Football and Odessa

"In 1888, great events began to take place in my life: I was sent off to Odessa" (Leon Trotsky)

“There is magic even in the name,” Jonathan Wilson wrote in Behind the Iron Curtain.  “Nowhere in the world has air like Odessa,” Sergei Shmatovalenko – a seven-time league champion with Dynamo Kiev – recalled of his childhood in the Black Sea port city.  Shmatovalenko, like  1986 Ballon d’Or winner Igor Belanov, Ukraine and Russia international  Ilya Tsymbalar, the USSR midfielder Leonid Buryak and 74-time capped former Leverkusen and Liverpool striker Andriy Voronin, progressed from the city’s youth academies to acclaim around the world.   Viktor Propopenko - who took Shakhtar Donetsk into the Champions League and became the first coach of the Ukrainian national team – Euro ’88 runner-up Viktor Pasulko, Nikolai Morozov and the legendary Valeriy Lobanovskiy each has their own Odessa connections, passing through the blue-and-black shirted ranks of Chernomorets, the city’s dominant club side and winners of two Ukrainian and one USSR Federation Cups.  “Not only the pearl of the Black Sea but also the footballing centre of Ukraine,” the mayor’s office boldly states.

                                    Isaac Babel, born in Odessa in 1894, executed 1940.

As with almost everything of substance in Odessa, football emerged from the port.  British sailors started playing the game in the dockyards of the Russian Empire – “Football is an English sport with a big ball.  Usually it is played by people with solid muscles and strong legs – a weak one would only be an onlooker in such a mess,” a St Petersburg-based periodical had observed in the late 1860s - long before a group of traders and workers from the Indo-European Telegraph Company founded the Odessa British Athletic Club in 1878.  As the first team in the whole of Tsarist Russia – St Petersburg Football Club wasn’t formally established until the following year - Odessa’s footballing pioneers were initially restricted to games against visiting British crews or fellow  telegraph workers based across the border in Romania.  In 1884, the year Ukraine’s first officially recorded football match took place in Austrian-ruled Lviv, Odessa’s expatriate players laid out the country’s only permanent pitch off the fashionable Frantsuz'kyi Bulvar (French Boulevard).  By the turn of the century local players such as the remarkable Sergei Utochkin – a multi-talented sportsman and aviator - were being invited to participate, though it wasn’t until 1910 that a city-wide championship was arranged.  The all-conquering British were joined by the recently-formed Ukrainian sides Odessa United Sport Club, Sporting Club and Sheremetievskiy Sport Club.  Sheremetievskiy opened the tournament on March 5^th 1911 with a 3-0 win over Odessa United, the foreigners seeing off Sporting 3-1 in the second game.   Two years later a combined Odessa side featuring “five Englishmen, four Russians and two Jewish members” lifted the All-Russian Championship by defeating St Petersburg 4-2 in front of 4,000 spectators at the French Boulevard ground only to be – dubiously in the eyes of  those from the host city - stripped of their title for breaching competition rules on the permitted number of foreign players.

Names such as Carr, Perkins, Jones and Jacobs featured prominently in the early years of Odessan football – Ernest Jacobs scoring twice in the victory over St Petersburg - but the expatriates’ hegemony would soon wane.  City champions in the competition’s first two seasons, OBAC were beaten by Sheremetievskiy in 1913 and could thereafter manage no better than third place before disbanding four years later.   Capped once for Russia, Grigoriy Bogemskiy had played and scored in the 1913 Odessa side and assisted Sporting Club to the first of two city titles the following year.  “He had rather a flabby appearance,” the writer Yuri Olesha recalled, “but the sight of Bogemskiy dribbling upfield was one of the most spectacular sights of my childhood.”  

Sergei Utochkin, one of Odessa's footballing pioneers.

