The Accidental Groundhopper

Ground 205: Frenchfield Park, Penrith

2012-02-18T20:43:00.000Z

"The pitch is slanted, bumpy, and dotted with dandelions...every linesman who visits digs deeper into a three-inch mud trench that traces the touchline nearest the club house," wrote the News & Star on the morning football finally left Southend Road. "A sign glued to the main gate (reads) ‘Penrith AFC, 1884-2009 RIP’"

The last - and possibly only - time I visited Penrith was in September 1999, the month that I signed up for my first ever email address, Kieron Dyer made his international debut, Sunderland beat Newcastle in a match made absolutely farcical by torrential rain and Ruud Gullit's ego and I left Tyneside for South Korea, where I worked for the next three years (the last two events were only tenuously related). Preoccupied with the task of tracking down Withnail & I locations (we didn't realise until later that cake, tea, morally outraged proprietors and "the finest wines available to humanity" could actually be found not far from Milton Keynes), we failed to notice the existence of a football ground between the red-brick, Victorian railway station and Toppers, Penrith's only nightclub, which, to my lasting regret, we stumbled across later that night.

Stanley Matthews, Kevin Keegan, Bill Nicholson and Burnley were among the many who did find their way to Southend Road, though none - not even the Clarets, who recorded a 9-0 victory in the first round proper of the 1984-85 FA Cup - could come anywhere near the ludicrously prolific Charlie Short, scorer of 212 goals in three post-war seasons - an incredible 102 coming in 1947-48 alone - as the Blues went from facing district competition to playing in the Northern League. Crowds of up to 2,000 were the norm, an estimated 4,000 fans witnessing an epic Amateur Cup tie with West Auckland in 1961 and 2,100 celebrating an FA Cup first round win over Chester City thirty years later. “At home games I had to crawl on hands and knees past spectators three-deep around the ground to get to watch games from the touchline," remembered David Noble, who went from childhood supporter to chairman of the club. In 2009, when Penrith finally relocated to an out-of-town site at Frenchfield Park they left behind a decade of near ruinous turmoil and a ground that had existed for as long as the football club itself.

"A smashing little club" in the words of Northern League chairman Mike Amos. If you come by car, it's a smashing little ground too, a few hundred metres from the A66 and the River Eamont with a covered main stand looking out on the North Pennine hills. We park in the town centre, have a pint in the pub where the Duke of Gloucester - later Richard III - stayed while he supervised work on Penrith Castle, then drive back out past the half-completed Sainsbury's which now marks the spot of the old Southend Road. "It's a young, inexperienced, very keen and very enthusiastic Penrith side this afternoon," says Colin Seel, 25 years a Football League referee and now the voice of the Frenchfield Park PA, "depleted due to injuries, commitments and other reasons."

After trying their luck in the North West Counties and, briefly, the Northern Premier League Division One, Penrith returned to the Northern League at the end of the 1990s, winning two second division titles but never threatening to match the achievements of 1961-62, Alan Ashman's ending runners-up behind Stanley United and winning the second of six successive Cumberland Senior Cups. Ashman left to take West Bromwich Albion to the 1968 FA Cup, Olympiacos to a second-place finish in Greece and Carlisle United to top-spot in the Football League. These days Penrith have slightly lower aspirations: "The Blue Square Premier would be a nice dream," owner Ges Ratcliffe says. They start the afternoon in eighteenth place, twenty-nine points behind a Spennymoor Town side who've won the Northern League title two seasons in a row. "We'll have to do lots of defending today," predicts an elderly home fan as we queue up for food. "The chips are crap, the pies are good and the burgers are better," my brother had told me after his visit earlier in the season. For the burgers at least, I wouldn't disagree.

Penrith start well but are soon pegged back. Lone forward Martin Coleman hesitates when given a chance to shoot at keeper Robert Dean; at the other end James Holland turns a shot from Spennymoor's Jamie Harwood away one-handed then blocks a second shot on the line. The afternoon sunshine turns to sleet, the floodlights turned on for five minutes as Steven Richardson squeezes through a challenge and slips the ball through Holland's legs. "It's been coming," a home fan says. Richardson has more chances to score, heading wide and skying a half-volley into a hedgerow in the opening ten minutes of the second half alone. By this time we're in the bar at the top of the stand, peering through a window while we finish off pints of Jennings and listen to the half-time scores. "Don't forget the prize in the raffle is a ticket for tonight's National Lottery," says the voice on the tannoy.

The home side are as enthusiastic as Seel had promised but can't breach a midfield every bit as solid as the walls of neighbouring Brougham Castle. There are ten minutes left when Gavin Cogdon finds space in the area and passes a shot under Holland for two-nil. Richardson gets his second with the very next attack, a long ball bouncing off two defenders and landing at his feet as he bursts into the penalty area. "We didn't deserve that," a Penrith supporter rightly says. "Could have been three or four just in the first half, mate," a Spennymoor fan replies with equal justification. Having controlled the game the defending champions move up to third in the league table, now just two points behind leaders West Auckland Town.

Date: February 18th 2012
Admission: £5

Ground 204: Victor Tedesco Stadium, Malta

2012-02-03T05:49:00.000Z

Malta is a three-hundred-square-kilometre speck in the Mediterranean Sea with a population only marginally bigger than the city of Bristol. It also has over fifty football clubs split into a four-division domestic league, three hundred days of sunshine a year and beer for as little as €1.50 a pint. Seriously, what's not to like?*

* Except this wall, obviously.

With just nineteen grounds and two grass pitches across the whole of the main island, matchdays are almost always double-headers, one ticket good for two fixtures with a quarter of an hour break in between. The national stadium, Ta' Qali, is off a main road in the centre of the island, while Paola's Hibernians Ground and the Victor Tedesco Stadium in Hamrun are more easily accessible from Valletta's main bus station. The Tedesco is named after the engineer-cum-actor-turned-political fixer whose Saudi and Libyan oil interests funded Hamrun Spartans' decade-long hegemony over Malta's football league. Without a domestic honour since the end of the 1940s, the club won an average of two every season between 1982 and 1994, Tedesco splashing money on foreign talent like Tony Morley, once a European Cup winner with Aston Villa, and former England international Peter Barnes. The English players were given new suits and shoes, free transport and accommodation and four flights back to Britain every year. "I paid the best wages," Tedesco said. "I was also the manager. I selected the team in spite of the coach at times. He was really just my trainer." In the end he overreached himself financially, almost bankrupting the club in the process. "I was too enthusiastic, too egotistic," he admitted. "It's a mistake to want only victory."

With Hamrun away to Hibernians in one of two Monday night games, first division sides St Andrews and Lija Athletic take up the mantle of home teams for the day, the opening fixture pitting St Andrews against midtable rivals Vittoriosa Stars. I'm accompanied by Derek, a Newcastle fan who once travelled by train to Bari to watch them play in the Anglo-Italian Cup, and his girlfiend Jo, who's only ever seen football on TV but thinks she might be able to make it until half-time. There's an hour to spare until the two o'clock kick off and no-one else in the ticket window queue, so we follow a handwritten sign down a staircase towards 'Il-Bar', finding a squad of ex-Hamrun Liberty players drinking around a pool table. "You want to see more pictures?" one asks, taking us on an impromptu boardroom tour. "Bring your beer. Take photos," he tells us, gesturing towards plastic garden furniture, filing cabinets marked 'Archive', 'Stationery' and 'Tombola', pennants from West Bromwich Albion and Reading Schools, and a trophy collection stretching back fifty years.

The teams are jogging-out as we head into the ground. "St Andrews' end?" asks the turnstile operator. "Erm, yeah." Inside, a central VIP section appears to be mostly populated by the teams from the second game. A few dozen supporters are segregated either side, watched by four policemen wearing sunglasses and black gloves. The warm-up consists of a couple of minutes spent tapping a ball around. "Yeah boys, come on," claps St Andrews' Malta Under-21 keeper Daniel Balzan, his gloves thudding against the whir of a generator behind his goal. "One-nil to Liverpool," someone says. "Rooney's not playing."

The first half is played at a pace as sedate as a Sicilian passagieta. A defensive header goes vertically off a forehead, a midfielder slips over and sees a pass bounce away off his knee, and a forward tries a volley which smacks harmlessly off his own chin. With St Andrews' Portuguese strikeforce of Guti Ribeiro and Valdo Alinho Goncalves left to fend for themselves up front, I count two shots in the opening twenty-five minutes, one of which lodges so high in the netting behind Balzan's goal that the ballboy only manages to dislodge it by throwing a backpack in the air. As soon as the whistle blows we join the queue for a beer, while a full quarter of the police presence retreats to the back of the stand to scoff a bag of Minstrels. Neil, an English St Andrews fan, fills us in on the background of a team formerly managed by Ally Dawson, a Scottish international defender recently inducted into the Glasgow Rangers Hall of Fame. "Because we're essentially from Sliema there's a lot of English spoken around the club, which most of the other sides dislike us for. There's a lot of us against the world at St Andrews." "Especially Melita," his son concurs. "This place will be full when we play against them." With clubs like Melita and St Andrews often just a mile apart, football rivalry inhabits the fault lines of Maltese society: language, politics and, occasionally, patron saints. "When the World Cup's on the island splits almost straight down the middle," says Neil, "half support England, the rest go for Italy."

The second half is a much more rollicking affair. Goncalves strikes the crossbar before Nicki Vella Petroni's volley crashes in to give St Andrews the lead. Vittoriosa, with Scottish forward Gary Muir wearing long-sleeves and gloves in thirteen-degree heat, gradually begin to find their way back into the game. "We have a habit of throwing away leads," Neil warns as the referee blows for a free kick. Balzan parries the shot straight to Ramon dos Santos, the Brazilian nudging in at the far post. "We've hit the crossbar twice and now it's 1-1," a St Andrews fan complains. Five Lija fans arrive for the next game, swigging Heineken out of paper cups. Their team are doing shuttle runs behind Vittoriosa's goal when Ryan Previ cracks a first-time shot past Jean Matthias Vella from twenty-five yards out. The Lija and St Patricks players applaud, Previ is mobbed and St Andrews fans jump in the air. "It's more interesting when you watch in person," Jo says on the bus back to Valletta. "Not bad," Derek agrees. "I've seen worse games in the Scottish first division."

Date: January 28th 2012.
Admission: €5 for two games.

If you're planning a football weekend in Malta, you can find a full list of fixtures here. All-day bus tickets cost €2.60 for non-residents. For the Victor Tedesco Stadium, take any bus from Valletta towards Rabat and get off at the Mile End Road II stop just after Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal Church. Bus routes and timetables are here and you'll find a great account of a day at Ta' Qali on the Tales From The Pigeon Stands blog.

Ground 203: The Regency Stadium, Northallerton Town

2012-01-30T06:21:00.000Z

Almost two decades have elapsed since the boom and bust of Northallerton Town FC. Between 1992 and 1994 the North Yorkshire side blazed into the top six of the Northern League, the FA Trophy's last-16 and twice came within an away win of a place in the first round proper of the FA Cup. A crowd of 700 saw the visit of Farnborough Town; the Northern League Challenge Cup was sealed with a 2-0 win over Blyth Spartans. The trophy almost formed an epitaph to the club, the High Court winding it up over unpaid debts before its players had kicked another ball. Community support kept Town alive, but the Northern League's southern outpost has only seen four seasons of top-flight football since, the club more commonly having to content itself with less direct achievements such as the Dawson brothers moving to Nottingham Forest's youth teams and Darren Mowbray's elder sibling pulling Middlesbrough out of their post-relegation freefall.

The Grand Central service to Kings Cross departs from an underground Metro platform in Sunderland. A portrait of Marilyn Monroe smiles from the doorways, Cluedo and Chess boards are printed on table tops and there's even free wi-fi if you can ever get it to connect (I couldn't in either direction). Two Mackem girls on a London weekender swig back lemonade and white wine - "Eeeh, it's 14% this, y'kna!" - as we clatter through the Billy Elliot towns of the East Durham coal belt: brownfield, red brick, plastic litter. Northallerton is the third stop, an hour down the line and the thirtieth leg of the Northern League Tour James Williams began in August last year. "Not a good start," he texts as he enters the Station Hotel to find the landlord dressed in red and white stripes and a Sunderland pennant hanging from the bar. Romanby's Golden Lion is just across the train tracks, a log-effect fire and Copper Dragon beers accompanying a window view of the village green, while the Regency Stadium itself is a few minutes further down Ainderby Road, past a Co-op food store, a war memorial and a pitch now belonging to Northallerton Juniors FC. A sign outside the turnstile promises 'Open Tonight: Food', wooden picnic tables are dotted along the side terracing, and the remnants of a wedding party watch kick-off from the clubhouse bar. "Can you get the team to sign my programme?" asks the bride.

Birtley's travelling ultras have come in the back of a player's van, outnumbered eleven to two by an equally vocal cluster of Northallerton fans standing behind the opposite goal. " We love you Birtley, we do" at one end of the pitch, "'Allerton, 'Allerton, 'Allerton" at the other. Four defeats in their last five games have left the home side clinging to the promotion pack like a banker to a million-pound bonus, and the bridesmaids have barely finished their chips when keeper Stephen Craggs brings Dan Smith down as the Birtley player prepares to tap in on goal. Craig Marron whacks the penalty into the top-right hand corner of the net. "He dived, ref," grumbles one home fan. "Rubbish," says a second. "Almost snapped him in bloody two."

Nobody contests the equaliser, Dan Clayton carrying the ball unchallenged through midfield before picking his spot as confidently as Marron. The gusting wind helps beat Birtley backwards and sends us in the direction of the clubhouse window, where, pints in hand, we watch the away side make the first of three strikes on the crossbar and Colin Anderson give Northallerton a thoroughly merited half-time lead. The black and whites shade most of the second half, too, Birtley's attacks finding nothing but the woodwork or, more commonly, Craig Winter's head. With the giant defender exuding calm like his father does controversy the home side don't seem in much danger of relinquishing their lead until Marron crosses for Dan Hepplewhite to nod in a leveller with just two minutes left of the ninety. "How much longer, referee?" a Northallerton fan shouts across the pitch. Long enough for a James Allsopp free-kick to find the corner of the net after two stepovers and three minutes of time added on. "Defeat from the jaws of victory" is the headline on a Northallerton forum; Birtley, undefeated since November 26th, are threatening to become promotion candidates themselves.

Date: January 21st 2012
Admission: £4

Ground 202: San Mames, Athletic Club Bilbao

2012-01-23T18:16:00.000Z

This is Bilbao

From the seven streets which made up Don Diego López de Haro's original walled settlement, numbers have always mattered in Bilbao. 3/5/1894, for instance, the date of the city's first recorded football game, the Nervión reporting a 6-0 win for a team of expatriate British industrial workers against eleven Basques who'd picked up the sport while studying in England. Or thirty-one, the number of major trophies Bilbao's football team has won since some of the losing players helped found Athletic Club four years later - the last a league and cup double notoriously sealed amid a 1984 street fight in the Santiago Bernabéu. There's zero for the number of seasons Spain's fourth most successful club has spent outside La Liga since the inception of a national league in 1929. Zero, too, for the non-Basques in Athletic's line-up since names like Martyn Veitch and Alejandro Smith featured in the team that defeated Espanyol in the 1911 final of the Copa del Rey. True, the Basque-only policy has been more generously applied in recent years, but 76% of the respondents to an El Mundo poll declared they'd still rather see the club relegated than ever break it entirely. Con cantera y aficion, no hace falta importacion (with home-grown talent and local support, you don't need foreigners), as the popular saying goes. The final number is of more personal relevance: 18, the years I've been waiting to see Bilbao since Newcastle United played there in November 1994.

Inside the old San Mames

Cross the road and you're outside the new (due to open in August 2014).

"The Geordies' UEFA Cup visit is legendary in the city," FourFourTwo wrote eleven years later. "Athletic fans recall in almost reverential tones the huge quantity of drink they shared with their visitors." "You couldn't buy a drink in the end," my dad remembers. "The Bilbao fans kept passing round these big plastic bottles of wine." "I was only four or five," says Athletic fan Miguel Arechavala. "but I remember looking out of my balcony and seeing Athletic and Newcastle fans holding a big Newcastle flag. It was going up and down the street; there were people everywhere." "Newcastle?" laugh three middle-aged supporters, making glugging gestures with their hands. "This is a very famous game for us." A precipitant Mexican wave and a Jose Angel Ziganda goal eventually undid Kevin Keegan's side. Typically, it would be the only European trip I missed out on in the four years that separated the 5-0 defeat of Royal Antwerp from a Cup Winners' Cup loss at Partizan Belgrade. Now, as Athletic prepare to move into a a new 55,500 capacity stadium, time is finally running out at the San Mamés, the club's home since 1913 and one of the earliest purpose-built grounds in Spain.

Matchday in the Old Town

It's half past five on Saturday evening when La Catedral's gated ticket windows finally snap open. Ahead of us in the queue are Dominic, an Australian Celtic supporter, and a Fulham fan from Italy who refuses to pay €36 for a seat behind the goal. Football tickets aren't the only things that end up costing more than we expected: the average price of una caña (or "baby beer" if you're English) in the Casco Viejo bars is €2. Tapas comes extra. Despite the high prices, in footballing terms Bilbao is one of the best value destinations in Spain, with virtually every bar in the city displaying its allegiance to Athletic and the plethora of clubs within easy reach of the Metro network - including Arenas Club de Getxo, Copa del Rey winners in 1919 and one of the ten founding members of La Liga - making it possible to take in five or six matches over the course of a typical weekend.

Aupa Athletic!

Matchday sees red and white flags draped above doorways, signalling socio drinking haunts and bars that are televising the game. The giant Athletic badge on the side of the San Mames is a constant beacon as we move among the half-empty bars on Licenciado Poza, where Newcastle and Bilbao fans thronged in 1994. "It's quiet today," says Jamie Rae, a St Johnstone supporter whose affection for red and white stripes began when he adopted Sunderland as his English team, "but it's much busier for Saturday games." Things don't begin to get crowded until we're inside the stadium itself, squeezing onto a step behind the goal the home side are attacking as the Himno Athletic Club de Bilbao formally announces the entrance of the teams.

The ninety minutes that follow are unexpectedly one-sided, Levante unable to find an answer to Athletic's direct attacking style. A tenth-minute corner finds Fernando Amorebiete's head to give Bilbao the lead, and with Levante's midfield in retreat José Barkero and Arouna Koné are left to forage up front on their own. Koné's shot into the side netting betrays the presence of four or five away fans, a handful of confetti blowing forlornly across the pitch, but when right-midfielder Óscar de Marcos - "Bielsa was playing him left-back until he decided the left-back was good enough to play there himself," Jamie tells us - shimmies past Javier Farinós, Fernando Llorente nods in the resulting cross and the game is over as a contest with five minutes of the half still to play. The home fans respond to each goal with cries of "Athletic! Athletic!", the middle vowel as long as the gaps in the centre of Levante's defence. Two-nil up, Bilbao drop the pace, Gaizka Toquero charging round the pitch to roars of acclaim from the crowd after replacing Llorente. In the 90th minute another substitute, the former Liverpool junior Mikel San José, heads a third from a corner after Levante's Juanfran is sent off for picking up a second yellow card. For a neutral, the only slight disappointment is the San Mames atmosphere, which, despite the noise that greets each goal, more often feels as sanitised as the big grounds of the English Premier League. "I won't lie to you," says Miguel, "the noise today was normal. Of course, it's different when we play Real Madrid."

Admission: €36
Date: 15th January 2011

Arthur Pentland and the Founding of Athletic Club Bilbao

Bilbao fans readily acknowledge and celebrate the English influence on their club, but the story that Athletic were founded by a County Durham shipyard worker who based the red and white strips on Sunderland AFC seems to rest on one or two British newspaper references, notably this 2004 example from the pages of The Daily Telegraph:

Like many of his colleagues, a 19th Century stevedore called Arthur Pentland did a shipbuilding stint in Bilbao. In between thumping home rivets, Arthur co-founded Athletic Bilbao and ordered their costumes. The Basques not only played in a replica red-and-white-striped kit, but loaned a spare set of vests to the emerging Atletico Madrid.

Athletic's own records, as summarised here, contain no reference to a "19th century stevedore" and the only other printed record of the name I've been able to find is a 1969 article from the archives of El Mundo Deportivo which mentions "the greatest successes of the club forty years ago under the direction of Arthur Pentland". Athletic did win a pair of La Liga titles and five domestic cups in the 1920s and 1930s under the guidance of an English coach, but Fred Pentland was born in Wolverhampton and was playing junior football in Birmingham at the time 'Arthur' was "thumping home rivets" in the Bilbao dockyards. Workers from the banks of the Wear and Solent may have taken part in the 1894 game, and British expatriates had a hand in the formation of one of the clubs which eventually became the modern Athletic Club Bilbao, but in the absence of any solid evidence to the contrary 'Arthur Pentland' himself appears to be no more than historical invention, an English journalist mixing up the story of 1894 with a surname borrowed from thirty years later. In any case, by 2007 the same writer was attributing the club's origins to nameless "British workers who left Sunderland and Southampton to work in the city's steel and shipbuilding industries", while Sunderland fans have themselves debunked the Pentland story here.

As for the costumes, Athletic played in blue and white halves until at least 1910, seven years after "the emerging Atletico Madrid" were founded as as a youth branch of the Bilbao team by Basque students in the capital. A more prosaic explanation for the two clubs switching to red and white stripes in 1911 is that the material was simply cheaper to buy, though one competing theory is of a Madrid director (or sometimes Basque student) being sent on a shopping trip for Blackburn shirts and returning home from London with Southampton ones instead. Whatever the truth, ascribing the origins of Athletic Club Bilbao to either Sunderland or Southampton remains an exercise in wishful thinking rather than historical fact.

Ground 201: Gillford Park Stadium, Gillford Park.

2012-01-08T11:21:00.000Z

What could be better than football and beer? Only a Saturday train ride from Newcastle to Carlisle taking in almost fifty of the finest real ale pubs in Cumbria and Northumberland and ninety minutes of action in the world's second oldest football league. A simple plan until we made it to the centre of Britain, when it unravelled faster than Liverpool's defence of Luis Suarez.

It's eighteen minutes past opening time but the first pub on our list is shut for another hour. While the lights are on in the place next door, we're left staring at Sky Sports News and beer pumps until the barman eventually ambles in. "We don't usually allow food in here, you know," he growls as James tucks in to a minced beef pie and Carling Extra Cold. "It's my breakfast, sorry."* "I don't care what it is," he snaps, which is exactly the kind of response you should expect for ordering a pint of fizzy in a pub that sells real ale.

Back on the train the football traffic is all for Carlisle United's home game with Orient. We take a right outside the station, give a crowded Wetherspoons and what I'm fairly certain is the worst pub in the world a miss, sink two pints of Jennings and a Newcastle Brown Ale in the Woodrow Wilson, then walk twenty-five minutes to the ground in pouring rain (or, as the BBC calls it, "Dry with sunny periods."). A concrete track along the West Coast Main Line brings us to the Gillford Park Stadium and a British Rail social club whose only occupant is a barmaid with her feet up in front of the darts.

There's a very good reason why. In 2005 just seven men - including co-founders Mike Linden, Geoff Andrews and Steve Skinner, a former first-team midfielder at both Gretna and Carlisle - turned out for Gillford Park's first training session. Within four years they'd progressed through the three divisions of the Northern Football Alliance; another twelve months and the Northern League's youngest club sat midtable in Division Two and had qualified for the extra-preliminary round of the FA Cup. With a 25-year lease on a ground capable of holding 4,000 spectators and new Conference-standard floodlights installed, the management team of Skinner and Stuart Bell should have spent the summer laying plans for another promotion bid. Instead, rumours that landlords the Carlisle and District Railway Club had been seeking more lucrative tennants were accompanied by a sudden raft of health and safety issues which saw the team locked out of the stadium and forced to play their opening nineteen games of the season away from home. An interim injunction finally allowed the visit of Crook Town in the first week of March, but court proceedings are still ongoing with a final hearing not expected for another four months. "At least they should finish the season," the football club's legal adviser Richard Bloomfield told the Christmas 2011 edition of the magazine Northern Ventures Northern Gains.

On the pitch, at least, events have reverted to plan, Gillford currently four points off the Division Two promotion places with up to six games in hand on the teams above them. Birtley Town have been almost equally troubled in recent seasons but sit a point ahead of the home side in sixth under the astute management of Scott Oliver, Barry Fleming and Paul Brown, their squad of promising young players - including 17-goal top scorer Dan Smart - supplemented by experienced heads such as former Esh Winning and Ryton midfielder Craig Marron.

Smart doesn't make the journey but Andy manages a head count of forty spectators including five Birtley Ultras who've turned up by car. "Nothing much to shout about this half," one says at the end of a forty-five minutes in which Gillford Park could justifiably have been three or four goals ahead. Somehow the scores are level, an early Ryan Errington goal - "Three yards offside" think Birtley's bench - cancelled out when John Martin's sliding effort just about crosses the line. "Just let it go, lads. It's gone now," says Gillford's keeper. "You can't tell me that was in," his manager tells the referee as the teams walk off for half time.

Martin scores again with the first attack of the second half, and when an attempted clearance strikes the underside of Reece Darwent's boot Birtley's ultras are doing a four-man Poznan and their side are 3-1 ahead. David Wallace heads Gillford back into the game on the hour, then three goals in little more than a minute see equalisers from Mike Reed and Marc Shiel, Dan Smith's big toe giving Birtley the briefest of leads. "We're too susceptible to crosses so you've got to stop them coming in," Fleming says as Shiel volleys in his 17th league goal of the season. "We love you Birtley, we do" and "Scotty Oliver's green and white army" the ultras sing, before asking "What's it like to hear a crowd?"

Straight out when the whistle blows, we scramble aboard the 5.28 from Carlisle, getting off at Haydon Bridge to find a pub with darkened windows and another next door where the conversation veers between the migratory patterns of fish in the Falkland Islands to Nicolas Anelka's wages at crack Chinese outfit 'Shanghai Rovers'. "Four hundred thousand a week that Shanghai Rovers are paying Drogba and Nico whatchamacallit. That's about twenty million a year." "Aye, we'd all take the same though, wouldn't we?" "I divvent kna, they don't mess around. I saw on the telly they hung 330 people in a week. One mistake there and you're gone." The last stop is Corbridge, where Paddy McGuinness' face leers out of a TV screen and a private party in the back room are wrapping each other in toilet roll to make snowmen. "Pint of Deuchars, please...actually, you'd better make that two."

Date: January 7th 2012
Admission: £4

* He's from Durham. It's absolutely normal.

Ground 200: Strathclyde Homes Stadium, Dumbarton

2012-01-06T18:00:00.000Z

Dumbarton or Airdrie? Airdrie or Dumbarton? "Airdrie are playing Albion Rovers in a derby, they're near the top of the league and Hughie Gallacher used to play for them." "Yeah, but Dumbarton's ground is right underneath a big rock." Right, we'll go there."

