Mike’s love for Consett CC burns bright

The love affair continues.

Mike’s club history was launched on Saturday evening following the match with Ryton, an unfortunate affair to which shortly, ruefully, we shall return.

He’s right about the ground, mind. Set magnificently above the Derwent Valley, it’s graced by an almost-statuesque pavilion built for £400 in 1921 and which, inadvertently, sparked the book.

In September 2007, the pavilion was severely damaged by fire. Electrical fault, they reckon. “About 20 of us gathered early in the morning, tears in our ears, watching the fireman at work,” recalls Mike, former wicket keeper and retired primary school head teacher.

“We thought that we might have lost everything and that we had no record of what had been taken away.

Instead it really rekindled interest.”

The club was formed in 1876, the Blackfyne ground their home since 1890.

Then privately owned, it was taken over by the locally ubiquitous Consett Iron Company – muck and money at the time – and by Durham County Council when production ceased in 1980.

The ironworks’ demise marked a rise in fortunes for the cricket club, however, because the company had insisted that a covenant forbade the sale of alcohol on the ground.

The teams had socialised after matches at the nearby Station pub – later the Cricketers – though, last Saturday, even the bedecked Cricketers had sold its soul to footy.

When County Hall could find no trace of any such prohibition, a lucrative bar was opened – though players, with the exception of West Indian professional Gareth Breese, still pay £30 a season for the privilege.

Mike Rogers is a Yorkshireman, his father scorer for Leeds, who played at Headingley. Mike moved north to train as a teacher in Newcastle, and never returned.

Though his splendid club history suggests yet again that there may be nothing new under the square leg sun – the vandalism, the financial problems, the occasional unseemly spats – among those things that manifestly have changed is the size of the crowds.

Derby matches, and the County second team games that Blackfyne long hosted, could regularly attract 3,000 or more.

“People would remember crowds heading here from afar, like ants on a hill,” says Joy Topham, a life member.

On Saturday, though the weather held, there may have been fewer than ten.Even critics’ corner stayed silent. Those who had had travelled for the launch included Walter Armstrong, a Consett legend and the only man to reduce the club history to two lots of anodyne asterisks.

Walter, a bowler said to play within the laws of the game but occasionally greatly to vex its spirit, objected among other things to the non-striker trying to steal; a yard or two.

In a cup game at Percy Main, north Tyneside, he’d threatened to run out an offender – “the ******* are backing up four yards down the wicker” – when rain, perhaps fortuitously, stopped play.

In the replayed fixture, however, Wally peremptorily broke the wicket, refused the umpire’s offer to reconsider and watched amid the mayhem – “all hell broke loose,” Mike records – as the aggrieved batsman made his way towards the pavilion.

“I warned the ****** last week,” he said.

Since he seemed a good enough sort, we raised the incident on Saturday. “My father was a church organist,” said Mike. “Can you imagine me using language like that?” The butter showed no signs of melting.

Mike Rogers played first team cricket from 1972-83, retired after a series of disc problems – “the sort of pain I would wish on my worst enemy” – that first became evident during indoor nets in January.

At first he couldn’t even bring himself to watch – “I was just a very bad spectator, and not alone in that” – but became secretary, chairman president and is now club secretary once again.

“There are quite a lot of former players still around.

It just becomes part of your life,” he says.

Ryton, when the column arrives, are 100 without loss.

Though wickets fall thereafter they finish on 239- 7, Nick Robinson ruefully departing on 99.

Consett bat as if anxious not to miss England on the television, five ducks recorded in their miserable total of 70. On the day that the epochal book is published, it’s unlikely to go down in history.

■ The Blackfyne Story by Mike Rogers costs £12.50.

Details from the club at consettcc@live.co.uk

Michael Barker – the miner who turned down the Red Devils

MICHAEL BARKER, a great footballer from a family of great footballers, died yesterday. He was 69.

A West Auckland miner, he began his career with the all-conquering Shildon Works Juniors in the 1950s, won six England amateur international caps while with Bishop Auckland, rejected lucrative offers from Manchester United among others but subsequently spent six happy seasons among an improbably posse of Englishmen at Queen of the South.

“They simply loved him up there. He was incredibly talented,” recalls George Siddle, another of the former Northern League players who hasted to Dumfries.

