İnönü Stadium, Istanbul

A ten-minute walk from Taksim Square on the European side of the Bosphorus, the İnönü Stadium is home to the black and whites of Beşiktaş, Turkey's oldest football club. War-interrupted building work started in May 1939 and took eight years to complete, the pitch officially christened with a November 1947 friendly against AIK Stockholm. The only football stadium to overlook two continents, Pele once claimed it had the most beautiful view of any ground in the world. "I have never seen anything like it. The stadium was a pressure cooker and the people were possessed,”  Lisandro Lopez, Lyon's Argentinean forward, said after he played there for Porto.

Turkey's first modern stadium was extensively renovated in 2004, when the running track was removed and the capactity increased to 32,000.  Even so, with two of the İnönü's former tenants, Galatasaray and  Fenerbahçe, now attracting crowds of over fifty thousand at newly developed arenas, Beşiktaş have long been looking to  upgrade their own facilties. At the end of the current season, the club will groundshare while a 42,000 capacity stadium, modelled in part on Hamburg's Imtech Arena, is constructed on the site of the İnönü. As part of the €120 million project, the pitch will be lowered another nine metres, while the Eski Açık tribune, a protected national monument, will be covered in glass and preserved.

The ground, which was built on the stables of Dolmabahçe Palace, is easily reached on foot from Taksim or by a short uphill climb from the ferry landing and tram stop at Kabataş.  Alternatively, you can see its floodlights behind the minarets of Dolmabahçe from the deck of a tour boat:

Or the downhill, cross-continental view over the Bosphorus to Asia:

Ground 219: Sheriff Sports Complex, Tiraspol

Nine dollars and two and a half hours is all it takes for the train ride to Transnistria, a self-proclaimed sliver of a state between the western border of Ukraine and the rest of what once made up the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. Only officially recognised by its three fellow breakaway republics of South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria effectively won its independence in July 1992 when the Russian 14th Army's artillery backed by high-level political pressure from Moscow forced the Moldovans to sign a ceasefire agreement. More than two decades later, Lenin statues, Russian soldiers and Soviet paraphenalia still abound in Tiraspol, capital city of a country reputed to have the biggest stockpile of illegal weapons anywhere in Europe and which attracts fewer Western visitors than even North Korea. "Two things are responsible for the creation of Transnistria: the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the script of Apocalypse Now," explains the Russian writer Vladimir Kaminer.

 It's a reputation which explains why I'm travelling in a carriage with only two other passengers as the Odessa to Chisinau service trundles out of Ukraine.  "Passport?" the conductor asks in gravelly Russian. "Looks Irish," he mumbles, turning it over in his hand before returning with an English-language immigration form. Ukrainian border guards stamp us out of the country while Transnistrian police officers and Alsatian sniffer dogs watch in the background.   After a twenty-minute wait the train starts moving.  Half an hour later I'm climbing down the metal steps at Tiraspol to find locked or deserted rooms and two taxi drivers who shrug their shoulders when I show them the address of my hotel.  I set off down Lenin Street, take a left at a decrepit stadium where FC Tiraspol's team coach is parked and finally get lost on an unlit backstreet near Victory Park. A woman with machine-gun Russian and two shopping bags shows me the rest of the way. "It's no problem. Sorry it took so long," she says, disappearing into the night.

Tiraspol by daylight is only marginally more exciting. City of a thousand black Mercedes, its few sights are spread along October 25th Street: the spired, white-columned Palace of the Soviets has a bust of Lenin outside, the parliament building built in 1960s office block style has a statue of Lenin on its front steps, a T-34 tank, several war memorials, a few dozen metres of sand by a concrete bridge and an equestrian statue to Alexander Suvorov, 18th-century Muscovite general and founder of the city.  An old crone on a collapsible seat tends four goats in the grounds of an abandoned factory building and barrel-chested pensioners sell bags of onions and potatoes near the open-air market.  Outside the $200 million Sheriff Arena Complex are a pair of Sheriff Petrol Stations and signs still adorned with hammers and sickles and CCCP. "Sorry for question, aren't you from Deutschland?" queries the waiter, ungrammatically, at a nearby branch of Andy's Pizza. "Good luck," he smiles as I finish up my Chisinau Draught and head towards the ground.

