Poverty and the elements may have taken their toll on Arbroath's Gayfield ground over the seasons, but there is one section of the stadium which is rigorously maintained. The revolving door is kept well oiled.
In the last 13 years, 14 managers or so - no-one is entirely sure, or can be too bothered to count - have come and gone as the club has slowly inched it's way towards extinction. The latest incumbent, however, has his foot stuck firmly in the door.
Dave Baikie has not only transformed the club in little over two seasons, he has also raised his own stock - it's fair to say it was nowhere when he took the job - immeasurably. When he arrived in June 1997, with no senior experience either as a player or manager, Arbroath were as low as the could be short of liquidation. They were bottom of the Third Division and, had there been a pyramid system in Scottish football, they would have been cast into the wild wilderness of junior football.
Ironically, had there been, Baikie's previous charges, Tayport, might well have replaced them. In seven years the quietly spoken Dundonian had won six league titles and reached three Scottish Cup finals, winning in 1996 against Camelon. He had been brought in, first as co-manager, by Peter Marr, whom he quickly replaced. However, the club, an amateur team before 19990, kept bumping up against the seniors' ring fence.
Personally ambitious, Baikie was frustrated and he began applying for jobs when vacancies came up at senior clubs. It may not quite rank with Decca turning down the Beatles, but Baikie put himself forward for the East Fife vacancy when Steve Archibald left, and was rejected. There is now a Division between Arbroath and the Fifers.
The neophyte's appointment at Arbroath was greeted with as much snobbery as it was scepticism. Baikie was asked by one reporter if he could count himself a success if Arbroath finished merely second bottom. How could someone with neither playing experience or knowledge of the top level, possibly succeed, asked the bar-room pundits?
Hard work, respect for his players, researching the opposition, organising his own side and a flinty determination to succeed was the answer. Baikie has even made a net gain in the transfer market in his tenure, lavishing £11,000 (on the one player, the perennially predatory Colin McGlashan) and bringing in £13,000.
"The board were looking for someone local for the job," Baikie recalls. "I got a phone call from a local reporter asking me if I was interested in going into senior management. Then I got a call from Arbroath asking me to go for an interview; that was it."
Baikie took over from the voluble and irascible Tommy Campbell, who used expletives as punctuation marks, and was last seen sneaking away to manage rivals Montrose. "The club had just finished bottom of the Third Division he recalls. "At the time there were something like 12 players, and three of them were 17-year olds. That's what I was left with. Twelve players and nothing else."
"I didn't know what to expect," he admits, in his typically understated way, summing up his first season in charge. "I just picked up a few players from different clubs and we got promoted."
Pushed about his part in it he says: "What I did consciously do was to bring in quite a few local players, ex juniors and seniors, through swaps. I managed to make a couple of good swaps with Tommy Campbell up in Montrose. I think I got the better of the deals ," he adds mischievously.
I don't think we were the best side in the division - we didn't have the best class of player - but what we did have was a good team spirit and we worked hard. That was rewarded by promotion."
Arbroath have no full-time players. One of Baikie's innovations was to split the training into two locations on two nights, McDairmid Park in Perth and Arbroath, on two evenings a week, making it easier for players who lived in the west of the country.
He also felt that the level of fitness was poor and he introduced a pre-season training camp. "I obviously got the fitness level up. We won our first three games, but I was still finding my way; it was a learning process. And I had to learn as I went. If I mad a mistake I made sure that I didn't make the same one again. There were a lot of pitfalls. Initially there was resistance from some of the players."
I've no doubt some of them were very sceptical about me. It took time to win their confidence. But the thing is that when you start to win games they're going to be happy...[he grins widely]...with the occasional win bonus.
After winning promotion in the first season, Arbroath were everyone's favourites to go down. "Campbell Money was manager of Stranraer and they had just been promoted to the First Division. H was asked how the positions were going to finish in the division he had left. He had us down at tenth. Going right back down. I cut that out of the paper," says Baikie with satisfaction, "and pinned it up on the wall in the manager's office to wind myself up and prove him wrong."
The transition to the new league was initially difficult. "The mistakes you got away with in the Third Division, a few slack passes, you don't get away with in the Second. So it was a case f setting about trying to add to the squad, getting a few better players. I think that after the first nine games we had five points. Everybody said, 'that's it, they're down'," he recalls.
He went for the much travelled McGlashan, then at Montrose. "I managed to persuade the board to spend eleven grand on him. It was a lot of money for the club to pay out, but Colin certainly made the difference, added his experience. And, of course, he score goals."
"Again we learned from the first quarter of the season. And in the second quarter we took something like 17 points and that put us in touch. If we had beaten QOS in the last game of the season that would have put us in fourth, which would have been tremendous in out first season up."
Last year, Arbroath player 4-4-2; this season it is 3-4-1-2, with the veteran Tommy Bryce as the spare man. "We created the system to accommodate Tommy, because I'm a big admirer of him as a player. And the system we play is set up to score goals."
"It also lends itself to leaking them," Baikie continues, "so we're working a lot in training with the same system but organising better at the back. Because I do believe the system is working."
Palpably it is. Before yesterday's game Arbroath were a point clear of Alloa at the top, but he is making no predictions.. "We shouldn't fear any other team," he says. "I've got to be thinking of taking the club into the First Division, if it happens, and full-time football is the way for Arbroath. How that can be done is something I am working on at the moment. There's no point in going up, like Stranraer last year, as a part-time club in a full-time league."
When someone starts at the bottom, like Baikie, it is surely inevitable that he will want to see how high he can climb. "I would like to test myself at a higher level," he agrees before his mobile rings. It is his wife Anne, and he is off to pick her up from Tesco. But, it surely won't be long before he is on a larger club's shopping list and a chairman puts in that call.
As with a lot of the other Sunday Herald's reports the above does feature some inaccuracies - at least they are consistent.