"Dumbarton is for the most part a brutalconcrete sprawl, fulfilling every last hellish cliche about postwar planningand architecture" says my 2004 copy of the Rough Guide to Britain, though all that suggests is that the writer's never been to Sunderland Central Station. I kept my head towards the pavement between Dumbarton East and The Counting House pub, where haggis, neeps and tatties with a pint of Belhaven Best came to under £6, and old men nursed cans of Irn Bru through the dull first hour of Hibernian against Hearts, their eyes never leaving the screen. Between them, the Edinburgh sides were responsible for two of the five Scottish Cup final defeats Dumbarton suffered between 1881 and 1897. Cup winners for the only time in 1883, when they saw off local rivals Vale of Leven in a replay, the club had more success in the newly-formed Scottish Football League, sharing the championship trophy with Rangers in 1891 and winning it outright the following year when they beat Celtic into second place and Rangers by an aggregate scoreline of nine goals to one. Professionalism eventually proved a more difficult opponent, Dumbarton's amateurs resigning their place in the league after a return of six points from eighteen games left them bottom of Division Two in May 1897. By the time they rejoined nine years later the club's glories had already been lost to a sepia age. In 2000, fifteen years since it hosted a top-flight game, Boghead Park, the scene of what remains the record league defeat in Rangers' history, was abandoned for housing and a new 2,025-capacity stadium built between the 17th century castle, the former site of a whisky distillery and the dormant shipyards of the River Leven.

They're a friendly bunch at the Strathclyde Homes Stadium. "These two lads are up from Newcastle for the game," announces the man selling tickets for the club's half time draw. "All the way from Newcastle," he grins. "Saturday's a fitba day. If we don't have a game I'll go and watch Partick or Queens Park, but there are Celtic and Rangers fans in Dumbarton who've never even been here." "Hope you enjoy yourselves, lads. A Scottish New Year welcome," says another, shaking my hand as we queue at the bar. A programme seller sets up out of a carboard box by the fire escape, the surrounding walls adorned with flags from Division Two championships, team shirts and framed photographs featuring Graeme Sharp, Ian Wallace and Murdo MacLeod, youth team graduates who went on to Everton, Celtic, Borussia Dortmund and Brian Clough's Nottingham Forest. A team shot from 1983 includes Albert Craig, less heralded on the pitch but later to make ten appearances for Newcastle United and one at Glasgow Sheriff Court, where he admitted helping himself to £40,000 from a Royal Mail sorting office and was sentenced to twelve months in jail.

Six hundred fans turn out for Dumbarton and Arbroath's third meeting of the season, the visitors winning the previous two by four goals to three to start the year second in the table behind Cowdenbeath. "No-one likes us, we don't care," the Arbroath fans sing, using a Klaxon horn to repeatedly reinforce their point. There isn't much else dividing the teams until the 20th minute when James Creaney's nine-iron cross finds Bryan Prunty's forehead to put Dumbarton 1-0 in front. Not that single goal deficits faze three-cap veterans of Berti Vogts' Scotland. Brian Kerr - an international midfielder during his time on the books of Newcastle and Motherwell - plays a ball from halfway, Steven Dorris outpacing Alan Lithgow before slipping the ball under Stephen Grindlay to quickly level the scores. When a misdirected header falls to Josh Falkingham's right foot the home side are 2-1 down twelve minutes after taking the lead. "Can you hear Dumbarton sing?" gloat the travelling fans.

Made to chase the game on a rain-sodden pitch, the home side's wayward passing creates as many chances for the opposition as it does for themselves. Grindlay looks vulnerable whenever the ball's in the air but makes two excellent saves as Arbroath squander opportunities to put the game out of reach. There are five minutes left to play when Lithgow somehow squeezes an equalising goal through two Arbroath players and keeper Darren Hill, the ball finally deflecting in off a defender's fist. In time added on Pat Walker - brought on as a 79th minute substitute - breaks clear, his shot rebounding into the net off Hill's left hand post. The silence is all at the far end of the stand.

"I never thought we'd turn that around at half time," a Dumbarton fan smiles on the walk to the Stags Head pub. "Me neither," says his mate. "Fucking great way to start the year!"

Date: January 2nd 2012
Admission: £12

You can see video highlights of the game here as well as cinefilm footage of Boghead from 1980. If you don't like bagpipes, it's best to turn the sound down now.

Ground 199: Central Avenue Stadium, Billingham Synthonia

2011-12-26T17:59:00.001Z

A village on the north bank of the Tees before 1914 Billingham was built on war, water and bombs, its proximity to the river, Durham coalfields and anoffshoot of the Stockton and Darlington Railway making it a perfect base forthe new Government Nitrogen Factory. The plant’s armaments production led togrowth which was explosive in both senses of the word: within two decades therewas a town of 19,000 people, a chemical works which employed more than aquarter of the local population, and the world’s only football team to take itsname from an agricultural fertiliser.

Billingham Synthonia began life on a pitch within thegrounds of Imperial Chemical Industries. Joining the Northern League at the endof World War II, the club took part in the first floodlit game of football tobe played in north-east England – 3,000 fans watching them beat an RAF side byeight goals to four in November 1952 – and briefly had a forward by the name ofBrian Howard Clough in their side until he left his job as an ICI office juniorto do national service and don the red shirt of Middlesbrough FC. One of three Northern League grounds within afive-minute drive of the point where the A19 and A1027 overlap, the CentralAvenue Stadium’s 2,000-capacity cantilevered stand was the longest anywhere inthe country when it opened in September 1958 with a game against FA Amateur Cupholders Bishop Auckland.

The few hundred fans, wrapped up in new hats and jackets, takerefuge from the buffeting winds under the stand’s metal roof as a blast of U2accompanies Billingham’s two teams across the cinder running track. “We are theSynners haters,” chorus a group of six Town fans in blue and white, earning wrysmiles from those in green. Across the pitch, you can see the slim floodlightsof Town’s Bedford Terrace stadium through the bare, wintry branches. The Belsais Lane pitchwhich Clough turned out on is now an abandoned office block, marked out fordemolition a couple of hundred metres from the Central Avenue’s turnstile.

It’s a scrappy, impatient first quarter, low on qualityuntil Synthonia’s Matty Crossen turns smartly past a defender on the lefttouchline and delivers a cross which Danny Earl stops with one foot and stabspast Town keeper James Briggs with the other. “The scorer for Synthonia isDanny Earl,” crackles a voice from the tannoy. Half the stand is stillchattering excitedly when Glenn Butterworth tries his luck from midway betweenthe Synthonia goal and halfway line, the ball dipping over the flailing righthand of ex-Town keeper Josh Moody. “Goalfor Billingham Town in the 24^th minute,”says the announcer grudgingly, not bothering to supply the goalscorer’s name. Withthe wind at their backs, the visitors aim high balls over the Synthonia defencefor the diminutive Nicky Martin and recent signing Dave Onions to hurtleafter. “Look at that, they defend with ten and leave one up top,” a home fansays, the disgust seeping from every syllable. “We don’t do that.” On the stroke of half time, Earl splits thecentre backs with a ball that Crossen thuds against the base of the post. “Justa matter of time,” slurps a home fan through his Bovril.

Wind assisted in the second half, there’s a sense ofinevitability about a second goal for Synthonia. Despite the occasional danger posed by the pace of Onions, gusts of wind more often curl attempted clearances back on Town’s hardpressed defence. When the goal does come, though, it’s an anti-climax - a cross headeddown by ex-Town defender Danny Wray and the ball just beating Briggs across the line with seventy minutes played. Already embroiled in a relegation scrap with Tow Law Town and Jarrow Roofing, the blue halfof Billingham push forward desperately. “Getin to the gits,” someone jokes. “Come on Town,” a woman’s voice urgesrepeatedly. But with just a minute of the ninety left to play, and the crowdspilling down the stairs to the bar and exit gate, midfielder Jamie Blyth beatsBriggs from the edge of the box. 3-1 Synthonia and the smiles are on the facesof the people wearing green and white.

Date: December 26th 2011

Admission: £5

Goalhanging For Beginners

2011-12-23T15:46:00.004Z

"Man is a goal-seeking animal." Aristotle.

I came across Steve McLay's simple but brilliant No Movement For Goalposts at the start of the year. The tumblr site is made up of nothing more than pictures of goalposts around the world, "(the) shapes and settings of childhood football dreams. Each has it's own story, each looks different to the next". Intrigued, I trawled through my old photos, sending off a batch which included a five-a-side goal buried in a mound of snow by the side of Moldova's national stadium and England, with me between the sticks, conceding to Algeria in an Odessa public park.

And then things came to an end. The site hasn't been updated since June; in its absence, here are a few of my favourite goals from 2011. Cue the Lightning Seeds.

Palmeral de Elche, Spain. UNESCO World Heritage football pitch.

Guisborough Town's King George VI Stadium.

New Mills AFC and the edge of the Peak District.

Jarrow Roofing and Penrith players at the Roofers' Boldon CA Sports Ground.

Goalnet in club colours at Gateshead Leam Rangers

Sagawa Shiga and a glimpse of Biwako, Japan's biggest lake.

Ground 198: Yamaha Stadium, Jubilo Iwata

2011-12-04T10:38:00.002Z

Think Jubilo and you think fallen giants. 'Road to Champion 2011' is the homepage banner on the club's official website, but Iwata haven't managed to get anywhere near that since they won both stages of the championship in 2002, finishing a mighty 16 points clear of Yokohama F. Marinos overall. Backed by Yamaha, initially marshalled by World Cup winner Dunga and inspired by the legacy of Hans Ooft, the first foreigner to coach the Japan national team, and the Italian forward Toto Schillachi, who wound down his career with 56 goals in 78 J.League appearances, the Shizuoka side lifted three titles, the League and Emperor's Cups and the Asian Club Championship in the space of seven seasons between 1997 and 2003.

At their peak, Jubilo had a squad packed with Japan international talent: Toshihiro Hattori, Hishori Nanami and Masashi Nakayama represented the Blue Samarai at the 1998 and 2002 World Cups, Nakayama scoring his country's first ever goal in the finals in a group stage game with Jamaica. Daisuke Oku and Toshiya Fujita won fifty caps between them, Naohiro Takahara scored 26 goals in a single season, played for Boca Juniors and made over 100 appearances in the Bundesliga with Hamburg and Eintracht Franfurt. His depature in 2002 marked the start of Iwata's decline, with a rapidly ageing squad slipping from runners-up in 2003 to ninth four years later. In 2008 Jubilo reached their nadir, narrowly edging out Vegalta Sendai in the last ever Promotion/Relegation Series thanks to a temporary comeback by Ooft and three goals from the otherwise unheralded Takuya Matsuura. "We'll do much better next season," the Dutchman promised. Masaaki Yanagishita returned for a second spell in a managerial job once briefly held by Luiz Filipe Scolari (the Brazilian replaced Ooft in 1997 but left for Palmeiras after just 11 games), and though his team have made it no higher than eleventh in each of the last two seasons, they scrapped their way to a first trophy in seven years with a 5-3 extra time win over Hiroshima in the 2010 J.League Cup final. Just as significantly, national team forward Ryoichi Maeda has finally emerged as a worthy successor to Takahara, 37 goals in two seasons earning him a pair of Golden Boot awards and a starting place in the Japan team which won this year's Asian Cup.

I take the train south from Nagoya, passing through the Brazilian belt of Toyohashi and Hamamatsu. When I get off at Iwata, the first thing I see are pale blue Jubilo flags: tied to the front of buses, lining the entrance to the station and propped in front of almost every shop on the half-hour walk to the ground, along with a Jubilo-branded vending machine, Jubilo posters - all, unsurprisingly, bearing a picture of Maeda - and even a Jubilo paving stone pointing the way to the Yamaha Stadium. Built at the end of the 1970s, the Yamaha's one of the more atmospheric grounds in Japan, its compact, running track-free design featuring a double-tiered home end, monolithic floodlights in all four corners and some impressively steep terracing, which I immediately head to the very top of. The travelling Kawasaki Frontale fans have filled one end of the pitch and a corner to the side, keeping themselves entertained with a lengthy display of synchronised bouncing. The home supporters respond by pumping their fists, clapping in time with a drum and twirling Brazilian flags and Jubilo scarves like helicopter rotor blades.

With Maeda missing, young forward Hidetaka Kanazano - scorer of an impressive 12 goals in his first J.League season - partners the popular Brazilian Gilsinho up front, but it's Kawasaki who draw the first reaction from the crowd for anything happening on the pitch, a ball turned round the two central defenders for striker Yu Kobayashi to chase, only for ex-Portsmouth keeper Yoshikatsu Kawaguchi to come storming off his line to clear. "Allez, allez, allez, Frontale!" trampolines nine tenths of the away end, still bobbing up and down when Gilsinho lashes in to the roof of the net on 16 minutes after keeper Rikihiro Sugiyama fumbles a high cross into a goalmouth crowded with blue shirts. With ex-Nagoya Grampus stalwart Masahiro Koga keeping Kobayashi as quiet as the Emirates Stadium it's left to Juninho, scorer of more than 200 goals for Frontale since arriving from Brazil eight years ago, to threaten Kawaguchi's goal, hooking a couple of metres wide after a game of up and under on the edge of the Jubilo penalty area. Off-balance, Yusuke Tasaka pushes the away side's only other chance of the half into the top deck of the stand as Jubilo, fleet-footed and tenacious in midfield, attack at will. Three minutes before the break Gilsinho adds a second goal, evading his marker at a corner kick and powering a header past Sugiyama. The Kawasaki fans bop out the rest of the half while Jubilo wave scarves and umbrellas and their team begins to showboat.

Frontale captain Yusuke Igawa replaces the youthful Yuki Saneto at the start of the second half as the away side immediately force Kawaguchi into action. Five minutes in the experienced keeper embarrassingly fluffs an easy catch from a left-wing corner and Juninho - a free agent next month - bundles in his ninth goal of the season. With their next attack full-back Yusuke Tanaka smashes the ball against the base of the post with Kawaguchi flailing and Jubilo, improbably, suddenly clinging on.

It takes the home side time to gather themselves, but when they do Sugiyama has to claw a Kanazono effort one-handed around the post and Daisuke Nasu slams a shot against a Yamaha hoarding to the side of the goal. It's the start of a breatless final third in which play lurches from one side of the pitch to the other like a pissed-up salaryman on a midnight pavement. The season ends with Gilsinho shielding the ball by a corner flag and Kashiwa Reysol clinching their first ever title with a 3-1 win in Urawa, bringing the curtain down on another thoroughly enjoyable year of J.League football.

Roll on next March.

Date: December 3rd 2011
Admission: 2,000 yen.

Ground 197: Home's Stadium, Vissel Kobe

2011-12-01T10:50:00.002Z

Imagine a scenario that goes something like this: a billionaire retail mogul buys a near-bankrupt football club despite cheerfully admitting to knowing little about the sport. He appoints business contacts with no experience of the game to oversee his investment, overspends on burnt-out superstar forwards, sells stadium naming rights to an online estate agency, completely rebrands the club, changing its kit from black and white stripes to the crimson of his own company, and suffers an embarrassing relegation before a semi-redemptive season in a lower league restores it to the ranks of top-flight also rans. The ghost of Newcastle United past? Not quite. This is Vissel Kobe.

Hello sailor

'We are Kobe. We walk together forever' reads the sign above the entrance to Home's Stadium, but Vissel (a mishmash of the words 'Victory' and 'Vessel', in linguistically awkward homage to Kobe's seafaring heritage) have spent more time stumbling than strolling - never finishing higher than 10th in J1, and suffering major financial problems after the Daiei supermarket chain had to withdraw its sponsorship in the aftermath of 1995's Great Hanshin earthquake. But still the big names came (and very often flopped): Michael Laudrup played 24 games between leaving Real Madrid and signing up for Ajax, Turkey's Ilhan Mansiz, Patrick Mboma, South Korean international Kim Nam-il, former Chelsea and Sheffield Wednesday star Emerson Thome, ex-Rayo Vallecano forward Shoji Jo and Masayuki Okano, the man whose goal sent Japan to their first ever World Cup. Nowadays, Mikitani's increasingly parsimonious ownership means the talent is spread much thinner, with the team's star player Yoshito Okubo, an ex-Japan international forward who played a minor part in Wolfsburg's 2009 Bundesliga title success and lasted two seasons in La Liga with Real Mallorca, and one-time assistant coach Mashahiro Wada occupies a managerial position formerly held by Stuart Baxter and ex-Real Madrid boss Benito Floro. After avoiding relegation on the final day of last season, Wada's side are doing markedly better this time out, pushing for their best ever finish in the J.League table.

Vissel Girl and Pirate Cow

Opened in 2001, the ground formerly known as the Kobe Wing Stadium hosted three games in the following year's World Cup including Brazil's 2-0 second round win over Belgium. As I enter I'm handed, in strict order, a matchday programme, a '2011 thanks book', a Football Allstars digital gamecard and a Big Mac discount voucher in a silent operation of military-style efficiency. I stop to pick up a double Vissel dog from a woman clad in a black shirt and white gloves. Inside, the two sets of fans are already trading songs. "We'll get up the anchor" and "My sweet Kobe home" read banners in the home end. Jublio reply more succinctly with "We Believe". The teams are announced, giant flags are raised and lowered, and a cow in a pirate's hat rushes around the pitch waving a Kit Kat banner back and forth over its head.

The away end

Prompted by the former Santos and Vasco da Gama player Rodrigo Souto in midfield Iwata enjoy marginally the better of the early possession. Kobe are more aggressive, and when their bustling Brazilian forward Popo crosses at pace his compatriot Botti beats Yoshikatsu Kawaguchi to the ball only to see his header strike the net stanchion. In the 18th minute the home side take the lead, Kunie Kitamoto striding upfield and sliding a pass which leaves Takayuki Yoshida one on one with Kawaguchi. Kitamoto continues his run, turning in the rebound after Kawaguchi's initial reflex save. Six minutes later, left-back Takahito Soma, formerly of Maritimo and Energie Cottbus, bursts through two defenders, slaloms round a third and slots in at the opposite post. "That's the way we like it," sing the Kobe fans, moshing at the far end of the pitch. It's very nearly three when Okubo gets on the end of another Popo pass but just fails to jink through two covering defenders.

And the home (at Home's)

Half time comes, with entertainment provided by a penalty shoot competition for children, a parade of Power Rangers, men in beige slacks repairing divots in the pitch and the travelling Jubilo fans clapping and stomping their way through an elongated version of the Colonel Bogey March. It takes until the 56th minute for their team to manage anything as noticeable themselves, the Brazilian Gilsinho nodding down a Yuichi Komano centre but the ball dribbling wide of Vissel keeper Kenta Tokushige's left-hand post. Kobe reply with a cleverly worked set play which eventually sees Kawaguchi save with his chest from Okubo's shot. Jubilo press forward - Komano stinging Tokushige's fingertips from 25 yards - leaving gaps which Kobe almost exploit when Masahiro Koga miscues a hurried clearance straight to veteran forward Takayuki Yoshida, the defender recovering as Yoshida struggles to control the ball. The anonymous Gilsinho is withdrawn for Tomoyuki Arata and Jubilo pull an unexpected goal back when Japan international Ryoichi Maeda emerges unmarked in the area to head in against his hometown club with ten minutes left to play. "Come on Vissel!!!" the scoreboard implores. It works. Four minutes from time young substitute Ryota Morioka advances onto a Popo lay off and curls a right-footed shot past Tokushige from almost 30 yards. The three points send Kobe up to eighth with just one game of the season - away at Vegalta Sendai - still to play.

Anything you can do...

Date: 27th November 2011
Admission: 2,000 yen (reduced from 3,000 thanks to the sterling efforts of Alan Gibson, owner and editor of the excellent JSoccer Magazine).

Ground 196: Banpaku, Gamba Osaka

2011-11-28T13:01:00.004Z

"Miracle Gamba!" is the throaty, defiant and, it has to be said, alcohol-induced roar from the Gamba Osaka ultras. Hundreds of arms point towards the leader, who crouches, blue and black scarf drawn round his neck, on a chair in the centre of the room. The enthusiasm, the perfect certainty of the moment, is infectious; no matter how improbable it seems, all you can think is "Why not?"

Vegalta Sendai!

This should have already been Gamba's year. With old rivals Kashima Antlers and Urawa Reds on the wane, defending champions Nagoya Grampus beset by early season injuries, and newly promoted Kashiwa Reysol supposed to fade once the serious business got underway, Akiro Nishino's side had their best shot at the title since pipping four teams to win it by a point in the final minute of the 2005 season, ending with what football writer and Gamba fan Ben Mabley rightly calls the "preposterous record of 82 goals scored and 58 conceded from 34 games".

Top of the table as late as mid-October, Gamba's trademark defensive frailties resurfaced at the worst possible moment, two blunders from goalkeeper Yosuke Fujigaya gifting Grampus a 4-1 win on a rain-sodden pitch in Nagoya. Wins over Yamagata and Kashima were followed by a 2-2 draw in Niigata last weekend, leaving last season's runners-up four points adrift of Reysol with two games remaining. This week the club declined to renew Nishino's contract after a decade in charge, one league title, three domestic cups and an Asian Champions League. "Given the current circumstances this is what I was expecting," Nishino told the Japan Times. "I have to accept and understand the club have a new vision."

Opened in 1970, Gamba are planning to move from the Banpaku to a 32,000 capacity football specific ground - tentatively (I hope) named the Field of Smile - in time for the 2014 season.

Formed in 1991 (three years before their city rivals Cerezo) out of the Matsushita Electric (now Panasonic) company team, Gamba attracted the hardcore football support in Japan's traditionally baseball-mad third city. Founder members of the J.League in 1993, the club - whose name derives from a contraction of Gambare, Japanese for 'fight!' - were a side of no more than middling ability before Nishino arrived at the start of 2002. "He has undoubtedly made a very large and distinguished contribution," Gamba president Kikuo Kanamori told the club's official site. Over pre-match pints I'm handed a felt-tip pen and square of paper to add my own contribution. "Good luck," I scrawl. "But don't go to Urawa."

Smoke bombs explode in the home end as Gamba kick off Nishino's final home game. The travelling Vegalta Sendai support reply with a song to the tune of 'Take Me Home Country Roads', seguing quickly into Twisted Sister's 'We're Not Gonna Take It' and 'Blitzkrieg Bop' by The Ramones as the fifth-placed visitors make the faster start, Shingo Tomita finding Shingo Akimine in space but the striker stabbing the ball straight at a grateful Fujigaya. The let off stirs Gamba into action, young defender Hiroki Fujiharo having a weak shot smothered at the second attempt before a through ball almost finds its way to South Korean forward Lee Keun-ho, and the Brazilian Rafinha is crowded out by two defenders after the best passing move of the half momentarily frees him in the Sendai area. When the deadlock is finally broken, Akimine merits half an assist, his wasteful shot enabling Gamba to counter at pace, Lee nodding in his 13th league goal of the season after his overhit cross is turned back into the centre. The away team respond on and off the pitch, each new chant prompted by a fan with a megaphone and Unity Japan t-shirt, but national team midfielder Kunimitsu Sekiguchi wastes their best chance to level when he sidefoots into Fujigaya's midriff with time and space to advance on goal. Moments later, with Vegalta finding gaps down Gamba's right side, Akimine flicks a header wide of the post after Yoshiaki Ota's cross picks him out, unmarked, in the home goalmouth. It's symptomatic of the half: to Sendai the chances, to Gamba the goal.

The second period continues in much the same vein. Ota heads a difficult chance high and wide and an Akimine chest down is hacked unceremoniously away with the Gamba end belting out a song to the tune of La Marseillaise. Akimine plants another header harmlessly wide, then loses North Korean defender Kim Jung-ya with a clever run but nods just over as the Sendai fans bounce on the spot urging 'Let's go Sendai'. Gamba voices echo back with the potency of a Muslim call to prayer, and when their side do break forward they do so with menace and intent, Lee striking the base of the post on the hour, the rebound fortuitously deflected away for a corner.

With most of Akimine's efforts at goal landing wider of the mark than a Daily Mail editorial it's Sekiguchi who comes closest again, skipping past two defenders before Fujigaya fumbles Ota's weak shot onto the outside of the post. The Brazilian Diego comes on as Sendai push men forward, setting fellow substitute Yuki Moto up for a shot that he lobs high over the bar. With time ebbing away an impeccably timed sliding tackle from Kim takes the ball off Moto's toes as he shapes to shoot at goal, and an off balance Yuki Nakashima can only head Naoki Sugai's cross out for a goalkick. Before Fujigaya can take it the final whistle blows.

To play badly and yet still win is the hallmark of champions. It's a tag Gamba, now just two points behind Kashiwa in third, hope to regain next weekend. A miracle for a side with a propensity to fold when the pressure is really on? As Nishino knows only too well, stranger things have happened before.

"Newcastle played here in 1996," remembers one of the Gamba ultras after the game. "They were pissed off at the size of the crowd (just under 7,000, or a third of the Banpaku's 21,000 capacity, saw Les Ferdinand net a last-minute consolation in a 3-1 friendly defeat) but our football culture wasn't developed at the time and most Japanese fans only knew Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal. Now everyone knows of Newcastle as one of the biggest clubs." "A lot of Gamba fans think of themselves as the Japanese Newcastle," Ben Mabley tells me. "As cities, they have a very similar relationship to the rest of the country and the same strange accents." "I think Newcastle are more like Kashima Antlers," one of the ultras laughs. "It's always windy there as well."

Date: November 26th 2011
Admission: 2,000 yen.

Many thanks to Ben Mabley for the hospitality, which included the use of his spare mattress in Osaka and an invite to the Gamba ultras' end of season party.

Ground 195: Nishikyogoku, Kyoto

2011-11-16T12:00:00.006Z

The ancient city of Kyoto is home to 1.5 million people, 1,600 temples, 400 shrines, 14 UNESCO World Heritage Sites and one professional football team, Kyoto Sanga (known as Kyoto Purple Sanga until fans complained it was too much of a mouthful to chant), Emperor’s Cup winners in 2002 and the first club of Japan international midfielder Daisuke Matsui, now playing for French side Dijon.

Hedges! Inflatable chairs! Triangular floodlights! Running track...

Three more things you should know about Kyoto Sanga: they’re one of the oldest football clubs in the country, dating back to the formation of a team at Kyoto Teachers’ University in 1922, Manchester United’s Park Ji-sung played for them between the summer of 2000 and January 2003, and their ground, the 20,500 capacity Nishikyogoku Stadium, is possibly the least popular of any professional side in Japan. “Cold and sterile,” the website Rising Sun News called it, and when you enter the stadium you can see why. There’s the running track and sandpits, the three uncovered stands, and a fourth that has a square roof protruding over the executive boxes and the few hundred VIP seats immediately below. But cold and sterile doesn’t cover what comes next: the 25-foot inflatable armchairs tied down behind each goal; the selection of slightly unkempt hedges that makes up one half of the home end; the triangular floodlights on gargantuan poles straight out of a Soviet retro design show, one anchored slap in the middle of the away fans’ section, another in the midst of a bunch of trees; the scoreboard that flashes ‘We Go! We Go!’ as the teams step onto the pitch; or the megaphone-toting supporters on raised platforms at the front of the stand who orchestrate the purple-clad ranks as they point, sing and pogo their way through most of the game.

