Oh me Darlo, oh me Darlo...

So it is. Darlington v Rochdale. It’s just no longer a big event day.

The Quakers are bottom of the bottom division, two points from nine games.

Another manager’s been sacked – or, possibly, sacked by mutual consent – crowds are in dangerous, potentially terminal, decline.

The hard-core fans, of whom we shall hear more, appear neither stoical nor suicidal. Rather they are world weary, hangdog like Huckleberry Hound.

“Oh me Darlo, oh me Darlo….”

ONE bar’s closed. In the other there’s a lad with “Save Our Club” on the back of his trackie top.

It’s a rather tatty trackie top. Given Darlington’s recent history does it mean this crisis, the last crisis or the crisis before that?

I’m wearing my Northern League tie. “Bloody hell,”

says someone in the queue, “does that mean we’ve applied to come back already?”

Another sign of the times, Richard Jones has got 3-1 through Sky’s on-line betting arm against the Quakers winning. “I’ve usually bet on our opponents this season but you can’t get odds any more,” he says.

His mate’s trying to have a few quid through his mobile but can only get something called adult services. So that’s what they mean by hardcore fans.

It’s subdued, like having the wake before the funeral, the talk turning gloomily to the last time they played Rochdale immediately after a manager – one of David Hodgson’s periodic departures – had been removed. They lost 5-0.

Rochdale, the town of Gracie Fields, Cyril Smith and sundry cowboys, have been in the bottom division for an extraordinary 35 years. Darlington, the next most inveterate basement dwellers, have languished there for 18.

“One thing’s certain, we’ll be out of it before they are,”

says a Darlo fan. Black humour? Black and white, anyway.

A latecomer discovers that the beer’s run out and is asked to wait while they change the keg. “It’ll be just my luck that it’s the last keg,” he says.

“It’ll be just your luck,”

says his mate, “that they’ll reinstate Colin Todd.”

DARLINGTON’S midweek matches never used to be like this. Back at Feethams, good old hugger-mugger Feethams where clouds of Old Holborn were wafted through the Monday night air and where you might get a pie and a programme for a peppercorn, the atmosphere seemed as comfortable and as congenial as the back row of the Odeon.

Here the stewards whistle an unhappy tune, twiddle their thumbs and may as well have brought their knitting.

A polliss – who turns out to be Stewart “the Monopod”

Dawson, Tow Law Town’s goalkeeper in the 1998 FA Vase final at Wembley – stops for a chat.

“There’s not going to be much happening tonight,” he says.

Tuesday’s programme (£2.50, a pretty good fist) has been redrafted to accommodate the weekend’s events. Craig Liddle, the caretaker manager, talks unsurprisingly of the need to get some wins on the board; Raj Singh, the chairman, discusses the options for Todd’s replacement.

“This is a great club for any manager. We’re all aware of the position we’re in right now, but I’d hope our next manager sees it as a challenge and buys in to what I’m trying to create at Darlington.”

So that’s how desperate things are. These days the manager pays them.

THE great folly of a stadium echoes like a Piccadilly Line station after the last train has gone: impressive, iconoclastic, eerie and absurd.

For a few minutes I hang around the reception in the hope that, rather like the Parable of the Wedding Feast, someone might emerge and bid “Go thou higher.” The Quakers, come to think, might benefit from the same invitation.

Admission otherwise is £18, the 200 or so Rochdale fans gathered in the top corner of the east stand, where the name Quakers is picked out on the seats. The visitors more or less cover the last two letters. It just says Quake.

It’s a decent game, save for the “If in doubt” tendency to hump, rather than play, the ball out of defence. In truth there’s more hoof than a herd of prize Friesians.

The Darlington supporters, the Hucksters, are commendably encouraging, reasonably encouraged, happy to go in goalless at half-time. Poor sods, they’ve just got used to singing “Colin Todd’s black and white army” when another manager goes and spoils it.

“Craig Liddle’s black and white army” is musically trickier, with the result that the west stand’s concertinad concerto sounds like a Stanley Unwin convention.

It’s what linguists call elision, or possibly Liddle elision.

“These lads will run for ever for you,” someone says over the Bovril.

“So would 11 greyhounds,”

says his mate. “They couldn’t score goals, either.”

The meat and potato pie is £2.50 and would be OK so long as someone didn’t analyse the ratio of meat to potato; the televisions beneath the stand reveal that Hartlepool, the old enemy, are losing 2-0 at Stockport.

“Champion, that’ll put them in the bottom six,” says Richard Jones and is reminded of the dangers of Schadenfreude.

There are no doubt those in the Northern Echo Arena who believe Schadenfreude to be the striker they’re trying to sign from the nether regions of the Bundesliga. Before very long they will learn about laughing last, an’ all.

THE second half has barely started before Rochdale’s ‘keeper makes two fantastic saves within a minute.

Between the two, the ball’s kicked off the line.

