BEFORE proceeding, a very happy 80th birthday today to our old friend Peter Willis – former FA Cup final referee, Northern League goalkeeper, Durham Constabulary polliss and long serving president of the Referees’ Association. In the wars a bit in recent years, Peter – absolutely top bloke – is now back on the golf course. May his ninth decade be memorable for wholly enjoyable reasons.

ON the day that the FA and its chief executive Martin Glenn were being assuredly eviscerated in parliament, Glenn’s Scottish counterpart was on familiar and more friendly territory.

Stewart Regan made the eight hour round trip from Glasgow to Bishop Auckland, principal guest at the sports awards at St John’s RC comprehensive school.

He’d started there 42 years ago, never been back inside the school since he left. “I told them about my starring role in Sweeney Todd, the school play, and my school records in the 400 and 800m. They stood for a long time,” he says.

“They gave me the grand tour. Some of the classrooms and the school hall hardly seemed to have changed at all.”

Son of the sergeant who headed Durham Constabulary’s dog training section at Harperley Hall, star runner at Crook Athletics Club, Stewart spent 16 fermenting years in the brewing industry before becoming managing director of the Football League Championship in 2004. In his first season, second tier attendance reached a 50-year high.

He became chief executive of Yorkshire County Cricket Club before crossing the border in 2012. Reforms followed. Regan 93 Blazers 0, said a Scottish Sun headline after one victory. The Backtrack column merely called him innovative and iconoclastic.

Now, of course, Scottish football has issues of its own, most immediately the failure to make the World Cup finals and Gordon Strachan’s consequent departure. “I had to fire the bullets and it wasn’t a nice thing to do. Gordon’s a great guy,” says Stewart.

The next manager, he hopes, will guide them to the finals of Euro 2020, not least because Glasgow is one of 13 host cities and is guaranteed two “home” games.

Stewart, whose brother is professor of English at Durham University, was on the shortlist for the FA’s £591,000-a-year chief exec’s post before Glenn was appointed. “You can’t worry too much about criticism in jobs like this, it goes with the territory,” he says. “I might have done things differently.”

Last time the column saw Stewart Regan was in 2012, over an executive box lunch at Hampden Park and in the company of Ralph Ord, then the No 2 in the 2014 Commonwealth Games hierarchy in Glasgow.

Like Stewart, Ralph was a Crook lad. He’d been manager of Eastgate leisure centre and of Wearhead United, Crook and District League second division. They reminisced about Queenie’s Café, Mile Lonnen and bopping at the Beehive Ballroom.

Now Ralph’s in Australia, where he runs a coffee farm and also finds time to be Head of Games Operations for next April’s Commonwealth Games on the Australian Gold Coast.

After four months without a drop of rain, he reports, it’s poured non-stop for the past fortnight – “just what we needed.”

From afar, he also continues to support Sunderland and Crook Town, neither of whom is setting the world alight. No longer, however, does he have to rise at 2am to watch Sunderland’s struggles – “they don’t show the Championship down here.”

DISAPPOINTED at losing their manager last week, Richmond Town – the Wearside League side on the very banks of the Swale – may take comfort from a letter in Non League Paper. The writer’s from Bury: in 52 years of ground hopping, he says, he’s never discovered a more welcoming or a more scenically situated club. “Fabulous.”

SUNDERLAND goalkeeper Jason Steele still manages The Huntsman, his local Sunday morning pub team in Newton Aycliffe, in which role he was at a cup tie at Shildon.

Someone mentioned that Elliot Finch, goalkeeper for Shildon Under 12s, wanted to be Sunderland’s goalie when he grows up.

Jason arranged for the lad to be in the clubhouse, nipped home after the match, returned with a signed pair of gloves he’d worn in a recent Championship game and with some words of encouragement.

The tale was told in Shildon’s programme for last Wednesday’s derby with Bishop Auckland. “Elliot was speechless, a memory that will live with him forever,” wrote Graham Stout. “Jason’s a top man who never forgot where he came from.”

THE other crack from Shildon last Wednesday was that the much loved Pagoda – the truly grand stand that’s stood on the Dean Street ground for almost a century – is to be preserved.

Some of us are old enough to remember when admission was an extra twopence, the gate guarded with Cerberus tenacity by a gentleman called Snack Davis.

Though a new 250-seat stand should be on the opposite side by Christmas, both dressing rooms and clubhouse remain beneath the Pagoda. Now the club has decided that the wooden seating will be renewed.

“It’ll be mothballed, an induced coma, but it’s going to reappear,” says club chairman David Dent. “Personally, I’m delighted.”

….AND finally, the last Englishman other than Harry Kane to score a Premiership hat-trick (Backtrack, October 19) was Andre Gray for Burnley against Sunderland on New Year’s Eve 2016 – and not, as some supposed, Jermain Defoe for Sunderland against Swansea 11 months earlier.

Readers are today invited to suggest the Premier League first which Newcastle United achieved in their victory over Crystal Palace last Saturday.

The column returns in a fortnight.