Michael’s brothers John, Alan and the late Colin all played for the Bishops, too. “I remember from being a young lad how managers and scouts from all sorts of big clubs would be round our house. I’m told I used to sit on their knee,” says Alan, 54, who played for Newcastle United, Gillingham and Hartlepool.

“We had Allan Brown from Sunderland, people from Man United, Blackpool and all over the place but he just didn’t want to know. He liked being at home. He loved Bishop Auckland.”

The Shildon Works side in which he played in 1957-58 won 40 of its 44 games, scoring 281 and conceding 54 and winning the Durham County Junior Cup among several others.

“They were a brilliant team, a footballing side from goalkeeper to outside left,”

he recalled at a reunion two years ago.

At Bishop Auckland he was managed, and much admired, by the young Lawrie McMenemy with whom he became firm friends. “I remember him once whacking me across the arse with a garden cane for not doing my press-ups right,” Mike remembered at a Bishops’ reunion. “I wouldn’t care but I’d done 25 and they were perfect.”

That he was a thoroughly amiable man was further proved when his friend George Siddle – playing for West Auckland – accidentally broke his friend’s leg in a Good Friday derby at Kingsway.

“It was a very good thing he wasn’t my enemy,” said Mike.

George Siddle, long in Sedgefield, remembers it, too. “It was a complete accident, he caught the bottom of my boot. I felt terrible about it, but we didn’t fall out. Once you were Michael’s friend, you were his friend for life.”

The Dumfries exodus included Stanley United goalkeeper Allan Ball – to become the Scottish club’s record appearance holder and still in the borders town – former Sunderland outside right Jimmy Davison, Hartlepool inside forward Barry Parkes and England amateur international George Brown.

“I loved it,” Mike recalled.

“There were some queer places, your Forfars and your Motherwells, but the worst thing was the travelling. I could drive up to Beattock, meet the bus, travel another two or three hours and be on the field 45 minutes later.

You can’t imagine them doing that today.”

Though Queen of the South historian Colin Rutherford records the fans’ view that Mike was among the most gifted players they’d ever seen, the Scots still viewed the border raiders with a certain reserve.

“I just hope they don’t mind being called English bastards when they go up north,” said the Palmerston Park PA man on a different occasion. “They call us that and we’re from bloody Dumfries.”

Michael, as modest as he was gentlemanly, leaves his wife, son and daughter. They lived, inevitably, in Bishop Auckland.

Backtrack briefs

SECOND time in a week, the No 1 bus to Tow Law, magnificent when the evening sun shines across the Wear Valley, but for a football club crisis meeting.

What crisis?

The Lawyers have been Northern League members since 1924, never out of the first division. It’s a proud heritage, and in those indomitable west Durham parts, they don’t let go easily.

Alerted, the incomparable Audrey Wilkinson had that day held a coffee morning and raised a remarkable £320. “I’m quite good at getting money out of people,”

she said, self-evidently.

Told that they needed sealing paint for the dressing room floor, she had a collection and raised another £60.

The meeting was positive, the outcome encouraging.

Great people. The principal problem, as usual, concerned big demands from smaller players.

Someone reported that one of last season’s players had a new house and a mortgage.

“If he’s offered £50 by us and £100 by someone else, what’s he to do?” they demanded.

The answer came immediately.

“Get a smaller house,” they said.

STILL with Co Durham’s No 1, we bump on the return journey into Jimmy Elliott, anxious to point out that it’s 40 years since – 15 years and 265 days – he became Bishop Auckland FC’s youngest player. So he remains.

Known thereabouts as Flash – his dad was a Powderhall sprinter and shared the soubriquet – he had trials with Chelsea but didn’t quite make it.

His Northern league debut brought a goal, at Penrith.

“I couldn’t miss,” he insists.

The Bishops, then nominally amateur, gave him a fiver. “It may have been about £20 less than anyone else but I was still at school,” says Jimmy. “To me it was an absolute fortune.”

...and finally

THE Durham bowler off whom Brian Lara passed his record-shattering 500 (Backtrack, June 12) was that most occasional of occasionals, John Morris.

Rather changing the subject, Fred Alderton in Peterlee invites readers to suggest why Yoshonori Sakai, a student, was chosen to ignite the flame when Tokyo hosted the 1964 Olympics.

Enlightenment on Saturday.