Relegated last season for the fourth time this century, Kyoto have never threatened to make an immediate return to J1, though a late season run of five wins in a row has lifted them into the top half of the table. Tokyo Verdy, former home of Ossie Ardiles (they sacked him too), Benfica’s Hulk and Bismarck (the Brazilian midfielder, not the 19^th century Prussian warmonger), are still paying for a disastrous start which has left them a few places but too many points off the third promotion place. The two or three hundred fans who’ve made the trip to the old capital are housed in the far corner, forested mountains and the setting sun behind, bouncing up and down as they switch between a St Pauli influenced 'That's the Way We Like It' and “Let’s go Verdy!” Both sets of fans seem fairly oblivious to what’s happening on the pitch, which is understandable in a first half whose infrequent highlights include a sliding block from Kyoto’s teenage defender Takayuki Fukumura as 16-goal striker Takuma Abe shapes for a point blank shot at Yuichi Mizutani’s goal, a chip from Jung Woo-young which Verdy’s Takahiro Shibasaki easily saves, and a header off the line by Mitchitaka Akimoto in Verdy’s final attack before the whistle.

Passing up the chance to buy an £80 replica home top or a ‘Hello Kitty + Kyoto Sanga’ scarf on my way around the main stand, I switch to the opposite scoreboard end in time for the start of the second half, taking up a seat next to a Kyoto fan in a purple rain poncho and surgical face mask that’s surprisingly ben left empty. “Come on Verdy! Come on Verdy!” the away fans sing as their side win a raft of early set pieces only to find the home defence in an impressively resolute mood. Verdy press hard in midfield, starving the home team of possession and forcing them into some last-ditch tackles, Akimoto taking substitute Hiroki Kawano out on the left of the area only for the resulting free kick to take a double deflection on its way over the bar. Moments later, the lively Kawano plays Seiichiro Maki in but the striker slips as he gathers the ball and Mizutani easily clears. Kyoto manage to withstand the pressure and launch some brief upfield forays of their own, Ryosuke Sakai pinging a right-footed shot wide before the home fans roar for a penalty when a forward belly flops in the area. With four minutes left, the deadlock is finally broken, substitute Taisuke Nakamura latching onto a Kohei Kudo pass and shooting low and accurately into the left hand corner of the Verdy net. Most of the season-high crowd of 12,287 jump up as much in surprise as in celebration. For fallen giants Verdy, two-time champions of Japan, it means another season of J2 football.

We Go!

Let's Go Verdy!

Floodlight heaven

Fashion hell

Date: 12th November 2011

Admission: 1,500 yen

Ground 194: Moriyama Stadium, Moriyama City

2011-11-13T10:10:00.001Z

“I smoked in a crowd,” reads the sign overhead. “I was alone.” “The mother eyed my cigarette as she passed by with her young child,” starts another one. “You tossed your cigarette out of the window,” says one hanging from the ceiling, accompanied by a drawing of a cigarette with the word ‘Victim’ printed accusingly above. “You looked like you were fleeing the scene of a crime.” I turn my head towards the door. “I threw my cigarette butt in the drain. That is to say, I hid it in the drain.” The left ear of the person next to me droops to within an inch of my shoulder. It’s eight on a Saturday morning, the train is only at Gifu, and the weekend has already taken its first turn for the bizarre.

The Shiga Bluecoats

I arrive in Kyoto, shuffle up the stairs behind someone dressed in a maroon puffer jacket with ‘Detroit Kill City’ stitched across the chest, and take five escalators to the Happy Terrace rooftop garden (“Creation of environment friendly urban life space and place of information transmission.”). The trees are still green and the outside temperature is 21 degrees but workmen are already putting up the giant Kyoto Station Christmas tree. “Lets Merry!” exclaims a sign outside Starbucks. A cleaner in a light blue and baby pink jockey’s suit runs a vacuum across the escalator steps. I head back down to the platform and the next train to Katata.

From the old to the new, I cross the neck of Lake Biwa – formed around five million years ago, some say by the same earthquake which created Mount Fuji – on a concrete bridge, supping Kirin Beer. A right turn at the other side, past a love hotel cluster - £20 for a ‘rest’, an extra tenner for ‘service time’ and twenty on top for an overnight sleep, though the mind boggles at the kinkiness going on in the Lego-block Chapel Christmas - and I’m at the ground just in time to see Sagawa Shiga and Sony Sendai FC, top and bottom in the semi-professional Japan Football League, come out of the solitary stand, flanked by two rows of cheerleaders in red miniskirts and sequined pom-poms. “Sony Sendai,” yells a bespectacled man in chinos and a baseball cap, a drum and cardboard box placed either side of his feet. At the other end of the stand the forty-strong Shiga supporters’ group test out their loudhailers and launch into songs to the tune of Rule Britannia, Smoke on the Water and It’s Off to Work We Go from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

Backed by Sagawa Express, one of Japan’s largest parcel delivery companies, with a client list that’s included Amway, Amazon, the Yamada Denki electronics chain, Tsutaya bookstores and the Japanese mafia, Shiga were formed in 2007 with the merger of Sagawa’s successful company sides in Osaka and Tokyo. Relocated to the firm’s home prefecture, the new club have won the JFL in two of the following four seasons, finished second once and lead this year’s competition by four points from Parceiro Nagano. Forty years older, Sony Sendai were established as the works team of a Sony branch office, but play a distant second fiddle to neighbours Vegalta, who play two levels higher in Japan’s top-flight league. Their place at the foot of the table has more to do with the devastation wrought by March’s tsunami than their lack of quality on the field, with the team having played just over half the games of the division’s seventeen other clubs.

Let's dance

Patient and controlled in possession, Sendai dictate the pace from defence, an off-colour Shiga hustling the ball to little avail. Yuki Miyao wastes the away side’s best chance of the half, looping a free header over the bar with thirty minutes played. Skipper Nobumitsu Yamane puts a right-footed shot wide of the post for Shiga but that’s nothing compared to the action on the side of the pitch, a barefoot fan in a ‘Tran’sport Communication Sawaga’ cape leading a group of around a hundred schoolgirls wearing blue t-shirts with ‘Thanks for all…’ on the back in a choreographed song and dance routine which ends with a shimmy to the left, mass fist pumping and a high-pitched eruption of ‘Hey, Hey, Heys!’ Things get even more Butlins Holiday Camp at half time when a singer starts belting out a love ballad on an electric keyboard while three stewards do overhead claps and star jumps on the running track behind. I try to track down a beer stand but find nothing but candy floss, chicken on a stick and a sculpture park of stone animals back beside the turnstile.

And sing...

With most of the away fans distracted by their make-up mirrors Sendai fashion the first chance of the second half, their ponytailed strikeforce combining as Jumpei Murata slides in Kouhei Aso to put a rising effort wide of goal. Shiga go long towards big forward Hideyuki Takeya and are almost rewarded when a chest down is whipped off the toes of Yuta Hamada as he homes in on Sasumu Kaneko in the Sendai goal. Shiga waste two free kicks and I walk towards the turnstile thinking it’s not going to be their day, before a pair of quick goals in the last ten minutes gives them an undeserved three points. I scurry back to Katata, making it to the platform as the tannoy announces the approach of the 15.08 to Kyoto.

Date: 12th November 2011

Admission: 1,000 yen.

Ground 193: Toyota Stadium, Toyota City

2011-11-07T09:56:00.001Z

After the usually incredulous “Why?” the thing I get asked most often about groundhopping is “What’s the best place you’ve ever been to, then?” It’s an almost impossible question to answer (How do you begin to quantify the experiences and emotions bound up with visits to football grounds? Is the Nou Camp better because it’s the Nou Camp? Does the Daejeon World Cup Stadium rate any higher because of the atmosphere on the night South Korea beat Italy?), but I can say without any doubt that the best looking stadium I’ve ever seen is the Toyota Stadium in Aichi Prefecture, Japan.

Completed in 2001 to mark the 50^th anniversary of Toyota City, home, unsurprisingly, of the Toyota Motor Corp, the Toyota Stadium was among Japan’s original list of fifteen candidate cities for the 2002 World Cup but failed to make the final cut of ten due to political machinations that, as academics Wolfram Manzenreiter and John Horne noted, may or may not have included Toyota’s rivalry with Nissan Motors and the willingness of Nagoya’s residents to publically oppose wasteful public spending projects.

With a stadium design by the world renowned Kisho Kurokawa – the architect behind the new wing at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, the international airports in Astana and Kuala Lumpur, The Big Eye World Cup Stadium in Oita and Zenit St Petersburg's long-awaited new ground (a close copy, incidentally, of his Toyota design) – the city government pressed on regardless, scaling back the maximum possible capacity by a quarter to 45,000 but otherwise sticking to Kurokawa’s original vision. And what a vision it is: bordered by the Yanagi River, rice paddy fields and pear farms, the stadium has a retractable fabric roof that folds back in on itself like a Japanese paper fan, a scoreboard which can be moved fifty metres up or down and slid anywhere between the goal and the halfway line, a 38-degree gradient to the stands and four masts holding up the permanent roofs, providing unimpeded views of the pitch from every single one of the 43,000 regular seats, an indoor swimming pool and exterior lighting that changes colour to coordinate with the neighbouring Toyota Bridge. “One of the most beautiful stadiums in the world,” ex-Nagoya, Roda and PSV manager Sef Vergoossen said. He wasn’t wrong:

Crossing Toyota Bridge.

The scoreboard and retractable roof.

The teams come out.

The away end

Now jointly used by Nagoya Grampus (who divide their home games with the much older Mizuho Athletics Stadium back in Nagoya) and rugby union team Toyota Verblitz, the stadium has also hosted three Japan internationals, four FIFA Club World Cups and will be one of the venues for the Rugby World Cup in 2019. It’s a fifty-minute train ride from central Nagoya to Toyotashi on the Tsuramai Subway and Meitetsu Toyota Lines, then a quarter of an hour walk over several pedestrian crossings and the skeletal Toyota Bridge. Twinned with Derby and Detroit and home to 1,345 industrial plants, Toyota’s a “city of radiant people with environmental consciousness and dynamic growth” according to its website, but the most exciting thing you’re likely to see between the station and the ground is the side-by-side presence of a McDonald’s and a Lotteria burger franchise. A much better choice is the Coco Curry Ichiban concession in the car park outside the east stand. “Good smell, good curry” as it says on the side of the van.

The Coco Ichiban van (in yellow)

With four games to play defending champions Nagoya are third in the league, two points adrift of Gamba Osaka and three behind surprise package Kashiwa Reysol. “Have a Confidence” urges a banner behind the home goal, though Cerezo Osaka take an early lead on grammatical accuracy: “Osaka City Football Club” and “Real Osaka Ultras 1994” their flags proclaim, in pointed digs at their city rivals Gamba.

The sides line up in matching 4-5-1s but it’s Cerezo, with Fabio Lopes and the highly-rated Japan international Hirotsugu Kiyotake (rumoured to be off to Stuttgart at the season’s end) buzzing around off Rui Komatsu, who settle first, narrowly missing Seigo Narazaki’s left-hand post with the opening attack of the afternoon. Nagoya are comparatively sluggish lack up front but respond to the threat by pushing their back four forward, squeezing the space in midfield and rendering Lopes and Kiyotake virtually anonymous for the remainder of the game. Takahiro Masukawa heads wide from a Kennedy cross and Yoshizumi Ogawa has a tame effort gathered by Kim Jin-Hyeon in the away goal as Grampus begin to find their range. On twenty-four minutes Cerezo unwisely concede a free kick and Jungo Fujimoto bends a left-footed effort that soars over the wall and inches wide of Kim’s slow motion dive. Komatsu equalises from the penalty spot after a clumsy trip by Musukawa, but the parity lasts just six minutes before Ogawa swings in a free-kick from the left and Joshua Kennedy brushes past a defender to head in a training ground goal, his seventeenth of the season. “Forza Grampus! Ole! Ole! Ole!” sing the Nagoya fans to the tune of Yellow Submarine. “We knew set pieces were a strong point of Nagoya’s game,” Cerezo’s Brazilian coach Levir Culpi complains afterwards.

Fujimoto over the wall?

With Nagoya now happy to sit on their lead, Cerezo are given more possession in the second half but are rarely able to threaten, managing just five shots all game. With fourteen minutes left Kim palms a volleyed shot back into a crowded area and young substitute forward Kensuke Nagai turns the rebound past a defender on the line. It’s a performance that owes more to Stoke City than Arsenal, but with 270 minutes of the season left and already relegated Montedio Yamagata the Toyota’s final visitors Dragan Stojkovic’s side are still in with a shout of their second title in a row.

Penalty!

Full time.

Date: November 3rd 2011

Admission: 2,200 yen.

Ground 192: Nagaragawa Stadium, Gifu

2011-11-05T12:44:00.002Z

A uniformed official in a peaked cap and face mask runs white-gloved hands down both sides of my bag at the entrance to FC Gifu’s Nagaragawa Stadium, while a second holds out a free programme in a club branded carrier bag and a third politely snips the edge off my ticket. Two bows and a choral thank you later and I’m inside. Food stalls sell Asahi beer in paper cups, hamburgers, skewered chicken, grilled octopus and rice flour dumplings dipped in soy, while three squad players sign autographs in a corridor and the oendan supporter groups hang out their flags: ‘Hellas Gifu’, ‘La Nagaragawa’, ‘Now and Here!’, ‘We Love You FC Gifu’ and ‘Techniek Hartstocht’ (Technique and Passion if you trust Google’s ability to translate from the Dutch).

At first glance the Nagaragawa is as unpromising a venue as most other Japanese football grounds. There’s the same concrete bowl exterior, the running track and hoardings keeping you further away from the action than Victor Valdes, the Brobdignagian-sized Subbuteo scoreboard, backless plastic seats, and the main stand roof, as wide and flat as a windowsill and ergonomically designed to shelter no more than five of the seats below. And then there’s the grass. Clipped to the length of a tennis court, kerbstone stepped at two-metre intervals and covering the upper half of no fewer than three sides of the ground, it’s precisely the kind of quirky horticultural feature that distinguishes a genuine football stadium from your common or garden multi-purpose facility. All that’s missing is a Brechin City hedge. Or maybe a Loko Vltavin one. With the rain teeming down and the few steps under cover already full – only the umbrella carrying, plastic poncho wearing oendan are braving the elements tonight – I head along to the far side of the stand where around a hundred Sagan Tosu fans are segregated by two lengths of rope and a sign saying Keep Out in English and Japanese.

After Gifu’s meteoric rise through the lower leagues – they won every game they played between late-2002 and their promotion to the Tokai Regional League in 2004 - the grass has recently been significantly greener off the pitch than on it for the hard-up club. Only five wins all season have left Takahiro Kimura’s side firmly rooted to the foot of the table, twelve points and a negative goal difference of thirty-one behind second bottom Gainare Tottori. Sagan – the only team to have played in all thirteen seasons of Japan’s second-tier professional league, are threatening to escape J2 for the first time since their last set of bankruptcy hearings, an unbeaten run of ten wins and three draws propelling them to second in the league with just six games remaining. With fourteen goals shipped in three successive defeats, Kimura makes five changes and switches his formation to a 4-2-3-1, the on-loan Omiya Ardija player Ryohei Arai given the job of buffering the two centre backs, Shogo Shimada and Hidemi Jinushizono hugging the flanks so tightly they could almost be wearing running spikes instead of studs, and big striker Yudai Nishikawa brought in as the pivot up front.

The two sides cross the running track to the noise of piped music, Sagan fans pogoing under their pink and blue flags and Gifu bounding rhythmically to the beat of a drum. It’s the league’s whipping boys who immediately look the better team, the constant pressing from Nishikawa and Shimada unsettling Sagan’s play while Jinushizono's relationship to his marker is like that of matador to an enraged bull. In the 16^th minute the little winger’s cross finds Shimada, whose shot is blocked by a defender’s hand. “Akahoshi,” the Sagan fans chant at their goalkeeper, but Shimada coolly Panenkas him to give his side their first lead in four games. The closest Sagan come to mustering a reply is a header from ex-Vitória Setúbal midfielder Kim Byung-suk which 20-year-old keeper Goro Kawanami watches past his post and a free-kick from the same player which Kawanami erratically fists into the ground and away for a corner. Everything is going exactly to Kimura’s plan until full-back Kazuki Murakami damages his knee ligaments midway through the half, necessitating a reshuffle which sees Yuki Oshitani brought on to play off Nishikawa and Shimada covering in defence. No longer able to outflank their opponents, Gifu go down the middle instead, Arai playing a ball over the top for Nishikawa, who shrugs off Keita Isozaki and, with the very last kick of the half, finds the corner of the net via Akahoshi’s right hand. The Sagan fans – who’ve been bouncing up and down singing "Ey! Ey! Sagan Tosu" while fanning the air in front of their faces – go quiet as their team troops off, one spending the half-time break with his eyes screwed shut, head bowed and palms pressed together in front of his face.

The Shinto gods respond by turning Gifu back into their ordinary selves. Within fifteen minutes Yohei Toyoda brings the scores level, the panicking home defenders twice failing to clear crosses into the box. A minute later Kawanami fumbles a bouncing ball, but manages to scissor kick Ryuhei Niwa’s shot away. A punt upfield finds Oshitani, who manoeuvres past two challenges and bends the ball around the retreating goalkeeper. A Hollywood goal, but it doesn’t count for any more than the scruffy flick off Toyoda’s head ten minutes later which gives the striker his 20^th goal of the season and his first ever J-League hat-trick.

It takes until the 83^rd minute for Gifu to renew their passing acquaintance with the ball, Nishikawa attempting a Zola backheel flick which hits against a defender’s shin and dribbles over the line off his big toe. With time running out and both sides kicking the ball in any direction they can, a mishit shot falls to Niwa, his jab at goal evading Kawanami’s left glove and putting Sagan three points clear of fourth-placed Tokushima Vortis, who they face in the Pocari Sweat Stadium in the season’s penultimate game.

“We worked really hard but in the end we just couldn’t win,” Gifu midfielder Kazanori Kan tells the club website. “We were lucky to draw,” says Sagan’s Naoyuki Fujita. “Not good enough,” reckons their South Korean manager Yoon Jung-hwan. “Control Gifu and you control Japan” was a favoured axiom of the Warring States Period. Sagan Tosu will settle for their first ever promotion and a season in J1.

Date: 30th October 2011

Admission: 1,500 yen

Ground 191: Chukyo University, Toyota City, Aichi.

2011-10-23T12:26:00.007+01:00

“Make a grass-field soccer stadium in Kasugai!” pleads the opening line of the Kasugai Football Federation’s website, the accompanying petition signed by more than a sixth of the 300,000 people who live in the town. “For the future of your children, please lend us your support.”

The bright lights of Kaizu Station.

Kasugai Football Club could definitely use a little bit of that. With a website last updated at the beginning of the year, they’re forced to play their home games on the grounds of Chukyo University’s Toyota Campus, whose ‘A’ and ‘B’ teams occupy the top two places in the Tokai League’s Division Two. Champions themselves in 2002 and 2006, Kasugai were immediately relegated on both occasions and are currently no higher than fifth of the eight teams which comprise the second-tier of the Tokai Regional League (and the fifth-tier of Japanese football overall). That’s still three places ahead of Volare Hamamatsu, whose name is derived from their hometown and the Latin for ‘to leap’, “relating to the team flying to high places” as their website – subtitled 'From Hamamatsu to the J-League' – helpfully explains.

Kasugai huddle

By far the best thing about Kasugai’s exile is the maglev ride to the ground. The $574 million Linimo Line was constructed for the 2005 World Expo, linking north-east Nagoya to nearby Toyota City. Automated trains glide noiselessly eight millimetres above the track. “We will soon make a brief stop at Aichikyūhaku-kinen-kōen,” says a voice in flawless, slightly American accented English shortly after passing the Toyota Automobile Museum. “The doors on the left side will open. Should you encounter any trouble on the train, please notify a station attendant.” I change at Yakusa, the end of the nine-kilometre line, sharing an Aichi Loop Line train as far as Kaizu Station with a pack of high school students in matching Hummel tracksuits, Meito Challenge emblazoned across their shoulder blades.

Around the edge of a rice paddy and straight on through a cabbage patch, I hear the first whistle as I crest the hill and see Kasugai - resplendent in dark green shirts – kick off towards the scoreboard at the forested end of the ground. Volare (whose red shirts signify “blazing passion and our extreme combative heart”) defend the clubhouse goal. The twenty or so people already in attendance sit on a grass bank and concrete with their backs to an American Football pitch. The home side look more accomplished in possession but Volare - in their first season out of the Shizuoka Prefectural League - are more incisive when it counts, player-manager Takayuki Uchiyama smacking a waist high volley which clanks back off the underside of the crossbar, drawing a ‘Woah, woah, woah’ from two thirds of the crowd.

With their number thirteen exuding a Death Star grip at the heart of the defence, Kasugai build patiently, hitting the post when a cross evades a congested goalmouth and finds a forward lurking at the far post. It’s a miss they soon have cause to regret. Volare prove that if you can’t go through a centre half you can at least go round him, Daniro Munemori stumbling through two challenges on the left of midfield before squeezing a shot that loops up and in off a defender’s big toe, earning three hugs and a slap on the arse from his grateful teammates. Kasugai come back strongly, Kengo Wakuda making a slapstick triple save which ends with him dragging his shorts back up as he rises from the ground. Very Bruce Grobelaar.

2-0!

Volare sit so deep in the second half I begin to suspect the halfway line is electrified. Kasugai throw on their substitutes and force a steady stream of corner kicks, but their touch grows progressively less certain the closer they get to the Volare goal. With a minute left to play, Takayuka Tsuboi is upended during the away side’s first real foray towards the Kasugai end of the pitch, and Uchiyama sends the keeper the wrong way to seal only their third win of the campaign. Nobody said that football was fair.

Admission: Free

Date: 23rd October 2011

Ground 190: Mizuho Athletics Stadium, Nagoya

2011-10-13T12:06:00.002+01:00

I may have committed a serious breach of groundhopper orthodoxy, but despite living just a ten-minute cycle ride from Nagoya’s Mizuho Athletics Stadium, since moving back to Japan I’ve found more interesting – or, to state the case more plainly, more immediately rewarding - things to do with my time than watching football. Prospective games have passed me by, blogging has been shoved unceremoniously onto the back burner, and two blank weekends turned into a third when my plans to take in Sunday’s Nabisco Cup semi against Kashima Antlers were foiled by the perfect storm of a punctured front tyre, a 1pm kick off, two shrimp and potato pizzas, a man with a horse’s head and a pet hairstylist from Peru. Run of the mill on a night out in Nagoya.

Another one.

With Grampus’ last three home league games of the season either taking place at the football-only Toyota Stadium or, in the case of Saturday’s potential title-decider against Gamba Osaka, sold out before my belated attempts to procure tickets, the Emperor’s Cup second round game with Suzuka Rampole was potentially my last opportunity to see a game at the Mizuho. Rampole – probably the only team in world football to derive the second word of their name from the pseudonym of a mystery novel writer - play in the first division of the amateur Tokai League, four divisions beneath the reigning Japanese champions, but with Grampus facing their third home cup tie in seven days and Gamba next up, coach Dragan Stojkovic had already revealed his plans to rest most of his regular starting eleven. Out went last season’s J-League Player of the Year Seigo Narazaki, Australian forward Josh Kennedy and the Brazilian-born defender Marco Tulio Tanaka, in came ex-Tokyo Verdy keeper Yoshinari Takagi, 20-year-old midfielder Taishi Taguchi and Kensuke Nagai, a recent star of Japan’s Under-22 side.

The main stand

With just fifty minutes to spare between getting out of work and the scheduled kick off, there was no time added on for stoppages in my final lesson of the day, the students shooed out to facilitate a race to the station and a just-in-the-nick-of-time arrival at the Mizuho ticket booth. Hand waving and repetition of the word for ‘cheap’ got me a 2,000 yen ticket alongside Nagoya’s ultras in an uncovered end behind the goal (even with the fall in the value of the pound from 248 yen in 2008 to 117 yen today that’s still only slightly more expensive than a seat at some League Two grounds). “Forza Grampus!” the six or seven hundred ultras chanted in unison, part of an impressive repertoire which peaked at a catchy ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh’ number accompanied by mass bunny hops and a bass drum solo. ‘Here is our Treasure’, ‘This is Home’, ‘La Famiglia Rosso Giallo’ and ‘Pixi’ read the banners tied around the running track boundary. At the opposite end of the pitch, around 200 Suzuka fans – bussed in from neighbouring Mie Prefecture for what would inevitably be their team’s last game of the season – pogoed around the empty spaces, waving giant flags in the manner of a Formula One marshal.

The Grampus ultras

Nagoya started with Montenegro international Igor Burzanović behind Nagai and Stojkovic doing his customary pacing of the touchline. Within 19 minutes his team was two goals to the good, Burzanović opening the scoring on the quarter hour before Koji Hashimoto rounded Makoto Mizutani in the Suzuka goal after the visitors lost possession and were picked apart on the counter. Tidy in possession but toothless in attack, Rumpole’s problems were compounded when forward Jumpei Yano was shown his second yellow card with ten minutes of the half to play, moments after Burzanović had added a third. Suzuka sit deep, not bothering to press the ball until Nagoya cross the halfway line, and leaving themselves vulnerable to pace and overlapping attackers – a combination of which indirectly resulted in the home side’s fourth goal, defender Tatsuya Arai heading in direct from a corner. There was still time in the half for Hashimoto to slip a first time shot inches wide after a one-touch passing move undressed the away side down the left. Suzuka’s only reply was a forward burst from centre-half Shinpei Sakaki, which ended when he blazed his shot horizontally across Takagi’s goal. A minute-long rendition of ‘Nagoya Grampus’ serenaded Stojkovic’s side off the field at half-time.

My vantage point

“There is always the possibility of the unexpected,” Stojkovic had said in his pre-match press conference, but the second half was as predictable as the first. Nagoya, now able to open up space at will, were content to play keep ball as Suzuka encamped themselves between the halfway line and the edge of their area. Akira Tanaka came on for Nagai after 55 minutes, making an immediate impression as he leisurely slid past two defenders before placing his shot straight at the goalkeeper. Suzuka managed a long range shot into Takagi’s chest and another which rolled just wide with the goalkeeper flailing, but in the 80th minute Tanaka got the goal he’d been waiting for, sidefooting home after two Grampus players had worked the ball around the exposed Masanori Murata in the Suzuka defence. The left-back had better luck moments later when he headed the ball off his own line, though Grampus added a sixth regardless, Burzanović’s 88th minute shot striking a defender’s boot and trickling apologetically over the line. At the final whistle Suzuka’s players and coaching staff were afforded a heroes’ reception by the away support while the Grampus team bowed an acknowledgement to each of the stands in turn before lining up to salute the ultras.

Now in its 91st year, the Emperor’s Cup is Japan’s most prestigious knock-out competition, stretching to seven rounds, eighty-eight teams and a New Year’s Day final at Tokyo’s National Stadium. Nagoya - two-time winners of the tournament in the 1990s - progress to play J2 side Giravanz Kitakyushu in mid-November’s third round, with potential ties against fellow title challengers Kashiwa Reysol and Yokohama Marinos to come before a December 29th semi-final. For Stojkovic, who recently lambasted his team for “playing like high school students” during a 2-0 defeat in Shimizu, a league and cup double remains a tantalising possibility.

Admission: 2,000 yen
Date: October 12th 2011

Attention Premier League clubs: this man brings beer to your seat and collects the empties afterwards.

