Modern marvels

Both sides were joint winners of the English Schools’ FA national competition – in successive seasons – all 30-odd squad members, save for an unused sub, gathered in the Colliery Club. The column, alas, couldn’t make it.

We’d also told how Alan White, fresh from university, had been given charge of the class of 1975-76 and compiled a chronicle of the season.

Already it’s a sell-out, raising £1,000 for the Sir Bobby Robson Cancer Fund. Now he’s written a second, incorporating the earlier triumph. “The boys from that season felt a bit left out,” he says.

To much surprise, none of the 75-76 squad went on to play football professionally. Among the Easington boys of 74-75, Stuart Robinson made eight appearances for Newcastle United before heading to Aldershot, where he remains and is a postman.

Alan Brown scored 21 goals in 113 Sunderland appearances, hit three in five before injury ended a loan spell with the Magpies and is reckoned on the Doncaster Rovers website “probably the most natural goal scorer to play for the club” – generous since he managed just six in 15 before injury again intervened.

After six unsuccessful operations he became steward of Easington Constitutional Club – in those parts the Tin Club – before service as a prison officer at Durham, where he also played football.

The unused sub was Graham Scurr, who now lives abroad and so had a decent excuse. Though he didn’t play at a high level, he became Southampton’s head groundsman. “After Easington,” says Alan, “football was in the blood.”

PROBLEMS at the grass roots: Darlington RA’s cutter, known more or less affectionately as the Green Goddess, has again hit the rocks.

Though most suppliers claim that the 1960s model can’t be repaired – and quote substantial sums to replace it – football club secretary Alan Hamilton has now found a chap in Whitby who’ll provide new blades and cylinder for £500.

Since that’s still £500 more than they have, the splendidly hirsute Mr Hamilton – former regional bank manager, top bloke – plans a sponsored head and beard shave, his first hair cut for two-and-a-half years.

It’ll take place on April 22, after the relegation-threatened club’s final Ebac Northern League match of the season. “It was either that or putting the wife out on the streets,” says Alan.

Mrs Hamilton, sadly, has not been available for comment.

HARD work and all that, tomorrow I get officially to open Darlington Rugby Club’s beer festival at Blackwell Meadows. They’ve even had a competition appropriately to name one of Mithril’s ales, the winning suggestion Joost One More in memory of the great South African player Joost van der Westhuizen, who died last month. Another motor neurone disease victim, he was 45.The formalities, short and bitter-sweet, are at 5pm – when it would be good to raise a glass with readers. The festival runs all weekend.

HISTORY almost literally crumbling around their ears, our friends at the Durham Amateur Football Trust have had to vacate railway pioneer Timothy Hackworth’s old cottage in Shildon, their headquarters for the past decade.

Temporarily homeless, they hope to relocate to portable buildings at Bishop Auckland’s Heritage Park ground but may need to find £10,000 to make it possible.

“It would be absolutely ideal,” says DAFT secretary Dick Longstaff, himself a former Bishops player.

Relocation also marks the end of a remarkable labour of love by Trust treasurer Geoff Wood who has digitalised 30-odd years worth of Saturday night Pinks – the Northern Despatch version – having first ironed and photographed them. It took four years.

Geoff’s wife Barbara, a former English international athlete, is impressed – “but if he hadn’t read every word first,” she says, “he’d have been finished ages ago.”

LAST Saturday to Hebburn Town v Tow Law Town, both mid-table in the Ebac Northern League second division. Four weeks earlier, Hebburn had entertained Thornaby in front of a paying gate of 16 – on Saturday, following a media SOS, there were 452. The campaign was fronted by Jason Cook, stand-up comedian and club president, who also has a fund raising show on September 22 – but by then Hebburn could be laughing all the way to the bank.

….AND finally, the referee on the infamous occasion that Eric Cantona launched a kung-fu kick at a Selhurst Park spectator (Backtrack, March 2) was telephone engineer Alan Wilkie from Chester-le-Street. Recalling the occasion, his autobiography was called One Night at the Palace. David Moyes was first with the answer.

Martin Birtle in Billingham today invites readers to name the first footballer to score a hat-trick in all four divisions of the old Football League – there’s a North-East connection.

Back on the Railroad to Wembley, the column returns next week.