On the road to Wembley with the Lawyers

Silsden’s in West Yorkshire, a small town of 7,999 inhabitants where Craven Herald meets Keighley News and which the name plate identifies as Cobbydale. It sounds like something from children’s television.

Almost everywhere seems Italian. Even the garage is Italian, though the junk shop’s pure Auntie Wainwright.

It’s also where Henry Price opened his first Fifty Shilling Tailors shop in 1905 at a time when £2 10s must clearly have suited the locals.

Eventually, says the Internet, Price had “more than 399” branches. Why do people write like that? What does it mean? 400? 500?

Several million?

In 1958 the chain was sold and rebranded as John Collier. That’s no longer the window to watch, either.

Not to be confused with Willesden, which is altogether nearer Wembley, nor with Hilsdon which is fizzy water, Silsden played STL Northern League club Tow Law, FA Vase finalists on a boiling hot, emotionally irridescent May day in 1998.

Twelve years later it’s the preliminary round.

For the Yorkshire side it’s a first appearance in the competition after seven years ground sharing with Keighley rugby league club, so great an occasion that they not only announce the crowd – 125 – but the names of all the groundhoppers who’ve travelled to mark it.

First, though, we head for the pub. Another of Silsden’s claims to some sort of fame is that it was the location of the first episode of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, the restaurant in question given so great a howking – as they say in gastronomic circles – that the owner tried to sue.

If the redoubtable Ramsay thought that were bad, he should have tried the beer in the pub near Clog Bridge, the ale so ineffably awful that the unfortunate wasp that lands in it expires forthwith. The wasp must have been a member of CAMRA.

Tow Law defender Greg Halliday, supping something else, is suspended after scoring the winning goal in a Sunday cup final at the end of last season for removing his shirt in celebration.

He’d been booked, his fifth, a ban triggered. “I lost count.

I thought it was only four,” he pleads.

The clubhouse proves altogether more hospitable, the pie, peas and mint sauce (£1 60 the lot) among the finest in football and the plastic spoon the most ineffable.

That instrument having snapped after 3.5 seconds, the dish has to be eaten with the fingers, a purpose for which the Maker may not primarily have designed them and perhaps not what is meant by digital technology.

Steve Moralee, the Lawyers’ secretary, looks on unimpressed. “You need a shovel,” he says. Mr Moralee is a polliss.

Matthew Scott puts the Lawyers ahead after eight minutes, prompting an air horn concerto from behind the visitors’ goal. Nothing much else happens save for the occasional appearance of Tracy Bailey, the Silsden physio, wearing a blonde pony tail and exceedingly minimal shorts.

Some of the Tow Law management wear shorts, too – not something you see very often at Arctic Ironworks Road – but altogether less fetchingly.

The first half has been uninspiring, though the elderly lady studiously reading OK magazine near the 18 yard box may be overdoing the protest.

In the guest room, hospitality first class, the conversation turns again to Ms Bailey, she of the healing hands. “We’ve arranged a council house swap, you can have our physio and we’ll take yours back on the bus ,”

says Tow Law chairman Sandra Gordon.

Ms Gordon is the Northern League’s only female chair.

“I’ll do anything to keep the boys happy,” she says.

There, too, is Rob Grillo, Silsden’s splendid – and lustrously named – historian whose book sub-titled Diary of a Football Obsessive is memorably called Anoraknaphobia.

We also bump into a chap from Consett who’s cowritten a book combining football travels and real ale.

It’ll be called Ground Hops and Barley – good, but not in the same league.

The second half’s much better, air horns silenced when Silsden equalise off the bar. Stephen Robinson, the Lawyers’ goalkeeper, is also a polliss, in North Yorkshire.

Once upon a time you had to be about 7ft tall to be a policeman. Now there are no height restrictions. Another few inches, he’d have saved it.

After 68 minutes, however, Tow Law left back Lewis Harrison fires the winner through a crowded penalty area. “His grandma had the Tow law paper shop for about 40 years,” someone says, approvingly.

The visitors are delighted, the hosts magnanimous. It wasn’t always so. Back in 1911 the locals riots outside the police station in protest at an over-officious officer. After questions in the House of Commons the gentleman was posted elsewhere.

The Lawyers are off for a night out in Harrogate: for them, as for the rest of us, the railroad to Wembley continues this afternoon.

Best wishes to FA Vase-winning Richardson

COLIN Richardson, one of the most successful managers and engaging characters in North-East football, is battling the “flesh eating” disease necrotising fascitis.

The 66-year-old Wearsider has undergone two complete blood transfusions and several operations in the last ten days.

“At one stage they thought he was going to lose his arm. He’s a bit dog eared,” says Tom, his brother.

“He just began to feel unwell a week back Tuesday, and they found a small lump near his elbow. Hours later he was in the operating theatre.”

Colin was on West Brom’s books without making the first team, returned to the North-East, joined Ferryhill Athletic in the Northern League and spent 11 seasons with the all-conquering Spennymoor United alongside the talented likes of Ralphy Wright, Peter Joyce and Kenny Banks – “the best footballer I ever played with.”