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Ground 189: Nagoya Port Soccer Field

2011-09-18T03:44:00.000+01:00

Underground to Tsukiji-guchi, cross water twice, turn left at Inaei Station and keep an eye out for the floodlights. That, and a 600 yen Donichi Ecco Kippu ticket, was all the preparation I’d done for the 11.30am kick off in the Tokai University Soccer League. Google Maps made it look like a two-mile walk each way; the weather forecast was for 9 mm of rain and an 80% chance of thunderstorms. In the end it was four, the sun beat down between squally showers and the closest we came to thunder was the applause for the third goal.

Look for the floodlights: bulbs like bug-eyes studded in rows above cylindrical, rusting poles. You could see them all the way from Inaei, rising above the trees, a concrete overpass and a Brazilian church cladded with ersatz brick. I take a short cut through a park, old women in golf visors power walking the pathways and kids in Mao collars practising their baseball swing by a Circle K convenience store.

I just about catch kick off through an unlocked metal gate before joining the hundred or so fans scattered along the top of the main stand. The rain blows in at angles, pushing everyone into the centre where a mini-roof hangs over the empty hospitality boxes and a man in a Chukyo University polo shirt is recording the game on a hand-held camera. The ball boys sit on folding chairs, hoods up and see-through plastic ponchos pulled right down to their feet. Behind the harbour-side goal is the Asian football ground’s scoreboard of choice: LCD display mounted on concrete with two clock faces on the side – one telling the time, the other ticking off the forty-four minutes still to play in the half. On the pitch, Chukyo University, dressed like Glasgow Rangers in red, white and blue, have already taken the lead. The greens of Gifu Keizai attack, the ball bounces in front of goal, and the scoreboard blinks before switching to 1-1. Although I didn’t know it at the time, for both Gifu and I the best part of the game had already been and gone.

Chukyu might be dressed like Rangers but they don’t play like any team Ally McCoist’s ever likely to send out, their centre halves resembling a pair of somnambulant pinball flippers as they slap passes back and forth across the defence. There’s a man and a dog at the back of the stand, but unlike England nobody disputes the referee’s decisions and the closest you get to bad language is the Keizai keeper’s “Aaagh!” when he miskicks the ball out of his hands for a throw-in. The few latecomers bow to people they recognise in the crowd, while at half time two women in short skirts and baseball caps stand by the entrance handing out small cans of Red Bull for free.

By then Keizai are two one down, a deflected shot earning a smattering of polite applause and four clucks of the tongue from a man sitting behind. While Chukyu are short on verve and cutting edge up front – even their free kicks are two-yard passes - Keizai look like they wouldn’t know which end of the knife to hold on to, their most prolonged spell in possession a block from an outstretched boot that gets passed out of play five touches later. Chukyu extend their lead with a quarter of the second half counted off on the scoreboard clock, their central midfielder calmly finishing off a minute-long passing move, and stroll through the remainder of the game. The sun comes out, heads start flopping in the seats to my right. “Dozo,” (Please) a Keizai forward shouts as he sets off on a run for a pass that never comes.

Admission: Free
Date: September 17th 2011

Ground 188: Dr Pit Welfare Park, Bedlington Terriers

2011-09-11T10:21:00.009+01:00

It’s a long, long way from the Northern Combination League to Buffalo, New York.

The journey begins with Bedlington Mechanics in 1949, taking in a Northumberland Minor Cup, promotion to the Northern Alliance, two championship trophies and four league cups, a home ground at West Sleekburn ‘A’ Pit, twelve months in the Tyneside Amateur League, four changes of suffix and a three year hiatus while the club was disbanded and reformed. And that was just before 1982.

The mid-1980s had seen Bedlington earn back-to-back promotions and finish runners-up to Bishop Auckland in the top division of the Northern League. The mid-1990s saw them stuck at the bottom of Division Two, out of cash and with the gates of Welfare Park shut on environmental health grounds. Enter the Perry brothers, Keith and Dave, local businessmen whose impact on Bedlington was like that of Abramovich and Mourinho combined. With Keith Perry and ex-Mansfield Town player Tony Lowery in the dugout, the Terriers won five successive Northern League titles, two Northumberland Senior Cups, reached an FA Vase final at Wembley Stadium and played in the second round proper of the FA Cup, losing at Scunthorpe after Second Division Colchester United taken apart 4-1 in front of more than 1,500 fans at the Dr Pit Welfare Park. Both men left in the summer of 2006, part of a chain of events which saw Bedlington teetering on the brink of extinction. Dave Holmes kept the club afloat off the pitch, while the combined efforts of Perry, Lowery and Newcastle Blue Star – whose promotion meant only two clubs went down – were enough to stave off fears of a first relegation since 1987. Set against all that, hearing that one of the world’s five hundred richest men wants to sponsor your shirts, buy you an electronic scoreboard and fly the team out to Buffalo to play for the Lord Bedlington Cup seems almost run of the mill.

Even without the North American tour it’s been a typically eventful start to the season. Buoyed by an impressive signing spree which saw Spennymoor’s free scoring Steven Richardson and former Newcastle United and Queen of the South midfielder Tommy English join the club, the Terriers were touted by some as an outside bet for the title after a 4-2 opening day win over South Shields. Single-goal defeats to Billingham Synthonia, Shildon and Newton Aycliffe have alternated with a 4-1 win at Ashington, a 6-0 FA Cup victory over Billingham Town and a 15-0 trouncing of Stokesley Sports Club, who just happen to be the visitors today.

The lure of goals, the FA Vase and Bedlington's brand new scoreboard tempts Chris Smith and James Williams along, Chris breaking off from Twitter long enough to direct us to the ground. We arrive in Bedlington with half an hour to kick off, park up behind the ugliest Tesco supermarket in the whole of the British Isles, circumnavigate a bowling green while attempting to track down the stadium entrance, and are already through the turnstile when we realise we’ve gone straight past the door for the bar. It’s still a better start than the visiting team make, going 1-0 down after just two minutes when Anthony Shandran scores his thirteenth goal of the season and his seventh against Stokesley alone.

Having lost their secretary, manager and all thirty-eight members of their playing squad over the summer, Stokesley are relying on players who spent last season two or three levels below Northern League Division One. The gulf is obvious, Bedlington faster to the ball and sharper in possession as Shandran adds a second with barely twenty minutes played, the fiftieth goal Stokesley have conceded in just over eight games. Nathan Porritt – whose agent was offered £150,000 to take him from Middlesbrough to Chelsea as a 15-year-old schoolboy - pulls a goal back with a stunning finish from the edge of the box, but it’s 4-1 by half time, Shandran’s name appearing twice more on the £30,000 scoreboard Robert Rich donated to the club. Porritt, still just 21, and Joe Melvin, a summer signing from the Teesside League, the star turns in a hardworking but utterly outclassed Stokesley eleven.

Stokesley change goalkeepers at half time, the PA announcer apologising for not knowing the name of “the player in the yellow shirt”. Whoever he was, he won’t want to meet Anthony Shandran anytime soon, the ex-Burnley, St Patrick’s Athletic and York City striker laying on goals for Tommy English, Paul Swithenbank and Ian Graham while still finding time to score his fifth and sixth of the afternoon. Bedlington go though to play Northallerton Town in the second round. Inconsistent in the league, you wouldn’t bet against them reaching at least another quarter-final in the Vase.

Admission: £5
Date: September 10th 2011

Ground 187: Bedford Terrace, Billingham Town

2011-09-07T08:36:00.008+01:00

I’m reading Brave New World as the train pulls in to Billingham, Huxley’s dystopian vision of a synthetically-engineered future partly inspired, like Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner cityscapes, by the town’s petro chemical skyline:

"…one of the most extraordinary of experiences, a sight almost unique in England. On either side of the road are the works. Steaming, sizzling - tall steel towers, great cylinders, pipes everywhere... At night the whole industrial world along the banks of the Tees comes to life... brilliant with a thousand lights, the great girders of the Transporter Bridge dark in silhouette: a magic city." Henry Tharold, Shell Guide to County Durham.

After forty-three years it was almost the end of the world for Billingham Town when Hartlepool United started court proceedings to reclaim £10,500 spent on improvements to Bedford Terrace while it was home to their reserve team. Volunteer helpers arrived at the ground to find a writ taped to the main gate, club officials contested the debt, and an anonymous (or some still insist imaginary) donor finally gave Hartlepool their money two days before Christmas 2010. With the threat of extinction lifted Billingham ended last season comfortably above the relegation places but a poor start has left them with just a single point from their opening four league games and looking over their shoulders at the bottom of the league. Manager Carl Jarrett must wish he could produce bokanovsky clones of some of the club’s former players, starting with Gary Pallister, who moved to Middlesbrough in 1984 in exchange for a set of kit, a bag of balls and a goal net, and Notts County midfielder Neal Bishop, whose route to Meadow Lane took in Barnet, York City, Whitby Town and the same Billingham squad as his 16-year-old brother and 46-year-old dad.

It’s been a much better start for Sunderland RCA, top of the league after five games and unbeaten this season before losing at Spennymoor Town in the FA Cup preliminary round. Top scorer Gavin Barton – seven goals in just five games for the club – moved to Spennymoor before the tie, though ex-York City winger Bryan Stewart has since made the opposite journey, joining Andy Jennings and Mark Davison in a front trio that remains among the most dangerous in the Northern League.

It’s a blowy night on the North Sea coast and RCA don’t look much like title contenders in a scrappy first half, the wind blowing the ball around in directions every bit as inexplicable as Michael Gove's pronouncements on education. Manager Neil Hixon watches from the edge of his technical area, arms folded across his chest. “Play, play! Movement, movement!” coach George Herd – an ex-Scotland international who made almost 300 appearances for Sunderland – shouts as the visitors fire high balls across the area. “Look to feet, look to feet!”

Billingham old boy Andy Jennings has the best of the early chances when home keeper James Briggs miscues a clearing kick. Stewart retrieves the spinning ball by the left-side corner flag, but Briggs recovers his poise to turn the low shot one-handed around the post. As RCA begin - as local boy and Maximo Park frontman Paul Smith might say - to apply some pressure, Briggs gets both hands to a Stewart shot and acrobatically pushes away a thirty-yard strike from the advancing right-back, though both come to him at the right height for a goalkeeper (my thanks to the football pundits’ book of cliché). With just minutes to go before the break Gary Shields just about manages to stay onside and squares a cross for Davison to curl first time into the roof of the net. The RCA players are still grinning when Steve Roberts equalises, heading in from a corner with the last touch of the half.

The hundred or so fans find shelter in their cars or head inside the tea hut – a wooden portakabin with tables and chairs and a Canteen sign stuck in one window – as they wait for the teams to come back out. When they do, the football is even more warming than the half-time Bovril. The goal and the wind give the home side extra impetus, Jamie Owens twisting, turning and hitting the base of the post and James Hackett – scorer of eight goals already this season for Thornaby Dubliners – warming Gary Hoggeth’s hands in the RCA goal. The visitors break, Jennings meeting an ankle-high cross with his head and scooping it over Briggs and into the top corner. Town respond immediately, Michael Arthur played into space down the left and clipping the ball over Hoggeth as he sprawls to cover the post. Arthur shoots just over from an identical position, Jennings rounds the keeper but pokes the ball wide, and then Stewart converts a penalty for 3-2 when Davison has both feet taken from under him in the area.

After that incendiary opening twenty minutes, the game inevitably slows. Jennings kills it completely ten minutes from time, his outstretched leg stabbing the ball past Briggs after a shot comes back off the post. Temporarily, at least, Sunderland RCA are four points clear at the top of the league.

Admission: £5
Date: 6th September 2011

Ground 186: Hilltop Playing Fields, Gateshead Leam Rangers

2011-09-03T18:23:00.002+01:00

1993. Olympique de Marseille beat AC Milan in the Champions League final; Manchester United win their first league title in twenty-six years; Kevin Keegan’s swashbuckling Newcastle United side are promoted to the Premier League; south of the Tyne, close to the streets where ex-Marseille and Newcastle winger Chris Waddle first kicked a ball around, Rob Houghton starts an under-12 football team called Leam Rangers Youth Club.

What happened next was a labour of love. As the club grew, Houghton leased a derelict plot of land from Gateshead Council, levelled a pitch and found some steel containers to use as changing rooms. When the players needed better facilities, he took a bricklaying course and helped to build them himself. Without external funding, volunteers trained the players, washed the kits, put up the goalposts and marked out the pitch. Cash from the Football Foundation enabled a proper clubhouse to be built, the club expanded to more than twenty-five teams, gained an FA Charter Standard award and helped produce Danny Graham, a £3.5 million signing for Swansea City this summer, and Christie Elliott, who recently moved from Whitley Bay to Partick Thistle. In 2009 a senior men’s team, Gateshead Leam Rangers, was formed, playing against the likes of Wheatley Hill Working Men’s Club, Brandon British Legion and Durham Garden House in the Durham Alliance League. After finishing sixth last season they successfully applied for membership of the Wearside League, one promotion away from the oldest grassroots football league in the world.

I’ve already seen Rangers play this season, their 1-0 win at Coxhoe Athletic one of three so far in the league. The visitors to the Hilltop Playing Fields are Peterlee Town, a one-time Northern League club and newcomers to the Wearside League themselves after five seasons in the Northern Alliance. Climbing the hill from Heworth Golf Club, there’s a Leam Rangers sign on the perimeter fence and the club’s name written across the metal entrance gates. Houghton collects the £2 entry as we pull into the car park. The pitch is railed off with hard standing newly laid along both sides and overhead power lines along the touchline nearest the clubhouse bar.

Non-League Day attracts a crowd of forty people, including several who’ve made the journey from Peterlee. The game’s played at a brisk pace and both sides have their chances before David Laight runs on to a bouncing ball in the twenty-fifth minute, sidefooting past keeper Dean Saunders to give the visitors the lead. The second goal comes five minutes before half time, a shot ricocheting around the goalmouth before Laight toes home at the second attempt as Saunders tries to get his hands on the ball.

The second half is every bit as eventful. Lee Turnbull – who’d earlier clipped the top of crossbar – smashes a penalty into the roof of the net on forty-seven minutes and the home side clatter the woodwork soon after. A players from each side is sent off, Saunders saves two penalties – the second denying Laight his hat-trick – a Rangers player is taken to hospital with a shoulder injury and Peterlee score a late third goal, their number seven breaking upfield and passing the ball into the corner of the net. At the final whistle the Rangers team untie the nets, collect up the corner flags and carry the goalposts back to the storage hut that Houghton helped build. It's an image which sums up a hugely impressive football club.

Admission: £2
Date: September 3rd 2011

Ground 185: Rheydt Avenue, Wallsend Boys Club

2011-09-01T07:06:00.006+01:00

“There have been many examples of what Wallsend Boys Club has done not just for Newcastle but also for football in general and the England team. It really sets the standards at a young age and you are prepared for the rest of your career and life,” Steve Watson, England Under 21 international and Premier League runner up with Newcastle United.

What has Wallsend Boys Club given to the game? More than sixty professional players, two current managers and Alex Ferguson’s goalkeeping coach, one Champions League, a Cup Winners’ Cup, 14 league titles in England and Scotland, 145 caps and five of the last six England World Cup squads. “A local charity youth club with a history of producing talented football players,” its website modestly proclaims. The club’s origins are thought to go back to the early years of the 20th century, though it was formally founded in 1938 by the directors of the famous Swan Hunters Shipyard, who wanted to provide a sporting outlet for the energies of their young apprentice workers. “The objects of The Club are to help and educate members through leisure activities, to develop their physical, mental and spiritual capacity in order to help them become useful and responsible members of society,” as the constitution states to this day.

It was shipyard workers who provided the first clubhouse, a corrugated iron shed built on Station Road in 1903. The latest building, in nearby Rheydt Avenue, was paid for by a Football Foundation grant and local fundraising events, including an Annual Dinner which Alan Shearer, Peter Beardsley and Steve Bruce still regularly attend. Shearer donated £15,000 from his testimonial funds to the club and Michael Carrick’s dad serves on its committee. “I started going there when I was five on a Saturday night,” the Manchester United midfielder recalled. “It was the focal point of the community. It was the gathering place for my mates and me and a great place to play five-a-side. The quality of coaching when we played was always excellent despite the fact they were mainly volunteers. Their expertise helped bring me along and develop my skills." “The attitude and conduct demanded,” explained ex-Burnley player Jeff Tate, “not only made you a more complete, competitive footballer on the pitch but a better, more rounded personality off it”.

Wallsend’s senior team play in the Northern Alliance Division Two, where opposing sides include both Bedlington and Alnwick Reserves, Whickham Lang Jacks and Harton and Westoe Colliery Welfare. Harton were previously known as Simonside Sporting Club. After stepping up from the Durham Alliance, they finished third last season and are still unbeaten this time round.

“It’s about how we approach the game,” the Wallsend coach tells his team before the start. “These are a decent side and we’ve got to be on our toes.” There are training sessions on the other seven pitches, though the main one stays empty while everyone waits for the car bringing Harton’s kit. “He’s gone to the wrong post code,” one of the officials explains.

When they do come out, the visiting team – whose squad includes players from the recently folded first division side Shields United – are visibly older than the young Wallsend side, and it’s little surprise when they take the lead, a 40-yard lob catching teenage keeper Sam Guthrie off his line. The home side equalise four minutes later, a miskick dropping fortuitously for the unmarked centre forward, and Guthrie makes a double save with his face to keep the scores level at half time.

In deepening gloom, the second half is a manic, ill-tempered affair, not helped by some heavy tackles and the Harton official’s unique interpretation of the offside law: if the ball goes towards an opposition forward, the linesman shall immediately raise his flag. Wallsend take an early lead, their two front players combining well, but Harton level the scores soon after and edge in front when a free kick plummets onto an unmarked head in the area. As darkness and midge clouds descend on our heads, Wallsend bring the scores level and then go 4-3 ahead, the two forwards breaking the offside trap as the slower Harton defence play an unwisely high line. With nine minutes left to play, the visitors equalise again, their centre forward groping towards the ball and heading in on his knees. Three minutes later it’s 5-4, a Harton midfielder touching the ball past the onrushing keeper and outpacing two defenders to slot into the corner of the net. Immeasurably more entertaining than deadline day on Sky Sports News; “That was undoubtedly the craziest game I’ve ever reffed,” Paul Mosley tweets after full time.

Admission: Free
Date: August 31st 2011

Ground 184: Chester Moor Park, Chester-le-Street Town

2011-08-31T07:41:00.000+01:00

Place of the horse people, the Celts called Chester-le-Street. When the Romans arrived they kept the name and added a road, passing close to the fort of Concangis on its way from the Humber to the Tyne. The Anglo-Saxons knew the town as Conceastre, which turned into Chester and finally le-Street, probably around the same time that the first game of football was played in the town – the Upstreeters versus the Downstreeters every Shrove Tuesday, two hundred a side, five hours a match, and the winners decided by the position of the ball come 6pm. Miner’s son Colin Todd, a Brian Clough protégé who won two league titles and 27 England caps, was born in the town sixteen years after the last Shrovetide game was played, and future Manchester United and England captain Bryan Robson followed nine years later. What Chester-le-Street didn’t have was a football team of its own.

In 1972 Colin Todd won the First Division championship with Derby County, Bryan Robson signed professional forms with West Bromwich Albion and Chester-le-Street Garden Farm, founded in a pub and playing on a pitch in Low Fell, kicked off their first season in the Newcastle City Amateur League. Todd picked up a second title and the PFA Players’ Player of the Year award in 1975, the year Garden Farm switched to the Washington League. Three years later, Bryan Robson played in all but one of West Bromwich Albion’s 42 league games, Chester-le-Street changed their name to Town and moved up to the Wearside League.

Town won the title in the year Robson moved to Manchester United, finished third and then second before their ground passed muster for the Northern League. In 1983-84 they won the division two title at the first attempt and joined Blyth Spartans, Whitby Town and Gretna in the top flight. Three times relegated and twice promoted, they spent twelve seasons in Division One before going down in 2010, Nathan Fisher’s 41 goals earning him a £3,000 move and a professional contract at Gateshead. He’s not the only ex-Cestrian to make the step up. Swansea City’s Danny Graham, Blackpool’s Chris Basham, young St Mirren keeper Adam McHugh and Kris Thackray, who’s turned out for five teams in Italy since leaving Newcastle United in 2008, are all graduates of Chester-le-Street Town Juniors. Set up in 1995, 61 players have moved from the Juniors to Town’s senior side, including members of the team which knocked Port Vale, Hartlepool and Derby County out of the 2004 FA Youth Cup on their way to a 2-0 fourth round defeat at West Ham United.

The Cestrians ended last season – their first in Division Two since 1998 – in eighth place, a massive twenty-three points off promotion. After ten years in charge, Stuart Sherwood stepped down in the close season, the club appointing Grant Crookes – Emmerdale extra, ex-Darlington and Hartlepool professional and West Allotment Celtic assistant manager – in his place. Unsurprisingly, Cookes’ hopes for this season rest on youth products such as centre forward Callum Patton and 19-year-old ex-Durham County midfielder Jonathan Evans. Birtley, thirteenth last year, suffered home defeats in their opening two games before beating Brandon and Northallerton Town by three goal margins. With one of the smallest budgets in the division, Scott Oliver has had to contend with a constantly changing squad, midfielder Andrew Barclay the latest to leave, this time for first division South Shields.

Chester-le-Street spent upwards of £100,000 bringing Moor Park up to Northern League standards. The results are still visible in the paved terracing behind one goal and the covered, all-seater stand with a glass box set aside optimistically for press. A PA splutters into life as the teams walk out of the tunnel.

Birtley have the bulk of the early possession, but with the grass long and the bounce more uneven than a fifth day Test wicket the sides struggle to keep hold of the ball long enough to threaten either goal. Chester test keeper Lenny French a couple of times, force a scrambled clearance and are just inches away from scoring when James Baxter slides wide from a Patton pull back. At the other end, Steven Telford and Dan Smart toil without reward, Birtley’s midfield leaving too much space front and behind, and Town keeper Kyle Barlow as much a spectator as those queuing for food at the Northern League’s number one burger van.

Things change dramatically soon after half-time. Telford opens the scoring with his team’s first on target effort, following up a shot which comes back off the post. Before Crookes or his layers can react, Andy McIntosh slams in a rebound from a blocked free kick. Smart goes close to extending the lead – dragging a shot across goal and failing to lob Barlow from the edge of the box – before Sam Renwick coverts a Baxter cross with a backheel flick at the near post. Chester-le-Street push three men up front, but their two best chances are squandered in injury time and Birtley hold on for their third win in a row.

Admission: £5
Date: August 30th 2011

Ground 183: Longbenton Sports Ground, Newcastle Chemfica (Ind)

2011-08-27T18:57:00.001+01:00

Whickham Lang Jacks, Red House Farm, Harraby Catholic Club and Willington Quay Saints are just some of the odd and obscure club names that populate the three divisions of the Northern Football Alliance. But none stand out like Newcastle Chemfica (Ind), probably the only football club in the world whose name reads like the losing candidate in a council election.

The team’s come a long way since the days when they drew their players from Newcastle University’s School of Chemical Engineering and Advanced Materials and “got regularly humped in the Alliance Division Two,” as local football writer Ian Cusack puts it. Formed by the merger of Benfield Chemfica and Independent FC, Newcastle Chemfica (Independent) Football Club now has six teams spread across Tyneside’s Saturday and Sunday leagues, with Nigel Reeves taking on the Romanov role of chairing the club and picking the starting eleven. The ambitious club train two nights a week and “reliability, commitment, a desire to improve…and an ability to pay your fees” are among the qualities demanded its players. On the heels of a Northumberland Minor Cup semi-final loss to Percy Main in 2010, twenty-two wins, four defeats and forty goals from Steve McLaughlin saw Chemfica streak to last season’s Northern Alliance Division Two title. So far Division One has proved a tougher proposition, Reeves’ first team squad losing all of their first three games before a 2-1 midweek win at Cullercoats.

With Newcastle University’s Cochrane Park pitches about to get a much needed spruce up before the London 2012 football teams start using them next year, Chemfica are playing their home games at the Longbenton Sports Ground this season. A blue rope, held in place by metal posts, is stretched around the touchline, where a crowd of eleven (or twelve if you include Ian Cusack’s bike) has gathered. Chemfica’s reserves – who turn out in the Tyneside Amateur League alongside Heaton Rifles, Diggers United, Blyth Isabella and New York – are already underway on the second pitch, kicking towards the Department of Work and Pensions complex.

Gosforth Bohemians haven’t started much better than Chemfica, winning two and losing two of their opening four games, including a 4-1 loss at Willington in their only away game to date. They go into the match with “probably the youngest side we’ve ever fielded,” according to their chairman Patrick William-Powlett, who’s been involved with the club since the early-1980s. “We’ve got two debutants, two 16 year olds and another two under 20 on the pitch.” Bohs’ inexperience is telling in an error-strewn first half. McLaughlin wears yellow boots and plays inches off the toes of the two centre halves, but his finishing is more Leon Best than Hernan Crespo as he blazes over the crossbar with only Bohemians’ keeper Steve Wilkinson to beat, pulls a shot wide and sees Wilkinson turn another effort around the post after a centre back passes the ball straight to his feet. Bohemians hit the ball long too often, barely mustering a chance of their own. “Play sensibly,” their manager tells them at the break.

Chemfica haven’t drawn a league match since the 2008-09 season and they begin the second half looking the likelier team to score. But then 16-year-old James Lockhead turns smartly on the edge of the box and hits his first ever senior goal under the diving body of keeper Craig Jones. “Fell asleep, didn’t you?” Jones grumbles at his defence. A minute later the keeper clips Lockhead as he tries to palm the ball away from the Gosforth player’s feet. “I never touched him, man,” he tells the indifferent referee. “He sold you a good ‘un there, like. They’re all diving nowadays.” Matty Atkin hits the penalty into the roof of the net. “You got mugged there,” Jones shouts as the teams run back to halfway.

Bohemians are rampant for the next twenty minutes, Jones keeping them out with two excellent saves from 18-year-old forward Andy Renton. Gradually, the home side come back into the game, McLaughlin having a headed goal flagged offside after Wilkinson tips a rising shot over the bar. Chemfica have two goalbound efforts blocked on the line – one bouncing back off the shin of their own players – while Bohemians have two players sent off in the final five minutes, ending the game with nine men on the field as a Chemfica player is carried back to the dressing room in the arms of two substitutes.

Admission: Free
Date: 27th August 2011

Ground 182: Peffermills Playing Fields, Edinburgh University

2011-08-25T12:45:00.003+01:00

Founded in 1878, Edinburgh University AFC are the third oldest of the East of Scotland League’s twenty-four member clubs and the most successful University side in the whole country. Awarded the Edinburgh Shield – the world’s third-oldest trophy after the FA and Scottish Cups – in 1883, when Hibernian were unable to raise a team to play in the final, the club lifted its twenty-fifth inter-Scottish Universities League earlier this year and went all the way to the final of the British Universities Championships before losing out to UWE Hartpury.

Full members of the Scottish Football Association, the students reached the third round of the Scottish Cup in 2008, beating Highland League side Deveronvale 3-1 in front of 350 fans at Peffermill Playing Fields before controversially exiting to a last-minute goal at Cove Rangers. Success has been more elusive in the East of Scotland League: since joining in 1926 the University has only the 2002-03 First Division title to its name.