 

Revolution, civil war and the Soviet Union’s early international isolation forced Bogemskiy abroad – he would play in Bulgaria and win a Czechoslovak title with Viktoria Žižkov – and saw football begin to serve an explicitly political purpose.  The local secret police founded Sparta Odessa in 1923, while the city representative side were second only to Kharkov – the national capital while Kiev remained tainted by association with the fleeting Ukrainian People’s Republic – in three of the first four Ukrainian SSR championships.  Sparta became Dynamo in 1926, were the first recorded opponents of Dynamo Kiev (a 2-2 draw on June 17^th 1928) and lifted their first city championship in 1933 as burgeoning crowds led to the construction of two new areas.  The Pischevik, named after the food workers’ union, held its first game in 1927; the following year a 10,000-capacity stadium was completed in time to mark the tenth anniversary of the founding of Komsomol, the Communist Party’s youth wing.   The Pischevik was renamed when it became the home ground of SKA Odessa, the club side of the Red Army’s Odessa Military District, who were founded shortly after the city’s liberation from Romanian occupation in 1944.   The Komsomol underwent a name change of its own, the three-sided Spartak Stadium nowadays hosting rugby, lower-league football and, for almost three years prior to November 2011, the city’s Ukrainian Premier League side, Chernomorets Odessa.  

Chernomorets were founded as Dynamo Odessa on March 26^th 1936, the year the first all-Soviet league competition took place.  The original Dynamo had already folded, the local authorities instead drawing the city’s best footballers together at a new stadium which had recently been constructed on land initially set aside for a boating lake in Shevchenko Park.  Named after Stanislav Kosior, general secretary of the Ukrainian SSR until he was purged in 1939, it held 22,000 spectators and was constructed in the classic Soviet elliptical roofless-bowl-with-running-track design.  “You cannot imagine a more wonderful spectacle,” Yury Olesha eulogised.  “Above the sea, the stadium is so much like a dream.”  With the team promoted to Group A of the Soviet League in 1938, the ground was soon hosting the likes of Spartak Moscow and the Dynamos of Kiev and Tblisi, although a disastrous second season in which Odessa were trounced 8-0 by champions Spartak and lost 6-0 at home to Dynamo Moscow, meant Chernomorets finished bottom of the fourteen-team top league and were relegated back to the second-tier.   The playing staff was subsequently transferred to another club, the merged sides  christened Spartak Odessa, and the team placed straight back in the top-flight only for the whole league to be suspended ten games into the season on June 24^th 1941. 

Post-war Odessa was a markedly different place.  Under Romanian occupation for 907 days from October 1941 to April 1944, only 200,000 people - roughly a third of its pre-war population – remained in the city. The 1926 Soviet census had counted 158,000 Jews resident in Odessa.  In November 1944, military officials calculated the figure was a mere 48. In his memoirs, the film director Sergei Eisenstein reflected on the possible fate of the baby whose bouncing pram had featured in the most famous scene of his Battleship Potemkin.  “What is he doing?  Did he defend Odessa as a young man?  Or was he driven abroad into slavery?  Does he now rejoice that Odessa is a liberated and resurrected town? Or is he lying in a mass grave, somewhere far away?”  Like everything else the city's football teams took time to recover, SKA’s run to the Soviet Cup semi-finals in 1959-60 heralding the start of a decade in which both they and Chernomorets (semi-finalists themselves in 1965-66) took part in the Soviet Top League. The 1970s saw SKA relocated to Tiraspol in the Moldovan SSR and Chernomorets take third place in the Soviet-wide league table, behind only Dynamo Kiev and Spartak Moscow – an event which is still widely ranked  as the high point of Odessa’s footballing history.   

 Playing table football during the city's April 1st celebrations

Last ever holders of the USSR Federation Cup (a post-season tournament roughly comparable  to England’s League Cup) in 1990,  Chernomorets were placed alongside SKA in the newly-organised Ukrainian Premier League two seasons later. Chernomorets – coached by Viktor Propopenko and with CIS, Ukraine and Russia-capped Yuriy Nikiforov marshalling their defence - lifted the first Ukrainian Cup through an extra-time Ilya Tsymbalar goal against Metalist Kharkiv, twice finished league runners-up and won the Cup again in 1994, defeating Tavriya Simferopol on penalties in the final.  SKA folded in 1999, their name briefly resurrected in the 2012-13 Second Division; Chernomorets, three times relegated, had recovered to finish fifth in the UPL, lost to Shakhtar Donetsk in the Ukrainian Cup Final and thereby qualified for this season’s Europa League, where they navigated a group including PSV Eindhoven and Dinamo Zagreb before falling 1-0 on aggregate to Lyon in the round of 32.  