Back in the communist-era, Zimbru Chisinau (Nistru Kishinev) and Tiligul Tiraspol were Moldova's big two football clubs. Zimbru, Soviet Cup quarter-finalists in 1963, spent eleven seasons in the Soviet Top League. Tiligul, First League runners-up in 1991, were denied promotion due to the break up of the Soviet Union, but won three Moldovan Cups as Zimbru picked up eight of the first nine national championships. Neither will figure in this year's title race: Tiligul folded in 2009 and Zimbru haven't won a trophy in almost six years.  Viktor Gushan is the reason why.

In 1997 Gushan, ex-KGB officer and founder of Transnistria's monolithic Sheriff Corporation, added a football club to a list of assets which include bakeries, supermarkets, a distillery, petrol and TV stations, a mobile phone network and Mercedes-Benz dealerships. Sheriff finished their first season fourteen points clear at the top of the second-tier Divizia A, won the Moldovan Cup in their second and a league and cup double in their fourth. Since then, Gushan's side have won eleven of twelve Moldovan championships, six domestic cups and have beaten the likes of Dynamo Kyiv, FC Twente, Dinamo Zagreb and Slavia Prague in European competition.

Actually, make that twelve of thirteen.  With a dozen rounds of the season remaining, Dacia Chisinau, title-winners in 2011, trail the defending champions by twelve points.  "Anything can happen," says Dacia manager Igor Dobrovolski, but the Chisinau side lost two players to third-placed FC Tiraspol during the winter break and were held 1-1 by city rivals Academica on their first weekend back.  Despite the temperature -  seven degrees above zero in Tiraspol - the meeting of Moldova's two best sides is played indoors, the 2,500 crowd including a raucous contingent of approximately thirty fans who've crossed an unrecognised border to see their team play. 

While the Dacia Ultras jump, twirl scarves and bang continually on a drum, the home support is surprisingly sedate apart from some high-pitched choruses of Sheriff and a discordant, mournful-sounding horn. The non-playing members of the home squad take up their places in the row behind mine, shaking their heads at each misplaced pass and sending their girlfriends for mineral water and packets of smoky bacon crisps at the end of a dull first half.  The only chance Sheriff are able to create falls to Marko Stanojevic, but the former Red Star Belgrade player hits Sektor 6 instead of the target after stumbling through a tackle on the edge of the box. Dacia's forwards huff and puff but get never remotely look like breaching a defence marshalled by skipper Miral Samardžić and Benjamin Balima, part of the Burkina Faso squad that lost out in the final of the African Nations Cup to Nigeria.  The second half is even less exciting - the only surprise that the official match report makes it into a second paragraph. With five minutes left, Stanojevic jinks round three players before miscontrolling and toeing the ball wide.  The crowd file out through the pitch-black stadium complex into unlit streets. Dogs bark, Belarussian-made trolley buses pass by on their way out of town. Somehow, it all seems very fitting.

Date: Saturday March 9th
Admission:  10 Transnistrian roubles (about 70p)

In Search of Jordanian Football

"You want to watch football?" asks the hostel receptionist, plainly more accustomed to handling questions about overnight trips to Petra's rock-cut World Heritage sites or Madaba's Christian mosaics.  "Football?" he repeats, shaking his head. "Later. I'll have to check the internet." With the national side playing a friendly in Tehran, both Soccerway and the Jordan Football Association website come up blank for league fixtures.  "Is that the football stadium?" I ask a taxi driver, gesturing towards a distant floodlight pylon. "Yes," he replies, "big stadium." "And is there a game there today?" He laughs, spreads his arms wide, and shrugs apologetically.

  A contemporary Amman mosque kickaround sees Cristiano Ronaldo defending a lamppost.

