Newton Aycliffe is another of those places that’s not too far from me, but I’ve never been to. I suppose you’d need a reason to go there and I’d never had one. That is, not until I’d wanted to tick off their Northern League ground.
I parked up near to the Moore Lane Sports Club and was directed towards the pitch through a gate in a wooden fence. It was seven quid to get in and the only team sheet available was fixed to a wall. There were no programmes either, due to “the media officer having gone to Hartlepool”.
I enjoy flicking through a programme, but I can appreciate that with sales likely to be in low double figures it’s a thankless task to produce them. Hopefully the career progression of the former media officer will encourage someone looking for a start in football media work to get involved at Newton Aycliffe and resurrect their matchday magazine.
I bought raffle tickets giving the chance to win a bottle of something or other and took a seat in the covered stand along one side of the pitch. Newton Aycliffe turned out in blue with Billingham Town in a white kit. The hosts are challenging for promotion from Division One of the Northern League with Town down at the bottom of the table.
The pitch was fairly cut up by modern standards with both goalmouths made up of mud rather than grass. Newton Aycliffe looked good early on and took the lead in the opening minutes with a shot that may have been deflected more than once.
The talking point of the first half was a Billingham town striker being sin-binned for telling the ref to “Fuck Off’. Whilst swearing is ever-present in football, there’s a line and he crossed it. I like the sin-bin approach being trialled in the Norther League but I’d like it more if players were simply sent off instead for abusing officials.
Newton Aycliffe added a second goal twenty minutes from time when a precise ball across the face of the goal was tapped in to clinch a win that keeps them in contention for promotion.
Harry and I got back from the Boro’s game at Old Trafford earlyish on the Saturday morning and after dropping him off I should really have got on with some outstanding jobs. I had a quick look on the Wearside League website though and saw that there was a game with a 1.30pm kick-off just a twenty-minute drive up the road. The jobs could wait.
The fixture that I’d spotted was in the First Round of the Clem Smith Bowl. I’d never heard of the competition or of Clem Smith. It featured two sides from the twelfth-tier Second Division of the Wearside League, Wheatley Hill Working Men’s Club and Ryhope Colliery Welfare Under Twenty-Threes. Wheatley Hill play at the Old Fire Station, a ground that took some finding.
I’ve never been to Wheatley Hill before and to be honest its unlikely that I’ll have a reason to return unless it’s part of some witness protection programme. I reckon you could hide someone there indefinitely as long as they could resist the urge to nip back to civilization every now and then.
My sat nav initially took me down a farm track which in hindsight wasn’t too far from where I wanted to be, but with fences between my car and the pitch it might as well have been miles away. Wheatley Hill isn’t a big place though and I eventually stumbled across the game. There wasn’t an old fire station anywhere within sight, so maybe The Field Near To The Allotments Ground might have been a better name.
The game was a few minutes old by the time I’d parked up and made my way in via a gate at one corner of the field. Wheatley Hill were in yellow and black with Ryhope in red and white. I hadn’t missed any goals. A quick count up of the crowd suggested that I was the seventh spectator.
As so often happens at this level the linos were drawn from the ranks of the subs or coaching staff. Neither of the press-ganged fellas on this occasion were keen to be involved and one kept the flag in his coat pocket whilst the other left the flag on the floor and picked it up only when absolutely necessary.
Wheatley Hill took the lead a few minutes after I arrived with a poorly struck shot that bounced in off a post whilst the keeper, who had chosen not to dive, watched on in horror. The standard was as bad as I’ve seen for a while, but the uneven pitch and terrible weather didn’t help at all. I wouldn’t have fancied turning out in the wind and rain. Actually I didn’t fancy watching either, it was just too cold and wet. I called it a day long before half-time and checked on the result later. It had finished as a two-all draw with the home side taking the tie on pens.
When we were drawn against Man Utd in the Fourth Round of the Cup I initially thought that a televised Friday night slot and close to ten thousand tickets being available to Boro fans would make it easy for me to continue my run that stretches back to the Extra Preliminary Round back in August of having attended a game in each round of this season’s competition.
The fixture, however, caught the imagination on Teesside and it sold out long before sales reached recent season card holders like Harry and myself. Fortunately, my friend Paul saved the day with a couple of corporate hospitality tickets that he had going spare at work. Cheers, mate!
I picked Harry up when he finished school for the day and set off for a trip that on a good run would take no more than a couple of hours. With the match traffic and the usual M62 Friday tea-time congestion it ended up taking around three and a half hours. Parking spaces were non-existent and I had to leave the car in a spot where I probably shouldn’t have within our hotel car park. I’ll wait and see if the postman brings a penalty notice.
We followed the crowds to Old Trafford and reached the Sir Bobby Charlton Suite with ten minutes to spare. We had to pass through an airport-style scanner on the way in, although I’d have thought doing it on the way out to stop us nicking any silver cutlery might have been a better use of it.
The lounge was just about the right level of poshness with buffet food available and a couple of bars. It was busy, but far less of a crush than you’d get in a concourse. Our last-minute arrival meant that that we didn’t have much time for anything other than a pre-match slash, but we were in our seats as the teams came out.