After a season at Whitby Town he became player/manager at Ferryhill, moved to Whickham and guided the club – then in the Wearside League – to victory in the 1978 FA Vase final at Wembley.

The programme described him as a “personable extrovert”, adding that the volume of his encouragement said much for the state of his vocal chords.

Colin still vividly remembers the occasion. “All that standing around on cold football grounds, all the knockbacks, were worth it for that moment of leading your team out at Wembley,” he once told the column.

He, and most of the team, moved across the river to Newcastle Blue Star who reached the Vase semi-final.

He guided Gateshead to fourth in the Conference, commuted to Bridlington and steered them to Vase victory, too.

We’d last interviewed him in 2006, back at Gateshead, the amiable and ever-opinionated Colin unhappy about the state of the North-East non-league game. “Newcastle United send us 18-year-olds who couldn’t kick my arse.

The closest they come to intensity is when they into one another.” Most recently he had been scouting for Southend United.

He is in isolation in Sunderland Royal Infirmary where only close family visitors are allowed. It’s hoped that soon he will be able to transfer to hospital in Durham.

Tom’s hopeful. “It’s a horrible, horrible disease, the bacteria just multiply so quickly. We’re awaiting more tests and then we’ll know more. I know that very many people will wish him well.”

Fun on the fairway as old friends meet for Bishop Auckland’s annual reunion

BISHOP AUCKLAND’S fabled footballers of the 50s, and one or two of a slightly younger vintage, gathered on Wednesday for their annual reunion at the town’s golf club. It was only later that things went a bit off course.

It was also the occasion on which we learned how Christmas had come early to the Royal Albert Hall, but more of that very shortly.

Though the reunion has long been an annual occasion, its regulars now around 80 and still longing for a game, it was a debut for Frank Palmer, outside left in the 1950 FA Amateur Cup final side that lost 4-0 to Willington.

Frank, now in Washington, insisted that he was 75, agreed to a little revision and settled on 87 next month.

“I’ve been telling folk I was 75 for years,” he said.

A first appearance, too, for long-serving Echo man Ray Robertson, who’d cut his journalistic teeth on the amateurs’ road to Wembley.

Ray will be 79 tomorrow. “I don’t want my name in the paper,” he said, affably.

Local legends abounded, none further travelled than Bert Childs, left back in the 1957 final, who’d flown in from his home in Nice. “I can only afford it once every two years,” he said.

There were lads like Ray Oliver, Cullercoats lifeboatman and buccaneering centre forward, like Dave Marshall, Corbett Cresswell and Bob Thursby, the dentist with his roots in Chester-le-Street.

As always, it was organised by the impeccable Derek Lewin, ex-England amateur international and FA Council member. “They never seem to get any older,” he insisted.

There, too, was Les Dixon, who’d played and scored in the twice-replayed 1954 Amateur Cup final against Crook but supposed that his real ten seconds of fame might only have arrived last Sunday.

Les, from Middlesbrough, had been with his wife at what the BBC calls the Big Sing, recorded at the Royal Albert Hall the day after the Last Night of the Proms so that everything was still in place.

Slow-cooked side of live, half of the recording will be screened at the end of October, half on Boxing Day.

That’s why a section of the crowd was told to wear Santa Claus hats and why Good King Wenceslas almost turned republican.

“We had to have all manner of goes at it, the producer fellow wasn’t very happy at all,” said Les. “I expect it’ll look very festive by Boxing Day.”

For the present-day Bishops, the score seems altogether more settled. The new ground at Tindale Crescent– “the boondocks,”

said Bob Thursby – will officially be opened on October 24, the first Northern league game on November 9.

Presently, however, it’s not so much surrounded by road works – new Sainsbury’s rising on one side, Tesco on the other – as besieged by them. It may explain why Mr Oliver, Mr Thursby, Mr George Siddle and myself set off for the grand tour and haven’t found a way in yet.

We returned, bunkered, to the golf club. For once the Bishops lost.

*A film show and talk-in dedicated to Bishop Auckland legend Bob Hardisty takes place at the town hall next Tuesday, when the original Amateur Cup will be on display and available for photography.

Signed copies of Never Again – Alan Adamthwaite’s acclaimed hardback biography of Hardisty – will be available on the night or can be ordered from the author (£20, include postage) at 21 Coley Grove, Little Haywood, Stafford ST18 0UW.

And finally...

TUESDAY’S column sought the identity of the Durham born footballer who only once made the Sunderland subs’ bench but made getting 800 senior appearances elsewhere and managed one of his former clubs. It was Sherburn lad John Wile, 63.

In the light of the mighty Somerset’s agonising failure to become county cricket champions, readers are invited to name the Teesside lad and former Darlington schoolboy who went on to captain the west country county. They didn’t win it under him, either.

Leading from the front, the column returns on Tuesday.