HOPE comes in many forms at Ayr United. It's present in the SPFL Championship league table, where the perennial underachievers sit top going into today's match at Arbroath. It can be found looking around the stadium, too, where chairman David Smith has made good on his promise to build a supporters hub. Then there is Dipo Akinyemi. Optimism can be heard in the cheers that greet another goal for Ayr's summer signing from Welling United, or in the excited voices of the children who form impatient queues to meet him whenever he turns up as the special guest at a club-run football camp or community outreach programme.
Akinyemi has been the early success story of the Championship season so far and his arrival at Ayr United is testament to the way they do things a little bit differently at Somerset Park. When managing director Graeme Mathie was appointed last December he promised to make Ayr a club for the area to be proud of. It wasn't just a call to arms on the pitch but off it, too, with the former Hibernian sporting director determined to place the club at the forefront of community activity. It is undeniably Ayr’s flying start to the season that has grabbed the attention of neutrals, though, and particularly the efforts of Akinyemi, who has come from the relative obscurity of the National League South to sit atop the Championship leading scorers charts on 11 goals, a haul that some strikers would be pleased with over the course of an entire campaign.
The telling of how Akinyemi arrived at Ayr in June is worth greater inspection. Shorn of talismanic striker Tomi Adeloye, who joined League 2 Swindon Town in the summer following a season in which he scored 14 goals, Ayr were in need of a front man. Keith Glendinning, the club's head of recruitment, had already been working on a replacement, scouring a market that could well be his specialist subject on Mastermind: the English Football Conference. Deep into his Wyscout research his gaze alighted upon Akinyemi, scorer of 16 goals in 34 games for Welling last season.