After 62 minutes the Lancastrians score, a strike which seems almost visibly to deflate the youthful hosts, like a slow puncture in a hotair balloon.

After 63 minutes the first fan goes home (or, perhaps, to watch “live” football in the pub.) None sings about seeing him sneaking out. After 65 minutes the photographer goes home. After 80 minutes Rochdale score a second.

Between the goals they announce the crowd, a pitiful 1,748 – 1,100 fewer than the corresponding fixture in February.

The faithful are still singing “We’ll support you ever more” when the final whistle goes, almost hunched, Lowry-like into themselves as once again they head homeward from the stadium.

If body language were an offence, these lads would be doing five years. It becomes yet more graphic when they hear that Hartlepool have pulled back to 2-2.

In Cleveland Bridge club they’re wondering if their team can overtake Doncaster’s all-time nadir of just 18 points in a season, or Newport County’s of three wins – two of them against the Quakers.

One of the lads has also discovered, somewhere at the back of the programme, the club’s new complaints procedure. “They’ll be queuing half-way to Hurworth,” he says.

In truth the team wasn’t bad at all, but may need more luck and more composure in today’s crucial home game with Macclesfield. In any event, big or small, they could do worse than sign that Schadenfreude.

Backtrack briefs

SO who’s this Sean St Ledger, Middlesbrough’s new central defender?

Though football has had a fair-sized congregation of Bishops, Priests and Deans – and the affectionately remembered Dickie Deacon at Darlington – the Irish international may be only the second player to have a sainthood. The other, of course, was Jimmy Greaves’s mate.

It’s to be hoped that the Boro new boy fares rather better than the original St Leger, a 7th century French bishop who was blinded, mutilated and, finally, beheaded.

Though yesterday was his feast day, the familiar horse race has nothing to do with the luckless saint. Barry St Leger was an army colonel who started it in 1776.

IT’S wholly coincidental that, in a 1963 issue of Soccer Star, John Phelan in Howden-le-Wear should come across a piece on Norman Hallam, the only man to play in the Football League while a church minister.

Hallam, a Methodist, turned the other cheek for both Port Vale and Halifax Town after the war, subsequently joining Goole Town where his reviving performances were appropriately described as miraculous.

When the man of the cloth was injured, Goole had to cut their own and finished second bottom.

The early Northern League had several God squad members, including the Rev George Wreford-Brown who played for Stockton and the Rev Robert Hill Drury, who enlightened Bishop Auckland, Boro and Darlington.

A true Christian, Drury not only declined all expenses, he paid at the gate to get in.

ALMOST five years ago, we recorded the passing of Harry Smurthwaite, allround sportsman and for 40 years a stalwart – on and off the pitch – of Bishop Auckland cricket club.

Though one of the lads, Harry was never happier than when in the company of his wife Shirley – “the ever-splendid, ever-smiling Shirley”, the column observed in 2004. Now we hear that Shirley herself died last Saturday. Her funeral will be held, near Hexham, on Tuesday, October 6.

JOHN Dawson, now in his 51st recorded year of relentless ground hopping – his first match, he recalls, was a pre-season friendly at Exeter City, Possibles v Probables – was joined at Norton and Stockton Ancients’ 1,000th Northern League game on Wednesday by his Norwegian equivalents.

They’re brothers from Bergen, familiar on Norwegian television.

One’s a Boro fan, the other a Gooner.

So while one had headed to tick off Burton Albion the previous evening, the other joined the 18,000- odd at Middlesbrough v Leicester. “The worst football match I ever saw,”

he said.

They were joined at Norton by Rob Nicholls, editor of the Boro fanzine Fly Me to the Moon. Norse code? “He mightn’t be too far wrong,” said Rob.

STILL with the Boro, a children’s story called The Return of George Camsell’s Football Boots, written by John Wilson, will be launched at the Marton Hotel next Wednesday.

Described as “a creative blend of fact and fiction”, it’s about a little lad who, on a snowy Christmas Eve, finds the local legends boots and moves heave, earth and the LNER to return them before the big match.

John Wilson may be better know known as the chap who runs Methusaleh, the football auction house.

TWO weeks ago we reported Sharon Gayter’s record-shattering 24 hour race around Fitz Park in Keswick – cricket and football pitches in the middle, Skiddaw towering behind. Harry Mead recalls that, four or five years back, Keswick’s was named England’s most beautiful ground by Wisden Cricket Monthly.

Whether Sharon had much opportunity to appreciate it is, of course, another matter entirely.

And finally...

THE current Premier League manager who has the most international caps (Backtrack, September 29) is Birmingham City’s Alex McLeish – known for some reason as Big Eck – with 77 for Scotland.

Terry Wells, who knew that one, today invites readers to name the scorer in Bobby Moore’s 108th and final match for England, a 1-0 friendly defeat to Italy.

Back on the Railroad to Wembley, the column returns on Tuesday.