LAST Thursday’s column anticipated at length the centenary season of the Wensleydale Football League. The evening previously, the league recorded perhaps one of its greatest claims to fame in the previous 99 years.

Hawes played Leyburn. From the kick-off, Jonathan Champion tapped the ball to Scott Guy who, seeing Leyburn keeper Jack Davison slightly off his line and facing the evening sun, tried a shot from the half-way line. It sailed in.

Immediately before kick-off, the goalie had asked for a cap. “I remember thinking that it hadn’t done him a right lot of good,” says veteran referee Jim Wilson.

It was recorded on the Richmond Today website, the ref said to have timed the guy’s goal at just two seconds – “the quickest he’d seen,” adds Richmond Today, “in his 400 years in the game.”

WIKIPEDIA’S wary about “quickest goal” records, partly because most claims weren’t filmed and are thus impossible to time precisely. Match of the Day is not thought to have been at Hawes last Wednesday.

A two-second goal is claimed in Saudi Arabia. Gavin Stokes of Maryhill is said to have scored in 2.1 seconds against Clydebank in 2017.

For a long time the Football League’s fastest was credited to Albert Mundy of Aldershot, six seconds against Hartlepools United in 1958-59, the first year of the fourth division.

Alan Shearer’s ten-second goal for Newcastle United against Manchester City on January 18, 2003, charging down City goalkeeper Carlo Nash’s attempted clearance, is the Premier League’s second fastest after Ledley King of Spurs.

Jim Wilson, good bloke and retired teacher at Wensleydale School, insists that this one was around two seconds. “He hit it sweet as a nut. Definitely no more than three.” The ref is 67.

PRETTY much in passing, last week’s column also mentioned Colin Nelson, a Sunderland full back in the 1960s who for much of the time combined football with work as a locum pharmacist.

He later joined Mansfield Town, where Martin Birtle finds him alongside Reg Nettleship in a list of former players. “You don’t get names like that any more,” says Martin, not unreasonably.

The great Albert Stubbins comes to mind as a player whose name epitomised old England. Any more?

*Martin spent last Friday evening watching a Tony Robinson programme on Durham Cathedral which talked of the many miracles attributed to St Cuthbert. During the ads he switched to Sky and discovered that Sunderland were winning 1-0 at Fulham – “proof that miracles, even if short lived, can still happen.”

LIKE many grass roots football clubs, Tow Law run a football card. Always I take Arsenal, top left hand corner. Last dreich Tuesday the Gunners were nowhere to be seen. I took Chelsea. Arsenal, half-hidden, won. Then they ran a second card. Sunderland won. The jokes may be imagined.

LAST Thursday evening to Easington Colliery v West Allotment Celtic, a ground impossible to visit without recalling the FA Cup fourth qualifying round game with Chester City, October 2000.

Chester were newly relegated from the Football League; Easington had the greater claim to media attention. They’d just released Billy Elliott, the dirty dancing film set in Easington during the 1984-85 miners’ strike.

The Sun. incorrigibly, had a headline about Easington hoping for a tutu draw. The Sunday Express man, long before kick-off, had written a report beginning “They were dancing on the streets of Billy Elliott country last night.”

Sky TV simply asked a woman outside the Co-op if they still took ferrets for walks on a lead.

It tanked down, television crews dressed as if filming Hans and Lottie Haas, not Easington v Chester. For the Northern League lads, sadly, it was a step tutu far. They lost 2-0.

HOOFING from Peterlee bus station to Easington Colliery means passing through Grants Houses, a village indelibly remembered.

It was there, in a terraced bungalow on a dank June evening in 1987, that the column interviewed Derick Parry, a West Indies test cricketer in his sixth season as professional at Horden, down the road.

He’d played in 12 tests, bagging 5-15 and hitting 65 in the first innings against Australia in 1977-78. In the Durham Senior League he did even better. If only they could have done something about the weather.

Even in the house he wore two jumpers and long johns beneath his trackie bottoms. The fire blazed half way up the chimney, a box of Kleenex snuffled on the chair arm, the curtains were drawn not against the night but against the day.

“I love it at Horden,” he said.

He’d been approached during a Headingley test by Horden secretary Ray Matthews, who mistook him for Viv Richards. “Everyone does,” said Derick.

Now 63, he’d cropped up just the other day on my blog – back on his native Nevis, running his own car hire business, very much a local hero and never once mistaken for Viv Richards.

….and finally, the fictional character whose name was appropriated from an early 20th century Hawes cricket professional – last week’s column – was Jeeves, that well known gentleman’s gentleman.

Rejected after a Yorkshire trial, Percy Jeeves was the Wensleydale club’s pro in 1910, claimed 65 wickets at 7.5 and hit 77 against Leyburn. Signed by Warwickshire, he bagged 106 wickets ar 20.88 in his first season but died in 1916 on the Somme.

Eric Smallwood in Acklam, Middlesbrough, was first with the answer.

Readers are today invited to suggest what Brechin City managed last Saturday which has never been done in the Football League and not in the Scottish League for 126 years.

Brechin news, the column returns next week.