From Bloodgate to Barney

The fee was doubtless substantial.

Written questions were additionally invited. The lady of this house, unusually in attendance, wanted to ask how he had the bloody brass neck but, regrettably, thought better of it.

The fee-paying school appeared also to have been in something of a quandary about the occasion – to raise funds for a South African hockey and rugby tour in the summer – as a preview in last Friday’s paper indicated.

Anxious to underline how many Barney boys had achieved great things on the rugby field – Rob Andrew, the brothers Underwood and Matthew Tait among them – they were understandably uncomfortable about being associated with a man so publicly branded a cheat.

The school, it was said, declined to comment.

We were guests of Mr John Niven, West Auckland architect and superb host.

The setting was grand, the dining hall panelled with sports honours, the meal excellent.

Since the invitation had clashed with a Burns Night dinner elsewhere, Mr Niven had even organised the finest haggis this side of Bannockburn, and a substantial dram with which to toast it.

Further evidence that this was a seat of learning, they’d even dispensed with the familiar game of heads and tails – the coin-tossing version, anyway – in favour of something marginally more cerebral.

“How long was Dean Richards a policeman for?”

asked Martin Pepper, the organiser, inviting his audience to go higher or lower than the given number of years.

Mr Pepper is by every account an excellent director of rugby. He would be unlikely to make head of English, however, if he persists in ending sentences with a preposition.

Mr Richards, the previous evening on his feet in Hartlepool, talked for about 15 minutes, answered questions for a further ten, swore quite a bit and generally suggested that he was an altogether better rugby player – and probably an altogether better polliss – than he is an after-dinner speaker.

He talked a lot about what were perceived to be the good old days – “to us, protein was a pint of Guinness” – and of how he and Mr John Jeffrey had kicked down Princes Street with the Calcutta Cup.

Of Bloodgate he said almost nothing, and nothing at all that hadn’t many times been in the papers.

He used a fake blood capsule, he said, because others had been doing it for years. The punishment, he thought, was a bit harsh. If he were repentant, there was no sign of it.

By this time it was turned 11pm. Barney’s boarders, it was to be hoped, were well out of earshot and long since in their beds.

It didn’t seem worthwhile to ask the school what they made of it all. They would have declined to comment further.

SPEAKING of those who (shall we say) are given to bending the rules, Dick Fawcett reports that at Redcar Cricket Club – where these days his only game is bingo – the call following the Westminster expenses scandal has changed from “Gordon’s den, number ten”

to “Robbers’ den, number ten.” It’s followed, says Dick. “by general rhubarb, rhubarb noises.”

COMMITMENT to the Barney army meant that it was impossible, earlier that day, for the Railroad to Wembley to continue with a trip to Roker Park.

There are, or strictly were, two Roker Parks. One was Sunderland’s ancestral pile, the other the home of Stotfold FC in Bedfordshire.

On Saturday they played Shildon, FA Vase fourth round. The bairns, filially faithful, went instead.

Originally it was simply a meadow called Roker, Stotfold’s home since 1911.

Northern Ireland international Phil Gray is thought to be the only man to have represented both Sunderland and Stotfold at Roker Park.

The column had visited in 1996. “What the two grounds have in common is that both seem to have seen better days,” we wrote, and Denise Haworth’s splendid photograph of the main stand appears to suggest that little has changed.

The younger bairn reports a “small but proper”

clubhouse, a nice big village green – never one of those in Sunderland – a small stand and a warm welcome.

Shildon won 2-0, ensuring a Fab Four of skilltrainingltd Northern league sides in the last 16 of the national competition. At least in the North-East papers, the old “Roker choker” headline must await another day.

STILL with memories of Roker Park, an illuminating correspondence on the Salut! Sunderland website invites the Echo to make a rather belated correction.

It was the sceptred year of 1973, Kerr and Co homeward with the trophy and a wagon load of journalists immediately preceding the triumphant bus from Durham to Roker Park.

Among those who happily failed to fall off the back of a lorry was the young Bill Taylor, Bishop Auckland lad, covering for the Echo.

Ian Porterfield, he wrote the next morning, waved aloft his magic boot.

No he didn’t. “It was actually my Adidas Scorpion trainer, painted gold,” writes Paul Dobson, another Bishop lad, on Salut! Sunderland. “I’d lobbed it up to a very bemused Ian at Belmont, as the procession started.”

Subsequently he has had to answer the question of whether he was hopping round on one foot. “I’d painted that one specially for the occasion,” he says.

“On the day in question I was, of course, wearing my red and white Doc Marten’s.”

THE piece on January 16 about Prof Gavin Kitching’s lecture on why North-East football overtook rugby in the 1880s said that Fencehouses-born Prof Kitching had written three “Bob Henderson” detective novels, based on a fictional academic who’s retired to Stanhope and turned sleuth.

We also implied that the stories were available as books. They aren’t, only on line – gavinkitching.com. As a result, however, interest has been so great that Waterstone’s are considering supporting a print version.

It’s hoped, he says, to publish them in print form by the end of this year.

Anyone interested in ordering hard copies in advance is asked to email g.kitching@unsw.edu.au BACK in the sNL, the end of the unplanned winter break meant that only one of Saturday’s games was postponed – almost inevitably at Tow Law, where 75 per cent of the pitch remained snow covered and the rest simply frozen stiff. It’s thus quite surprising to read in the February issue of the league magazine that club secretary Steve Moralee – he who found funding for a wind turbine – is now exploring grants for solar panels in the stand roof.

Lawyers treasurer Kevin McCormick is duly impressed. “Steve’s sold the Tow Law air to the mobile phone people and the wind to the environmentalists. It can’t be long before he tries to sell someone the snow.”

...and finally

THE 12 London grounds at which FA Cup finals have been played (Backtrack, January 23) are Kennington Oval, Richmond Athletic Ground, Queens Club, Crystal Palace, Craven Cottage, The Den, Stamford Bridge, Highbury, Wembley, Selhurst Park, White Hart Lane and Upton Park.

John Briggs in Darlington today invites readers to name, on the basis of the year in which they were formed, the three “youngest” clubs in the Premier League.

Young as always, the column returns on Saturday.