RECORD appearance makers Ron Greener and John Peverell, 490 and 465 games for Darlington FC, are saluted in the new housing development finally taking shape on the former Feethams ground.

Greener Drive and Peverell Drive lead to house types like The Greener (from £194,950) and The Peverell, much pricier at £279,950. There’s a Quaker, too, but what of The Stephenson, The Keating and a five-bedroomed place called The Woodchester?

Darlington have never fielded a Keating or a Woodchester. More surprisingly, the only Stephenson who ever pulled on a Quakers shirt was a South African who made but a single appearance in 1974.

A spokesman for Charles Church, the developer, says that all the sales reps are in a conference and he’ll get back. He hasn’t yet, suggesting that in-house details will have to wait until next week.

There isn’t a Reynolds Road, either.

A GLOOMY PS to last week’s note on cricket at Cliffe, south of the Tees near Piercebridge. Some time between Friday evening and the Saturday game with Cockerton, thieves smashed into a shed and stole both mowers – together worth several thousand pounds. “They must have known what they were after,” says committee member Richard Mallender. Salt in the wound, Cockerton scored 325-1, Cliffe totalling a meagre 95 in reply. They didn’t so much as win a point.

IT was a very much better day for Cockerton, of course – if not for Martin Robinson, the Darlington club’s treasurer.

That 325, off 40 overs, was the highest team score in Cockerton’s 122-year history. Shaun Farrow’s 231 was by many a mile the highest individual score and the 309 partnership with Antony Rawlings – after Shaun had come in at 16-1 – the highest for any wicket. Antony was 73 not out.

The top individual score had hitherto been Shaun’s own 148 not out against Brompton-on-Swale in 2007, the highest partnership the 213 between Shaun and Ian Dade in the same match.

The biggest total had been the second team’s 310-5, from 45 overs, against Raby Castle II back in 1972.

The Cliffe face could have been steeper yet. “Shaun hit the biggest six I’ve ever seen in local cricket,” says Martin. “Unfortunately Cliffe have a local rule, something to do with the trees at the bottom. It only counted as four.”

The treasurer had to leave after his side’s innings. “I spent all the journey home worrying about where we were going to find the money to pay for all the extra trophies on presentation night,” he says.

THE average bat, it’s reckoned, can eat its way through about 3,000 midges on a good night shift. A few would have been useful last humid Wednesday evening on the four-mile walk to Barton Cricket Club, the only problem that cricket (by and large) is a daylight sport.

Barton were to play our old friends from Lands, Darlington and District League A P Croskell Memorial Cup. At the appointed hour, however, the only person on Barton’s pristine ground was the groundsman himself and the only refreshments a bowl left out for the dog (or, possibly, for a conspicuously clammy columnist.)

The sign on the gate advising that the ground was very wet had, it transpired, been there since Christmas and was thus non-contemporaneous. Lands, neither hope nor glory, had conceded.

The news will have been a particular disappointment to the Godivas – “an old blokes team, retired teachers, mainly,” said the groundsman – who usually play at Barton on Wednesday evenings but had been, as they say, jocked off.

So why should a cricket team of men of a certain age be known as the Godivas? As probably they used to say in the Coventry of legend, all may yet be revealed.

….and finally, the England cricketer who became BBC Sports Personality of the Year despite scoring just 635 Test match runs (Backtrack, July 2) was David Steele, summoned at the age of 34 to face the wrath of Thomson and Lillee at Lord’s. “He resembled a Home Guard character from Dad’s Army,” said Bill Frindall at the time.

It’s widely recorded that Steele lost his way when called to the crease, ended up in the gent’s and was advised “Perhaps you’d better go back up, sir” by the toilet attendant. What’s not so well known, says Don Clarke, is Dennis Lillee’s greeting: “Where’ve you been, Groucho?”

In 1991, 15 years later, we heard him at a £2-a-head do at Bishop Auckland Cricket Club. “He didn’t look a day older than those heroic mid-70s days,” said the column, “a solitary benefit of prematurely silver hair.”

Steele acknowledged his slow scoring reputation. “I came in and the crowd went out,” he said.

Eddie Roxburgh, among those who knew the answer, today invites the identity of the Yorkshire cricketer who represented England at both cricket and football.

At the double, the column returns next week.