SIX years after Backtrack revealed that West Auckland-born former English international footballer David Thomas had been registered blind, he is to get a guide dog.

“It will change my life, the best Christmas present I could possibly have had,” he says. “Sight loss has been life-changing, but so are guide dogs.”

Though his central vision remains pretty good – with a little help from his partners he still plays golf off nine – congenital glaucoma has robbed him of peripheral vision. Three operations brought no improvement.

“Both of my parents had glaucoma. It’s one of the reasons that my wife and I came back to the North-East,” he tells the QPR website. They now live in the grounds of Lartington Hall, near Barnard Castle.

Even before being accepted for a guide dog, the winger capped seven times by his country had started a fundraising campaign to provide money for their training and hopes to auction signed shirts provided by every Premiership club.

Thomas’s grandfather, known as Ticer, was in the West Auckland team which, indelibly, won the “World Cup” in 1909. Lloyd, his father, never left the village or the terraced house in which he was born.

David, an outstanding schoolboy player, scored 15 goals on his debut for Barnard Castle Comp – though he’d swapped sides at half-time – joined Burnley from school and was subsequently signed by QPR for £165,000, huge money in 1972. He helped the London club to within a point of the old first division title.

Though registered blind for seven years, he decided to ask about the possibility of a guide dog after chasing a stray goose at his home and running into a branch that he just hadn’t seen. “There are plenty worse than me. I felt terribly guilty about applying for a dog,” he says.

The story appeared in last Wednesday’s Daily Mail, following which he has made several television appearances. A week ago his justgiving page – www.justgiving.com/davidthomas7 – stood at £3,000. Yesterday morning a total of 387 donors had given £8,687.

We’d last been in David’s company at the unveiling in October 2013 of the World Cup statue on West Auckland village green, honours shared between him, Sir John Hall and the actor Tim Healy.

As always, he was upbeat. “I’ve no complaints at all,” said the wings-clipped flyer. “Life is good.”

JUST another night in the Darlington and District 5s and 3s League (second division), Brainless Britannia B v East End Club. Then something extraordinary happens.

Harry Moses, playing me, picks up all seven fives in his seven dominoes, the occasion almost unremarked by his team-mates save for the fact that he’d allegedly have been better off not playing the double first. Aficionados will understand.

The odds against such a thing happening are huge, nonetheless. Kit Pearson, our broad-brained skipper, supposes there to be 8,683,560 combinations in 28 dominoes, with seven chances of picking up all seven.

The question’s also put to Bob Bacon, another of the column’s resident experts, who on such occasions recalls his long-gone days in the Trimdon and District League when dominoes were drawn from a bag to prevent skulduggery. “The backs could have been marked,” he supposes.

At any rate, Bob jots down a few permutations and concludes that the odds against seven-out-of-seven are 1,184,040-1 – which sounds pretty much what our skipper said – but that’s for a specific suit. About 170,000-1 for any seven.

Harry may still be advised not to buy a National Lottery ticket, however. The odds against that winning the jackpot are 13,983,814-1 and the Euromillions odds 76 million-1. The odds against winning the top Premium Bonds prize in any month are 27 billion-to-one.

“You’re more likely to be killed by a vending machine, that’s just 112 million-to-one,” says one of the websites.

In the Darlington Doms League, Harry Moses is a man in a million, nonetheless.

PASSING mention a fortnight back of Newton Real, a long-gone football team in the long-gone Darlington Weekend League, prompts Alf of That Ilk to recall that seven of them were Hutchinsons. “Aye,” adds someone in the Brit, “and the other four were A N Other.”

LAST week’s column on 1902 Wimbledon ladies’ singles champion Muriel Robb not only confused Osborne Road and Osborne Avenue in Jesmond, but may also have exaggerated the gentility of that Newcastle suburb.

Hilary Andre, who points out the error – “the tennis club is in Osborne Road, at the posh end” – has lived on both streets. Osborne Avenue is the home of the cricket club, its clubhouse used as a polling station.

Osborne Road, says Hilary, now has too many bars – among the reasons they left. “Not everyone wants to be mooned at on the way home from Evensong at St George’s.”

TENNIS courting, the column also recalled that the Rev J T Hartley, men’s singles champion in 1879 and 1880, was simultaneously Vicar of Burneston, near Bedale in North Yorkshire. It brings a splendid return of service from Roger Jennings.

Hartley, it’s chronicled, had completed a quarter-final on the Saturday afternoon, caught a north-bound train in order to take Sunday services, sat with a dying parishioner for most of that evening and then rode to catch a Monday morning train from Thirsk in order that play might resume.

Having consulted his Bradshaw’s railway timetable from that late-Victorian age, Roger supposes the vicar to have been an advocate of the “muscular Christianity” then prevalent.

“He must have been on the 5.45pm from Kings Cross to be in Thirsk by 10.50pm,” he concludes.

The return journey would have involved leaving Thirsk at 7.55am, changing at York, reaching London at five past two. “The approximately 11-mile hackney carriage journey to Wimbledon would, in 1880s terms, have cost him six shillings and sixpence – but at least there was no congestion charge to worry about.”

Roger also consults his 1925 Crockford’s Clerical Directory, which finds Hartley living in the Abbey at Knaresborough and a canon of Ripon Cathedral.

Last week’s paragraph on Sunderland striker Duncan Watmore’s supposed resemblance to Alf Tupper – the Tough of the Track – was also a bit ahead of itself. It’s today that he receives his first class economics degree from Newcastle University.

“Advanced macro-economics, advanced micro-economics,” said Watmore – reckoned only the second Premiership footballer with a first class degree – in an interview in The Times the following day.

“My team-mates ask for advice with their mortgages. I tell them I don’t want to lose their money,” he added.

Inexplicably, a perceived resemblance to Alf Tupper wasn’t mentioned at all.

THE other Premiership player with a first class degree – chemistry, Sheffield – has been David Wetherall of Bradford City, Sheffield Wednesday and Leeds. That academic formula notwithstanding, he is now head of youth development with the Football League.