Hampden Park: Geeing up the crowd @Glasgow2014

I had arrived at Hampden Park a good 90 minutes before the action was due to start. There would probably be no more than 2 - 3,000 in the crowd when I took my seat, thinking it was going to be a long and perhaps dreary wait. How wrong could I have been.

You will see in this shot two weel kent Scottish journalists: The lovely Alison Walker and the less lovely Bryan Burnett. They were already speaking to the gathering crowd, informing everyone of what was going on, and entertaining the crowd as they led a series of wonderfully daft crowd based activities.

Even after there was a full house and events were underway, they would keep the crowd going by, for example, leading mass renditions of the proclaimers 500 miles between events (which you might have heard on the tele.) or running crowd kissing competitions (don't even ask!). They were great.

Alison in my opinion is one of the best sports broadcasters we have. Why BBC have decided to import so many sports journalists from down south and largely ignore the talents of local journalists such as Alison and Bryan we can only surmise. At least they would have been able to pronounce words such as loch, Murdoch and quaich!!

There are restrictions on the use of photographs, hence me not showing any of the athletes in competition within the venue (the marathon yesterday was OK as it was a public event). But in any case, it's good to recognise the people who have contributed so much to building the energetic crowd atmosphere at these games.