Stepping up from junior football in 1979, when the league they were playing in withered to just six teams, Whitehill Welfare have since lifted a record Premier Division fifteen titles and twelve League Cups. Champions in each of their first four seasons, their most recent success came in 2008 when they pipped University to the title by a single point. Last season only goal difference kept the two apart as they finished fourth and fifth in the league, while an East of Scotland Qualifying Cup meeting earlier this month ended in a goalless draw.

There’s a crowd of around sixty for the opening night of the new league season, including five looking out of a wooden portakabin, the front latched open and a portable cricket scoreboard propped against the side wall. Beset by absence and injury and outmuscled in midfield, University sit deep, hitting balls high and early over the Whitehill defence for their lone forward to chase after. “Referee, they’re slowing the game down,” visiting coach Andy Gray complains. “Could the keeper move any slower? It took him twenty seconds to get the ball back there.” “We’ve only played fifteen minutes,” Douglas Samuel shouts back from the home dugout.

“There’s goals tonight, there’s no danger of that,” a Whitehill fan says between drags on a cigarette. But though his team do everything short of walk the ball into the net they don’t have anyone to finish the approach work. “We innae Barcelona,” Grant Kearney says on the Whitehill bench. “Use your feet, move the ball,” manager Rob Paget shouts. “He can dribble but he can’t shoot. He kicked the ball like a three-year-old there.” When they do get a shot on target they can’t find a way past University keeper Mark Tait, a third year Medicine and Pharmacology student who had “the most outstanding game of his career” the last time the teams met.

At half time I join the queue for the tea hut in the pavilion, where a cup of coffee’s just 50p and the walls are covered in signed shirts, pennants and team photographs. A Newcastle United shirt, autographed by Alan Shearer and presented by a fan, hangs by the entrance to commemorate the club’s Scottish Cup run of 2006 when they knocked out Highland League side Keith before losing 5-1 at Cowdenbeath in the second round.

Whitehill pick up where they left off after the break but the closest they come to a goal are a few long range shots and a dive in the area that only succeeds in winning a yellow card. “We’ve got to change something,” a man in a University training jacket says, "we can't hold out like this." “It’s coming, it’s coming,” shouts a Whitehill voice as a University player blocks a shot with his shin and another careers off his back. In the 87th minute it finally does, trialist Kevin Moffatt striking past Tait after the University defence fail to clear the ball. “About time too,” says a Whitehill fan.

Admission: Admission: £4 (I think). I unintentionally snuck in by walking across the fields from the main entrance and didn’t see the board until half time.

Date: August 24th 2011

Ground 181: Beechfield Park, Coxhoe Athletic

2011-08-20T17:50:00.004+01:00

“A club where you genuinely feel welcome,” says Chris Daniel about Coxhoe. “They have a quirky ground, a great pitch and stunning views over towards Durham City. All in all it’s everything you could want as a spectator.” “Everything is spotless and lovingly cared for,” 100 Football Grounds Club author Shaun Smith wrote in early 2009. “Immaculately maintained,” Football Grounds in Focus agreed earlier this year. “A visit to Coxhoe comes with my highest recommendation”.

Coxhoe Athletic have been around in one guise or another since the 1950s, carrying on a tradition that began with three clubs - Coxhoe Pottery, Coxhoe Town and Coxhoe St Mary’s – formed in the opening decade of the 20th century. After taking over the running of the Steetley Lime Company football team in the 1970s, the village team won the Auckland League Division Two Cup in 1978 and eventually progressed from the Auckland and District League to the Durham Alliance under the astute management of Gary Forrest. Forrest led Coxhoe to five cup finals in a single season, won the Alliance title in 2003 and 2004 and saw his team score a hundred goals in thirty-six games as, newly promoted to the Wearside League, they finished fourth behind future Northern League sides Darlington RA, Birtley Town and Stokesley Sporting Club.

In the summer of 2005 Forrest left for the Northern League himself, replacing Kenny Lindoe at struggling Shildon. Stripped of their manager and fifteen players – including ex-Scarborough forward Wayne Gredziak and defender Rob Bowman, an FA Youth Cup winner with Leeds who played in the same England U18 squad as Paul Scholes, Gary Neville, Robbie Fowler and Sol Campbell - the club’s progress understandably stalled. Last season Coxhoe propped up the league, winning only five games and conceding a hundred and three goals. A brighter start to 2011-12 has seen them draw with Willington and beat league newcomers Silksworth Rangers after an opening day defeat at Redcar, leaving them ninth in the table as the game kicks off.

Beechfield Park more than lives up to its billing, freshly painted with neatly clipped grass and a playing surface that is absolutely pristine. The two come out through a gap between a concrete terrace and the main stand, just one of several distinctive, covered structures that are dotted around the pitch. Like Silksworth, the visiting Gateshead Leam Rangers side are in their first season in a step seven league, winning one and losing two of their first three games.

Both sides begin warily, neither having enough movement to pose any threat. With the midfield congested all the two goalkeepers have to worry about are a few overhit passes and the occasional trundled effort at goal. Rangers stab two shots wide after crossfield balls expose the static home defence, finding their range with a diagonal pass which Coxhoe keeper Carl Robinson does well to block only to see Robert Allen sweep a follow up shot past the covering defender. “We’re making everything hard for ourselves,” complains the home skipper Trevor Tearney. “Get the ball down and move.” But despite Coxhoe’s efforts to find an equaliser it’s Rangers who go closest to scoring again, Robinson misjudging a bouncing ball and a header slamming against the outside of the post.

It’s the closest either side comes to a second goal. Despite playing with three up front from midway through the second half, the best the home side can manage is a tame header from a free kick, their over eagerness to get the ball forward meaning they rarely find a player in white. With keeper Dean Saunders commanding his area and Stephen Robinson outstanding at right back, Rangers are largely untroubled by the bustling home attack. Although they never stop battling, Coxhoe run out of ideas before they finally run out of time.

Entrance: £2
Date: 20th August 2011

Ground 180: Ponteland Leisure Centre, Ponteland United

2011-08-18T17:35:00.002+01:00

A couple of miles north of Newcastle Airport, Ponteland's the kind of place where people still clip their hedges and spread gravel on their drives. There's a sign for the cricket club's game with Greenfield at the entrance to the Leisure Centre, a stone bridge over a gently burbling river on the opposite side of the road, and two women discussing hollyhocks in a garden next door. You couldn't get more ITV detective drama if John Nettles turned up with a murdered vicar and a plate of cucumber sandwiches.

Put the words 'Ponteland' and 'Football' together and the first thing you think of is Darras Hall, a housing estate for the nouveau riche where lottery winners, businessmen and Newcastle United footballers share the same leafy streets. But the town and football go back a lot further than Andy Carroll's bail arrangements, Alan Shearer's golf swing or a burnt out car on Kevin Nolan's drive. Formed in 1900, Ponteland United led a mostly uneventful existence before joining the Northern Alliance in 1983. Under the management of Ken Scott, Paddy Lowery, Barrie Wardrobe and finally Jarrod Suddick, whose father Alan made over 450 appearances for Newcastle United and Blackpool, the club won three Northumberland Senior Benevolent Bowls while narrowly missing out on a sucession of other trophies.

League runners-up twice and ten-time beaten finalists in the Alliance's two major cup competitions, United finally got their hands on the Challenge Cup in 2010 and added their first league title in May, Harry Tulip's winner at home to Blyth Town putting Suddick's team one point clear of Alnwick with just three minutes of the season left to play. With Alnwick now in the Northern League, United started the new campaign by beating Seaton Delaval Amateurs 4-2, Tulip once again scoring the game's final goal. Harraby Catholic Club, third last year and seen by many as the main threat to Ponteland retaining their title, were even more impressive in winning 4-1 away at Heaton Stannington.

Long grass and rusty railings surround the Leisure Centre pitch, the Harraby players out kicking balls through the grass shavings. "This pitch is gonna hold up, no doubt at all," their coach shouts, handing out bibs. "More on the ball. Don't give them an excuse to make the game tight." Harraby line up in a 4-3-3, the coach still giving instructions to his defenders as the captains shake hands. Ponteland walk out silently a minute before the game kicks off. "From the whistle," their keeper growls. "Pressure."

After scoring two penalties at the weekend, Ponteland's Paul Hodgson limps off with a groin strain in an opening twenty minutes enlivened only by Richard Kent's trickery down the right and the home keeper fluffing a tame shot out for a corner. "Fuck off," shouts the frustrated Harraby left-back, already beaten twice by Kent, as he slices a pass out for a throw. "Do you know any other words?" asks a Ponteland fan. "It's this pitch, isn't it? It's a jungle," a defender replies. Despite their complaints, Harraby manage the first shot on target and almost follow it with a goal when a cross is booted away from on - or just over? - the line.

Into the second half, Ponteland's keeper saves with his feet before a near post header direct from a corner gives the away side a lead they just about deserve. Their second is messier, a sustained bit of possession on the right hand side of midfield ending with a misplaced cross deflecting in off the big centre half's chest. By now it's all Harraby, the Ponteland keeper turning a shot around the post as his teammates are suddenly incapable of stringing two passes together. With five minutes left Tulip outpaces a defender but his shot dribbles back off the post. "Thing is, this is probably the worst Harraby team I've seen in ages," says a home fan as the visitors close the game out. "Absolutely awful," is Tulip's verdict on Ponteland's display.

Admission: £1
Date: 17th August 2011

Ground 179: Swans Recreation Ground, Newcastle East End

2011-08-13T20:12:00.003+01:00

The original Newcastle East End Football Club was founded on the occasion of Stanley Cricket Club’s annual general meeting, 15th of November 1881. The members, whose club was named after the vacant plot of land they played on near Stanley Street in Byker, voted in favour of forming a football team. Eleven days later they played their first game, beating Elswick Leather Works 2nd XI by five goals to nil.

After changing both their name – the initial choice had caused the club to be confused with two County Durham teams, Stanley Nops and Stanley Albion - and home ground, East End settled near a railway junction on the Chillingham Road at Heaton. In November 1883, while still based in Byker, they drew the first of their derby games against Newcastle West End. Two years later, they defeated their city rivals in a semi-final replay on their way to lifting the Northumberland Senior Cup. In 1887 East End made their first appearance in the FA Cup, losing 3-2 after extra-time to South Bank of Middlesbrough.

Both East and West participated in the opening Northern League season, a crowd of 1,500 turning up at Heaton for East End’s first home game against Darlington on September 7th 1889. A week later West End won the city derby 2-0 in front of a 4,000 crowd at their home ground, St James’ Park. West End finished runners-up on goal difference to Darlington St Augustine’s with East End two places behind.

West’s ascendancy wouldn’t last for long. In February 1890, East End became the first of the city’s clubs to turn professional, the board of directors issuing 2,000 public shares and electing Adam Gilchrist as their first chairman. The eighty-two men and one woman who bought ten shilling shares in the club listed occupations including wine merchant, hosier, bookbinder, schoolmaster, traveller, milkman and spinster. Despite a disappointing second season for both clubs – East finishing one place above West in sixth as Middlesbrough Ironopolis won the first of their three successive titles – the tide had turned in favour of the Heaton-based club. East End finished fourth behind Ironopolis, Middlesbrough and Sheffield United in 1892, lost 2-1 away to Nottingham Forest in the First Round of the FA Cup and beat West End no fewer than five times, including a 7-1 thrashing at Chillingham Road. In April 1892, struggling on the pitch and beset by financial problems off it, two West End committee members offered East End “the West End ground for the rest of the lease and £100” to take over the running of the club. Although East End Wednesday continued for a time at Chillingham Road, Newcastle’s two biggest clubs became one on May 8th 1892, East End moving their team and main stand to St James’ Park. The opening game at their new stadium was a friendly against Celtic, the visitors winning 1-0 in front of 6,000 fans.

Rebuffed in their attempts to join the top flight of the Football League – the club polled just one vote at a meeting of First Division clubs and rejected the offer of a place in Division Two – East End played one final season in what was now a six-team Northern League, finishing eight points behind runaway champions Middlesbrough Ironopolis. Gates remained stubbornly low, prompting the club’s chairman to tell the local press: “If the public want a professional team they must be prepared to pay for it”. In an effort to widen the club’s appeal a public meeting was called to discuss a change of name, a near unanimous vote opting in favour of Newcastle United. The side turned out for the first time under its new name at Christmas 1892 in a home defeat to Middlesbrough seen by 2,500 fans. On September 6th 1895, the legal title was finally amended: East End was no more.

A century on, as Kevin Keegan’s side prepared for their ill-fated assault on the club’s first title since 1927, Charlie and Kelly Scott reformed Newcastle East End as a grassroots football club with just a single junior team. The club now has twenty different sides and four hundred members, an FA Charter Standard award testament to the strength of its work in the local community.

The senior side ended last season tenth in Division One of the Northern Football Alliance, one place ahead of Morpeth Sporting Club. Morpeth, formed as recently as 2009 following the amalgamation of FC Morpeth and Morpeth Town Juniors, finished fifth and won the Northumberland Minor Cup in their first full season but, like East End, have more recently established themselves among the division’s more nondescript teams.

It’s an overcast, mid-August day and the blackberry pickers are out along the Shields Road as the Northern Alliance 2011-12 season gets underway. The two managers give their final instructions at separate ends of the pitch – “Keep talking to each other” and “Massive game for us” – while a home defender nips to the touchline to take a last minute piss through the metal perimeter fence. East End see a shot hooked off the line and another clear the bar by mere inches in the opening five minutes. With Jamie Richardson dominant down the right and Paul Blakey cleverly linking the play, the home side have the better of the opening quarter, Morpeth’s attempts to find their two big forwards invariably ending in raised offside flags until the 24th minute when Chris Musgrave bursts through two challenges and is clipped as he drags his shot wide of the post. Wayne Buglass gets a hand to Rob Haney’s penalty but can only push it into the corner of the net.

East End run and tackle hard but stumble over the final ball, while Haney goes close again in the 40th minute, the home side losing their shape after referee Michael Shearer awards a disputed free kick. An increasingly ill-tempered second half is largely devoid of goalmouth action until a Dan Grey mistake on the hour leaves Haney free behind the defence. Buglass saves the first shot only for Michael Starkie to follow up with a first time shot low into the corner of the net.

Buglass makes two good saves and watches a shot smash against his crossbar before his side are reduced to ten men following a studs up challenge on the edge of the box with ten minutes left to play. East End lose their last remaining vestiges of discipline and the third goal Morpeth have been threatening finally arrives with almost the very last kick of the game.

Admission: Free
Date: 13th August 2011

Ground 178: Metcalfe Park, Wolviston.

2011-08-06T19:20:00.008+01:00

Rivulets of rain stream down the windscreen, puddles widen, bunting sags miserably against the front of the village shop. ‘Welcome to Wolviston – Please Drive Carefully’ says the sign at the start of the village. “There’s nothing around here that looks like a football pitch,” we mutter, waving mobile phones in the air as we try to pick up a signal.

It takes a combination of Google maps, a cricket sight screen and three men under golf umbrellas helps us find Metcalfe Park just in time to see the two teams enter through a gate in the perimeter fence. The ground is next to a cricket club and garden centre, south of Wynyard Hall, west of the A19. The early arrivals in the crowd of 14 (excluding substitutes and club officials) hug the back row of the main stand, the only artificial cover outside of the two dugouts. We choose the shelter of a conifer hedge on the opposite side of the pitch, which keeps us semi-dry until the rain begins to cascade through the branches on the stroke of half time.

There’s been a football team in Wolviston since 1910, though the Wearside League – which the club joined in 1988 – remains the highest level they’ve ever reached. Three-time winners of the Sunderland Shipowners’ Cup since 2001, Wolviston ended the 2006-2007 season behind only Birtley Town and Whitehaven Amateurs (both since promoted to the Northern League), but have recently slipped back into mid-table, finishing thirteenth of the league’s twenty member clubs twice in the last three years.

“Patience, lads. If we ping the ball around here they won’t be able to live with us,” Wolviston manager Martin Summersgill tells his team before the game gets underway. They do their best to follow instructions, playing most of the early football with their visitors from Sunderland, Ashbrooke Belford House, content to strike long clearances towards their lone centre forward, the 37-year-old Stephen Dickinson. The two teams put more pressure on the referee than on either goal until the 35th minute, when the Wolviston defence fails to clear a free kick and Dickinson sidefoots his first goal of the afternoon past the unsighted home goalkeeper.

The rain gets heavier and thunder rumbles over the pitch. “Are there many pools on the pitch?” someone asks over the cricket club fence. “I don’t know but there are plenty on my trousers,” comes back the reply. An equally ominous sign is the freedom being afforded to Wolviston’s Anthony Brown, the right-back finally managing to translate time and space into an accurate cross, Ryan Hebb turning the ball in at the far post for the equalising goal. When the whistle blows we scurry back to the car, missing the entertainment provided by a side-of-pitch lightning show. “You can hardly see out there, man. Forks of lightning and everything!” an Ashbrooke player exclaims when he’s substituted after the break.

Wolviston undo their recovery work with two unforced errors in the opening five minutes of the second half, keeper Daniel Jeffry undergoing the kind of judgement malfunction more commonly associated with an England goalkeeper at Wembley. First, he races out and completely misses a through ball, leaving Dickinson with a tap-in second goal. A miskick from home captain Shaun Gregory lays on the third, Jeffry remaining static in the centre of his goal as Dickinson slams a shot in next to the right-hand post. Prompted by substitutes Matt Garbutt and ex-Hartlepool junior Christian Selby, Wolviston spend the remainder of the game in the Ashbrooke half, but a mixture of stout defending, ill-fortune and poor finishing keeps the score at 3-1, a late red card reducing the home team to ten men.

Driving home we hear Newcastle United’s game with Fiorentina has been called off after 63 minutes, heavy rain making the pitch unplayable. They could learn a thing or two from the Wearside League.

Admission: £2
Date: August 6th 2011

Football Art: The United Trinity

2011-08-02T14:10:00.007+01:00

"Who are they?" asks the young boy in a Mancunian accent, coming out of the Megastore with two bulging carrier bags and a newly bought shirt, Rooney 10 printed on the back. "They're famous United players from the 1960s," his dad replies, pointing his finger through a gap in the wire fence. "Oh," he says, his voice betraying a rapid drop in interest. "The Trinity," his father goes on, unheard. "Best, Charlton and Law..."

Unveiled in 2008, forty years to the day from Manchester United's first European Cup win, the bronze statues were deliberately placed directly opposite the elevated scupture of Sir Matt Busby, facing the Megastore entrance and the glass facade of Old Trafford's East Stand. Designed by Philip Jackson - who also did Busby and the statue of Bobby Moore outside the new Wembley stadium - Law is at the centre, frozen post-goal, right arm and index finger held aloft. Best and Charlton form a photograph huddle, arms draped around the scorer, socks pulled up to the kneecaps and a leather ball placed casually in Charlton's hand like a scroll in the palm of an ancient Greek orator.

For Charlton, present at the unveiling along with the other surviving members of the 1968 team, the accolade was "a fantastic compliment...one of the greatest things that's ever happened to me". "To just think as the years have gone, starting as a young boy of 15 coming down from Scotland," recalled Law, "and many, many years later you've got a statue outside Manchester United's ground." "George was always telling me," said his sister, "when I'm gone they'll forget the rubbish and I'll be remembered for the football."

Always.

Ground 177: Grimshaw Park, Prestwich Heys

2011-07-31T20:22:00.007+01:00

Three miles north of Manchester city centre and five miles south of Bury, Prestwich is home to Victoria Wood and Heaton Park, Britain’s second biggest Jewish community and Prestwich Heys AFC, a football club formed the same year Neville Chamberlain came back from Munich promising “peace in our time”.

The young side won its first major honour, the Woodward Shield, as Allied troops prepared to storm the beaches of Sicily. By the outset of the 1970s Heys had matured into one of the top non-league sides in the country, reaching the last eight of the FA Amateur Cup in 1969-70 before making a clean sweep of all four Lancashire Combination League trophies the following year. But despite being founder members of the North-West Counties League in 1982, a shortage of financial backing meant the club was already on the wane, dropping down to the Manchester Football League in 1986 after their ground failed to meet the North-West Counties’ grading requirements. A revival in the mid-2000s saw Heys win three successive titles and obtain planning permission to install a set of floodlights at their Grimshaw Park home before the tragic death of manager, chairman and former player Adie Moran in the summer of 2007. Last season saw the club record a disappointing twelfth-place finish, twenty-nine points adrift of champions Manchester Gregorians.

Visitors St Helens Town were also among the North-West Counties’ founder members, though unlike Prestwich they’ve remained there ever since, ending last season seventeenth of the twenty-two Premier Division sides. FA Vase winners in 1987, they had earlier produced John Connelly, a title winner with Burnley in 1960, and Bill Foulkes, a European and FA Cup winner and four-time champion of England during his 563 appearances with Manchester United. Bert Trautmann, the ex-German paratrooper who went on to lift an FA Cup and the Football Writers’ Player of the Year while at Manchester City, started his post-war career with the club after coming out of a nearby prisoner-of-war camp in 1948. Like Foulkes, Trautmann remains an honourary president of the club.

The players are out sunbathing when I arrive at Grimshaw Park, after a ten-minute walk from the Metrolink stop at Besses o’th’Barn. Pylon cables hang above the side of the pitch and ‘Welcome to Prestwich Heys sponsored by Grimshaw Vauxhall’ is painted on the side of the portakabin from which the sides will later emerge. Two static caravans house a small bar and tea hut counter and a pair of brick dugouts marked Home and Away are placed on the side of the pitch furthest from the two-way buzz of traffic coming from the neighbouring M60 motorway. Seating is on the grass or a line of plastic chairs placed in front of the bar. The only cover is from the sun, the concrete perimeter fence providing a few metres of shade in the weeds behind the goal where the six travelling fans have tied up their flags.

The two sides are evenly matched for the first half of the game. “We’ve started flat again,” the visiting keeper tells the crowd during an early break in play. “No urgency, just strolling around.” With Kyle Greaves' pace causing the St Helens' left-back untold problems, both sides have their chances to score before the visiting team break the deadlock immediately before the half-time whistle. The Heys keeper pushes a fierce, rising shot away but Karl Brown is on hand to force the ball over the line.

Buoyed by the goal, Saints squeeze the home side at both ends of the pitch in the second half, their offside trap restricting the home attack to long-range shots while their own forwards plant two headers wide and see the impressive Prestwich keeper palm another effort over the bar. On the single occasion Heys break through on goal skipper Matt Morris sidefoots wide with only the keeper to beat. A late rally sees the home side have a shot cleared and another strike the top of the bar, but an Andy Ledger goal in the 85th minute puts a more accurate sheen on the overall balance of play.

Date: 30th July 2011
Admission: £1 (plus the same again for an excellent minced beef pie at half time).

Ground 176: Church Lane, New Mills AFC

2011-07-30T11:34:00.006+01:00

One hundred and twenty-five years after the first game of football was organised in the High Peak, New Mills AFC finally made it to a Step Four league, winning the Vodkat Premier by an eleven-point margin after two second-placed finishes in the previous two seasons. But then geography intervened. Enfield 1893, champions of the Essex Senior League, were ruled out of promotion by an Isthmian League ground inspector. In the reshuffle which followed, Ossett Albion, newly relegated from the Evostik North, were reprieved on a points-per-game formula, filling the space earmarked for New Mills. One failed appeal later, the Millers were placed in Division One South, leaving them with trips to Grantham Town, Market Drayton, Romulus and Sheffield FC rather than any of the six clubs from Greater Manchester who play in Division One North, including one, Woodley Sports, who even share their SK postcode.

My own journey was a bit less complicated. A half-hour train ride from Manchester Piccadilly brought me to New Mills Central, from which the Church Lane ground is an easy 10-15 minute stroll: up the steep Station Bank, right at the junction by the Heritage Centre, over the River Goyt bridge, left past the Co-Op and opposite St George’s Church, passing two pubs and a Cantonese along the way. There’s hard standing on two sides of the immaculately tended pitch and a covered stand down the length of one touchline. The clubhouse, bar and tea hut are behind the goal nearest the entrance, picnic tables arranged on a rise, grassy hills and chimney-tops peering over the wooden perimeter fence.

I take up a seat next to three men in yellow and black scarves. “£6.50 for a friendly?” says one. “It’s not right. I’ve told them it’s not. I had the grandkids with me but I wasn’t paying £3 for a game like this. Sent them home, and that’s £6 you’ve lost there.” The few dozen fans who’ve made the journey over the border from Bala Town gather at the entrance to the bar as their team are put through their paces in the afternoon sun.

The training session pays off as the visitors pin New Mills to their own goalline for most of the first half. Lee Hunt has the game’s opening chance, Procter pushing his shot back out and the Millers’ defence – which includes Wes Brown’s brother Clive – scrambling the ball away. Shortly afterwards an effort from Stuart Jones strikes against the underside of the bar and spins away from goal, Procter clinging to his line like Ed Miliband faced with a TV camera. “Tell you what,” says one of the bumblebees to my right, “this lot are going nowhere. Not a chance. We’re gonna get battered. Straight back down.” “Crap crowd too,” mutters another voice. “It’s cos they’re robbing bastards. If you’re paying £6.50 for a friendly you should be seeing top players not trialists.” “It’s something we’ll look at next year,” says the woman selling raffle tickets, pausing on her way around the pitch to see Bala screw another two chances narrowly wide of Procter’s right hand post.

It takes forty-three minutes for the Millers to seriously threaten Terry McCormick’s goal, Danny Pringle meeting a cross from the right with a volley that gives the home side an entirely undeserved lead. “Counter attack,” says a man to my left, sagely. If the first goal was a surprise the second is astonishing, the flying head of Matt Berkeley touching a cross past McCormick. “Mark the runners, stop the crosses. It’s not difficult, is it?” the goalkeeper moans.

Two down with quarter of an hour to play, the Welsh Premier League side flick on the turbo switch, Chris Mason finally drawing Procter off his line before slipping the ball under the goalkeeper's body. Mark Jones levels from close range but the keeper responds with three fast saves before a cross bobbles off a defender and Lee Hunt slams in the winner via a post, the crossbar and a bounce on the line.

Date: July 23rd 2011
Admission: £6.50

Ground 175: Moss Lane, Altrincham

2011-07-17T17:11:00.006+01:00

It’s 30 minutes on Manchester’s Metrolink from Victoria Station to Altrincham, an affluent market town eight miles south of the city centre which is home to a 24-hour Tesco and one of the most famous names in English non-league football. Founder members of the Conference in 1979, Altrincham were the Liverpool of the amateur game, winning back-to-back titles at the start of the 1980s, two FA Trophies in a decade and famously defeating Birmingham City (and a young David Seaman) 2-1 in the 1986 FA Cup third round, the last time a top-flight side lost to non-league opposition.

That aside, they can’t have seen many day-glo yellow boots at Moss Lane, let alone a pair adorning the feet of a £90,000 a week international footballer. But just two months after Manchester City claimed their first trophy in thirty-five years Craig Bellamy, once of Newcastle United, Liverpool and Celtic, is doing shuttle runs between the Popular Side and Carole Nash Family Stand while England Under-21 internationals Nedum Onuoha and Michael Johnson limber up nearby and the rest of the first team prepare to take on Mexico’s Club America in the drier and slightly more exotic climes of San Francisco.