The winter break saw five foreign players depart the redeveloped Chernomorets Stadium. “Given the extremely difficult socio-political situation in Ukraine and Odessa….we were forced to meet the persistent requests of foreign players and their families who are extremely concerned for their safety,” the club’s website reported.  With owner Leonid Klimov – a fireman turned banking and real estate magnate – a parliamentary deputy and prominent supporter of ousted president Viktor Yanukovych, the future funding of the club remains uncertain, leaving manager Roman Grigorchuk reported to be looking for a new job.  The recent unrest in the city - Chernomorets and Metalist Kharkiv ultras implicated in the running street battles with pro-Russian demonstators which culminated in 48 deaths after Molotov cocktails set a building ablaze -  saw the scheduled home fixture with Karpaty Lviv played instead at the Obolon Stadium in Kyiv, 3,200 fans witnessing the goalless draw which left Chernomorets - among the early season pacesetters - having to settle for another fifth-placed finish.  For the city’s football fans setbacks are nothing new.  “Odessa,” thought the US academic Charles King, ”disappoints as much as it inspires.”

The Roof are Going Up: Willington AFC 0 Jarrow Roofing 3 (McBryde (2) and Myers)

 Danny Carson facing Willington walls.

 

 Home spectators on the touchline

 Team news and the tea hut hatch

 Assistant manager Ian Davison ponders a Roofing substitution

 Waiting for the whistle.

 Goalmouth scramble aftermath.

Where there's a will: Richie McLoughlin on the pitch

And the promotion celebrations begin...

Jarrow Roofing: The Handmade Football Club

This is the club that Richie McLoughlin built, the ground he assembled, the players he trained.   Offered an overgrown field and old, tarmacked car park on condition they wouldn't cost the owners a penny to develop,  McLoughlin used spare time and materials to create a handmade, homespun venue fit for Northern League football and beyond.  Just 18 years after the team he founded first entered the South Tyne Senior League,  1,100 spectators crammed into the Boldon CA Sports Ground for a game that could have taken Jarrow Roofing all the way to White Hart Lane.

"I went and got some machinery, cadged wagons and diggers and made a start," he recollected to the Northern League magazine. "Wherever I went, I'd collect some more gear. The floodlight pylons were a bit of a problem but Brian Marshall (the club president) worked at the pit, so we were all right when it closed. We've just pieced everything together."  The Observer, visiting for an FA Cup preliminary round tie in September 2007, found him working as "coach, chairman, owner, scout, secretary, treasurer, groundsman and chief sponsor", their headline lauding "Jarrow's mini-dynamo."  The intervening years have seen him slow down a bit - these days he's no longer secretary.

He's still got his eye for a player, David Carson going from a Roofer last May to a Blackburn Rovers contract in March.   The 18 year old is just one of many professional footballers to pull on the blue-and-yellow shirt.  Ex-Sunderland first-teamers Kevin Arnott, Tony Cullen and Craig Russell - a £1 million signing for Manchester City - have all later played for or alongside McLoughlin.  So too Wes Saunders - brought up in neighbouring East Boldon, promoted together with Kevin Keegan, Peter Beardsley and Chris Waddle at Newcastle United and later Paul Gascoigne's agent and manager of Torquay - and Paul Robinson, the striker Ruud Gullit preferred to Shearer and Duncan Ferguson in his valedictory gesture as manager at St James' Park.  Three-time FA Vase winner Paul Chow was a youthful member of the forward line when Roofing made the semi-final of the same competition in 2005, while McLoughlin himself - manager since the club was founded in 1987 - has a claim to be the oldest man to play an FA Cup tie, lasting the full 90 - in his late, late 40s - during a preliminary round game against Bootle in 1999.

"I'm here first thing in the morning, go to work and then land back at the ground," Richie said in an interview to mark the club's 25th anniversary in 2011-12. "I can't tell you how much time I spend here, and I'd better not tell you how much money."

Jarrow Roofing's dynamo just keeps powering on. 

Ground 232: Teesdale Park, Thornaby FC

Ruled by Vikings, razed by Normans, Thornaby's been namechecked by Tennyson and home to aviators, the actor Richard Griffiths - later Harry Potter's priggish and Withnail's lovelorn, predatory uncle - and an industrial behemoth that shipped bridges and blast furnaces all over the world.  It was here in 1987 that Margaret Thatcher strolled in heels for the cameras across concrete, dead weeds and the detritus of industry.  "The walk in the wildnerness," they called it, the prime minister recoiling from the litter-strewn, foul-smelling riverbank and later accosted by an unemployed man with 1,000 failed job applications who she blithely told to "retrain."

