HIS route resolutely roundabout, Brian Dixon in Darlington steers us towards Accrington Stanley’s much garlanded promotion to League One.

Wasn’t there a Milk Marketing Board commercial, he recalls, suggesting that if a kid didn’t drink his pinta he’d never play for Liverpool, only Accrington Stanley?

The poor kid looks bemused. “And who’s Accrington Stanley, exactly?”

The column’s been over there twice, on both occasions remarking upon the Canine Workingmen’s Club and upon the Ossie Cloggers. The latter may be a folk dance group from Osbaldwistle; not even the Lancashire Telegraph can explain the former.

As if further colour were needed, there’s a Dyers and Finishers Workmen’s Club, too.

The first match was against West Auckland in 1990, Stanley then in the Northern Premier League second division, the 500 crowd chewing upon their Holland’s pies and dreaming of better days.

The second was in August 2006 against Darlington, Stanley’s first home game back in the Football League.

Changing times, a Quakers fan was texting team news to his daughter in Shanghai. The last time Stanley were in the Football League, the column observed, the news would have taken a month to arrive and only then if the pigeon didn’t become disoriented.

Michael Cummins and Martin Smith, Quakers won 2-0. Accrington were bottom.

Brian Dixon swears that, in the 1980s, he heard a folk group called Accrington Stanley and the Third Division North and wonders if readers may be able to help. Every dog, and all that, they may also be able to provide the Canine Workmen’s Club’s puzzling pedigree.

STILL with our four-legged friends, if not the Canine Workmen’s Club, the splendid Harry Pearson has a piece on the Wisden website about cricket-playing mutts of his acquaintance.

This should on no account be confused with Bulldog Billy Teesdale, Evenwood’s raw meat mastiff.

Harry fondly recalls Charlemagne Commondale, a standard Schnauzer who fielded, formidably, for a sadly unnamed Co Durham club.

He remembers Stanley, a King Charles spaniel and a border collie called Jess but, most of all, a West Highland terrier from Berwick Hills, Middlesbrough, which was called Doogie but answered to Rodney because, like Rodney Marsh, he enjoyed keeping wicket.

“Rodney,” writes Harry, “had short legs, several missing teeth and a minatory attitude that sometimes ended in violence.”

He adds, however, that while the dog and the great Aussie had much in common, Marsh never bit his dad’s finger when he took away the ham bone he was chewing beneath the dining room table.

“I don’t doubt,” adds Harry, “that Marsh would have done had the situation arisen.”

Ends

Bowls news: the Teesdale Mercury reports that the Monday Evening League has fewer teams this season. “In an attempt to avoid a hat-trick of wooden spatulas, PDs came up with a masterplan, and didn’t enter.”

HOW greatly astonished might Mr Bill West have been at Ireland’s test cricket debut, against Pakistan tomorrow?

Mr West, a Malton-based barrister, published in 1991 the 144-page History of Irish Cricket, 1940-1990, chiefly a collection of scorecards. His method was “largely reproductive”, he admitted, his number of appendixes akin to the path lab at James Cook hospital.

There was also a foreword by his friend Laurence Elliott, from Scarborough. “Bill West has collected together the scorecards of matches played by Ireland between 1940-90,” he wrote. “Why he has done this, I have no idea.”

M’learned friend had paid for 500 to be printed. At the last count he’d sold 18, though even that modest return seemed far to exceed that of the follow-up, the 12-page History of Irish Women’s Cricket, 1982-92.

Last we heard he’s sold precisely one, to his greengrocer.

LAST week’s note on former Horden and West Indies cricketer Derick Parry – Frozen of Grants Houses – reminded reader Ron Hutchinson that that Co Durham pit village was also home to acclaimed folk singer Jez Lowe. Jez’s newsletter was once euphemistically called Midnight Mail, after one of his songs – “Working on the midnight mail, working on the midnight mail, With my boots, my shovel and my pail.” In the Durham coalfield, it should perhaps be explained, the midnight mailman didn’t collect letters.

Ends

Billingham Catholic Club from 5pm this Saturday plays host to a reunion of those footballers who around the turn of the century represented the hugely successful Wynyard/Billingham Station Wanderers/Norton and Stockton Ancients side in the Over 40s League. They included former Football League men like Gerry Forrest, Tony Kenworthy, Bob Scaife and Kevan Smith. Organiser and former team manager Ray Morton insists that all are welcome.

….and finally, last week’s column wondered what Brechin City had done this season which hadn’t been done for 126 years in the Scottish League and never in the Football League. They went the whole season without a win – four draws.

Among those who knew was Paul “Sobs” Dobson, also featured in last week’s column as editor of the Sunderland fanzine A Love Supreme. He quotes Labi Siffre: “”There’s always someone, somewhere, much worse off than you are.”

Last Sunday, it may have been noted, Arsenal invited all former players with more than 100 appearances to join the salute to M. Wenger. Readers are invited to name the only North-East born man in the line-up.

More of him, with luck, next week.