Football arrived in Amman in 1922 along with two Iraqi-Kurd brothers who'd picked up the game at school in British-controlled Jerusalem.  Four years later the city's first team played an exhibition match against a side made up of soldiers from the British Army garrison at nearby Markah.  The first organised club side, Al Faisaly - named in honour of the Emir of Transjordan's younger brother, the pan-Arabist King of Iraq - were founded in 1932, though it wasn't until the mid-1940s that the ruling family began to take a serious interest in the burgeoning game.  In 1944, twenty-two years after football came to Amman, an annual league competition was set up under the auspices of King Abdullah, whose driver was among the founding members of what would go on to become one of Jordan's most successful clubs. "You are my family (Ahl)," the king is said to have told his chauffeur, "so call it Ahli club."  Unsurprisingly, Al-Ahli and Al-Faisaly dominated the early years of Jordanian football, winning all but four of the league championships played between 1944 and 1981.

Many of the league's early stars were Palestinians, born in the West Bank territories annexed by Jordan in April 1950. Among them were Abd al-Rahman al-Habbab, a title winner with Jaffa's Islamic Sports Club in 1945, and Jabra Al-Zarqa, who had been offered a contract with Arsenal after his starring role in a victory over a British Army team in Haifa the same year. Matches took place in school playgrounds around the capital or in the grounds of the Al Husseini Mosque until the mid-1960s when the country's first purpose-built football ground, the Amman International Stadium, opened with a friendly between Jordan and Egypt which the visiting side won by six goals to one.

The view from the Royal Box at the Amman International Stadium

Affectionately dubbed Al-Nashama (the Courageous), the national team didn't manage to qualify for a major tournament until the 2004 Asian Cup when, coached by Mahmoud El-Gohary, the Kingdom's footballers shocked everybody by holding South Korea in the group stage and taking Japan to penalties in the quarter final.  El-Gohary, who'd previously taken Egypt to the 1990 World Cup and an African Nations title eight years later, subsequently took up a position as technical director of the JFA.  Adnan Hamad, five-time coach of his native Iraq,  matched his predecessor's Asian Cup record by making the quarter final in 2011 and has more recently overseen the elimination of Nepal, Singapore and China to reach the fourth and final round of qualifying for Brazil 2014, where the Jordanians pulled off a 2-1 upset of Australia in Amman. That win was sandwiched by losses to Japan and Oman, and November's single goal defeat in Iraq leaves Jordan bottom of the five-team group with the Blue Samurai the next visitors and Hamad's side now down to 95th in the FIFA rankings, wedged between the Dominican Republic and El Salvador and three places above Northern Ireland.

 The new Petra Stadium, home to Al-Baqa'a SC

The respective merits of their international footballers isn't the last of the similarities between Belfast and Amman.  National identity remains a thorny issue for Jordan, an independent sovereign state for fewer than eighty years and a country in which one third of its population is comprised of refugees.  Al-Wihdat, the favoured team of the Palestinian minority, was formed in 1956 in a UN refugee camp which still houses over 50,000 people on the outskirts of Amman.  One of the six capital-based clubs in the twelve-team Jordanian Pro League, Wihdat lifted the first of their twelve national championships in 1980 and now rival thirty-two time champions Al-Faisaly as the country's dominant force. "99% of our fans are Palestinian," former club president Tareq Khoury told the English journalist James Montague. "You won't find any Jordanian fans of Wihdat...It's the same with Rangers and Celtic or Barcelona and Madrid. Here it is between two countries, Palestinians and Jordanians."  "I'm for Faisaly," a Jordanian student at the British Council tells me. "My English team is Manchester United. In Spain, Real Madrid."  "We support any team playing against Faisaly," says a Wihdat fan. "They hate us and we hate them."

 Three generations of the ruling dynasty.

