Cass act

The great sports journalist, who died last week, found himself outside the stadium without accreditation or a valid ticket and with no chance of either.

Magpies manager Joe Harvey spotted him anxiously outside. “Come and watch it with me,” said Joe, which explains why United had an extra man on the bench – right next to the gaffer – and how Bob got the exclusive of a lifetime.

“It was incredible,” recalls his long-time former colleague and friend Ray Robertson. “I’m watching the match on television and there’s Bobby Moncur lifting the cup with Bob right beside him. You talk about getting the inside story.

“It just couldn’t happen today, you’d never even have got in the ground, but it showed how much Bob was liked and trusted.”

The two had worked together in the Echo’s Bishop Auckland office, around 1960, spirits lifted by gaggling gatherings daily in Rossi’s café.

“No bylines in those days. The only time Bob got his name in the paper was when he broke his leg playing for Bishop Auckland Wednesday,” recalls Ray, long the Echo’s man on the Boro beat.

Bob, Darlington lad and Quaker loyalist, worked subsequently on The Sun and the Mail on Sunday, renowned for the sumptuous thickness of his contacts book, the unceasing jollity of his nature and the multiplicity of his exclusives.

Ray attended his retirement lunch in Wilmslow, near Sir Alex Ferguson’s house. Bob had been there many times, it transpired, and continued to provide Man United exclusives thereafter.

Often they quoted a club “source”, though source for Bob’s goose was seldom sauce for the gander.

“Any other journalist walking up Sir Alex’s drive wouldn’t just have got the hairdryer, they’d have got the shotgun,” says Ray, over a coffee in Middlesbrough.

Bob and Ray also helped form the northern branch of the Football Writers’ Association. Bob compered their dinners – “a lot funnier than some of the professional speakers” – but for a journalist wasn’t always a good communicator.

Ray remembers discovering, two days before the meeting to choose the year’s FWA award winners, that his pal was in Spain. “On the night of the meeting he turned up smiling as always, carrying a personally signed David Beckham shirt for the raffle. You couldn’t knock him back.”

Times change. These days everything’s controlled by club press officers, who issue they-shall-not passes and strait jackets within which to wear them. “No one’s allowed personal contacts, no one has players’ home telephone numbers, no one travels on the team bus,” Ray laments. Not unless they’re Bob Cass, anyway.

Bob was 78, lived for many years in Durham, was a committed Roman Catholic who’d written a monthly column for the diocesan newspaper.

“He’d covered all the big matches, countless internationals, but always said those early days in Bishop Auckland were the best of his life,” says Ray.

There’s a pause over the latte. “Except, perhaps, for the time he got the best seat in the house at the Inter Cities Fairs Cup final.”

n Bob’s funeral is at St Joseph’s RC Church in Mill Lane, Durham, at 10am on Monday, December 12.

Expletives repleted

FRANK Clark, still studying A-levels at Hookergate Grammar School when he lifted the FA Amateur Cup with Crook Town in 1962, was back in the North-East last Friday evening.

He’d subsequently made 456 appearances for Newcastle United, won league and European Cup medals with Nottingham Forest, was assistant manager to Ken Knighton at Sunderland and manager of Leyton Orient, Forest and Manchester City (“the worst decision I ever made.”)

“I never understood why the Newcastle fans used to sing ‘Frank Clark knew my father’, but it was about the nicest thing they ever said about me,” he once, self-effacingly, told the column.

It was a fundraising night in memory of Jackie Foster, a lovely man and outstanding Northern League player with Willington, Bishop Auckland, West Auckland and Crook – “the best left peg I ever saw in non-league football,” said Brian Newton, his former manager, in affectionate tribute.

Frank, now 73 and the only man in the room to wear a tie, scored just twice in 600 games, might have had one or two more had he not broken his leg in a youthful challenge with Tommy Smith. “The trainer said I could run it off,” he recalled.

Ferryhill lad and ex-England man Eric Gates, incomparably entertaining, also spoke. So, very well, did Julio Arca. After long spells with both Sunderland and Middlesbrough – and a couple of eye-opening seasons with the Willow Pond in the Sunderland Sunday league – the Argentinian is now in the Ebac Northern League with South Shields.

His English is good, his Anglo-Saxon better, somehow seeming even to aspirate the f-word – but no one on earth does Anglo-Saxon expletives like Little Eric.

THE column had last caught up with Frank Clark in July 1993, a 1pm appointment at the City Ground not long after he’d been appointed Forest manager.

He arrived, apologetically, at 4.25pm. They’d been signing a player, he said.

The player was Gary Bull, whose cousin Steve may better be remembered, on a free from Barnet, who were broke. Barnet’s manager was Barry Fry, their chairman Stan Flashman. “Let’s just say it was time consuming,” Frank recalls.

In the Evening Post that night the Forest chairman had been enthusiastic. “Bull doesn’t just score goals but he isn’t a bad footballer, either,” he said.

In five years at Forest he made 12 appearances, scoring just once. “Aye,” says Frank Clark, “but he was a lovely lad.”

THE following evening to a Christmas fundraiser at Spennymoor Town Hall for the Ian Larnach Cancer Care charity.

Ian, formerly a Darlington footballer, has long fought the disease and is in the middle of yet another round of chemotherapy.

“What fettle then, Ian?”

“Brilliant.” Ian, great lad, is always brilliant.

The bash attracted 140 friends and family. Lily Brass, his 83-year-old mother-in-law, had spent the previous year knitting a woolly menagerie to help swell the coffers.

Retired newsagent Barrie Taylor, on the next chair, appeared also to have had the wool pulled over his eyes. “Your father was a vicar, wasn’t he?” he said.

Saturday’s effort will benefit the Butterwick Hospice, comfortably beating the £2,000 target. The fund overall has raised around £30,000.