With sixteen FA Cup wins over Football League sides Altrincham are a well-renowned nuisance to higher ranked teams. Helped along by some lackadaisical defending from Courtney Meppen-Walter, they take the lead two minutes into the game. City concede a penalty with virtually the first touch an Altrincham player has on the ball and Damian Reeves smacks his kick through the goalkeeper’s arms. “Someone YouTube that one later,” says an Altrincham fan from the top of the stand as Meppen-Walker looks apologetically at the ground.

The game is played at a training ground pace, the part-timers content to harry City’s midfield – which includes Johnson, Premier League substitute Abdul Razak and Israel international Gai Assulin – in possession and Bellamy bustling around tirelessly upfront alongside Joan Angel Roman, an 18-year-old attacking midfielder bought from Espanyol. Their work goes unrewarded until the 37th minute, when Bellamy works a four-man single touch passing move and Roman shoots low into the Altrincham net. Eight minutes later captain Kieran Trippier, an FA Youth Cup winner who played 37 games on loan at Barnsley last season, runs onto a pass from Razak and, as an unmarked Bellamy screams for the cross, slices a dipping effort into the same corner as Roman’s.

Bellamy is replaced by 16-year-old Devante Cole ten minutes into the second half, exiting to a standing ovation from the City fans in the 1,300 crowd. It’s just the first in a flurry of substitutions as the game peters out with City largely content to stroke the ball around midfield and Altrincham, relegated to the Conference North on the final day of last season, taking the chance to field youth team players and trialists. Benfica’s Francisco Santos Silva Júnior looks tidy but unspectacular in the City midfield, Johnson miraculously manages to survive the game unscathed and Onuoha shows why he was so highly-rated, a combative and assured display marred by too frequent lapses in concentration. By the end of the game, with the bench and stands emptying, you can't really blame him.

Football is back. Long may it continue.

Date: July 16th 2011
Admission: £7

Ground 174: Tallaght Stadium, Shamrock Rovers

2011-07-09T07:15:00.004+01:00

Far and away the Republic of Ireland’s biggest and most successful football club, Shamrock Rovers - sixteen times Irish League Champions, seven-time winners of the All-Ireland Cup and almost a hundred other trophies, including fifty-five FAI and President’s Cups alone – have a haul of domestic honours to rival that of Manchester United, though their recent history bears a slightly bigger resemblance to Charlton Athletic or Brighton & Hove Albion.

For more than sixty years, the club were synonymous with Milltown, a suburb of Dublin on the old Harcourt Street railway to Bray. Rovers moved to Glenmalure Park in 1926, the year after they’d added the FAI Cup and League of Ireland Shield to their second title win of the new decade. The ground was built on land leased from the Order of Jesuits, its main stand and terraces built by some of the 18,000 supporters present at the first ever game, a friendly match with Belfast Celtic. Among the many famous names to grace the Glenmalure pitch were Jimmy Dunne, a league title winner with Arsenal in 1934, Liam Tuohy, who gave up a job at the Guinness brewery to sign for Newcastle United, and Johnny Giles, player-manager at the club from 1977 to 1983. When Giles left for Vancouver Whitecaps, Jim McLaughlin coached a team including Liam O’Brien – Ron Atkinson’s last ever signing at Manchester United – and future Racing Santander forwards Alan Campbell and Liam Buckley to four league titles and three FAI Cups between 1984 and 1987.

Despite their success on the pitch, attendance figures in the League of Ireland had long been on a downward trend. In early-1987, Shamrock’s owners, the Kilcoyne family, announced their intention to sell Glenmalure – “a jaded old shithole” to many Irish fans - for development and relocate the team to Tolka Park, north of the River Liffey. An FAI Cup semi-final against Sligo Rovers in front of 6,000 fans would prove to be the club’s last ever game at Glenmalure, though it took another three years before the Keep Rovers at Milltown campaign eventually conceded defeat. “Things took off very quickly,” KRAM’s chairman Liam Christie later told the Sunday Tribune. "We were getting money in as quick as possible from everybody . . . supporters on the ground, supporters away in America and England. They even got a publicity firm involved, very much like, say, a politician would do, and the whole campaign was to get as much publicity as they could in the newspapers, on the television and on the radio. I was just an ordinary Joe Soap, but the politics of things amazed me. Then there were Rovers families that were split down the middle over it. I know there was one household with four or five of them who went to all the Rovers matches but two of them decided to pass the picket and go into the matches and the others wouldn't, and there was a civil war in their house.”

On March 16th 1990 An Bord Pleanala, the independent planning regulator, overturned an earlier decision by the Dublin city government and granted permission for houses to be built on the Glenmalure site. The ground was demolished, the only marker that it had ever existed a memorial stone paid for by Rovers fans. By then a supporter boycott of Tolka Park had forced the Kilcoynes out, a consortium of fans buying the club and moving it back south of the river to the Royal Dublin Showgrounds. In 1996 plans were unveiled to move to a permanent home in Tallaght, a distant suburb of the city whose name translates as plague burial place. It took thirteen years and another planning battle before Rovers played their first game there, defeating Sligo Rovers 2-1 in front of a capacity crowd of 3,000 fans.

Further development has doubled Tallaght’s capacity in the intervening two years, the addition of temporary stands enabling 10,900 people to witness Cristiano Ronaldo’s debut for Real Madrid in July 2009. The all-seater stadium has covered stands down both sides of the pitch and views of hills and a shopping centre behind either goal. Glass-coated high rises with fashionably angled rooftops and wraparound balconies peer over the angle of the West Stand rood, leading back towards the final stop on the Luas line to central Dublin.

Defending champions Rovers start the game in first place, narrowly ahead of city rivals St Patrick’s Athletic. After tying their flags behind the goal, Shamrock’s ultras congregate at the far end of the East Stand, faced by a noisy cluster of 50 or so fans who’ve travelled from Dundalk.

Belying their midtable position, it’s the away side who create the best of the game’s early chances. A clipped ball intersects the home defence, Alan Mannus saving with his chest from Mark Griffin. Moments later Mark Quigley, once of Millwall and Shamrock Rovers, lobs wide of the post with only Mannus to beat. Rovers are stronger and more direct, moving the ball forward quickly for their front pairing of Gary Twigg and Gary O’Neill. With the size of Rovers’ centre halves – Ken Oman and their English-born captain Dan Murray - suggesting an imperviousness to the high ball, Dundalk are more intricate in possession, the front three of Griffin, Quigley and ex-West Ham junior Daniel Kearns constantly interchanging positions and pulling the home defence around like the bellows on an accordion. With 22 minutes gone, Keith Ward exchanges passes with Quigley before slipping the ball left to the unmarked Griffin, the young forward stroking it past the despairing Mannus to put the visitors ahead. Twigg has a goal disallowed for offside and Dundalk’s Peter Cherrie saves from Gary McCabe but while Rovers huff and puff it’s the away side who come closest to a second goal, Mannus scrambling off his line to deny Kearns.

It takes sixty minutes for Rovers to begin ratcheting up a concerted spell of pressure. It takes another two for Dundalk to extend their lead, Griffin getting an unimpeded run on to a Ross Gaynor free kick and looping a header over Mannus for his fourth goal in six games. Manager Michael O’Neill, another Rovers man with Newcastle United connections, responds with two quick substitutions, Twigg replaced by Karl Sheppard and Chris Turner coming on for Stephen O’Donnell. By now the rain, which has been falling incessantly since moments before kick off, has reached a kind of Niagara Falls intensity, driving the crowd upwards and inwards as it swirls through the open sides of both stands.

We’re up to seventy-nine minutes before Rovers finally manage a foothold, Cherrie punching a cross off his own player’s head and Turner hitting the ball back into the net with the goalline unguarded. The home side are invigorated, only a fantastic save from Cherrie denying Oman an equaliser, but we’re into injury time – and the first big push towards the exits – before Billy Dennehy seizes onto a long Pat Sullivan cross and heads a leveller the home side barely deserve. “That’s why we’re champions,” chorus the Rovers ultras. The rain stops abruptly and I even manage to get a seat on the Luas back to O’Connell Street.

Date: June 21st 2011
Admission: €15

There Again: Lansdowne Road

2011-06-23T18:50:00.004+01:00

I got into Dublin just after noon with a hangover to match the Irish economy. ‘Greed is the knife & the scars run deep’ someone had spray painted by the side of the road into the city, glass edifices and sleek, modernistic bridges lining the out-of-town end of the Liffey. 'Buddhism and the financial crisis,' said a sign on a lamppost outside Trinity College, 'Resist Minister Button's Attacks,' began a United Left Alliance flyer pushed into my hand outside the GPO. It took thirty minutes on the bus to the Spire of Dublin on O’Connell Street and a couple of hours longer to loop around the city’s tourist sights: Grafton Street, St Stephen’s Green, Merrion Square and the Aviva Stadium…well, it just happened to be on the way.

I’d been to the Aviva – or Lansdowne Road as it was called at the time – once before. Newcastle had pipped Sunderland to the summer signing of Jon Dahl Tomasson, bought to play off Alan Shearer in a new formation which left Les Ferdinand surplus to requirements after 41 goals and a pair of second-placed finishes in his two seasons at the club. The undisputed star of a four-team tournament featuring Celtic, PSV Eindhoven and Derry City, the Danish international’s purple patch would last for all of a week until Shearer’s ankle ligaments and Newcastle’s hopes for the season were simultaneously ruptured at Goodison Park, the team shorn of a centre forward as Ferdinand agreed to sign for Spurs the very same day. Pressed up front alongside Faustino Asprilla, Tomasson vomited in the tunnel before the opening game of the season, missed a one-on-one after ninety seconds and scored just three goals in twenty-three games, one of them mishit and another deflecting in off his arse while he looked the other way.

Newcastle being Newcastle, these things are always predictable. “Howay, let’s gan back to Temple Bar,” someone suggested as the final whistle blew. (We didn’t know then that Temple Bar’s pubs were only for wankers. Or maybe we did and were proving the point.) “Nah, hang on, this might be the only chance we get to see us lift a cup,” someone else replied with infinitely more logic than he’d shown in attempting to chat up a burger van girl in the half time break. “Are ye from ‘roond here, like?” he’d begun, liberally coating his burger in onions and sauce. “Yes,” she said, hesitantly, trying out an answer to a question she didn’t understand. “Whereboots?” he asked, aiming for a sauve expression as he lifted the bun in the general direction of his mouth, boiled onions splattering the concrete. She looked puzzled. “Erm, no, I’m wearing trainers.”

Opened in 1872 as an athletics stadium, the old ground later hosted Irish rugby and football internationals. James Joyce spent part of one summer living in a terraced house by what’s now Entrance Number One; Sammy Davis Junior and Frank Sinatra held concerts on a pitch graced by Brady and Stapleton, Johnny Giles and, erm, Eamonn Dunphy. But by the summer of 1997 Lansdowne Road was as hopelessly unfit for purpose as Newcastle’s front line a few weeks later. “An old grey building,” Ray Houghton once described it, “leaky and it wasn’t a great place to bring your family and friends.” When they knocked it down a decade later the only thing that remained was the DART station, the lines cutting directly behind the south stand. 410 million euros, 50,000 seats, 150 CCTV cameras and 69 bars, “a shimmering form of transparent 'shingles' rises in the east and west to position the majority of spectators in the desirable side locations of the pitch,” if you believe what architects tell you. It’s an infinitely more impressive structure than the old stadium, though to me it looked more like an avant-garde contemporary art museum than a football ground – a factor which might go some way towards explaining the size of those crowds at the Celtic Nations Cup.

1644: The first Tyne - Wear Derby?

2011-06-19T16:17:00.011+01:00

It started with coal. In north-east England, everything started with coal. The produce of the Northumbrian coalfield had been shipped from Newcastle since the middle of the 13th century, around the time the city’s mayor, Nicholas Scott, was leading a group of armed merchants in setting fire to the rival port of North Shields (an attempted historical re-enactment by residents of the Meadowell Estate went slightly awry in 1991). Although the Prior of Tynemouth took legal action, Newcastle’s traders eventually checkmated him by making King Edward I a monetary offer he couldn’t refuse. The Priory’s trading rights were severely restricted and the sale and export of coal was made the sole preserve of the Freemen of Newcastle.

The city’s trading dominance was just as entrenched at the beginning of the 17th century, Elizabeth I having reaffirmed Newcastle’s monopoly in exchange for a one-shilling tax on every wagonload of coal exported from the Tyne. After a failed attempt to annexe Gateshead, Newcastle’s coal magnates turned their attention towards the nascent trade from the River Wear. In 1609 11,648 tons were shipped out of Sunderland, a small fraction of the 239,000 which left the Tyne. Nonetheless, King James I was persuaded to issue a decree compelling a percentage of Wear coal revenues to be paid to Newcastle’s merchants. A decade later the world's first recorded railway started transporting coal from Whickham down to the Tyne at Dunston. The dominance of Newcastle’s Company of Merchant Adventurers was confirmed in 1637 when Charles I doubled the tax the Crown levied on coal shipments and granted the Company control over production and the right to hike up their prices in return. And so they did.

Sunderland's Stadium of Light from Boldon Hills.

Newcastle’s prosperity – in 1635 a traveller described it as 'the fairest and richest town in England inferior for wealth and building to no city save London and Bristol' – and strategic importance made it an attractive target for the Scottish Covenanters. In 1640 a poorly-trained English force was soundly defeated at the Battle of Newburn and hastily withdrew from the garrison at Newcastle, which, together with the counties of Durham and Northumberland, was ceded to the Scots in the subsequent Treaty of Ripon. Charles agreed to pay £850 a day towards the maintenance of Scottish troops in Newcastle and was forced to recall Parliament after an eleven-year gap to negotiate a larger financial settlement (the Scottish eventually departed a year later). Parliament opened on November 3rd 1640. By the middle of 1642 the country was at war.

Returning from South Shields, the Scottish troops took up positions across the valley on Cleadon Hill, seriously disrupting bus traffic and several games of golf

After failing to capture Hull, William Cavendish (a Nottinghamshire landowner who Charles had ennobled as the First Earl of Newcastle) was sent north to secure the coalfields of Durham and Northumberland. Although Parliament ships blockaded the Tyne (coal exports dropped to just 3,000 tons in 1642), Charles’ control of north-east England wasn’t seriously threatened until January 1644 when a Scottish army of just over 20,000 re-entered Northumberland, crossing the Tyne at Ebchester and taking Sunderland unopposed. After some initial skirmishes around Penshaw Hill, the Scottish besieged and captured the Royalist fort at South Shields in the third week of March, turning south to face Cavendish, who had brought up troops from the garrisons at Newcastle and Durham City.

West Boldon and the Tyne

Who, if anyone, triumphed in the skirmish which resulted is unclear, though popular myth – perpetuated by this Guardian article – asserts that the Battle of Boldon Hill was fought between the armies of Newcastle and Sunderland (who presumably arrived dressed in Stone Island chain mail and spent six hours shouting “Come on then, I’ll do you” at each other while hopping around and waving their arms) and resulted in the red and whites’ first Tyne-Wear derby win (“bolstered by the anti-Royals from Scotland,” as Sunderland’s Wikipedia entry puts it). What is known is that the two sides exchanged cannon fire across what is now East Boldon and Cleadon and Cavendish was unable to enter Sunderland itself. The Scottish made no attempt to capture Newcastle until Charles suffered a calamitous defeat at the Battle of Marston Moor on July 2nd and consequently abandoned much of the north of England. Cavendish sailed for Germany the following day, only returning to England after the 1660 Restoration.

Besieged by a Scottish army of 40,000 troops, and with scant hopes of relief, the city of Newcastle refused to surrender for three months until its defensive walls were finally breached. The garrison of 1,500 made a last-stand at the Castle Keep, Sir John Marley – the Royalist mayor whose statue is one of four on the façade of 45 Northumberland Street – handing over the city on October 20th. Charles followed suit within months, surrendering to the Scottish army at Newark and spending the best part of a year as their prisoner in Newcastle.

The Tyne – Wear rivalry didn’t end with the Civil War. Although Sunderland had closed the gap on its wealthier neighbour, the town’s trade was again restricted by Royal Charter after the Restoration. This allowed Newcastle to dominate coal exports until the end of the 19th century, when the antagonism between the two cities was first noted on the football pitch. The opening games between the sides took place in 1898. On Good Friday 1901 an estimated 50-70,000 supporters packed in to St James’ Park, overwhelming the 25 police officers present, swamping the pitch and causing the game to be called off when the players were unable to make their way out of the tunnel. The mood quickly turned, punches and missiles were exchanged and “three or four thousand persons, mostly young fellows with caps, formed themselves into one compact body and went on an expedition of wreckage,” the Athletic News later reported.

Nicholas Scott would have enjoyed that one.

Ground 173: Amberley Park, Killingworth

2011-05-29T11:46:00.007+01:00

First contested in 1989, when Blyth Kitty Brewster saw off the challenge of Heaton Corner House, the Northern Football Alliance League Cup has since been won by the likes of West Allotment Celtic, Team Northumbria, Shankhouse, Percy Main Amateurs and Morpeth Town. Amberley Park, home of Killingworth Sporting and located near the site where, in 1814, a 33-year-old colliery engineer by the name of George Stephenson trialled his first working locomotive, is the venue for tonight’s 23rd final between Ashington Colliers – the reserve eleven of the Northern League side – and Heaton Stannington, whose 2-1 weekend win over Alnwick Town had helped Ponteland United to their first ever Premier Division title.

Renamed in honour of George Dobbins – the long-serving Northern Alliance committee member who was League Chairman at the time of his death in March 2010 – this season’s League Cup saw Alnwick Town put twenty unanswered goals past Chopwell Officials, Red House Farm and Heddon in the opening three rounds before falling 8-7 on penalties to Whitley Bay A in the fourth. Bay went out in the semi-final, Heaton Stannington – who’d previously beaten Newcastle East End, Murton and Percy Main – coming back from two goals down in the first eight minutes to eventually win 4-2 on penalty kicks.

A 6-3 win at four-time winners Carlisle City set Ashington on their way to Amberley Park. After Amble and Newcastle University were dispensed with in the second and third rounds, Wark – who’d previously knocked out holders Hebburn Reyrolle - were beaten 7-4 in the fourth. There were four goals shared in the semi at Blyth Town, the Colliers scoring the final three to make up for the disappointment of their lowly 10th place in the league.

It’s the final game of the Northern Football Alliance season and the great, the good and the groundhoppers have all turned out. Jarrod Suddick, Ponteland United manager and son of ex-Newcastle and Blackpool midfielder Alan, watches from a corner flag, Mick Jeffels, who recently swapped Walker Central for Seaton Delaval Amateurs, does a circuit of the pitch, while Percy Main coach Mick Ritchie walks his dog behind the goal the Colliers are defending. The game begins at a thunderous pace. Heaton are denied a penalty in the first fifteen minutes when a shot is blocked simultaneously by a foul and a handball, and have a headed goal flagged correctly offside. The frame of the goal is rattled as often as Alex Ferguson at a press conference and Shaun Backhouse, the Heaton goalkeeper, goes full-length to claw a shot away. “How’s this still goalless?” asks Ian Cusack, Percy Main’s assistant secretary, at half-time.

Backhouse saves Van der Sar style with his feet, Heaton hit the crossbar from a corner and Ashington’s Craig Towart makes a brilliant one-handed stop as both sides edge closer to scoring the winning goal. The clock ticks by, a few people mutter about having to leave early if it goes to extra time – “I said I’d be back in the bar by quarter past nine” – and then, with just a minute left to play, the ball rolls right to left across the face of the goal and Lawrence McKenna – the league’s second highest scorer behind Shankhouse’s David Dormand - slides in past Towart at the back post. The touchline erupts. All over the pitch, Ashington players drop to their haunches and stare off into space.

The trophy is carried out on a table and the victorious manager jogs back to get a camera from his car. “McKenna is magic!” reads the headline in the Newcastle Evening Chronicle.

The new season starts on August 14th.

Amission: £2
Date: 25th May 2011

Ground 172: Hall Lane, Willington AFC

2011-05-28T11:07:00.007+01:00

Willington are possibly the most famous club you’ve never heard of.

There’s been a football team in the tiny ex-mining village of around 7,000 people since 1890, when Willington Rovers – later Rangers, Wednesday and finally Brancepeth Colliery Rangers – were established. The club reached the final of the 1899 Durham Amateur Cup, losing 4-1 to Consett Swifts, before folding in 1906. After a brief hiatus caused by Rangers’ demise, Willington Temperance AFC entered the ranks of the Auckland and District League later that same year, shortening their name to Willington sometime before they filled the Northern League place vacated by Knaresborough in the summer of 1911.

It was a year in which Willington changed grounds too, buying the land that now makes up Hall Lane from the 9th Viscount Boyne. The first ever game at what remains the club’s home a century later took place on September 2nd. A crowd of 5,000 turned up for the Christmas derby with neighbouring Crook Town, who ended the season in third, two places ahead of newcomers Willington and the same number behind Bishop Auckland, Northern League champions for the sixth time.

Runners-up to Esh Winning the following year, Willington took the first of their Northern League titles in 1914. They were champions on two more occasions in the 1920s, a decade in which they also lifted the first three of their eight Northern League Cups.

Some of Willington’s former players enjoyed contemporary success of their own. Jimmy Banks, an inside forward who’d transferred to Tottenham Hotspur in 1913, won an FA Cup winners’ medal against Wolverhampton Wanderers in 1921, scoring the only goal against holders Aston Villa as Spurs made the final. Billy Ashurst, a title winner in the Willington side of 1914, made 200 appearances in defence for Notts County in the mid-1920s, winning five England caps and turning out in the colours of Lincoln and West Bromwich Albion. His younger brother, Eli Ashurst, played 66 times for Birmingham City but died before his 26th birthday. Walter Holmes went on to Middlesbrough; Teddy Maguire reached an FA Cup final with Wolves in 1939. George Tweedy made almost 350 appearances in goal for Grimsby Town, helping the Mariners to two FA Cup semi-finals, the Second Division title and their highest-ever placing of fifth in the old Division One. He retired, aged 40, in 1953, seventeen years after earning his only England cap in a 6-2 win over Hungary.

1953 was also the year of Hall Lane’s record crowd, 10,000 squeezing in for an FA Amateur Cup tie with Bromley. It was the competition that brought the club its greatest moment of glory in a 4-0 win over Bishop Auckland in front of 88,000 fans at Wembley Stadium. Captain Eddie Taylor – a Sunderland shipyard worker whose younger brother, Ernie, would go on to play in FA Cup finals for Newcastle United, Blackpool and Manchester United – headed the opening goal, with Rutherford and Larmouth adding two more before the half hour. Auckland dominated but couldn’t find a way past Jack Snowdon in the Willington goal. Matt Armstrong, whose two goals in a minute had seen off Wimbledon in the third round, scored a fourth. “Soccer amateurs thrill Wembley thousands,” the newspapers reported the game. For Willington it was ample revenge for 1939, when they’d lost in the final to three extra-time goals from Bishop Auckland’s Laurie Wensley, watched by 20,000 at Sunderland’s Roker Park. Wensley had spent the morning of the game delivering sacks of coal. Also among the winning side that day was a young wing-half called Bob Paisley.

A new stand – Willington AFC emblazoned across the front – was built with the Wembley proceeds. Two Durham Benevolent Bowls and a seventh Northern League Cup soon followed, but they would prove to be club’s last honours until the mid-1970s, a 2-1 League Cup win over Bishop Auckland – who else? – giving Willington their first trophy in almost two decades. In 1973, 4,500 turned out in a gale to see the goalless FA Cup first round game with Blackburn Rovers, Tommy Holden missing a late chance for the Durham side. Rovers, with Derek Fazackerley and Danish international Preben Arentoft – a Fairs Cup winner with Newcastle United – in their team, triumphed 6-1 in the replay and donated Hall Lane’s first set of floodlights in return.

Out of the light came some of Willington’s darkest ever days. In the three seasons between 1981 and 1984 they won a total of seven league games, including a winless run that stretched for 53 matches from October 1982. Alan Durban, a First Division title winner at Brian Clough’s Derby County, briefly managed the club after being sacked by Sunderland at the start of the 1984-85 season. Durban left for Cardiff – and two successive relegations – a month later and was replaced by Malcolm Allison, recently fired by Middlesbrough. Allison’s first game in charge was a 1-0 home defeat to Hartlepool Reserves. He left soon after to coach in the Middle East – between them Durban and Allison won 10 out of 22 games.

Next to take charge were Eddie Kyle, once of St Mirren, and Alan Murray, an ex-Middlesbrough midfielder who turned out 68 times in Willington’s blue and white stripes. The managerial duo departed for Hartlepool United, masterminding the 1993 FA Cup win over Premier League Crystal Palace. By the time Harry Pearson visited Hall Lane in 1994 he found “a heavily vandalised clubhouse with steel shutters across the windows” and the words “One Win” chalked on the concrete steps. As the graffiti implied, it was something that Willington rarely ever managed to do. Alan Shoulder, an FA Cup hero with Blyth Spartans three decades earlier, spent a couple of seasons in the dugout, turning out twice in three days at the age of 49, his team losing 9-1 and 8-0. In 2002-03 Willington used 78 different players and slumped to a 13-0 loss at Sunderland Nissan. Stan Cummins, an extravagantly-skilled midfielder with Sunderland and Middlesbrough, was the last of Hall Lane’s big name managers. Aged 45, he played 11 times before resigning in the midst of the club’s worst ever season, which ended in their relegation from the Northern League after an unbroken stay of 94 years.

Rock bottom of the Wearside League in the previous two seasons, Willington – now managed by ex-Wolves schoolboy Robert Lee, who moved up from coaching one of the club’s thriving youth teams in the wake of a 10-0 hammering at New Marske – have improved to 14th this year, reaching their first cup final since the game against Bishop Auckland in 1976. It’s the final day of the Wearside League season, and Ryhope Colliery Welfare – already winners of the league title, Sunderland Shipowners’ and Monkwearmouth Cups – are on the brink of only the third clean sweep of all four trophies since the league was formed in 1892.

The cinder terraces Pearson wrote about are gone, replaced by grass banks and a small flatpack stand, with children kicking a ball around on the rise behind. The covered main stand is still there, with holes in the side of its roof and a players’ tunnel which leads to a wooden fence and an overgrown patch of waste ground. The crowd of 489 is Hall Lane’s biggest for years and a welcome boost to a club that requires £8,000 a season just to cover basic running costs.

The two teams are playing as much against end-of-season fatigue and the blustery wind as they are against each other. The players work hard but struggle to create many chances to score. Willington, their defence marshalled by Mikey Weston and John Richardson, cede possession and territory, pinning their hopes on exactly the kind of breakaway goal Danny Lee almost provides with half an hour played, but Paul Thorns heads the ball wide of the unguarded goal.

Although Ryhope have the better of the game – John Butler, their 28-goal top scorer going close on at least four occasions – it takes a brilliant save from Lenny French to keep the scores level in extra time. “Who are ya? Who are ya?” scream a couple of dozen kids in Willington tops as Ryhope scramble the ball away. When Nathan O’Neill puts a late header wide, his team’s quadruple hopes come down to ten penalty kicks. Andrew Stocks, just 17, can’t do anything to stop the first four attempts, and when Thorns follows Turner in missing with his shot at goal, Willington’s players slump to the floor while Ryhope’s pile on top of the prostrate Lenny French.

