Hammy hamstrung by his weight

If the question were "Who ate all the pies", Ian - a butcher for 35 years - would prove a pretty good advert for the product, an' all.

Now, however, the dedicated football administrator - 5ft 8ins tall and just two pounds on the light side of 30 stones - is on his bike towards a life-enhancing new goal.

"I want to lose 12 stones in a year," says Ian, Consett FC's secretary for a decade and now match secretary along the A68 at Tow Law.

Fat chance? "I've been on diets before but always gave up after a couple of weeks. By going public I hope to give myself encouragement. I was 50 in April and I realise I have to start my life again if I'm going to see 60," admits Ian.

Ian weighed in after Tow Law's final match of 2006-07, on May 4 - "I knew I was getting a big lad, but 29 stones 12lbs did surprise me a bit" - and will again be weighed when the 2006-07 season kicks off, on August 11.

For £1 a time, backers will be invited to guess his weight that day. There'll be a cash prize for the nearest, the remainder going to charity and to the Lawyers.

Hammy really became hamstrung after a fall 18 months ago - cowped his creels on a CD cover - which damaged the ligaments at the base of his back.

"I couldn't walk, hardly left the house for six months and couldn't work because I couldn't stand," says Ian, who's had to retire from the butcher's shop where he spent all his working life.

"The doctor said it would never get better while I was carrying so much weight. I had to give it a chance."

Now he's even given up drinking, and swears he doesn't miss it. "I was a big drinker, maybe 15 or 16 pints a night, and because it gives you a false hunger you then add to it by having a kebab or pizza on the way home."

After it had spent five months in the shed, he's also riding the bike which his dad gave him for Christmas. "It's a bit like a pea on a drum at the moment but I've got beyond the end of the street and I can already feel it doing me good.

"I've always been big but I was only about 18 stones until I was 45 and still played squash and five-a-side football. One of the doctors said he used to watch me and said he was surprised how agile I was. This past year, though, my weight just seems to have flown up."

Restricted to a 2,000 calorie diet, he regrets that it can't be stricter still. "I'd really like to starve myself but the doctor says it takes 1,000 calories a day just to stop your organs packing up. I have to take things a bit more steady."

Anyone interested in guessing the lad's kick-off weight in August, or simply in providing a few bob sponsorship by way of encouragement, can find Ian at 29 Grange Street, Delves Lane, Consett, Co Durham DH8 7AG.

The Jason Rockett who's Sheffield United's recently aggrieved chief executive, on televisions all over the place, could it be the same Jason Rockett who played Northern League football, fiver a game, for Ryhope in 1991? Course it could.

"A lovely lad and a great player," says Roly Bell, who signed him from Evenwood for £100. "At the time he was the best centre half I'd seen in Northern League football."

Rockett, London born, also brought with him several team-mates from the English universities side. "We mightn't have been the best side in the league, but we were certainly the brainiest," says Roly.

Propelled to Scarborough, he scored 13 goals in 196 appearances before injury forced his retirement, and a move into commercial property, in 1998.

Jason had also been mentioned in the Backtrack column in May 1991, bowling for Marton in the NYSD League B division. "The quickest I've seen in 20 years at the club," said Trevor Gaynon, the secretary.

We called Rockett a speed merchant, of course.

Nothing special about Sky 'spectacular'

Now paying for its mistake, last Friday's column asked what was so special about the Oxford United v Sunderland match on February 27, 1999.

Though the answer was slot-on - it was Sky TV's first-ever Pay-to-view match - both Tony Henderson in Newton Aycliffe and Dave Wright in Darlington point out that we were wrong on Tuesday to suggest that Sunderland won it 7-0.

That was the home game, earlier that season - Oxford's worst ever league defeat and Sunderland's biggest win for 11 years. Hardly suggesting blue Sky thinking, the match at Oxford ended 0-0.