A leaked US diplomatic cable in the wake of crowd violence at a 2009 cup game between Faisaly and Wihdat laid bare "the uncomfortable gap between East Bankers and Palestinian-origin Jordanians - one that most would rather keep hidden for the sake of political stability".  After Faisaly fans mocked the half-Palestinian Queen Rania with chants of "Divorce her and we'll marry you to two of ours", the teams walked off the pitch and the JFA ordered a subsequent cup game to be played behind closed doors, labelling the chants "a threat to the national unity of Jordan".  The following year a group of Faisaly supporters began hurling stones at Al-Wihdat fans, who broke through a metal fence as they attempted to escape.  When the police belatedly responded, 250 people were injured. "(They) started to beat people left and right," a witness told the AFP news agency. Khoury, who used his Wihdat presidency as a springboard to a seat in the Jordanian parliament, accused the authorities of committing "a massacre" and was later threatened with a two-year jail term for threatening behaviour towards a police officer after an earlier game between the two clubs. While recent games have passed off peacefully, the animosity between the two communities shows few signs of diminishing. "Football has always been and remains the most popular sport in Jordan," says Prince Ali Bin-Hussein, a member of the ruling family and the youngest ever member of FIFA's executive committee. "It's a celebration of our culture, our beliefs and our connection to the global community." In a country in which "it's almost forbidden to publicly speak out against the government", the national game is also one of the few places where it's possible to express open dissent. 

 

The Petra Stadium, part of Amman's Youth City Complex.

Third last season as Al-Faisaly lifted their thirty-second league title, Al-Wihdat, who play their home games at the King Abdullah II Stadium in south-east Amman, are currently three points behind leaders Shabab al Ordon in the 2012-13 Jordan Premier League. Faisaly, fourth behind Irbid's Al Arabi club, travel to Wihdat at the end of March having lost October's first league meeting to a goal from Raf'at Ali goal, a Jordanian international of Palestinian descent who's scored more than 120 times in seventeen seasons and two spells at Wihdat. "We will fiercely challenge for the title," Ali recently promised the club's supporters.  Shabab, coached by the Romanian Florin Motroc, won 2-1 at Wihdat last weekend and host Al Faisaly at the beginning of March.

The Amman International Stadium, Hussein Youth City.  There are separate entrances for right and left VIPs, Journalist's (sic) and the Royal Court.  A taxi from the Third Circle should cost around 1JD (double from downtown Amman)

  

The Jordanian football season ends on the first weekend of May with Shabab (Jordan Youth Club) looking to break the Faisaly-Wihdat duopoly and pick up a second championship after their league and cup double in 2006.  Aside from Shabab and Faisaly home games, the Amman International Stadium also hosts international fixtures against Japan in late-March and Oman in mid-June.  If you're planning a Jordanian football weekend, EasyJet fly to Amman from Gatwick on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. The Hisham Hotel is in the capital city's embassy district a few hundred metres from the Third Circle and has Amman's oldest pub in its grounds. For those on a tighter budget, the Jordan Tower Hostel has shared bathrooms with hot water in the mornings and a rooftop with a view of the citadel and Roman amphitheatre in the middle of the city centre.

Football Art: Jackie Milburn

"I was born in the upstairs flat of my grandparents' home at 14 Sixth Row, Ashington," John Edward Thompson Milburn wrote in his Newcastle United Scrapbook.  "From my bedroom you could see the pit yard and the shaft leading down to the coalface...the money to be made down the pit and the beer it could buy spoilt many a promising football career."

The Milburns were a footballing dynasty. Jack Milburn made almost 400 appearances at full-back for Leeds United, scoring 15 penalties between 1934 and 1936.  His three brothers, George, Jim and Stan, played league football for Leeds, Chesterfield, Leicester City, Bradford and Rochdale.  Their father, Tanner Milburn, had kept goal for Ashington, where his brother, Alec, also played after turning down the chance to sign for Tottenham Hotspur.  "He preferred to stay at home and drink his ale," his son later wrote.