Champagne and the League Cup trophy are carried on to the pitch. Those in blue and white look on disconsolately as Ryhope unfurl a ‘Quadruple Winners’ banner. “Willington made it very hard for us,” says triumphant manager Martin Swales. It's a magnificent achievement by Ryhope's finest side since the mid-1960s. For Willington, you can only hope it’s the start of the long road back.

Admission: £2
Date: 21st May 2011

Football Art: Sir Bobby Robson

2011-05-27T14:46:00.008+01:00

"There was never another club for me when I was growing up. My father was a Newcastle supporter all his life. I grew up watching men like Jackie Milburn and Len Shackleton. They were my heroes…If my dad had known I was going to be manager one day, he wouldn't have believed it. He'd have been so proud. He would have somersaulted all the way to the games.”

“Very fitting,” said Lady Elsie Robson, unveiling the Sir Bobby Robson Memorial Garden on the day Newcastle United played another of his former sides, West Bromwich Albion. Between the remnants of the town’s medieval defensive walls and the cantilevered back of the Gallowgate End, the garden stands on the old site of the Carnegie Electric building, opposite the Tyneside Irish Centre and Newcastle’s Chinese arch, with four trees backing on to a billboard and sandstone walls pointing back towards the corner of St Andrew’s Street and Gallowgate Road.

Five white limestone blocks capture parts of a career which began at Langley Park pit and later took in honours at home and abroad, the freedom of three cities and the establishment of the Sir Bobby Robson Foundation, which to date has raised more than £3.3 million towards developing treatments for cancer patients. Sculpted by Graeme Mitcheson, the blocks are placed along a wide gravel pathway. One lists the club sides he played for and managed, another his achievements with England: four goals in twenty appearances, “the World Cup quarter finals in Mexico ’86 and the semi finals at Italia ’90”.

“I just think my father would have been amazed that a memorial garden has been set up in the centre of Newcastle, particularly in the shadow of St James’ Park,” said Andrew Robson, the second of Sir Bobby's three sons. Like his hero Jackie Milburn, whose statue now stands in St James' Boulevard, the stories of the miner's son from Sacriston, County Durham will endure for generations of Newcastle fans to come.

Ground 171: Palmersville Community Centre, Forest Hall

2011-05-07T19:45:00.007+01:00

Although I’ve been using the Tyne & Wear Metro system since it first opened in 1981, I don’t think I’ve ever got off at Palmersville (a fact which might owe something to a late-night documentary I once saw on Tyne Tees in which a group of middle-aged country & western obsessives in cowboy hats and snakeskin belts travelled between Shiremoor and Monkseaton massacring songs by Willie Nelson. Believe me, you don’t risk hearing that twice).

There’s no arguing against the lure of Forest Hall versus Berwick United Ultras at the bottom of the Northern Football Alliance Division One, though. At 2.30pm, as the forecast rain began tipping down, Berwick kicked off to a non-playing audience composed of me, four substitutes, two club officials who keep up a constant stream of instructions – “Stay there. Use your eyes. Hold it, hold it. That’s the ball. Why did you do that? Hold. Use your common sense.” - while running the line, and a pair of kids who wander in with an old ball and leave before half time.

Forest Hall, founded in 1996 and now with 23 separate teams, spent four years raising a £25,000 contribution towards the brand spanking new £1.2 million East Palmersville Sports Pavilion, funded by North Tyneside Council and a Football Foundation grant of almost £500,000. The facilities are a big improvement on their old wooden clubhouse, but it’s on the pitch where the club has struggled this season, losing fourteen of their first fifteen games before six wins in their next seven moved them briefly off the bottom and three successive losses dumped them straight back. The visitors, formed in 2006 through the merger of Berwick’s two oldest amateur sides, Spittal Rovers and Highfield United, haven’t managed to pick up three points since a 7-4 romp at Stobswood Welfare on the last weekend in March, and are third bottom on 25 points, three ahead of Forest Hall and one in front of North Shields Athletic.

In a scrappy, error strewn start on the now slippery pitch, it takes fifteen minutes for either side to threaten a goal, Berwick’s keeper allowing the ball to dribble through his legs and having to scurry back to retrieve it from the line. With both teams equally uncompromising in their tackles, the referee is the busiest man on the pitch. A Forest Hall midfielder skips round two challenges but is felled by the third. “You dived, you cock,” the defender says. “Eh? I slipped, aye, after you hoofed us in the air.” They’re soon at it again, the Berwick defender sliding in as his opponent attempts a turn to the right. “You shouldn’t be diving in like that,” the Berwick centre-forward shouts back from halfway. “I didn’t dive in,” turning to face the Forest Hall player, “I didn’t foul you at all.”

The rain falls, Berwick shank a couple of shots wide and Forest Hall put a free kick over the bar and have a flick on chested off the line. Then, right on the stroke of half time, the twice-fouled Forest Hall midfielder picks up the ball and, without breaking stride, hits it right-footed into the bottom corner of the net.

Berwick have the ball but Forest Hall the chances when play restarts after the break. A forward shoots just wide, another misses with only the keeper to beat. The Forest Hall linesman flags a couple of dubious offsides before the home team score a second, a forward latching on to a backpass and sliding the ball through the goalkeeper’s legs. Forest Hall stretch their lead, a substitute squeezing through a gap on the edge of the area and celebrating with a double somersault, before Berwick manage a shot on goal, Jamie Punton rolling the ball into the net as the entire home defence appeal for handball. “Aw ref, man. He might as well have caught it. That’s ridiculous,” the goalkeeper moans. The referee loses control, showing five yellow cards before, with arguments still raging over a disallowed Berwick goal, three goals in the last five minutes give Forest Hall a flattering 6-1 win. “Let’s just get this game ower with,” says a Berwick defender as his clearance smacks a teammate in the face and the fifth goal slides into the net.

It’s a long journey home for Berwick, who slip to second bottom of the league. On Monday they play at South Shields United and have it all to do again.

Admission: Free
Date: May 7th 2011

Ground 170: Derwent Park, Annfield Plain

2011-05-04T08:25:00.003+01:00

This is Annfield Plain. Twelve miles south-west of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, overlooked by the Pontop Pike TV mast and hometown of ex-cruiserweight champion of the world ‘Gentleman’ Glenn McCrory; “most of Annfield Plain is made up of housing, a few run down shops and several pubs,” its Wikipedia entry promisingly states.

The town’s had a football team of its own since 1890, when Annfield Celtic first came into being. Northern Football Alliance champions in 1920 and 1923 and runners-up, as Celtic, in 1904, Annfield Plain AFC later had a mostly unremarkable 40-year spell in the now-defunct North Eastern League before switching to the Wearside in 1964.

Three times – in 1926, 1928 and 1964 – Plain reached the First Round proper of the FA Cup. York legend Norman Wilkinson – “one of the most loyal and outstanding players ever to appear for City,” in the words of the club’s official history, and a man who knew about FA Cup success himself, having played up front in the York side which famously took Newcastle United to a semi-final replay – finished his playing days with the club in the Wearside League. Wilkinson worked as a cobbler while turning out for York, commuting from north-west Durham – where he lived at home and looked after his elderly father – by public transport for matches. After retiring as a player, he worked the Annfield Plain turnstile, helping to sell raffle tickets, take down the nets and retrieve stray balls.

Norman Wilkinson wasn’t the only famous striker to run out at Derwent Park. Ralph Allen, who scored 47 goals in just 52 games as a Charlton Athletic player in 1934-35, ended his career here too. Andy Graver, Lincoln City’s record goalscorer, left Plain to sign for Newcastle United in 1949. Reg Keating also ended up at St James’ Park, later scoring 35 goals in two and a half seasons with Cardiff City. In August 1993, Kevin Keegan and a Newcastle United side made the opposite journey in a pre-season friendly arranged to mark Plain’s centenary and raise funds for the West Stanley Colliery Disaster Memorial Fund (on 16 February 1909 an explosion in a pit shaft killed 168 men and boys. Frank Keegan grandfather of the future England captain, was one of the 30 or so who got out alive). Cypriot international Costas Costa, once of FC Utrecht and Olympiakos Nicosia, scored his only goal in a black and white shirt with a shot from inside his own half. Back then, it still wasn’t enough to earn him a contract.

Plain, Wearside League champions once previously in 1985, had a managerial messiah of their own in the late 1990s, Kenny Lindoe – now at Consett – leading the club to a second title in 1998. Lindoe left for Brandon United - Derwent Park not meeting the Northern League ground criteria – taking the Durham club from third-bottom to Division Two champions in two seasons and, even more improbably, holding off Bedlington Terriers – title winners five years in a row – to finish top of Division One three years later.

Without Lindoe, Brandon slipped back into Division Two and Annfield Plain have never finished higher than last season’s sixth place, one behind today’s opponents Cleator Moor Celtic, who’ve travelled from the Cumbrian birthplace of Kangol hats and one-time England keeper Scott Carson. Plain take the lead after 25 minutes when the current Celtic custodian (Carson came through the youth ranks at Cleator before moving on to Workington and Leeds) taps a free kick back out onto Paul Henderson’s head, the on-loan Consett forward heading in at the post. “Come on boys, it’s only one goal,” a Celtic player shouts, but neither he nor any of his teammates can threaten the Annfield Plain goal. The pitch, lovingly cared for, is bordered by grassy banks on three sides and a rusty corrugated fence, propped up with metal posts and bent inwards at the top. A crumbling stand provides rudimentary cover, with several steps of terracing and some plastic chairs along the back row. At half-time the players disappear down a whitewashed tunnel, vandalised by ‘John, Tom and Deano 2009’.

“Same again, lads,” the Annfield Plain keeper says at the start of the second half. With the wind at their backs the home side have a shot hacked off the line in the and hit the crossbar twice before Jonathan Kemp heads in direct from a corner. “What a bastard surprise,” says the Cleator number 10.

Admission: £2
Date: May 2nd 2011

Ground 169: St James' Park, Alnwick Town.

2011-05-03T12:48:00.010+01:00

Alnwick and football go back a long way. Back to 1366 in fact, when Harry Hotspur, the man who, in a roundabout way, gave Tottenham the appendation to its name, was born the eldest son of the 1st Earl of Northumberland. Fittingly, Hotspur was always more comfortable in attack, recovering from a moonlit first-leg loss at the Battle of Otterburn to win the return at Humbleton Hill (“Ten thousand bold Scots, two and twenty nights, Balk’d in their own blood,” Shakespeare wrote in his later report of the match, making it sound a bit like the 2008 UEFA Cup Final). Ultimately, though, Harry proved no more adept at choosing sides than Juande Ramos, losing away to King Henry IV at the 1403 Battle of Shrewsbury. Instead of a trophy it was his body parts that were put on display – in Chester, London, Bristol and Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

“O Percy, thou art dust, and food for –“
“For worms, brave Percy.” Henry IV, Part I.

The game itself has been played in the town since 1762, when the annual Shrovetide football match first took place. Two teams of roughly fifty-a-side represent the parishes of St Michael’s and St Paul’s, play beginning when the Duke of Northumberland drops a ball from the Barbican of Alnwick Castle and ending when one of the teams puts a second goal through the three-foot-wide wooden targets, placed a furlong apart by the banks of the River Aln.

Things got even more organised in 1879 when Alnwick United Services were formed as the first association football side between Newcastle and the Scottish town of Dunbar, lifting the inaugural North Northumberland League title two decades later. Renamed Alnwick Town in 1936, the club enjoyed its halcyon years in the thirteen seasons between 1960 and 1972, winning the Northern Alliance eight times, finishing runners-up in 1960, ’62 and ‘67 and only losing out to Ashington in the final of the 1962 Northumberland Senior Cup. Moving up to the Northern League in 1982, they spent two seasons in the top flight at the beginning of the 1990s but ended up bottom of the heap in 2007 and were relegated back to the Alliance with their St James’ Park ground (the club’s home since 1900) no longer fit for the Northern League.

The club itself might have gone out of business had it not been for Tom McKie. The ex-chairman, owner of a coffee shop and takeaway in Alnwick town centre, returned at the head of a consortium which narrowly saved the club from extinction. McKie was subsequently nominated for the Northumberland Gazette’s Sports Personality of the Year after a season in which Alnwick won the Pin Point Recruitment Charity Cup, their first silverware since 1987. Helped by a £20,000 grant from the local council and a pledge of the same amount in each of the next five seasons from landlord and patron the Duke of Northumberland, the club have been able to redevelop their ground back to Northern League standard – an improvement manager Albert Straughan has been replicating on the pitch. Eleven straight wins put Straughan’s team thirteen points clear at the top of the Northern Alliance Premier in early-November, but Saturday’s 1-0 defeat at struggling Walker Central has left them trailing new leaders Ponteland United by four points with two games in hand and five still to play.

The first of those is against fifth-placed Seaton Delaval Amateurs, who are looking for swift revenge for last week’s controversial 2-1 home defeat. The two sides are evenly matched in the opening half hour, Alnwick having a goalbound effort sliced off the line before Craig Cook powers past home captain Bryan Murray and rolls the ball across the oncoming six-foot frame of Brian Brooks to put Delaval a goal ahead. Alnwick have a goal disallowed for a push on keeper Stephen Mundy, who tips a Neil Catlow free-kick over and, even more impressively, claws a James Swordy shot onto the angle of post and bar, but with young captain Andrew Johnson dominant in the air and Cook, Luke Newton and Paul Hodge forming a dangerous trio in attack, Delaval merit their lead at half-time. “We’re all waiting for someone else to make something happen,” complains an Alnwick player as the teams leave the pitch.

The home side respond by bringing top scorer and ex-Morpeth Town forward Ben Keenan on at the break. “You’re not going to win any headers against him so make sure you get the second ball,” Delaval manager Nick Gray warns his team. As in the first half, Alnwick look to get the ball forward quickly but despite the deft probing of former Ryton and Ashington midfielder Mark Cockburn the home side’s only clear chance falls to Keenan, who blazes over the crossbar with eight minutes left to play. Delaval see the game out, their goal largely untroubled, for a deserved three points, sending most of the Bank Holiday crowd of almost a hundred – including a few who’ve never left their pitchside seats in the clubhouse bar – home disappointed. “Absolute rubbish,” says one Alnwick fan, somewhat harshly. As he's wearing a Newcastle United training top, I doubt it's the first time he's felt that way leaving St James' Park.

Admission: £2
Date: May 2nd 2011

Ground 168: Brewery Field, Spennymoor Town

2011-05-01T09:25:00.008+01:00

Spennymoor United’s Icarian existence in the Northern Premier League ended ignominiously in April 2005, their wings clipped by a discarded cigarette. The fire which broke out at the Brewery Field ground’s uninsured social club in the early hours of Christmas Day 2003 precipitated a series of events which saw owner Benny Mottram depart, crowds dwindle, players go unpaid and the club’s expulsion from the League amid a controversy which saw three different sides claiming first place. Ten league titles, more than twice as many cups, FA Trophy semi-finalists, 2-1 winners at Ipswich Town in the second round of the FA Cup: so ended the 101-year history of Spennymoor United FC.

Enter Evenwood Town. Formed in 1931, twenty-seven years after the Moors first took to the pitch, the three-time Northern League champions had finished the season a lowly 16th place in Division Two. By far the smallest community still supporting a Northern League team, Evenwood’s committee, frustrated in their attempts to set up a community sports trust and with the problem of a dilapidated ground, announced their decision to fold the club. The Spennymoor Supporters’ Trust - in the process of forming a side of their own to compete in the Wearside League, a feeder to the Northern League – amalgamated with a group representing their defunct near-neighbours and, to the consternation of those who felt relegated Easington Colliery should have been given reprieved instead, took Evenwood’s place in Division Two under the new name of Spennymoor Town FC. “We’re delighted that Spennymoor will be returning to the Northern League. They will be a breath of fresh air for the Second Division and the town,” said Northern League Chairman Mike Amos. “In effect, Evenwood are moving ground, and then it’s a matter for Durham FA to approve the name change.”

The new team - playing in the Moors’ club colours of black and white stripes – returned to the vacant Brewery Field (Spennymoor’s home since 1904) in time for the start of the 2005-2006 season. After finishing eighth in their first year, they stormed to the title in their next, ex-Middlesbrough, Osasuna and Manchester City midfielder Jamie Pollock – who’d already led United to a Northern Premier League promotion in 2003 – overseeing a campaign in which the club went undefeated for six months and won their final seventeen games to clinch the title with a ten-point gap to runners-up Seaham Red Star. Although Pollock departed that summer – and a row with the council saw the club served with a twenty-eight day notice of eviction before club chairman Alan Courtney was able to negotiate a new 25-year lease – his assistant Jason Ainsley, an-ex United, Hartlepool and Durham City midfielder nicknamed ‘God’ by the Brewery Field fans, took over the reins. You can measure his success by the fact that Tuesday’s 6-1 win over West Allotment Celtic sealed the club’s second Northern League title in a row.

“Just like old times,” says Dave as we get into the car, his Whitley Bay scarf standing in for the black and white of Newcastle United as it flaps against the passenger window. Thankfully, the journey is nowhere near as long it was in the Premier League: we’re at the ground for two o’clock and straight into the bar, handily sited at the top of the impressive, all-seated main stand. “Best ground in the Northern League,” Andy reckons. A window looks out on the pitch while a framed photograph shows Ryan Giggs, Mark Robins, Jim Leighton and Gary Pallister lining up as part of a visiting Manchester United team, alongside the programme from Spennymoor Town’s first Northern League game and a shot of ‘Players and Committee, Season 1906-07’

It may be Spennymoor’s big day but visitors Whitley Bay arrive determined to spoil the fun. Eight days ahead of their third successive FA Vase Final, the Bay can still clinch second place – and a possible promotion to what was the Northern Premier League – with wins from their last two games. But with whispers intensifying that the club don’t want to go up (“There must be some of the players who want promotion but I haven’t come across any yet,” a Bay fan tells me before the game), most of the fans’ attention is on next week’s trip to Wembley.

The teams kick off in front of a Northern League season-high crowd of 626, around half from Whitley Bay. “Our budget’s bigger than yours,” sing the fans behind one goal. “What’s it like to see a crowd?” reply those behind the other. What begins as “We are Spennymoor” ends as “You are Evenwood.” “You’re going all the way to Wembley for a pie,” taunt the Spennymoor fans, bizarrely. “We’re all going to Wembley, you’re all going to Aldi,” comes the quick retort from the Bell-End Choir. On the pitch, Spennymoor, with ex-Newcastle United and Norwich City junior Sam Grieveson replacing former Sunderland man Craig Turns in goal, are strangely lethargic in the opening, affording Bay time and space in the middle of the pitch. Spennymoor’s Chris Mason heads a Lee Kerr effort away from the goal-line before David Pounder curves a shot round Grieveson’s right hand and back off the bar. Having found his range, Pounder smacks one into the opposite corner on the stroke of half time.

Shortly after half-time Craig McFarlane makes it two, chipping Grieveson from the edge of the box. Spennymoor’s Kallum Griffiths is forced to head off his own line before the champions hit back, two goals in the space of a minute from Steven Richardson and Craig Hubbard levelling the scores with thirteen minutes still to play. The visitors hold on - but Consett’s 2-1 victory over Ashington takes the Steelmen three points clear in second, leaving Bay needing a fifteen-goal margin of victory at Newcastle Benfield to overhaul them.

The Spennymoor fans walk on to the pitch, unfurling a banner saying ‘Northern League Champions 2010-11’. “A magnificent achievement,” says Mike Amos before handing the trophy to skipper Leon Ryan, who this time last year was preparing for Wembley as captain of Whitley Bay. Sadly, a few Spennymoor fans plumb the depths of childishness by sticking their hands in their pockets and shaking their heads when Amos wishes Whitley Bay all the best against Coalville Town.

We leave with Spennymoor’s party just getting started. Hopefully, Whitley Bay will soon be enjoying another one of their own.

Admission: £6
Date: 30th April 2011

Ground 167: Horsfall Stadium, Bradford Park Avenue

2011-04-29T19:34:00.008+01:00

For much of the season, promotion seemed little more than a remote possibility for Bradford Park Avenue and FC United of Manchester. After their FA Cup heroics at Rochdale and Brighton, FC were next to bottom at the turn of the year, until a run of two defeats in twenty games lifted them into fourth, one place behind the similarly resurgent Park Avenue, who finished the regular season with eight wins out of nine.

“We’re up for it, we’re ready and we’re confident. We don’t mind who we play or where we play them. We’re a nomadic team, we’ve not got a home of our own so we play wherever we have to,” assistant manager Roy Soule tells the FC website, but United haven’t won in five previous visits to the Horsfall and there’s a palpable lack of confidence in the pub before the game. “Three-nil to them,” a mate tells me as we join the lengthy queue to get into the ground. “I think we’ll get stuffed, but I’m still hopeful,” another says. After a fifteen minute delay while the near-3,000 crowd tries to enter through the stadium’s two turnstiles, both pessimists are quickly proved wrong. Bradford keeper John Lamb does well to parry a shot from the prolific Mike Norton, but the left boot of Matty Wolfenden sparks bedlam in the tea hut queue, which otherwise hasn’t moved much since the two teams finished their pre-match warm-up.

Bradford have the better of the half but rarely threaten with Chadwick and McManus imperious at the centre of defence. The home side’s best effort comes direct from a corner, the ball striking the angle of post and bar. “Let’s play football, United,” a fan shouts as it’s hooked up towards Norton. The noise in the single stand is relentless, the 2,000 travelling FC supporters going through a repertoire of songs which includes The Beach Boys, Woody Guthrie, The Carpenters, Ewan MacColl, The Inspiral Carpets, Norman Greenbaum, The Drifters and The Sex Pistols. “Come on Avenue,” a few voices shout as Bradford press forward before half time.

The game has barely restarted when United’s front two combine once again to put the result beyond any doubt. Norton’s pass to Wolfenden is misdirected / struck perfectly through the covering defender’s legs into the path of Jerome Wright, who turns the ball at the far post, a Bradford player tumbling after it. Bodies surge forward, scarves twirl maniacally overhead. Some run on to the pitch, joining the heap of players in front of the stand. A Park Avenue defender looks across, arms folded over his chest, shaking his head in dismay. When James Riley is shown a second yellow for dissent only moments later, it’s all over for the home side. Riley stomps off, still remonstrating about a free kick. “Won’t pay Glazer, work for Sky,” sing a couple of thousand delirious Mancunians.

The ten-men have chances, Aiden Savory and Tom Greaves – scorer of a hat-trick when Park Avenue put four goals past United at the start of the season – both going close. The home fans begin to drift away. “We’re going to Colwyn Bay,” booms out as the other play-off ends in a 2-0 win for the Welsh side at home to North Ferriby United.

Somewhere down the line it became fashionable to knock FC United. “Why couldn’t they just go and watch a non-league team that was already there?” people ask, as if tribal loyalties have nothing to do with following a club. “The Chelsea of non-league football,” they sneer, although the stadium development fund and the rent they pay to Bury means the club’s playing budget is one of the smallest in the division. “Hypocrites,” they yelled when they switched their cup-tie with Rochdale for live TV in return for cut-price tickets for both sets of fans. “It’ll never last,” they tell you, though Alan Gowling said the same in the summer of 2005. “We’re gonna build our own ground, we’re gonna build our own ground,” serenades us all the way back to the car. With fans like these, you don’t doubt it for a moment.

FC United of Manchester – one win away from the Conference North.

Admission: £8
Date: 28th April 2011

Ground 166: Farnacres, Gateshead Rutherford AFC.

2011-04-25T19:30:00.007+01:00

Rutherford AFC, “the famous football club from Newcastle” (or, more accurately nowadays, Lobley Hill). Formed, as Science and Art FC, in 1878 by schoolmasters from the Rutherford College of Technology (now the University of Northumbria), founder members of the Northumberland FA and first club of the legendary Colin Veitch, England international, FA Cup and League title winner, devisor of an offside trap that became so successful it necessitated a change in the law, the first man to use the humble chalkboard for pre-match tactical planning and, as a result, the most decorated Newcastle United captain of all-time. Playwright, musician, socialist and friend of George Bernard Shaw, “Veitch’s name,” began his obituary in The Guardian, “was synonymous with honesty and good fellowship.”

It’s 115 years since Rutherford took on Newcastle United ‘A’ in the Northumberland Senior Cup semi-final which would turn out to be their 17-year-old captain’s last appearance in red and black stripes, but they remain one of the largest senior football clubs in the north east of England, with different men’s teams, two women’s sides and line-ups at ten different ages playing in the Gateshead Youth League. Each player contributes an annual membership fee which, along with cash with sponsors, helps keep the club afloat.

The Farnacres Ground is in dip just a few short metres from the A1 road and the Team Valley Trading Estate, hidden by trees, a dodgy postcode and the continuing inadequacies of the Orange mobile phone signal. When we arrive, five minutes after the 11 o’clock kick-off, a man, the dog from the Dulux Paint commercial and two children are exiting through an open gate, reducing the crowd to nine. The game begins as a war of attrition fought over and above the middle of the pitch, “Howay lads, get it doon and play,” shouts a Rutherford player as he watches a high ball disappear down the wing. The home side, with one of Ryton’s Northern League Day goalscorers Robbie Frame playing on the left of midfield, are the first to threaten, striking the base of the post midway through the half. “It’s coming, lads. Just a bit of luck,” shouts manager Danny Hall, an ex-FA Youth Cup winner with Manchester United and the man who led the Swifts to last year’s First Division title. But it’s Ashington Colliers, the reserve eleven of Northern League side Ashington AFC, who take the lead, Craig Knox turning away a shot only to see the rebound planted firmly between defenders as they scramble to cover the line. “They’ve only had one chance,” Knox complains.

They've barely had another one when Rutherford deservedly pull level just before the break, midfielder Chris Douglas spinning on the edge of the area and clipping the ball inside the keeper’s right hand post. “Cracking goal that, Dougie,” a dozen voices shout all at once. Ashington are on the back foot and when a midfielder accidentally runs the ball out for a throw-in he prods it away while he recovers his position. “Get on with it, man,” the referee says, jeeringly. “What’s the matter with you?”

The second half starts just as niggly, though the referee keeps the game flowing by shouting “Get on with it!” whenever a player appeals for a foul. “You just play football and shut it,” he tells a Colliers midfielder who’s disputing a throw-in. Gradually, though, with James Harmison, ex-Bedlington Terrier and brother of England cricketer Steve, an imposing presence at the centre of defence, the away team begin to press forward, their number nine blazing wide with a first-time volley, scuffing a shot over and steering the ball the wrong side of the post before he finally scores with a glancing header direct from a corner. “About time, Davy,” the goalkeeper shouts up the pitch. “How slow are we today?” a Rutherford defender asks. “It’s the exact same ball everytime.” We’re into the dying minutes before Rutherford finally exert some pressure of their own, Frame hitting the keeper square in the face before Douglas shoots low into the corner of the net. With third-bottom Murton beating Percy Main, it's a vital point for the home side. Nec Sorte Nec Fato (Neither By Chance Nor Fate), as the Rutherford motto puts it.

The two teams climb the steep bank to the clubhouse bar and we set off to see Jarrow Roofing at home to Whitley Bay.