"Sunderland are to the Manor bored," said The Northern Echo headline, above, while Frank Johnson told of a "dreadful" game with the only action in the final 15 minutes.

"Not only must the home viewers who paid £7.95 have been bored out of their minds but the 2,000 Wearside fans who made the 500 mile round trip were also left feeling flat," Frank added.

The pay-to-view screen test only included Football League matches, Colchester v Manchester City also due for a live airing later that season. The Echo on the morning of the match supposed that they were targeting clubs with small capacities.

"The odds are that Oxford will have a full house, or close to it, and that thousands will watch in the pubs and clubs, not to mention those who will stack up their tinnies with their mates at home."

A Football League spokesman had clearly seen pay-to-view coming. "Whether you're in favour of it or not," he forecast, "the reality is that it's going to be part of the game."

If Oxford and Sunderland have grown far apart in the intervening eight years - Sunderland in the Premiership next season, Oxford in the Conference - so have four other sides who met that February afternoon.

York City, now in the Conference, lost 3-0 at home to Kevin Keegan's Fulham, a club still hanging onto the Premiership, while Accrington Stanley - now back in the Football League - went down 3-2 to visiting Spennymoor, where the club have just been promoted from the Arngrove Northern League second division. Martin Bowes scored twice for the Moors.

Elsewhere, Darlington went down 3-0 at Shrewsbury - robbed, as usual - goals from Dietmar Hamann and Nicolas Anelka ensured a 1-1 draw between Newcastle United and Arsenal, Boro continued a ten game winless sequence by losing 3-1 at Danny Wilson's Sheffield Wednesday and Hartlepool played a miserable 0-0 before fewer than 3,000 spectators at the Vic.

They might as well have stopped at home and watched television.

Rayner makes it an Oakes family double

Charles Rayner's appearance for an R F Oakes XV on Saturday in the annual match against Hartlepool Rovers completed a family double. Robert Carr, his England international grandfather, played in the same game 61 years previously.

Carr was his mother's father. "Charles is a fly-half and I was just a rather large second row," says Merrick Rayner, his dad.

"He kicks with both feet and passes with both hands, rather annoying things like that."

In Hartlepool, they're still pretty proud of R F Oakes. He joined from Hartlepool Trinity in 1890, won eight England caps, was himself an England selector for 25 years and president of the RFU in 1933-34.

"If ever a comet blazed across the rugby firmament of Hartlepool and left a trail of light which will ever remain visible, surely this distinction will be the prerogative of Bob Oakes," claims the Rovers' website, unequivocally.

Robert Carr won three England caps before the war and the MC during it. "He never really talked about it, but I think it was a rugby-type exploit, running between two pill boxes," says Merrick.

Carr's old scrapbook even contains a "classic" 1946 letter from Oakes thanking England's team members after victory over Scotland - "It was grand, and we are all tremendously bucked up" - but urging them to "whack" the old enemy in the return.

"We are therefore asking you all to keep absolutely fit, and determined to win. Whilst keeping fit, see you do not over-train, as that is infinitely worse than being under-trained.

"Walking, with plenty of God's fresh air, is as good as anything for keen rugger players."

Charles, 20, is a physiology student at Newcastle University, trains with the Falcons academy - "a pretty good place to be a fly-half" says his dad - and plays for Darlington. Last soggy Saturday, his side beat Rovers 27-21.

AND FINALLY...

So to Tuesday's question, which sought the identity of the club which plays at the Keepmoat Stadium. It was, of course, Doncaster Rovers.

Alf Hutchinson in Darlington points out that on May 22 it will be exactly 100 years since Albert Trott performed a remarkable feat at Lord's while playing for Middlesex against Somerset.

Since it wasn't the time when he became the first person to hit the ball over the pavilion - that was 1899 - or when someone killed the poor spuggie, which was 1936, Alf invites readers to put meat on memory's bones.

The answer on Tuesday, the centenary of Albert Trott's finest hour.