The flustered, first tee guddle on the golf course is a common palaver. A rummage for a battered ball here, a forage for a tatty glove there, a delve for a pencil goodness knows where?Instead of an elegant, poised build up to an opening drive, you end up frantically flapping about with all the grace of Admiral Nelson trying to change a duvet cover.
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Nick Rodger on the 10th. Picture:Colin Mearns

This fevered search for the various odds and sods required for a round of gowf may look as chaotic as the Keystone Cops attempting to erect a clothes horse while you dig into the dark, fusty nooks and crannies of the bag, but, as you curse and mutter that “the bloody poke of tees is in here somewhere,” at least you know you are in possession of said odds and sods.

Which is more than can be said for this correspondent and his colleague, Scott Mullen, when we were invited along to Caprington Golf Club in Kilmarnock for a game of Footgolf. “Did you bring a baw?,” said Paul Doherty, the sales director of Footgolf Scotland. “Er, no we didn’t,” came the rather sheepish response from a spectacularly ill-prepared duo as we stared vacantly at each other like Laurel & Hardy trying to fathom out an Ordnance Survey Map. It was a fairly inauspicious start.

Mercifully, Paul’s car boot is packed with a myriad of balls, it resembles the draw machine for the National Lottery. So, with fitba in hand, off we trotted for a first taste of this sporting amalgamation. This was going to be all about channelling the combined forces of our inner Messi and McIlroy. Then again, it had the potential to be more like Cissie and Ada.

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Scott Mullen clears the rough on the 9th. Picture:Colin Mearns

The premise is pretty simple and the leather wedge is legal. Instead of hitting a wee, dimpled ball with a collection of sticks until you get it into a small hole, you kick a big ball down a fairway until you get it into a bigger hole.

Of course, anybody who plays golf knows fine well that this process can be an anguish-laden palaver of swipes, thrashes and desperate gouges which wouldn’t look out of place on the blood-stained battlefields of yore. Footgolf, too, can quickly descend into a frenzied scene of wayward blooters. “There are similar frustrations,” conceded Paul, who was a recreational golfer but readily admits that he is much better at Footgolf. “You can kick it big off the tee but if you’re short game is not up to much, you’ll not score. "Unfortunately, when it came to golf, my long game and my short game were both pretty dire. The instinct with Footgolf is to boot it as far as you can. It’s an ego thing. In golf, people stand on a tee and try to smack a ball as far as they can. But it’s all about course management. I can beat lads who kick it further than me just by putting it in the right place.”

The Caprington Footgolf course was only opened last week. “Up until three months ago, it was a swamp,” said Doherty of this piece of land which sits alongside the club’s regular 18-hole golf course. This was all rather fitting. Whether it’s golf or Footgolf, this correspondent is well versed in exploring the murky depths. “We have 12 Footgolf courses in Scotland now and there’s room for more,” added Paul, who plays competitively across the UK. “I’ve sat in front of a lot of golf club committees and it takes time to get things like this through. We are starting one with Muckhart Golf Club but that was first proposed two years ago. At first, regular golfers were a bit stand off-ish but I think they see it brings a bit of revenue into the club. Hilton Park do Footgolf once a week and it helps keep the membership costs down. Clubs are realising they have to try new things with memberships declining."

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Nick Rodger sinks the ball on the 15th. Picture:Colin Mearns

The one thing you quickly learn about t Footgolf is that the toe-poke is an extremely useful weapon in the armoury, particularly on the greens. In football, the big toe technique is much-maligned with withering observers sneering that is about as aesthetically pleasing on the eye as the Elephant man with a bad cold. When David Narey scored a wonder goal for Scotland against Brazil in the 1982 World Cup, Jimmy Hill almost sparked rioting in the streets when he dismissively described the effort as a “toe-poke.”

Forget all that stuff you were taught about caressing the ball with the in-step. On the Footgolf front, a straight jab with the toe-end brings considerable rewards as this scribe discovered on the second hole as I poked in a tidy 12-footer for my par. That was nothing. Later in the round, Paul showed what can be achieved when he dinked in a tidy effort from 50 yards for a two on the 11th.

Mr Mullen, meanwhile, seemed to be fighting a fairly damaging hook over the opening couple of holes. His left-footed curlers off the tee may have been handy over a defensive wall at a direct free-kick but, like traditional golf, the punishment for missing the fairway leaves you, well, on the back foot. “You’ll be up ta yer waist in s***e there,” said Stewart Robertson, another of our playing partners, with the observational eloquence of the great Henry Longhurst.

Scott quickly found his shooting boots, though. In the end he signed for a 79, 11-over the par of 68. “A very good score for a first attempt,” said Paul, who nipped round the 2,249-yard course in 73. As for yours truly? Well, a reckless attempt at fading an approach round the dogleg on the 18th ended with the ball stuck up a tree and led to a humiliating salvage operation amid the twigs and foliage. Despite this sorry scene, a score of 87 was certainly not the worst card I’ve signed down the years. As one often wryly observes, it was a solid round sullied by three pars.

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Nick Rodger in the rough on the 17th  Picture:Colin Mearns

Booting away at a ball for two hours left my leg joints feeling like they’d been slowly loosened with a rusty Allen Key. It was all good fun, though. “Before Stuart McCall went back to manage Bradford we couldn’t get him off the Footgolf course at Cumbernauld,” said Paul of the sport’s growing popularity. “We’ve had Leigh Griffiths and Charlie Mulgrew there too while Paolo Di Canio and his partner won the UK Pairs Championship. You tend to find that, tee to green, footballers are really good but the putting can be the Achilles Heel.”

Whether it’s traditional golf or Footgolf, cursing the ones that got away on the greens remains, well, par for the course.