Ground 191: Chukyo University, Toyota City, Aichi.

“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

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

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

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

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

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

“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