HENRY McLAREN, a Durham County cricketer in the 1970s, rings after last week’s Backtrack recorded the likely demise of Lands CC, near Cockfield.

“Your column usually gives me a lift, this morning it’s really depressed me,” he says. “More and more are going to go the same way.”

As we’re talking, an email arrives reporting “with immense sadness” the immediate demise of Seaham Harbour cricket club – ahead of its 150th season – after a meeting the previous evening. They played in the North East Premier League.

“Devastating,” says Henry, still umpiring at 78. “Seaham Harbour were a wonderful club who always played the game in the right spirit.”

It was the club of former England test player and international umpire Peter Willey, of footballers Brian Marwood and Nigel Gleghorn and of Jim Dyson, Hartlepool United’s goalkeeper in the mid-50s who also managed Darlington Mowden Park rugby club.

Though it is doubtless irrelevant, Henry recalls the eulogy at Jim’s funeral. “The vicar stood up afterwards and said it was the only time he’d heard the word ‘bollocks’ used in his church.”

Among other Seaham players was Doug Weatherall, probably the region’s best known sports journalist, who sends a photograph of his second team debut – against South Shields in 1948. “Look how my mam had pressed my trousers,” he says.

He’s at inside right, as incorrigibly he puts it, in the photo. At inside left is Frank Forster, who also became a Durham County man.

Still Doug wears the club tie. “I’m devastated, grieving,” he says and, like Henry McLaren, believes there’s worse to come. “What’s wrong with local cricket is money. The successful teams are paying the so-called amateurs and the rest are being left even further behind.”

The latest is that Seaham may yet try to run a re-formed team in the lower reaches of the North East Durham League. Safe Harbour? Watch this space.

DOUG WEATHERALL’S 85, in great good fettle, still watches all Sunderland’s home games and loves choral singing.

In the course of last Thursday’s conversation, I mention that, two days later, Bishop Auckland Choral Society is performing Messiah at the galleried Methodist church in Hetton-le-Hole.

Shortly afterwards Doug emails. The Bishop folk have said he can join the bass line that Saturday evening if he pitches up for the rehearsal in the afternoon. No contest. “Sunderland,” he adds, “will just have to take on Preston North End without me.”

In the event, sadly, the snow meant that he made neither.

THOUGH doubtless he’s lost a yard or two of pace, former Newcastle and Liverpool left back Alan Kennedy fears that he has flunked his trial for the England Over 60s walking football team.

Last week’s column revealed that the man the Kop called Barney Rubble, born 63 years ago in Penshaw, had hoped to add to his two full international caps at a slightly more pedestrian level.

“I’m still a bit too inclined to run,” Alan confesses. “I went to close this chap down in the trial match and the referee was going to blue card me for both feet off the ground. I then wanted to argue with him and that probably didn’t help me, either.”

He’s now helping promote a 5k run in Liverpool on May 12 in memory of the Hillsborough dead. “I’ll be taking part,” says Alan. “I might be slow, but it’s still a bit more my style.”

RECORDING a fortnight back Chester-le-Street’s unfortunate Northern League record against West Allotment Celtic – not a win in 20 games – the column wondered if there were greater jinxes. Richard Jones in Darlington points out that when Garth Crooks’s goal gave Spurs a 1-0 victory at Liverpool on March 16 1985, it was the Londoners’ first win at Anfield since the same date in 1912 – 43 league and cup attempts.

LOOK North man Jeff Brown’s enthusiastically received play about former Sunderland player David Corner – best remembered for his part in the League Cup final defeat to Norwich City – is at the Peacock (formerly the Londonderry) in the city centre from April 12-14. Again it stars Steve Arnott.

Jeff also promises stand-up comedy from Sunderland born David Callaghan, an Edinburgh Festival regular, a talk-in with himself and Davey Corner and pie and peas. £20.

….AND finally, the team which conceded a Premier League hat-trick of owns goals in 2003 – last week’s column – was Sunderland, a 5-1 defeat against Charlton. “I don’t think we’d have won that day if Charlton hadn’t turned up at all,” says Sunderland fanzine editor Paul Dobson.

The goals came within seven minutes of one another, Michael Proctor discredited with two of them and Stephen Wright the third.

Extraordinarily, the same thing happened 11 years later in the 8-0 defeat at Southampton – Patrick van Aanholt, Santiago Vergini and Liam Bridcutt all culpable.

The guy who usually sets fiendish quizzes was among those missing from last Saturday’s trip to Stockton. Conversation nonetheless turned to the identity of the artist with whom Peter Sellers so memorably recorded Bangers and Mash.

Readers are invited to complete the pairing. More of gravy than of grave – as Ebenezer Scrooge observed – the column returns next week.