Good Goad

Its landlord in the 1970s, while still playing and coaching at Hartlepool United, was Alan Goad – whose 418 Pools matches make him fourth behind Richie Humphreys, Wattie Moore and Ray Thompson in the all-time appearance list. Alan was 70 on Wednesday.

All this began four or five weeks ago after we carried an old photo of Teddy Gardner with Len Shackleton and legendary Bishop Auckland footballers Bob Hardisty and Seamus O’Connell.

Though no one has been able to explain what brought them all together, watched over by a group of admiring schoolboys, Gardner’s question time has brought some unexpected answers.

Alan Goad signed from Exeter City in 1967, a left back paid £18 a week and soon finding his feet while others lost theirs.

In his first match, he once recalled, the coach – presumably team manager Gus McLean – told him that, first chance he got, he should kick the winger up in the air near the halfway line because the guy would never come near him again.

It worked, though Alan supposed that it wouldn’t in the modern game. “The winger would kick you back.”

EVEN before taking on the Square Ring, Alan and his wife Sue had had the Masons Arms at Middlestone Moor, near Spennymoor, to which regulars pushed a 30-gallon barrel – filled with water – from the Victoria Ground as part of his testimonial.

“They set off at a cracking pace, first ten miles in two hours,” said Sue at the time.

Old Mickey Moor men may like to recall that the barrel rollers – joined by Alan himself – were Ray Rickaby, Rick Wilson, Monica Wilkinson, Don Aird, Peter Brown, John Wetherill and Alan Wilkins.

Back in the 1970s, players – Pools players, anyway – organised their own testimonials. Alan first approached Newcastle United, supported from afar when a boy in Hampshire. The Magpies declined, swiftly followed by Sunderland and Middlesbrough.

Then he tried Brian Clough, who’d left Hartlepool two months before Goad arrived and who at the time was managing first division leaders (and future champions) Nottingham Forest.

Alan was surprised not only that Clough answered the phone himself but that he at once offered to send a full first team, on condition that the testimonial fund stand their pre-match meal.

The match took place on a bitter-cold November evening, two days after Forest had beaten Manchester United. “Goad has never been afraid of injury or criticism, a player who takes risks others wouldn’t dream of contemplating,” wrote Arthur Pickering in the programme.

The match ended 2-2, Billy Ayre and Big Bob Newton scoring for Pools, Kenny Burns and Tony Woodcock for Forest. “I swear to this day that every player in the Forest team tried as hard as they could and they were lucky to get out of Hartlepool with a draw,” he said a couple of years later.

Perhaps best of all, Cloughie didn’t even charge him for the meal. The beneficiary was delighted. “It exactly fitted my budget.”

Ends

Among those with particular reason to remember that testimonial night is Trimdon lad Malcolm Dawes, who himself made 200 Hartlepool appearances in the 1970s.

“Alan’s great asset was his strength,” recalls Malcolm, now in Newton Aycliffe. “He was a hard, determined player, a real 110 per cent man.”

Malcolm had been Pools’ player of the year the previous season, had won the same accolade after a summer with New York Cosmos and was returning from injury at the time of the Forest match.

“I got myself changed, expected ten minutes of game time, didn’t get anything. Next morning I went to see Kenny Hale, the manager, intending to play hell and the first thing he did was ask me if I’d like to go on loan to Workington.”

He went west and prospered, perhaps the only man in football history to win player of the year awards for Hartlepool, New York Cosmos and Workington in successive seasons.

A CENTURY of Poolies, Colin Foster’s wonderful 2008 collection of potted biographies, records that under five different managers and in a “massive” number of games Alan Goad’s name was always first on the team sheet.

He didn’t stand his corner long in the Square Ring – where Andy Capp creator Reg Smythe was a regular – briefly became a police officer, emigrated to Canada, played for and coached Vancouver Whitecaps and is still in British Columbia.

Despite Malcolm Dawes’s best efforts, we haven’t been able to wish him a happy birthday. It’s exactly 40 years, however, since he featured prominently – under the headline “It’s tough at the bottom” – in the Topical Times Football Annual.

Alan recalled four re-election bids in ten seasons, hitching a midnight lift on the back of a lorry after the team coach broke down on the motorway, talked of ten years spent exclusively at the wrong end of the soccer ladder.

“If I could turn the clock back,” he added, “I’d willingly do it all again, and feel privileged.”

FOOTBALL at the Masons Arms in Middlestone Moor also featured hereabouts in 2001, after the pub team rather overplayed its youth policy.

Managed by pub landlord Maurice Flint, who was also secretary, they were in the Over 40s League – where proof of seniority is carefully scrutinised. They might even have got away with Stephen Weldon being a bit bairn of 39 had not his 40th birthday party at Eldon Lane club been so extensively advertised.

In more youthful parlance, someone dobbed them in.

The team was docked 24 points and relegated, the player fined £100 and suspended, the manager fined £200 and banned for life.

Thereafter the team became known to Over 40s League secretary Kip Watson as Captain Flint and the Pirates, a buccaneering spirit underlined when Maurice’s wife Trish was named as secretary.

Kip said they had to accept it. “It’s just that she has a rather deep voice, that’s all.”

FIRST day of the season, we head for Sunderland RCA v Newcastle Benfield, a sunny day overshadowed when RCA goalie coach Lenny French, 47, complains of chest pains shortly before kick-off.

Ambulance and paramedics are there commendably quickly, Lenny – lovely bloke – undergoes surgery at the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle and by 7pm is sitting up in bed and answering his text messages.

Benfield win 1-0, the goal almost inevitably scored by diminutive former Newcastle United man Paul Brayson, who’s scored at least 40 in each of his four seasons with the club.

The man they call Brassy is 40. Unlike what might be claimed elsewhere, that – as they say – is official.