AFTER all these years of gathering in ale-infused clubhouses, the Northern League annual meeting scaled vertically upmarket last Saturday. It was held in the guest hall at Alnwick Castle, ancestral home of the Dukes of Northumberland – the Percy family – and, more recently, of Harry Potter.
OLD, old story, the column was again invited to hand over the honours at the Over 40s League’s annual presentation in Sunderland, a pleasure shared with former Premiership referee Ken Redfern, 74 and still whistling.
LAST Thursday’s column anticipated at length the centenary season of the Wensleydale Football League. The evening previously, the league recorded perhaps one of its greatest claims to fame in the previous 99 years.
SINCE first form days, and to all manner and estate of men, Paul Dobson has been known as Sobs. It seems tearfully appropriate, really, for he is co-editor of A Love Supreme, the Sunderland FC fanzine.
SAM GORDON’S funeral faced fearfully and full frontally the terrible reality that he had hanged himself. Suicide, we were reminded, is now the single biggest cause of death among British men under 45.
THE Wensleydale Football League, grass rooted in North Yorkshire, marks its centenary next year. They’re looking for memories and mementoes.
THE banner flying photograph was taken two Saturdays ago at Wadham Lodge v Clapton, Essex Senior League. Spectators may understandably have queried the identity of Barry Chambers, proclaimed trade unionist and activist.
FOR almost 120 years it was a railway station – a rather magnificent railway station, a Grade II* listed building – and then a transport museum.
HENRY McLAREN, a Durham County cricketer in the 1970s, rings after last week’s Backtrack recorded the likely demise of Lands CC, near Cockfield.
THOUGH it remains the permanent way, the Railroad to Wembley was temporarily abandoned last Saturday. There’s a limit to how many times the beaten track from Darlington to Thornaby may be traversed without a déjà vu view. We catch the X66 bus instead.