John Milburn was 19 years old when he read an advert in the North Mail newspaper offering public trials at Newcastle United. He'd worked briefly as a pantry boy in Dorking, played football for Hirst East Old Boys and Ashington YMCA, been rejected for military service due to his height and trained as an apprentice fitter for the Ashington Coal Company, where "boys just disappeared into the ground to work for the rest of their lives as miners". He turned up at St James' Park on a Wednesday afternoon in 1943 with a pie and a pair of borrowed boots, scored two goals and did well enough to be invited back the following weekend.  After forty-five minutes of his second trial game Milburn's team were trailing by three goals and he'd barely had a kick. "Come on lad, snap out of it," barked the unimpressed coach. "Show us what you did last week."  He did. Six goals in the second half persuaded Stan Seymour to offer a £10 signing-on fee and £1.50 a game. "I'd never seen so much money in my life," said Milburn.  Seymour, who'd played alongside Hughie Gallacher, been capped for England and won a league title and three FA Cups with Newcastle, had no doubts: "I knew there and then he'd be a star."

The teenager quickly set about proving Seymour right, scoring within two minutes of his home debut, striking twice against Barnsley in his first match after the war, and smashing a hat-trick at Bury when he was converted from outside-right into a reluctant centre-forward, his twenty goals in thirty-nine games helping Newcastle back into the First Division after an absence of fourteen years. Milburn still worked part-time at Hazlerigg Colliery, breaking new boots in down pit shafts and travelling to home games after shifts until his fellow workers voted unaminously in favour of strike action unless he was given Saturday mornings off. 

Capped thirteen times for England, Wor Jackie was always more comfortable the closer he was to home.  "The only time I'm really happy is when I come back over the Tyne Bridge and smell the pit heaps," he wrote. His Newcastle scoring record of 200 goals was finally broken by Alan Shearer in 2006, though Milburn's total excludes the 38 goals he netted between a debut strike against Bradford City and the resumption of the Football League proper in 1946-47.  "I was brought up being told how great Jackie Milburn was," Shearer said. "He was a man of the people...nobody had a bad word to say about him."

Three Wembley victories in the space of five seasons cemented Milburn's status as a Newcastle legend. He scored in every round of the 1951 FA Cup,  including two in five minutes against Blackpool in the final.  A hat-trick in the quarter-final at Portsmouth helped the Magpies retain their trophy. Three years later, it took just forty-five seconds for Milburn to head past Manchester City's Bert Trautmann and set  Newcastle on the way to a 3-1 win. "He meant a lot to me," remembered Sir Bobby Robson, who grew up watching Milburn at St James' Park and later managed England and Barcelona.  "He used to remind me of a wave breaking," said Sir Bobby Charlton, World and European champion and yet another member of the Milburn clan. "He would just surge past defenders with his incredible pace. Everybody loved watching him." "He was the most exciting thing I have seen on a football pitch," said Bob Stokoe, a Cup winner as both player and manager. "The most natural striker of a ball I've ever seen," thought Charlie Crowe, another of the North Mail trialists and left-half in the 1951 FA Cup winning side.

Wor Jackie.  In Honour of John Edward Thompson Milburn, Footballer & Gentleman.

Aged 33, Milburn  left Newcastle for Linfield, where he scored over a century of goals in two seasons as player-manager and netted twice as the Blues beat IFK Gothenburg in the European Cup, before an ill-fated spell in charge of Ipswich Town saw an ageing side relegated the season after lifting the First Division title. "There are a lot of good lads in football but you always get one or two bad ones, about five per cent that do all the damage, and believe you me, they do a lot of damage. It led really to the players becoming a little bit greedy, which is a bad thing in sport," he later explained. 

In a mark of the esteem he was held in on Tyneside, 45,000 fans turned up for Milburn's testimonial game in 1967 and tens of thousands of mourners gathered outside the city's St Nicholas' Cathedral for his funeral in 1988.  The west stand at St James' is named in his honour, and on the first anniversary of his death Newcastle Evening Chronicle readers raised £35,000 to pay for a 12-foot bronze statue by Susanna Robinson.