We were surrounded by Man Utd fans, but they were very friendly in that way that you can be when you expect your team to win. They saw it as our ‘big day out’ and smiled indulgently at every chance they squandered, confident that there would be others. As you might have seen on the telly they ran out of chances eventually and we nicked it on pens. Big day out indeed.
I was interested in their attitude to Phil Jones. He’s been out injured for a long time and his appearance from the bench was treated with mirth. They praised everything he did with a smirk, as if he was there as a competition winner or something and clearly thought Man Utd were too good for a player like him. He didn’t look any worse a centre-half than Harry McGuire to me and I wouldn’t swap either of them for Dael Fry.
It seems commonplace these days for me to praise Chris Wilder in these posts and this one is no different. I’ve lost count of the times when a big Boro cup turnout has seen key players ‘rested’. Stevie Mac infuriated me at times in the UEFA Cup runs with his selections, although to be fair to him he generally got the results that he needed to overall. This was a full-strength selection from Wilder with the intention of giving it a real go against a Man Utd line-up that the fans around me reckoned was as strong as it could be from the players that they had available. It’s great when decisions like that pay off.
This game against Coventry was the third of the eleven that Harry and I get to see with our half-season tickets. The previous two matches had seen us take an in-form Forest team apart and then nick a win at the death against Reading.
Ever the optimist, Harry was confident that Coventry wouldn’t pose a problem, but mindful of the performance against Reading and the defeat away at Blackburn since then I wasn’t quite so sure.
It was a cold day again, with the wind making it even chillier. I was well wrapped up but the grandson was kitted out in a hoodie and one of his Dad’s old Boro shirts. I gave him my gloves when he started to shiver.
The game played out more in line with my expectations than Harry’s with Coventry looking the better side for much of the first half. Wilder made a couple of changes early in the second half and they paid off almost straight away with Balogun crossing for Sporar to tuck away the only goal of the game.
I was impressed again with the way that Wilder made a difference. He only seems to make substitutions to address a specific issue and so far they have paid off more often than not. Even better was him explaining his reasoning for the changes in post-game interviews in an intelligent and informative manner. It’s a long way from the guarded folksy platitudes of Warnock and light years away from the pig-ignorant nonsense that was dished up in the Strachan era. It’s a good time to be following the Boro.
I’d looked at heading to a game at Ford Quarry earlier in the season but spotted that you needed a covid pass to get in. At the time I was in limbo due to having had a couple of Sputnik jabs whilst in Russia that were preventing me from being further vaccinated in the UK. As the Russian vaccines aren’t recognized in the UK I was struggling to provide any sort of evidence that would get me into events such as a tenth tier football game taking place outdoors with fewer people in attendance than you’d find wandering around Aldi.
Eventually I took matters into my own hands and, by not mentioning my previous jabs, managed to get a couple of Moderna shots at walk-in centres. I’m now eligible for covid passes and once I get a booster I’ll probably, with five vaccinations, have been jabbed more often than most Gennardy Golovkin opponents.
After all of that it turned out that I didn’t need a covid pass after all for the Ford Quarry. I just needed to provide them with my contact details. Once I’d done that I was through the first set of turnstiles and after handing over a fiver admission charge I was soon through the second set and pitch side.
Ford Quarry is just off St. Luke’s Road in Sunderland and so the drive to the game had all been very familiar. My Dad grew up on that road, just a little further along from the Ford Quarry turn-off, and it’s a journey from Norton that I must have done at least two or three hundred times, mainly more than thirty years ago.
Quite a lot of the area just off the A19 has changed since then and it looks as if the old Echo offices have gone. When returning back to Teesside on a Saturday night after visiting my grandparents I was always keen to look out for the neon character up on their wall that signified the Sunderland result by the position of his arm and facial expression.
The photo is of my great-grandad at the house in St. Luke’s Road with what looks like a clay pipe. You don’t see many people smoking those these days.
The fixture between Sunderland West End and Easington Colliery was in the second division of the Northern League. Both teams are fairly new at that level and I suppose I still think of them as being Wearside league clubs. The Northern League, for one reason or another, has opened up and engaged with the pyramid to a much greater extent in recent years and as clubs make the moves upwards to the Northern Premier and the National leagues, it creates space for the likes of these two.
There’s a reasonable chance that both side might progress again this season with visitors Easington going into the game in third place in the table with West End just a point behind in fourth.
The conditions weren’t ideal for football with a strong wind blowing from one end of the pitch to the other. Any empty Quavers packet blew past me at a pace that would have triggered a speed camera and any passes hit in that direction didn’t need a lot of weight on them.
It was cold as well as windy with most of the two hundred or so crowd well wrapped up. A fair few kept warm by raging at the match officials. The lino on our side copped a bit due to his close proximity whilst the ref got similar treatment mainly because that’s what always happens but also because he let a lot go. Mind you, if he had blown for more fouls I’m sure he’d have got stick for that too.
Easington had the best of the opening half-hour, culminating in a ‘goal’ being disallowed for a marginal offside. The lino abuse hadn’t fully died down before West End broke away and opened the scoring. I thought the away keeper made it easier for the striker by leaving a big gap to one side but it was still a tidy finish.