The abandoned factory land included a sports ground used by a Northern League football team which was repeatedly laid waste in the decades that followed Thatcher's latter-day harrying of the north. Vandals smashed, graffitied and torched buildings,  used the pitch as a dumping ground, stole metal touchline barriers and  drove over every single inch of the playing surface. "When I first came here the ground was like a bombsite," team manager and acting club secretary Ray Morton told Northern Ventures Northern Gains in March 2011.  Two months later he received a Northern League award for his work towards saving a team that had been first demoted and then threatened with expulsion due to the constant attacks on their ground.  "The great survivors of the Northern League," one visitor called them.

Recent years have seen Thornaby lose a cup final but win accolades off the pitch, using grants, lottery cash, donations and thousands of volunteer labour hours  to impressively spruce upTeesdale Park. Tucked between golf and cricket clubs, a cemetery, and a retail park where Stockton Racecourse once stood,  there are now fitness and nature trails, a clubhouse,  picnic area, teen shelter, junior football academy and even plans for a forest school. "There was a definite need to identify with the local community in a more effective way," the club's matchday programme history modestly explains. The local McDonald's sponsors the ground, while Crimestoppers and Teesside's evening paper supply perimeter hoardings.  A smart new covered seating block remembers Peter Morris, the long-serving secretary who collapsed after refereeing a five-a-side game in 2010, the ground completed by a combination of hard standing, grass banking, a pair of bus shelters, a terrace with corrugated roof and tarpaulin back, and open-air seats, in blue and red, next to an entrance that once needed a full-time guard to keep it secure.

I drive down the A19 with Jarrow Roofing boss Richie McLoughlin, media manager Andy Hudson and Justin Perry, once of Sunderland, Cardiff City, Barry Town and Rhyl.   The 41-year-old striker has played in the Champions League and UEFA Cup and was a mainstay of Roofing's run to the Vase semi-final in 2004-05, but is nowadays more often among the substitutes. "Full game today?"  McLoughlin teases. "I hope not," he laughs.   Pre-season promotion favourites,  the Roofers have stuttered of late with successive defeats to Washington and West Allotment Celtic before a win over South Shields which left McLoughlin's side two points short of Seaham Red Star wth two games in hand and four left to play. "Three more wins does it," assistant-manager Ian Davison says.

An impeccably observed minute's silence for the 96 victims of Hillsborough precedes a 3.07 kick-off,  spectators bowing heads and players shivering in semi-circles as a cold wind whips across the pitch. Every ball and bit of space is contested, the home side edging the early stages but Roofing's Stuart Nicholson - a former England Under-19 and West Bromwich Albion player in his final game for the club before emigrating to Australia - lofts over after a three-man move also involving skipper Dan Kirkup and Corey Barnes, a 16-year-old debutant for Darlington when they were still in the Football League.  Thornaby's Curtis Edwards loses control off his knee with only Andy Hunter to beat, Barnes clearing off the Roofing goal-line moments later as the Teessiders surge forward. "We only need one goal," a Thornaby fan says as the teams clatter off at half-time.

Davison goes off for forward Stephen Young,  Shaun Heads switching to left-back as McLoughlin tries to counter a strong Thornaby opening to the half.  "We're winning nowt, man.  We've got to start winning something," screams Andy Hunter.  The home side tire, Michael Duff clinging on with Roofing's 27-goal striker Andy Appelby poised for the rebound; a Nicholson cross is deflected into Duff's arms and then Danny Carson clears upfield, Appleby draws the goalkeeper and lifts the ball high into the net.  Roofing keep pushing, Young missing a glorious chance to kill the game before an Anth Myers pass is cut out, Thornaby break through tackles and Ged Livingston levels the scores.  In a frantic last few minutes, the reinvigorated home side have a penalty appeal turned away, the referee exiting to shouts of "Absolute rubbish" as a disconsolate Roofing walk silently off.  "It's still there for us," McLoughlin says, but with Seaham beating Ryton those three wins seem just a bit further away.

Admission:  £5
Date: Saturday April 12th 2014

Ground 231: Bullocksteads, Heddon FC

They hadn't seen so many foreigners in Heddon since Emperor Hadrian's legions stuck up Milecastle 12.  It was February 2001 and the foot and mouth outbreak - which had spread across Britain to Germany, Ireland, France and the Netherlands - had been traced back to a pig unit by the A69. Cue exclusion zones and import bans, almost four million animals slaughtered and £9 billion in costs.  "People kept away...on meeting people who found out you were from the Heddon area, you were sometimes treated with suspicion," runs one eyewitness account on the village website.