Originally sited in Northumberland Street, the sculpture was relocated to St James' Boulevard in 1999, where it stood at a road junction beside a tyre factory and a brick wall behind the now demolished Tyne Brewery.  Moved again in April 2012 to the south-east corner of St James' Park, it shows Milburn - posed by a ballet dancer, the only model Robinson could find able to keep their leg raised while she worked - aiming a thunderous kick down the hill towards the city centre and the Sir Bobby Robson Memorial Garden. "It's great news that the statue has been moved," said Jack Milburn Jnr.  “He was in a dark shadow where he was but now he’s back at his favourite end of St James’ Park. That’s where he wanted his ashes scattered, at the Gallowgate End, and that’s what we did 23 years ago. I have no doubt that if he’s looking down he’ll be thinking ‘that’s a great spot’."

Jackie Milburn: footballer, gentleman, Geordie legend. 

Ground 218: East End Park, Dunfermline

I don't know much about Dunfermline, but I do know it has a football team that plays in black and white stripes. Andrew Carnegie, once the world's richest man, was born here - and left; the writers Iain Banks and Daniel Kalder, author of Lost Cosmonaut, were born here too.  They also left.  If you're into dead kings, there's Charles I, who was born in Dunfermline Palace but left for London aged three and a half, and Robert the Bruce, buried at Dunfermline Abbey in 1329.  He, at least, is still around.

Kalder dismissed his birthplace as "a dead dump with a few historical ruins and a lot of charity shops".  While it's not exactly Scotland's answer to Kyoto, the old capital has a lot more going for it than that. Things like free parking within walking distance of the football ground and a team which won two Scottish Cups, finished third in the league and reached a European semi-final in the 1960s, losing by the odd goal in three to a Slovan Bratislava side which beat Barcelona in the final. No, really.

The first pub we try has stopped serving food "due to sport".  The second has no spare seats, the third no other customers and bean burgers which taste like "twenty coasters jammed together".  As we enter the ground, a bear in a flat cap and some kids holding chequered racing flags jog around the pitch while the tannoy plays over the visiting fans' attempts to get a chant going. "Shall we sing a song for you?" they finally manage to ask. "Ath-e-letic, best in Fife," the home fans reply. 

The first half is dire, made bearable by some blood and thunder tackling and a full forty-five minutes of world class vitriol from the row behind. Raith skipper Allan Walker is simultaneously "a wanker", "a fucking wanker", "a prick" and several other things which I can't make out but are probably not very complimentary. He's still more popular than Jason Thompson, who gets welcomed back to East End Park with a shout of "Dye your hair, you ginger cock." Every member of the Raith team is "a wanker" or "a paedo", leading Ian to speculate that the Fifers might be surreptitiously operating a less successful version of Athletic Bilbao's Basque-only policy. "Dig a hole," comes the chorus whenever a red-shirted player goes down, and when Thompson mistimes a tackle an irate fan screams "I'll drop ye in the toon, ye ginger bastard."  On the pitch, Raith's Bobby Graham heads into the goalkeeper's arms and Dougie Hill clears off the line at the other end.  There's lots of running. Mainly, though, into other players. "Not the most exciting 45 minutes of the season," Dunfermline's official match report says.

The second half is much more entertaining.  Dunfermline's Ryan Wallace shoots across the area while Shaun Byrne and Andy Kirk both narrowly clear the crossbar.  Raith have their moments, too, Paul Gallacher saving from Graham before a scramble sees a penalty appeal and the ball spinning the wrong side of the post.  "We've done everything but score," complains a home fan.  "There's nee final ball." With twenty minutes left and Dunfermline suddenly looking much the better team, Josh Falkingham crosses from the right and Andy Greggan pops up on the other side of the pitch to head in the winning goal. The home fans break out into "This kingdom is ours" and "You'll always be the wee team."  Raith hit and hope but the travelling support can only look on sullenly as the final whistle and Morton's 3-0 defeat by Dumbarton leaves the Pars two points off first place and an immediate return to the Scottish Premier League.

Kalder was wrong.  Dunfermline is not dead yet.

