels, the manager always filled his team with such characters, were doing their work on Ruchill Park, an interesting part of Glasgow, when two young gentlemen decided to tell Mr Charnley that they weren’t overly enamoured with his footballing abilities.

The situation quickly escalated.

Read more: Partick Thistle ready to take on the Old Firm after confirmation of a brand new £4m training facility

“There were two boys in the park who were giving me and the players a bit of stick,” recalled the bold Chic a few years back. "They came out with ‘you’re f****** useless Charnley’ so I basically told them to come back in an hour after training and we would have a wee discussion.

“I didn’t think I’d see them again but then the two characters came up the hill and said they were ready for their discussion. When I turned round one of them had a Samurai sword and the other one had a dagger. They also had a dog with them.

“As I raced towards the moron with the sword, I picked up a traffic cone while Gerry and Gordon made a beeline for the guy with the knife.

“The bloke with the sword saw what was happening to his pal and started running away after the dog. I chased after him with the traffic cone but he stopped abruptly and swung the sabre at me.

“I instinctively put my hand out and felt the blade slash through my palm. I was raging and dropped the cone. I whacked him with a right hander and he went down in a heap.”

It’s fair to assume Andres Iniesta does not have a similar tale to tell.

That’s what can happen when even a top tier Glasgow football team doesn’t have a training facility to call their own. They move around from grass to gravel in search for a few uninterrupted hours to work on their passing, crossing, shooting and self-defence.

It always felt as if this happened to Thistle more than most. Not any more. Not now there will have a £4million dedicated training ground for the first time in their 140 year history

Gerry Britton, playing legend and now highly respected head of youth development at Firhill, was there in the bad/good old days and can’t quite believe all of this is happening.

“When I heard about it I felt like it was Christmas morning,” said Britton. “It is something we have always strived for and hoped we’d be able to achieve but to be told it was actually going to be a genuine proposition was fantastic news.

“Will it save me on mileage? No half. We have to ship loads of balls and dirty strips all over the city so it will make a massive difference to whole project and the way we go about our business."

Read more: Partick Thistle ready to take on the Old Firm after confirmation of a brand new £4m training facility

Britton can remember the day Charnley took on and beat Ruchill’s last, and most likely, only Samurai and bravely recounted that he hid to avoid what must have been an almighty palaver.

Thistle under the great Lambie hugely over-achieved and their feats are even more impressive considering what they had to put up with on a daily basis.

“We trained in Ruchill Park on disused bowling greens, getting chased off there by council workers,” said Britton. “We trained on school pitches, we were at what is now the Firhill complex when it was St Columbus on a gravel pitch.

“We called it dog **** park. We had to take all the **** off it so we could train. We went through the entire spectrum here so the prospect of a state of the art facilities is fantastic.

“That day with Chic I was hiding somewhere when that was all happening. I have to say that incident did sum up the way we went about things in the past and some of the areas we went to. Even with the kids, some places we’ve trained have been difficult. We’ve dodged golf balls, we’ve had motor bikes coming across the pitches as well.

“So to go from those beginnings to where we will be taking the academy in the next couple of years is fantastic.

“If you are at a council facility you end up waiting for people to leave, then you have a two-hour slot and by the time you get everything ready it does cut down on the time. With our own facility we can double the contact time we have with the kids, even informally."

All joking aside, selling Partick Thistle as an attractive club to parents of a kid with a choice of teams with which to train is a hell of a lot easier when they can show them one of the best facilities of its kind in the country.

“That is a definite,” said Britton. “But it’s also in terms of the staff as well. It’s going to affect everyone right from the coaches to the kit men; the whole working environment will be so attractive.

“It’s right to say to it will help to attract the top players, hopefully, to come to the academy.

Read more: Partick Thistle ready to take on the Old Firm after confirmation of a brand new £4m training facility

“We have got to look after the kids so to be able to bring them into an environment where everything will be state of the art is so conducive to their lessons. It will be a big pull to parents who a lot of the time are the people you are trying to impress.”

Managing director Ian Maxwell was one happy man as he looked forward to a future he could not see when he walked back into the club four years ago now.

His task now is to find a site where all the magic will take place.

He revealed: “We’ve got ideas. We’ve been looking at going to do our own things somewhere, and that was always going to be a partnership with somebody like Glasgow University or one of our other existing sites, but trying to get a bit more exclusivity there in terms of usage.

“The difference with them is that they are all sites that somebody else currently owns, and this is a site that we will buy ourselves. There’s land all over Glasgow and I’d imagine that the phone will start ringing now with people who have a bit of land we can use for it.

“In terms of timescale, as quickly as we possibly can. If we can get it up within a couple of years, then that would be brilliant.”

Staying in Glasgow would be the club’s first choice but, as Maxwell says, Celtic, Rangers and Hibernian all train miles away from their respective homes so nothing is set in stone.

Read more: Partick Thistle ready to take on the Old Firm after confirmation of a brand new £4m training facility

He will visit several training complexes in Britain to get tips on even the littlest detail such as the best place for the washing machines to go.

These are exciting times for Thistle and, naturally, the supporters and everyone rest will be fascinated to see where this takes the club.

Maxwell said: “If you look at the league, the clubs in the bottom six or seven places need to look at St Johnstone and think that they are a similar size, and they’re consistently hitting the top six.

“The likes of Aberdeen, Hearts and Hibs, if they come up, are hitting nine or ten thousand season ticket holders, so that’s a big jump and it’s not going to happen here overnight.

"So we look at someone like St Johnstone, and I think we have to try to be the best of the rest and be that team who is always in and around that top six spot, winning cups or getting to finals.”

“This club has come a long way. You want to see progression every year, and since we won the league we’ve always managed to finish a wee bit higher. We’ve got more points, scored more goals and conceded less goals, and that’s culminated in this season getting into the top half.

“This will give everyone a lift, whether you’re a supporter or a player or an academy kid, and it’s just about keeping that progression going.”

Partick Thistle are a good news story. This makes the world a better place.