Admission: Free
Date: 25th April 2011

Ground 165: King George V, Guisborough

2011-04-24T17:43:00.010+01:00

Easter: for football fans a time to celebrate new beginnings and an end to the dark winter days of doubt, denial and freezing cold terraces. Wycombe’s goalless draw at Torquay United had already put Chesterfield into League One. In Cardiff, two goals from Adel Taarabt left QPR on the cusp of the Premier League, while a last-minute header at Brighton’s Withdean Stadium put Nigel Adkins’ Southampton within touching distance of the Championship. And at the lovingly-tended King George V Ground in Guisborough, the home team, now six long years out of the Northern League’s top flight, need only a single point to clinch their first promotion since 1987.

Excitement mounts as the team news comes in.

Seventh and fifth in the previous two seasons, the Priorymen began their league campaign with seven wins and a draw and haven’t been out of the top two anytime since. With just one defeat in 18 games – a run which includes a 1-0 North Riding Senior Cup final win over local rivals Marske United – Guisborough go into the game having scored 15 goals in their last four matches and 98 across the season as a whole. Washington had a barnstorming start of their own when they briefly challenged at the top and inflicted a 3-0 defeat on Newton Aycliffe – the champions’ second and final league loss of the season – but have recently lost their main source of funding, manager David Lee, and most of their playing staff to other clubs, resulting in a run of 20 games without a win which has latterly included a 9-1 battering at home to North Shields and only the third victory of a tumultuous season for bottom club Morpeth Town. In soaring temperatures, visiting boss Dave Smith is pressed into service in the centre of defence – his first competitive game in fifteen years as part of an otherwise youthful and largely inexperienced first eleven. Local lad, captain and top scorer Dave Onions, whose 35 goals – to go with the 31 he scored last year - include a stunning three hat-tricks in ten days against Crook, Seaham and Morpeth Town, leads the line for Guisborough. “Every player except the keeper has scored so far this season” committee member John Butterfield tells me as he chalks up the team on a board in the social club. Even so, Mark Cowan, who helps run the ever-growing supporters club and is currently writing Far From the Massive Crowds, an entertaining, anecdotal account of the club’s season, isn’t the only Guisborough fan to be feeling more than beer and hot dogs in their stomach as the kick off draws near.

Guard of honour

Those nerves don’t last long. It takes approximately two minutes for 19-year-old ex-Aston Villa junior Tom Portas to open the scoring, slipping a defender and stroking a 20-yard shot past the goalkeeper’s dive. It’s three within twelve minutes and six before half-time, ex-Horden forward Chris I’Anson scoring four times and Onions contributing his now obligatory goal. With the sublime Portus controlling the tempo from midfield and manager Chris Hardly patiently conducting his team’s play, Guisborough glide through the half, the Washington defence left looking despondently at the linesman as I’Anson scores his fourth goal OF the day and fifteenth of the season just before the break.

To the away side’s great credit they never once look like giving up, and their unstinting efforts are finally rewarded with a late goal for midfielder John Sherlock. By then the home team are seven goals ahead, Ian Clark – who made over 300 professional appearances for Doncaster, Hartlepool and Darlington – having scored shortly after the restart. As the North Riding Senior Cup is paraded in front of the tea hut, Lee Bythway stoops to head an eighth goal with his side’s final attack of the game. Most of the season high crowd of 210 stay back to celebrate with the players in the clubhouse bar. “We’ve got a lot of young lads in this team, seventeen and eighteen year olds,” a beaming Dave Onions tells me. “We’ll push on next season and see where it takes us.” “Beyond any of our expectations,” says Mark Cowan.

Thunder booms over the nearby hills as players from some of Guisborough’s ten youth teams start to practise on the now empty pitch, but inside the bar the celebrations are louder still. A fantastic club. Go and see it for yourself.

Admission: £4
Date: 23rd April 2011

Ground 164: Links Avenue, Cullercoats

2011-04-21T11:01:00.004+01:00

It’s a gorgeous April day, the warmest of the year on the south bank of the river, but the fog rolls in as I cross to the north of the Tyne and Cullercoats is all but deserted. A small troop of kayakers paddle in the sea like spectres on an Elsinore battlement; a JCB digger is parked on a sandy beach littered with the remnants of chip shop dinners.

Although it’s long since been swallowed by the urban sprawl of North Tyneside, Cullercoats has its own distinct history as a fishing village and fashionable bathing resort. The Cullercoats Colony, a group of artists which, between 1881 and 1882, included the renowned American illustrator Winslow Homer, helped put the village on the cultural map. The small bay, once home to coble boats and salt pans, still houses the Dove Marine Laboratory, first opened in October 1897, while the nearby Metro station, built the year Homer left as part of a loop in the North Eastern Railway, maintains its Victorian bridge and platform canopies. Andy Taylor, guitarist with Duran Duran, was born in Cullercoats in 1961; Chas Chandler, ex-Animal and later manager of Jimi Hendrix and Slade, lived there before his death in 1996.

Though it’s nowhere near as renowned as any of those, Cullercoats Football Club is fast approaching a milestone of its own. Founded in 1915, the black and whites had their greatest period of success in the late-1930s, winning two out of three South East Northumberland League titles and the League Cup in the season in between. Promoted to the middle division of the Northern Alliance in 2008, when they finished runners-up to Killingworth Sporting, they’re sixth in the table, eighteen points behind leaders Hebburn Reyrolle and nineteen ahead of Stobswood Welfare, who prop up the table in sixteenth. For much of the season that was a position occupied by Forest Hall, but after taking just a single point from their opening fifteen games five wins in their last six – including an 8-0 home win over third-bottom North Shields Athletic – have lifted them into fifteenth.

With the fog getting worse by the minute I’m almost certain the game has been called off until I turn a corner behind the Sea Life Centre and hear a shout of “Man on!” A few hundred metres inland from the North Sea, Cullercoats’ Links Avenue pitch has a single-storey changing room block on one side and a main road, bus stop and road sign marking the boundary with Tynemouth behind the nearest goal. Except for the home goalkeeper, I can’t make out a single thing at the opposite end of the pitch, though I suspect on a clear day you’ll be able to see overhead Metro cables and the French Gothic spire of St George’s Church.

The home side do most of the early attacking but outstretched legs and some desperate blocks just about keep them at bay. With ten minutes gone, Forest Hall’s keeper palms a shot against his left-hand post. “Pressure the ball,” comes a voice through the gloom. Gradually, the away side improve, and a shadowy five-man passing move ends with a first-time shot swerving metres past the post. “We’re all going to make mistakes,” shouts a Cullercoats defender. “First pass you see, lads, first pass you see.” Just before half time a misplaced ball squeezes through the goalkeeper’s hands, a Cullercoats player squares it across the unguarded goal and a forward spins a shot wide from six yards out. It’s a costly miss: with their next attack Forest Hall produce the best moment of the half, a looping cross from the right redirected in to the top corner of the net via the number 9’s head. “How come their tops are all wet?” asks a substitute, shivering in the fog. “Didn’t you do geography at school, like?” “Yeah, but we didn’t study weird weather, did we?”

“The effort’s got to be better, lads,” cajoles the Cullercoats captain as the teams come back from a six-minute break (no namby-pamby quarter hours this far down the pyramid; at least not when there’s still a danger of it getting dark before full-time). The fog lifts enough for me to locate the Metro line and a junior football game taking place on a second pitch. The home side force two corners but it’s the visitors who fashion the best chance, the number 9 spinning a defender and letting fly with a shot that the keeper gets his fingertips to and turns away from goal. Minutes later the same player outpaces two players down the left and his cross is volleyed in off the bar. “Remember last week?” the home captain asks. “It’s still there for us.” “Twenty minutes,” echoes his manager, “plenty of time if you decide to start playing.” They try their very best, a shot deflecting on to the bar and out for a corner before they finally cut the deficit with ten minutes remaining, Forest Hall having previously squandered two glorious chances to extend their lead. But the away side cling on – and with Stobswood winning 4-2 at Berwick United Ultras, North Shields Athletic drop two into the single relegation place.

Admission: Free
Date: 20th April 2011

Ground 163: Kingsley Park, Ryton

2011-04-18T08:34:00.012+01:00

This time last year Ryton FC were a club that was really going places. Places like Eppleton Colliery Welfare, where after surviving their second season in the Northern League’s top flight, they made it all the way to the Durham Challenge Cup Final, losing out 2-0 to holders Billingham Synthonia.

But then disaster struck. Just a few games into the new season, club secretary Ken Rodger discovered that the £1,000 a week sponsorship money he’d been promised wasn’t actually going to arrive. Ryton, who had already set their playing budget for the year, had to sack manager Barry Fleming and his assistant Paul Brown; every single player but one – David Wansell, who’d been signed from Chester-le-Street Town’s youth team as recently as May – followed them out of the door.

A starstruck Mike Amos meets Tyneside's top football bloggers.

Ex-Ashington assistant manager Peter Craggs arrived from a Sunday League side in Wallsend but just weeks after the club had gone out to an unlucky defeat by Scarborough Athletic in the Preliminary Round of the FA Cup, Ryton’s team of untried youngsters were thrashed 8-0 at home by Division One rivals South Shields in the Second Round of the FA Vase. Craggs tried out thirty-five players in the month that followed, none with any previous Northern League experience. A 7-0 loss at Esh Winning gave the Durham side their first win of the season, Spennymoor Town won 8-1 and Shildon topped both, scoring ten without reply at the end of October. Ryton were already relegated by the middle of March, with just a solitary win, three points all season and a goal difference of -128. Not that anybody at the club was throwing in the towel. “We’ll get to the summer, regroup, and try to get back on track,” Ken Rodger told The Northern Echo.

Which is right about where Northern League Day came in. What started out as an effort to get a few dozen fans along to Kingsley Park the day before Newcastle United played at Aston Villa soon snowballed into a league-wide campaign and a national football bloggers’ get together(in Northumberland’s finest pub, naturally). Going into Northern League Day, and on the heels of a pair of heavy defeats at Consett and Dunston, Ryton’s young team had drawn both of their previous two games – their first points since August 10th – and hopes were high for a big turn out to see their match with Brian Clough’s old side Billingham Synthonia.

"It's like watching Inter Milan versus an eco-Bristol Rovers."

The sun beats down on the Tyne Valley as the two teams come out to the sight of just over a hundred fans – Ryton's third-highest attendance of the season and more than double the crowd they would ordinarily have expected. With queues building at the burger van (we’ve gone through the pies by half time, leaving “one pastie and a few hotdogs”), the home side take an early lead through Chris McCabe, a local teenager making his full debut up front, only to be pegged back by the first of James Magowan’s three goals. After a half-time snack of jam tarts, sandwiches and cups of tea, we're still in the bar when 20-year-old midfielder Robert Frame scores the home team’s second. Actually, some of us are still there when the excellent McCabe scores again just two minutes later. Not that we miss anything: how many Premier League grounds offer cold beer in a real glass and a view of the pitch through a window in the bar?

Socrates Football Writers

When McCabe converts a loose ball for his hat-trick there are scenes of pandemonium under the five bus shelters lining the near side of the pitch. Billingham hit the post and Alex Curran, outstanding in the Ryton goal, has to make a smart save to deny former Hartlepool United and IFK Uppsala midfielder Chay Liddle. Curran's next touch is just as crucial - a free kick from the halfway line which Daniel Wilson, another graduate of one of the nineteen youth teams the sponsorless club still operates for local players, smashes past Josh Moody in the Synners goal. Ryton, without a win in 42 games and with just seven shots on target all game, are, astonishingly, 5-1 up with a little over ten minutes left to play. “Remember you’re playing for the public who’ve turned up here today,” Craggs told them at the start of the second half.

Billingham come back, Magowan scoring twice to make it two hat-tricks and eight goals with a minute plus injury time still to go. “Settle, lads. Just settle,” Craggs says from the touchline. When the final whistle goes, there are eleven heroes in blue and black stripes, exhausted but unbeaten.

Leazes Terrace gets press accreditation.

“It’s fantastic to be playing for my local team. It means a lot,” Ryton's young captain Phil Burdon tells us in the clubhouse bar after the game. “I just want the lads to have fun,” says Peter Craggs. “Just to come out and play football and enjoy it.” “Help yourselves to food,” the ever hospitable Ken Rodger tells us. “It’s like having a press pass this, isn’t it?” grins a Newcastle supporter through a mouthful of chips and dry rice. Another Premier League fan has brought his five-year-old son to his first non-league game. The clubhouse is packed, Mike Amos, Northern League Chairman, gets the drinks in and Craggs, after shaking everyone by the hand, invites us out to his car to listen to the classified results on BBC Radio Newcastle. We stand around the open door while they get to the Northern League. “And on Northern League Day,” the announcer begins, “relegated Ryton won their first home game of the season.”

A fairytale ending, fantastic people and a grand day out in the Northumberland countryside. Like the newly-named Ryton and Crawcrook Albion, I'll be back next year.

Admission: £5
Date: April 9th 2011

Ground 162: Welfare Ground, Brandon United

2011-04-17T16:45:00.011+01:00

From the 1968 Durham & District Sunday League to the most unlikely of Northern League champions thirty-five years later, life has rarely been dull at Brandon United FC . Little more substantial than an uphill street southwest of Durham City, and a few short miles from the battlefield at Neville’s Cross, where on October 17th 1346 a Scottish army of 12,000 men was routed, their king, David II, captured, imprisoned and later ransomed, and both his Chancellor and Chamberlain killed, Brandon made it all the way to the first round proper of the FA Cup twice in the 1980s, losing 3-0 to Bradford City and, more narrowly, 2-1 in a second game at Doncaster Rovers, and have sent four players on to the professional game including the mercurial Paul Dalton, signed first by Alex Ferguson and Manchester United and later of Hartlepool, Huddersfield and Plymouth Argyle. Alan Shoulder, Blyth Spartans’ centre-forward in their famous 1978 FA Cup run, once managed the club with ex-Newcastle United, Manchester City and England defender Steve Howey serving briefly as his assistant. "A super move for us all," Shoulder called it at the time – but in 2006 the club’s financial backers pulled out, the committee resigned en masse and United were relegated with just four wins in forty games. Two years later, Brandon had tumbled to the very bottom of the Northern League’s forty-two clubs, and were only saved from relegation by the travails of those in the feeder leagues.

After more impressive showings in the previous two years, Brandon went into this season having lost manager Adam Furness to Esh Winning and most of their players to rival clubs. An understandably poor start – they didn’t win a single game before October and have added only three more wins since then – was compounded by a failed ground inspection which left them in grave danger of expulsion from the Northern League irrespective of what happened on the pitch. When Furness’ replacement Steve Cook walked out following a one-all draw with third bottom Horden Colliery, Brandon were without a win in nine and had only Morpeth Town below them in the league. "I have operated with no budget and with the intent of formalising a club structure that works. I believe the club now has this,” Cook told The Northern Echo.

‘Lee Hitch is a Rapeist 2010’ is the first thing I see as I enter the Welfare Ground, daubed along the breezeblock back wall of its solitary stand. The second is the bags of sand and building materials dotted around the pitch, work progressing quickly as Brandon upgrade their ground. The third, the glorious view back over the valley, Durham Cathedral regal above the huddle of semi-detached suburban houses. The team sheet is sellotaped to the side of a cargo container. “Enjoy it,” shouts Marske keeper John McDonald. “Let’s start well, lads.”

The visitors, desperate for the points as they chase down North Shields in the third and final promotion place, hit the post and Andrew Wilkinson in the Brandon goal turns a shot away one-handed, but the bone-dry pitch hardly encourages possession football and soon enough both sides are resorting to lumping the ball high over the desperately flailing heads of their respective centre forwards. Passes bobble, Brandon put a header wastefully over the bar, and Wilkinson, whose handling is immaculate throughout, somehow gets his fingers to a rising shot. But too much of the play gets bogged down in midfield; “We’ve got to pick it up,” a Marske player shouts in frustration just before half time.

Marske come out brighter after the break. Within minutes a Brandon defender hooks off his own line and Wilkinson scampers out to stop ex-Whitby Town forward Karl Charlton. The away side finally score when a ball is laid back into the path of John Burton, who slams it low into the corner. “Blatant push, ref,” a Brandon defender complains to no avail. To the increasing consternation of their travelling fans, though, once in front Marske seem content to protect their lead. With fifteen minutes left the unthinkable happens and Brandon equalise, McDonald swatting the ball away from his line and top scorer Daniel Corbett scrambling home his 19th goal of the season. “Someone’s got to give us something,” a Marske player pleads. “Come on, lads. We need a goal. We’ve still got time.” Yellow shirts pile forward, Brandon miss a chance on the break, Atkinson blocks a shot with his feet, and then, with a minute of injury time left to play, Charlton holds off a defender and hits a shot across goal…it bounces off the post, thuds against a Brandon chest and rolls back over the line. It’s heartbreak for Brandon, but Marske, undeservedly on the balance of play, move to within three points of a promotion place – and still with a game in hand on North Shields.

Admission: £4
Date: April 7th 2011

Ground 161: Recreation Park, Ryhope CW

2011-04-08T08:03:00.006+01:00

Chelsea – Manchester United wasn’t the only game taking place on the night of April 6th. At the southernmost edge of Sunderland, within sight of the Tunstall Hills and North Sea, it’s second against first in the Wearside League, Ryhope Colliery Welfare versus Easington Colliery.

For much of the season it looked like Easington, who along with Redcar have applied for promotion to the Northern League, would run away with the title in the same manner as Scarborough Town did last year, but their stuttering recent form – including a 2-1 home defeat to Darlington Cleveland Bridge at the weekend – has left them looking over their shoulders at Ryhope, Redcar and New Marske. For Ryhope, founded in 1892 but whose heyday came in the 1960s when over 4,000 fans packed in to the Recreation Ground to see an FA Cup first round tie with Workington Town, the season is shaping up for a hectic, and potentially historic, climax with a League Cup final against Willington, a Shipowners Cup final versus Easington and a Monkwearmouth Cup final at Kirkbymoorside on top of the title run-in. Fixture congestion is an inevitable consequence, with this their third game in just five days, including a 2-1 extra-time victory over New Marske in the League Cup semi-final.

Despite their success on the pitch, it’s a little too early for Ryhope to be thinking of moving up the pyramid. While there are plans to extend hard standing around all four sides of the pitch, a Northern League ground inspection in December found the changing rooms were a foot too narrow for the higher league which, along with the lack of cover, currently poses a far more intractable barrier to promotion.

Width isn’t a problem outside, where a crowd of almost a hundred, including local footballing celebrities Keith Stoker (who as Assistant Secretary of Hylton Colliery Welfare once swapped team sheets with Brian Clough before a match with Hartlepool Reserves) and ex-Seaham Red Star player and coach Joe Dixon, has gathered along both sides of the pitch. Ryhope take an early lead and with the Easington team rattled and their defence embroiled in a continuing argument, the home side pile forward in search of a second, only for their momentum to be disrupted by the sound of the referee’s whistle. “Christ man, are you watching the same game?” a Ryhope player asks when he’s pulled up for a foul. The home fans are dancing on the touchline in the 24th minute when a long cross from the right is nodded back across goal and bundled in on the line with the Easington keeper stranded. “Get in!” shouts Martin Swales on the Ryhope bench. “We don’t stop, we don’t stop.” “Come on boys, let’s have a lift,” replies an Easington player.

His team gets a goal back shortly after the restart and Jimmy French in the Ryhope goal has to make a smart one handed save to keep his side ahead. But as the game wears on it’s Ryhope who are in the ascendancy. A diving header goes inches wide and a lob beats the keeper but drops the wrong side of the bar before the home team kill the game off, a shot hooked back over the goalkeeper’s head after he tips a goalbound effort off the line. Easington huff and puff but misplaced passes and resolute defending keeps them comfortably at bay. With minutes to go French rushes to the edge of the area and pushes the ball out with his hands. “He was yards outside,” yell the Easington bench, though it looks more like an inch, if that, to me. The linesman flags for a throw-in. “You bottled it, liner,” an Easington fan tells him. “He wasn’t outside the box. We’ll talk about it at the end,” he replies. “You bottled it.” “You can’t say that.” “You bottled it.” “That’s your last chance.” “You bottled it.” “Last chance.” “Doesn’t matter now, it’s finished anyway.”

Soon enough it really is. Ryhope, still with a game in hand, are just three points behind in the race for the title.

Admission: £2
Date: 6th April 2011

Ground 160: Benson Park, Gosforth Bohemians

2011-04-06T17:46:00.006+01:00

You wouldn’t have thought there’d much of a tradition of non-conformist behaviour in the Newcastle suburb which gave the world Alan Shearer, Greggs the Baker and Lord Justice Taylor. But in 1894, in the front room of a Georgian townhouse in the city’s Leazes Terrace, Gosforth Bohemians Football Club were officially formed by Messers Reid, Anderson, Hope, Frain and Hill. The meeting took place in the shadow of St James’ Park, where Newcastle United were taking part in only their second season in the Football League. Many of the street’s other residents were unhappy at the construction of a small stand on the site and had threatened legal action over the “intolerable nuisance” of having a football club on their doorstep.

In the half century which followed Newcastle United were four times English champions, FA Cup winners on three occasions and beaten finalists on another four. Bohemians moved around cricket pitches and public parks before finally securing a 99-year lease on a ground of their own, Polwarth Park, in 1951, the year their illustrious neighbours won the first of three FA Cups in just four years. A pavilion was erected ten years later and the ground renamed Benson Park in honour of their club secretary and benefactor.

Eighty years after Bohemians were born, Garnett FC were formed in another Leazes Terrace meeting. The Grade I-listed street, designed by Thomas Oliver in 1829, was by now given over to student accommodation and Garnett took their first steps in local football in Newcastle University’s Saturday Inter-Mural League. By the mid-1980s, the team had begun its ascent through the university divisions, winning successive promotions, changing their club colours and adopting the motto ‘'fortissimi pratinonigri' or ‘the mighty green and black’. Before the century was out Garnett had won the Corinthian League by a margin of eleven points and were one of the largest football clubs in north-east England with eight teams and eighty-one players. The only thing they lacked was a ground of their own.

By another of those coincidences that bind football teams together, Bohemians now found themselves in the opposite predicament, only three years after winning the Northern Alliance First Division title. Garnett provided the players, Gosforth the pitch and in 2002 the newly-formed Garnett Bohemian F.C started life with seven teams and the goal of promoting “the amateur sport of Association Football in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and community participation in the same.”

In their short joint history, Garnett Bohemian have consistently finished midtable in the Northern Alliance’s middle division. This season, with bad weather restricting them to just twelve matches, they’re in a more precarious league position, three points and nine games behind fourth from bottom North Shields Athletic. The visiting Newcastle East End side are comfortable in seventh, one place ahead of a Newcastle University team I’d seen them lose 1-0 to at the turn of the year.

After the quarter hour slog along the Great North Road from Regents Centre Metro Station, I make it through the entrance gate just as the game gets underway. East End are kicking into the sun, a chest-high metal fence encircles the pitch and there are two tennis courts and a clubhouse behind the goal the home side are attacking. Despite some early pressure from Garnett, it’s East End who score the game’s opening goal, a daisy cutter from the left touchline finding a forward completely unmarked on the edge of the six-yard box, leaving him to redirect the ball past the helpless home goalkeeper. Bohemians respond with a few shots off the tennis club fence before smacking a dipping effort against the East End crossbar. But just before the half hour the visitors break upfield and add a second from much closer range. “This is too easy,” two different voices complain simultaneously. “We’ve gotta buck our ideas up here, man.” They don’t, and it’s three before the break when a crossfield ball drops Xavi-like out of the sky straight on to the number 10’s right boot. “Bit more, lads, bit more,” shouts a Gosforth midfielder with admirable optimism as the referee blows his whistle and the two teams regroup on the touchline.

“Absolutely shocking all over the park,” is the opening line of the Garnett half-time team talk. “You’re trying to play forty-yard passes when there’s a ten-yard pass on. We’re not out of it, lads. Step it up and we can score four or five easy.” But though Bohemians improve after the break the manager’s mood is little better when I leave, with darkness falling and the visitors’ goalnet unruffled to the end.

Admission: Free
Date: 4th April 2011

Ground 159: Grounsell Park, Heaton Stannington

2011-04-03T12:09:00.005+01:00

Grounsell Park is one of Newcastle’s less well-known football grounds, tucked behind a chip shop, delicatessen and a Cantonese takeaway in a trendy student suburb of the city’s east end. It’s the quarter final of the George Dobbins League Cup, the visitors are Percy Main Amateurs, and after January’s rain aborted trip, it's my second attempt to see Heaton Stannington play at home.

On paper the two teams are about as evenly matched as it’s possible to get: seventh and eighth in the Northern Football Alliance Premier Division, with only two points and three goals keeping them apart. The visitors – formed in 1919 by Great War veterans – have the longer history, Heaton - founded around the same time Hitler was marching into Poland two decades later – the slight edge on the pitch, having returned from Percy Main with a 2-1 victory back at the start of the season. Encounters between the two sides haven’t always been friendly. Five years ago a twenty-one man brawl over a disputed throw-in led to the abandonment of a goalless league game with just a handful of the ninety minutes left to play.

Never the most successful club on the pitch, Heaton nevertheless managed seven seasons in the Northern League either side of the Second World War, disbanding after a 12th-placed finish in 1952. The club reformed in the late-1970s and played out five uneventful seasons in the Wearside League before joining the Northern Football Alliance in 1986. Along the way, they made it through fourteen FA Cup ties and as far as the third round of the 1974-5 FA Vase, losing 2-0 in a replay to Wallsend Town. Last promoted to the Northern Alliance Premier in 2004, their best effort in recent years was finishing fourth behind Team Northumbria two seasons later.

Except for the bobbles on the pitch, Heaton’s facilities are positively salubrious for this level of football, with a metal entrance gate, a two-storey clubhouse, and parking spaces and picnic benches facing on to the pitch. The dugouts are separated by the width of the halfway line, and a grassy bank slopes up towards wooden fences and back garden washing lines on the far side of the ground.

With the wind gusting at their backs, Percy Main have the better of the early play but lack composure in front of goal. Heaton have a header brilliantly tipped over the bar and another barely scrambled away for a corner. The visitors, with Pierre-luc Coiffait’s throw-ins inducing bouts of mild panic in the Heaton defence, have a goal disallowed for a push before the break, but it’s the home side who eventually put the ball in the net ten minutes into the second half, a long punt upfield hooked past Rob Rodgerson before he can scramble off his line. It’s two shortly afterwards – if I was a tabloid journalist I’d be shoehorning in a Stannington turn up the Heat reference right about now - the ball bobbling around the edge of the area before it’s dispatched low into the corner. When a third goal follows soon after the hour mark, the game’s as good as over. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for my digestive process, which is still suffering as a result of the Kilimanjaro-sized portion of chips I’ve been working my way through ever since half-time.

Main pull a goal back from a late penalty but with ten more matches to play this month and a Northumberland Senior Benevolent Bowl final to come against Seaton Delaval Amateurs, their disappointment is tempered with relief at having one fewer game to schedule between now and the end of the season. Heaton march on to a last-four game meeting with Whitley Bay ‘A’, Blyth Town or Ashington Colliers awaiting the winners in the final.

Admission: Free
Date: 2nd April 2011