The village football club was born the year after with the merger and acquisition between Northern Alliance teams Proctor & Gamble and Heddon Institute. The players made news of their own with a First Division title and six seasons in the Alliance top-flight, finishing as high as fourth in a division that included current Northern Leaguers Alnwick Town, Heaton Stannington and Celtic Nation (née Gillford Park) before going down with Newcastle University in May 2010.  Denied promotion when their ground failed the grading requirements, the Tyne Valley club moved back to Bullocksteads - variously used by Newcastle Gosforth Rugby Club, the University of Northumbria, Newcastle United Women's Reserves and Tyneside Irish FC - but lost one manager to neighbours Ryton and Crawcrook, a second to work commitments and their first five games of the season by an aggregate score of twenty-six goals to six.  When only half a team turned up for a game with Ponteland United the club decided to call it a day.  Salvation came from Cowgate Juniors, Billy Finlay providing a decade of experience, a crop of young players and a 4-3 win from 3-0 down to local rivals Hexham in his opening game in charge.  "It's been a torrid time but things can only get better," secretary John Shaxon told the Hexham Courant.  

Six months and 19 matches later, Heddon enter today's game against promotion chasing Newcastle Chemfica (Ind) having won three of their last four but with only Willington Quay Saints below them in the league.   The visitors, probably the only team in the entire pyramid whose name resembles a losing candidate in a local election, have already beaten Finlay's side this season but had been wobbling like Ed Miliband's poll ratings before last week's 4-0 home win over Wooler. "Don't let them bully you...it's a nice pitch so keep it on the deck first and then get behind them," the Chemfica trainer tells his starting eleven.  "You're not in any rush."

The pitch is railed off with metal dugouts, one part of a Univeristy of Northumbria-managed complex in the open space between Woolsington Village and the Kingston Park rugby ground.  Chemfica draw patterns but the home side go closest with a looper that the goalkeeper turns against the bar.  A few minutes of Heddon pressure later ends in a cross taking out everyone except Frank Storey, a lone forward of Stakhanovite workrate and Desperate Dan build, who nods in to the empty net.  "Hold", "Squeeze out halfway", "Push", "Start again" and "Don't foul," exhorts the beaten Chemfica keeper, though a passerbymight wonder if he's marshalling his defence or toilet training a pet dog.  A defender's head preserves Heddon's lead before a free kick evades two attackers and the goalkeeper's dive, dropping into the far corner to square the game.  Tempers flare, two players challenge for a ball and a Chemfica striker drops to the ground.  "Absolute disgrace.  It's supposed to be a football game,"  Chemfica boss Nigel Reeves shouts.  "Not as bad as he made out.  He caught him, like.  Elbow," a Heddon official reckons.  "It's wrang," says a spectator. There's thirty seconds' silence and then a yellow card. "Lucky," a Heddon fan tells me.  "Very lucky."

After a six-minute break we're into the second half.  A three-man, one-touch passing move nudges Chemfica ahead, an individual goal from the Spaniard Dan Sherliker makes it three, and a tap-in after a defender miskicks the ball puts the visitors 4-1 up with just  over an hour played.  The home side never give up, sneaking a goal back and seeing their keeper impressively deny both Sherliker and the tireless Dieu Lomana, but with only four games remaining Finlay's team are still three points short of beating the drop.

Admission:  None
Date:  Saturday March 29th 2015

Ground 230: Heritage Park, Bishop Auckland

1889 was the year the Eiffel Tower opened, Charlie Chaplin was born and the first Kodak camera went on sale. In sport, John L. Sullivan retained his heavyweight title after 75 rounds of bare-knuckle boxing, Preston North End's invincibles lifted the inaugural Football League championship, and Charles Samuel Craven, a 25-year-old railway engineer, invited 19 clubs from Durham and Northumberland to a meeting in Brown's Hotel, Durham City.

Only seven turned up - and only three of those took part in the first season of Craven's brainchild, the Northern League.  Saturday September 7th saw 1,500 supporters and Newcastle East End waiting 45 minutes for Darlington to arrive by train, and Elswick Rangers - beaten 4-1 at Birtley - protests so vehemently about the result that it was eventually counted as a draw.  A Catholic church team, Darlington St Augustine's, won the first title on goal difference from Newcastle West End, who played their home games at St James' Park.

