ARDROSSAN Winton Rovers boss Stevie Wilson is delighted that

football fans are in line to make a return to the stands in mid-September.

Wilson insists that for a local club like Winton, the community needs the team and the team needs the community.

Last week Nicola Sturgeon announced that the reintroduction of fans to spectator sports can be gradually brought back into stadiums as of September 14.

And Wilson says this is welcome news for Winton and the rest of lower league clubs in Scotland.

He told the Herald: “For a club like ourselves, the community and the supporters are vital.

“It’s something I’ve said before. We need the community but the community also needs us. We need each other.

“To get the supporters back in it’s brilliant for us and them. A lot of the fans are of an older generation.

“I still speak to a few because of my time when I was a player at Ardrossan years ago.

“All they keep going is ‘I just want back to the fitba’. They’re okay during the week because they’re retired and they’ve been used to that.

“However, at the weekends, they don’t know what to do on a Saturday because the football was their day out and something to look froward to.

“They love coming down to Winton Park and we love having them there.

“Some of them have genuinely struggled and they’re the people I feel sorry for.

“I’m delighted that there’s a guideline on when we can get them back in.

“At Winton Park, the capacity is around 2500-3000, but we don’t get crowds like that, so we should be able to space the fans out accordingly by putting measures in place to assign so many people to certain zones around the park.

“The committee have already discussed plans and how the logistics of it will work. Fingers crossed we’ll see it come in to play sooner rather than later.

“We’re all desperate to get going again. It’s a weird feeling just sitting and waiting for something to happen.”