Darren ground

Lies lovely little dirty Darren.

“DARREN” is how locals pronounce the town of Darwen, though if particularly out of puff they might further abbreviate it to Darn.

“A quintessential Lancastrian town,” says one of the guides, presumably suggesting that it retains tenuous ties to the textile industry and that they could have filmed Hovis commercials there.

It’s also the starting point of this season’s Railroad to Wembley series, AFC Darwen v West Auckland, FA Vase second qualifying round.

Mr Kit Pearson, among fellow travellers on the 8.29 out of Darlington, not only recalls that we’d together watched West Auckland last season – down the East Lancs road at Nelson – but that an irate visiting supporter had demanded to know what I was going to do about the referee.

Advised that he was whistling in the dark – rather like the poor ref – the gentleman stormed off, vowing never again to buy The Northern Echo.

“You’ve a very good memory,” I tell Kit.

“I thought it was one of the great moments in sport,” he replies.

FROM York we catch the Blackpool train, change at Blackburn. That it’s barely half full is puzzling, a) because it’s a Saturday, b) because it’s the Illuminations and c) because Blackburn Rovers are at home. OK, delete c.

In any case, most of the train appears to decant at Hebden Bridge which, its virtues else, isn’t the sort of place you’d expect a West Yorkshireman to go on his jollies.

Blackburn’s the town of 4,000 holes and of Bryan Douglas, still with us at 81. Though the local authority is Blackburn and Darwen Borough Council, though the M65 services was changed after local protests from Blackburn to Blackburn and Darwen, Blackburn regards its neighbour as just a small town in Lancashire.

From there to Darwen there’s a rail replacement bus service, four words which someone in The Times recently suggested were the most feared in the English language.

Though there’s a half hour wait, the railway staff take one look at us and are at once helpful. “The pub’s that way,” they say.

FORMED in 1875, four years before the doggerel atop the column was published in the Darwen News, Darwen was the first English football club to pay its players – Fergie Suter and James Love, imported from Partick – by that action releasing so many evils into the unsuspecting world that Pandora’s Box might be considered a bee sting by comparison.

Origin of the species, as you might almost say, they should have sensed over-extravagance the moment they decided to increase admission to a tanner.

They reached the FA Cup semi-final in 1880-81, having beaten Romford 15-0 the round previously, and in 1891-92 joined the Football League, the 12-0 defeat to West Bromwich still a top flight record.

In their last League season, 1898-99, the team known as the Salmoners because of the puce-pink colour of their shirts, suffered 18 successive defeats, a record which Sunderland tried very hard to beat in 2003, but fell one short when inadvertently triumphing 2-0 at Preston North End.

Though languishing in the Lancashire Combination, Darwen also reached the FA Cup third round in 1931-32 – drawn at league champions Arsenal.

Bert Proos, the Darwen mascot, had let out the team, nipped back inside to put on something warmer, returned to his seat and asked the score.

“Three-nil,” they said.

“Who to?” said Bert, indelibly.

It ended 11-1, a picture of returning Darwen officials still hanging in the club’s congenial clubhouse. Most still managed to smile. Perhaps they were remembering Bert Proos.

Arsenal gave them a set of red and white strips, Darwen’s colours to this day. Some say it was on account of the visitors’ sportsmanship: more likely it was that the Gunners couldn’t stomach salmon pink.

WE’D last visited in 1999, when Darwen played Billingham Synthonia – “a match uniquely and unequivocally awful,” the column observed, though the Synners won 1-0.

Strictly, this one’s a new club on the same ground, Darwen FC having been wound up in 2009 with £60,000 debts. “One of the previous owners had systematically destroyed the club financially,” says Saturday’s programme, no less equivocally.

Now they’re AFC Darwen, mid-table in the North West Counties League – that of Alsager, Abbey Hey and Atherton Colliery. Though as Lancashire as hot pot, club president Bob Eccles reveals himself to be a Bournemouth fan – all to do with Bob Lord, the black pudding butcher who was Burnley’s chairman when in 1960 they won the old First Division.

Like cow heel, say, Bob Lord was by all accounts an acquired taste, though Bob Eccles’s hero and big mates with Fulham chairman and celebrated comedian Tommy Trinder.

So what’s that to do with Bournemouth. “It’s where the two of them went on their holidays,” says Bob.

ALSO among the 150-or-so crowd is the column’s old friend Alan Kennedy, a Penshaw lad who won five top division titles and two European Cup medals with Liverpool, where universally he was known as Barney Rubble, on account of a perceived resemblance to Fred Flintstone’s best buddy.

There were England appearances, too. “Me and Kenny Sansom had 88 caps between us,” he likes to say. “Unfortunately, I only won two of them.”

He subsequently signed for Lawrie McMenemy at Sunderland (“the worst move I ever made”) and for John Bird at Hartlepool, which worked out no better, before becoming player/manager of the Masons Arms at Billinge and doing a bit of after-dinner speaking.

We’d first heard him at the late lamented North Briton in Aycliffe village, so nervous that he couldn’t eat a thing. “I’d rather play in front of 100,000 at Wembley than speak to 100 at Aycliffe,” he said.

On Saturday he’s there to watch his son Michael, a fellow full back, playing for the home team. “You don’t get goal-scoring full backs any more,” says Barney.

“I once hit one from 35 yards for Sunderland against Carlisle. It gets further every time I talk about it.”

WE’D last seen Alan Kennedy at a Northern Alliance dinner in 2010, upstaged by North Riding FA chairman and Wensleydale farmer Len Scott, on one of his first speaking engagements.

“A speaking star of the future,” we’d accurately forecast, though Len himself had been reluctant so publicly to rise to his feet.

It was, he said, a bit like being invited to make love to the former Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles – “a great honour, but I really can’t say that I’m keen.”

WEST Auckland score first, the goal heralded by a travelling trumpeter and by a vociferous suggestion from a home player that they should have had a free kick first.

“If that were a yellow card I’ll stick my a**e in Busby’s,” says the referee. It’s what genteel folk call swearing and what the FA calls man management.

Darwen lose their goalkeeper, suspected broken leg, take a 2-1 lead, but are pulled back with three minutes remaining. Roused to celebration, the West Auckland trumpeter is advised on the possible relocation of his instrument.

Near the end of extra-time, West 3-2 ahead, a second Darwen player suffers a suspected broken leg in an innocuous-looking challenge and speedily joins his team-mate in Blackburn hospital. Darwen are down to nine men, Anthony Hume's second makes if 4-2 for the Ebac Northern League side.

A good day is overshadowed somewhat, but the Railroad rattles on. Handsworth, Hallowe’en, is next along the line.