East and West End became Newcastle United, while Darlington, Middlesbrough (fifth and sixth that first season), Scarborough, York City - who registered 746 players in the first three months of their two year stay - and Sheffield United all progressed from Northern League to Football League.  The Blades provided two Northern League players for England in 1892-93, Middlesbrough won the first of the League's 24 FA Amateur Cups in 1895, while Middlesbrough Ironopolis - formed by disaffected members after Boro's committee refused to countenance turning professional - won three successive Northern League titles, played a midweek friendly by "artificial lamplight" and took Preston to a replay in the quarter-final of the FA Cup watched by 15,000 fans.  West Auckland won Lipton Trophies in 1909 and 1911, defeating Juventus and  FC Zürich while finishing no higher than fifth in the Northern League.  Crook Town beat Barcelona and gave the Catalans their second longest serving manager behind Johan Cruyff. 

Raich Carter, Bob Paisley, Brian Clough, Frank Clark, Gary Pallister and Chris Waddle are just half a dozen of the hundreds of professional footballers who spent their formative years in the Northern League.  It developed referees and cricketers too:  England fast bowler Steve Harmison played centre-half for Ashington in the mid-1990s; George Courtney, Terry Farley, Pat Partridge, Peter Willis, Michael Oliver and Mark Clattenburg all officiated in the League.  Courtney, Northern League president since 1997,  started out on Cockfield Hill recreation ground - "A public footpath crossed the pitch. Every few minutes I'd be stopping the game to let a litle old lady cross with her shopping bags," he told the he told the wonderful Northern Conquest  - and went on to two World Cups and three European finals. Over 100,000 people saw Crook Town and Bishop Auckland meet in a Wembley final that Kenneth Wolstenhome rated the best sporting occasion of 1954.  Four years later, the Bishops lent three players to Manchester United.  One, Warren Bradley, scored two goals in three games for England just over 12 months after playing in the Northern League.  Seamus O'Connell, another Bishops man, played at Cockfield in October 1954 and then hit a First Division hat-trick for Chelsea against Manchester United the following weekend. Blyth Spartans - "the most famous non-league football team in the world" - came within a minute of an FA Cup quarter-final,  Whitley Bay won three back-to-back Wembley finals, Gretna - Northern League members for a decade from 1982 - lost at Hampden to Hearts and made the Scottish Premier League.

Brown's is now student accommodation and Craven buried in far-flung East Grinstead but the competition he founded - the second oldest league in the world - has endured into his 125th year.  "We wanted to make a fuss of this anniversary for several reasons," says genial chairman Mike Amos, "not least that most of us in league administration are unlikely to be around for the 150th."  Wreaths have been laid at Craven's grave, and a celebration service at Durham's Elvet Church - a pitch's length from that first meeting place - and anniversary lunch are followed by tonight's commemorative game between a Northern League Select and an FA X1 largely drawn from former member clubs.

Bishop Auckland's smart new stadium - covered on two sides, temporary seating on a third and a giant Sainsbury's behind the other - is around a fifth full, the damp night, Premier League football and an out-of-bounds bar putting all but 305 fans off attending. "We've got a young team but they're really enjoying it," one of the FA coaches tells me before the game.  "It's a big honour for us all."  The quality of the programme - written nationally, edited in Jarrow and designed in Serbia - is rich testament to a league which continues to innovate and inspire well outside its traditional County Durham borders.  "It's both a real pleasure and an immense privilege to welcome everyone," Amos writes in his notes.  The game itself is incidental to the occasion.  We kick off at 7.30pm, almost 125 years to the minute since the meeting that started the whole thing.  A raft of half-time substitutions is followed by Stephen Capper - Republic of Ireland U21 international, Vase winner and three-time titlist with Spennymoor Town - smashing in from a quick break on the hour.  Ashington skipper Andrew Johnson heads a second eight minutes later, the FA's best chance of a reply foiled when Dunston's Liam Connell turns a shot against the bar.  The players are presented one by one after the final whistle and Bob Rogers, grandson of the founder, talks of his pride in seeing what the Northern League has become.  Outside, fans drift away into the County Durham mist. "If you ask what makes the Northern League such a very, very special place to be," Amos writes in Northern Conquest, "then the principal answer will always be its people."