 Admission: £17
Date: January 2nd 2012

Ryhope Colliery Welfare

 

Winn and Butler

It took 120 years and a manager from Seaham Kitchen Magic for Ryhope Colliery Welfare to make the Northern League. Wearside League champions four times in the 1960s, the days of Charlie Grose, Jackie Wilkinson and 4,500 cramming into the Recreation Ground for an FA Cup first round tie with Workington Town were a distant memory when Martin Swales was recruited from the Durham Alliance, where he'd just led his company team to a final success in the Washington Aged Peoples Cup.  "Ryhope hadn't won a trophy for donkeys' years.  I said I'd try and get them one," he told Northern Ventures Northern Gains.  Swales's first season saw the club lift the Monkwearmouth Cup, last won back in 1967. The following year Ryhope joined Marske United and Newcastle Blue Star as only the third team to sweep all four Wearside League trophies in the same season after a penalty shoot-out at Willington AFC.  Last season Swales and his players went even better - losing only one game in all competitions as they swept the board for a second time and were promoted to the Northern League.  "68 games 1 defeat" the club's Twitter profile justifiably boasts.

Paul Kane prepares to put Seaham two goals ahead.

Propelled by the goals of ex-Magic striker Johnny Butler and 21-year-old Chris Winn - 59 between them in 22 league games alone - Ryhope top Division Two at Christmas, two places and eight points ahead of fast-improving Seaham Red Star.  With Swales on holiday in Lanzarote, a subdued Ryhope fall two goals behind to a hard-working Red Star team, Channon North scoring from close range then earning a penalty which Paul Kane easily converts. "We were playing some lovely stuff earlier in the season," a home fan tells me, "but there's been no cohesion lately."  "It's all back to front and the odd diagonal," says a visiting Northern League manager. "I was expecting a lot better."

Chris Trewick reduces the arrears shortly before an interval which is lengthened when Ryhope chairman Dave Hall collapses and is taken to hospital. A photographer from the local newspaper turns up, snaps some pictures from the halfway line then promptly disappears, North misses two chances to seal the win and Seaham see a shot smash back off the crossbar, but with time running out Chris Winn edges the ball on to Butler - almost the first exchange of passes between the two all game - from a throw-in and the point is enough to keep Ryhope ahead of Crook Town, 3-2 winners in the wilds of Tow Law. "It'd been coming all half," says Red Star assistant Simon Johnson," but I'm absolutely gutted."

Admission: £4
Date: December 26th 2012

Goalposts 2012: Bilbao and Moldova

When I wrote about Steve McLay's now defunct No Movement for Goalposts blog this time last year, my picks of 2011 included a UNESCO-listed dust pitch in the centre of one of Elche's many palmerals, a congested goalmoath at Jarrow Roofing, and movable posts on the shores of Biwako, Japan's largest freshwater lake.  This year's top two take us to a lesser known tributary of the Dniester and the Basque country, where I spent a weekend in January watching Marcelo Bielsa's then rampant Athletic at the soon to be demolished San Mames.

An hour's drive along the potholed roads out of Chișinău, we pulled into the cave monasteries of Orheiul Vechi just ahead of a clapped-out coach full of boisterous schoolkids and two men in a horse and trap. Fishermen paddled along the listless River Răut, where local communists had dumped whatever religious icons they could lay their hands on at the end of World War II.  Wreaths shaped like teardrops and mounds of bare earth marked the graves in the village cemetery, old women tied on headscarves before shuffling into the church, and the souvenir stand was a plastic table wedged against a crumbling stone wall.  The goalposts were crooked, the grass rubble-strewn and overgrown.  A horse stood by what might have been the edge of the penalty area, dribbling a pebble with its nose.

Our final morning in Bilbao. Hungover but ignoring the concrete lift, we panted up a flight of steps from the Casco Viejo and took an unplanned left into Park Extberri. The pitch was made of concrete, still wet with the previous night's rain. A metal fence stopped balls bouncing down the hill. The goalposts, of course, were painted red and white.