Season of beef and raspberry gateaux, the annual round of sportsman's dinners began - as it always does - at East Rainton Cricket Club's do on Friday.

Once again they'd won the North East Durham League, once again 44-year-old skipper Ian Kitching topped the bowling averages, 23 at seven and a bit.

Team-mates remain habitually unimpressed. They call it flight and something that rhymes with flight, the cavalier Kitch reported.

Former England all rounder Geoff Miller and Newcastle and Sunderland full back Alan Kennedy were the speakers. Though brought up in Penshaw, about three miles away, Kennedy had to be talked into Chilton Moor country club by mobile phone, like a pilot in a pea souper.

He and Kenny Sansom had shared the England left back spot, he recalled, 88 caps between them. "He won 86...."

Miller, world traveller and accomplished speaker, revealed how to tell the difference between an Australian and a New Zealander - ask if they've made love to a 14-year-old.

"The New Zealander will say it's the most disrespectful question he's ever heard; the Australian will say "A 14-year-old what'?"

He also recalled the County championship match at Buxton from May 31-June 3 1975 in which Lancashire scored 477 on the first day, the second was lost because of two inches of snow on the ground and Derbyshire were bowled out for 42 and 87 (Miller 2 and 0) on the third.

The innings and 348 runs defeat is by no means the heaviest ever, as Dusty Miller supposed. The biggest victory margin in the championship was Surrey's innings and 485 against Surrey at The Oval in 1888, while at Lahore in 1964-65 Railways (910-6) won a first class match against Dera Ismail Khan by the small matter of an innings and 851.

Perhaps the most daunting tie in yesterday's FA Vase draw was Shildon's home game with bogy team Bedlington Terriers - particularly for long serving Shildon secretary and FA Council member Mike Armitage since it was he, as vice-chairman of the Vase committee, who drew the "away" teams at Soho Square. "It was horrifying," he reports from the noon train northwards. "I'm thinking of staying on until Edinburgh."

Just something in the air maybe but John Briggs in Darlington - rarely wrong - insists that Brian Clough once smoked a pipe on the Sunderland team photograph, sending team manager Alan Brown up in a blue light when he saw the newspapers next morning.

Neither Charlie Hurley nor Frank Johnson, both of whom might remember it, have been around. The cuttings file is blameless, the photographs unobjectionable.

Tony Francis's Clough biography merely records that the relationship between him and Brown was "always uneasy".

John believes it to have been at the start of season 1962-63; others may still recall a whiff of it.

Perhaps the best Clough story, frequently told against himself, concerned the night he returned home late from a scouting mission to find his wife Barbara already tucked up.

"God, your feet are freezing," she said.

"Hey, love," said the old feller, "you can call me Brian in bed."

Still with the baccy brigade, the Newcastle Benfield Saints' programme on Saturday carried a report of a match earlier this season at Guisborough Town - and wondered who was the woman smoking the pipe. Town secretary Keith Smeltzer denies all knowledge. "It must have been a Benfield supporter," he says, "we don't allow women to smoke pipes in Guisborough." It could be a smokescreen, of course.

However Great the North Run for Durham County Council libraries and culture director Patrick Conway - two hours 25 - what followed was pretty awful.

As the column reported on September 17, Patrick's a Mayo man - unable because of promised participation in the run to fly to see his side attempt to win a first All Ireland Gaelic Football final for 53 years but hoping to watch it in the Irish Club in Newcastle.

It didn't go well. One of yesterday's Irish papers described the match as "amazingly one-sided", the victory as "unbelievably facile" and Mayo as shapeless, hapless and other things much ruder.

"We were completely outplayed," admits Patrick. "In football terms they keep on talking about the west awakening, but they've been talking about it since I was a child. I'm afraid we were still asleep."

The crowd was 79,749, the score Kerry 1-20, Mayo 2-9. Apparently that's a hammering in any language.

Still with the GNR, John King - whose goal for Trimdon Vets on his 59th birthday we reported on Friday - ran with his wife Lesley and sister-in-law Anne Malkin for the Children's Foundation and Children's Liver Foundation. Assuming a modest pace (says John) they got round together in two hours 25 minutes, raising around £2300. Truly, Kings for the day.

Smarter than the average Northern League man - or club steward for that matter, since he's now in charge of Rise Carr WMC in Darlington - Evenwood Town managing director Ken Houlahan again finds himself in print.

Houlahan, he of the three degrees, is co-author of a "Time/motion analysis of soccer" in a chapter called "Temporal pattern analysis and its applicability to soccer" in a blockbuster book called "The Hidden Structure of Social Interaction."

After that it gets sexy. There are also chapters called "Relational patterns in courtship", "Sexual hormone cycles in married couples" and "Microanalysis of courtship behaviour in Drosophila."

Though Drosophila proves to be a breed of fruit fly and not, as we had imagined, a Mediterranean holiday resort for 18 to 30-year-olds, Ken's confident of bumper sales.

"They talk about nowt else in Evenwood," he insists.

After Friday's piece on the 1892 Liverpool v Stockton programme on offer for a minimum £1,500, the full sale catalogue has now arrived.

There are thousands of items, but the cover reproduces the programme for the FA Cup semi-final, Huddersfield v Sunderland, played on March 26 1938 at Ewood Park, Blackburn.

Rovers themselves were losing 2-0 to Newcastle before a crowd of just 14,000, Boro's second division championship hopes were hit by a 1-0 home defeat to Brentford, North Durham won the Durham Senior Rugby Cup for the first time in 55 years and Darlington's 3-0 defeat at Carlisle was said by the Echo to be "a defeat too bad to be true."

Meanwhile, back in Blackburn, holders Sunderland gave their worst performance of the season and Huddersfield their best in the Terriers' 3-1 win. The programme cost twopence; now the minimum bid price is £550.

The old lads of Darlington Railway found themselves on rather the wrong track for the Over 40s League match with the Willow Pond of Sunderland.

The Willow Pond duly pulled into Darlington, only to discover that the Railway had shunted off to Sunderland.

Thanks to mobile phones, the Railway were able to arrive back at their home station just half an hour late for kick-off.

"It could only happen in this league," says Over 40s' secretary Kip Watson.

...and finally

Graham Yallop's claim to cricket history in the West Indies v Australia match in 1978 (Backtrack, September 24) is that he became the first player to wear a helmet while batting in a Test match.

Alf Hutchinson in Darlington today simply seeks the identity of the player who scored the first Premiership hat trick.

More rabbits out of the hat on Friday.

Published: 28/09/2004