Date:  March 25th 2014
Admission:  £5

The League's anniversary celebrations continue with an exhibition at Manchester's National Football Museum (until April 30th).  Former Northern League ground St James' Park hosts this year's League Cup Final on May 6th.  The excellent Northern Conquest is available for just £3.99 from any Northern League ground, on amazon, or by post here.

Ground 229: Whitburn Academy, Whitburn Athletic FC.

In the first half of the twentieth century Whitburn's coastal hamlet and colliery produced up to 1,500 tons of coal per day, the creative impetus for Lewis Carroll and half a dozen FA Cup finalists.  West Ham United's Billy Henderson and Jack Young formed an all-Whitburn full-back pair in 1923.  Portsmouth's 1929 line-up included Jack Weddle at centre-forward and inside-left Jack Smith, both men returning to Wembley in 1934 along with Billy Smith at left full back.  Weddle's hat-trick in the 4-1 semi-final victory over Leicester had seen off a third Smith brother, Sep playing over 500 times for City, attracting £10,000 bids from Arsenal and Aston Villa and becoming by common acclaim "the greatest player ever to wear the club's shirt".  "An extraordinary footballer," Don Revie thought.  "He played a big part in shaping my career."  Joe Smith  also found his way to Filbert Street; Tom Smith turned out for Manchester United, Norwich City and Northampton Town.  The five brothers started in homemade boots with corks nailed in for studs.  Two were capped by England.  They returned every summer to play cricket for the village team.

And still the players came. John Hastings was a half-back at Rotherham United, George Farrow a wing-half who played for Bournemouth, Wolves, Sheffield United and Blackpool. Centre-forward Bill Robinson scored a four-minute hat-trick for Sunderland, won the 1947 final with a Charlton Athletic side including fellow South Tynesiders Sam Bartram and Jack Shreeve, and was  player, coach and assistant manager at West Ham United. Keith Waugh, schooled in the village in the same decade the pit finally closed, went on to make over 400 league appearances in goal for Bristol City, Peterborough, Sheffield United and Watford.

Sep Smith had received a £150 signing-on fee and £4 a week when he turned professional at Leicester in 1929.  Eighty-five years on Whitburn Athletic's amateur footballers train on Mondays and Wednesdays, pay weekly subs and contribute £5 per red card, 50p for turning up in dirty boots and 20p for each goal conceded into the shared players' pool.  Formed by Andy Smith in 2010, three years facing the likes of the Dray and Horses, Wearside Wildcats, East Durham Spartans, Blue Stone Construction, Aquatic Sports and Sunderland University 'B' in the Wearside Combination League preceded last summer's switch to the Northern Football Alliance Division Two.  Their first game was a 4-1 spanking by Longbenton, though last weekend's 1-1 draw against the same opposition marked the club's progress since a difficult opening two months which also saw them lose 3-0 at High Howdon and 7-1 at home to Grainger Park Boys Club.

There's a seating capacity of five picnic tables and six benches at the Whitburn Academy pitch, with views of the North Sea and Sunderland's cantilevered stands.  Club officials run the touchline, the perimeter's marked out with yellow tape and the substitutes are kept busy chasing stray balls.  "Keep it tidy, keep it tidy, fellas.  Nothing silly," referee James Milne says just moments before a late tackle draws the afternoon's first yellow card.  "Settle doon, that's his first one," shouts a High Howdon Social Club defender.  "He won't listen, man," says a teammate. "He's still in nappies, this one."  The complaints are even louder when a Howdon midfielder gets a straight red.  "He's gonna gi' wu nowt if we whinge so shut it!" the visiting keeper tells his team.  Despite their numerical disadvantage, the away side take the lead on 38 minutes when a Whitburn player is dispossessed and the hardworking number 9 rifles a shot into the bottom corner.

Athletic think they've equalised midway through the second half, their players back on the halfway line and the referee cautioning the Howdon keeper for dissent before he spots the visiting official's late flag.  "Can I have a word, please?" Whitburn's manager asks.  "It looked offside to me," Milne says apologetically.  A goal's chalked off in similar circumstances at the other end, levelling the sense of injustice if not the scoreline.  When the final whistle goes, it's the black and white shirts of High Howdon who are making all the noise.

 The gates to Sunderland's former training ground, at the entrance to Whitburn village. 

Admission:  Free
Date: Saturday 22nd March 2014