At half-time I went into the clubhouse for a cup of tea and a warm. I missed winning two bottles of vodka in the draw by a single number. It was won by the fella sat next to the bloke who did the draw. That made handing over the prizes a simple task.
I watched the second half from behind the goal at the clubhouse end as I thought that there might be better shelter from the gale. There was a lot of pressure from Easington and a few missed chances before Sunderland ran out the clock with some convenient injuries to hold on for the win.
The three points were sufficient for them to swap places with Easington and move into third place in the table.
As a ground hopper who keeps a tally of games that I’ve attended I love it when I get a new ground as a bonus. This one came about as I was up at the Ford Quarry in Sunderland for a Northern League game. Ford Quarry is a newish venue with three pitches in close proximity. The kids game was on pitch 2 and as I waited for the match on pitch 1 to begin I had a brief watch.
As you’d expect for an academy game the players all had a decent touch. After all, they should be the best players of their age in their town. Maybe Sunderland, as a former Premier League team, has an academy that casts their net even wider.
One thing that stuck me was the different sizes of the players. Some looked their age or younger, others could have been grown blokes. It reminded me of our kickabouts on Freddy Natt field on those occasions when we were joined by the blokes spilling out of the Centenary fresh from their Sunday lunchtime sessions.
I’ve no idea what the score was or even which was the better team as the main event was due to start but I did wonder how many of those lads might make it to the Stadium of Light or the Victoria Ground and whether any will end up on the next pitch along in a Northern League game. Either is good.
For one reason or another my match-going has all been at weekends recently. I’d been hoping to get along to a game or two mid-week, but other commitments and cancellations meant that it didn’t happen.
On the plus side I’d been able to attend a couple of gigs this week. The Howl and the Hum were back in town at Ku Bar on the Wednesday with the age of the crowd a fair bit lower than at most of the gigs we get to. They were very good. The odd song veered into U2 territory but a lot could easily have fitted into a Sea Power set. That’s good enough for me.
Two nights later we were at the Westgarth for The Men They Couldn’t Hang. One of our party described them as ‘Pound Shop Pogues’ which, on reflection, was probably a little harsh. Best thing though was that they had Bobby Valentino fiddling for them. Surprisingly he didn’t do his Bluebell’s Young at Heart riff. Is it a riff when it’s a violin? If I were him I’d be dropping it into every song I played. In fact I’d play a quick burst of it everywhere from waiting for cod and chips to queuing for a pile cream prescription. Unfortunately he missed out on a photo as he was skulking behind the speakers.
Anyway, after taking my Mam shopping at Tesco on the Saturday morning, Jen and I were free to head over to Kirksowald, near Penrith, for what was left of the weekend. It meant that we could do some walking the day after the game.
The walk went well and took in a loop that started and finished near to Kirkoswald Castle. The fortification was nothing special though and if I was planning to invade I’d target one of the pubs instead and leave the edge of village defences to themselves.
Our walk took over five hours and went to Little Salkend and back. On the way out we called at Lacy’s Caves and then returned via the Long Meg stone circle. Highlight though was walking through a field of attentive pigs. Sadly I was under strict instructions not to try and be-friend them but to just keep walking.
Pigs aside, there wasn’t much in the way of wildlife. I thought I’d spotted a deer lying close to the river but when we got nearer it turned out to be a log. It’s a rare species, the log deer. Not very skittish at all.
Ok, the match. We’d crossed the Pennines for a game in the Westmoreland League. It’s a league with three divisions that sit from the fourteenth to sixteenth tiers of the English pyramid. This was their highest level, a Division One game between Kirkoswald and Endmoor at Kirkoswald’s Old Showfield pitch.
Kirkoswald, in red and black, were going into the game in second place in the table with Endmoor, in green and black, in fourth.
We arrived just before kick-off and at a time when it looked like there were only two other spectators in attendance. As the game progressed the crowd swelled to around twenty, although some of them may well have been volunteer stewards or club officials.
It was free to get in and as the only parking was alongside the pitch we watched most of the game from the car. It was like being in an executive box. There weren’t any other options at the ground for sitting other than the swings at the nearby playground or getting a couple of camping chairs out of the boot.
It was a good natured game with the only vitriol reserved for the players who had been press-ganged as linos whenever they gave a fifty-fifty or less decision in favour of their own side. The ref, who spent most of the game pacing the centre-circle, ignored or overruled the dodgiest of the decisions.
The standard, as you might expect at this level, wasn’t great, but it was a well-matched contest where the defences dominated. We reached half-time without either keeper having to make anything other than a regulation catch.
The teams were only away for five minutes at the break. That’s ideal when there’s no food or drink to queue for. Endmoor took the lead with twenty minutes remaining. The ball fell to someone loitering around the penalty spot and whilst his shot didn’t have much power to it, he placed it well enough for the keeper to stand little chance.
The visitors held the advantage for around five minutes before their keeper gambled on reaching a through ball before the striker could. He didn’t quite get there in time and the ball was knocked past him into an empty net for one each.
There were no more goals and the draw did little to enhance Kirkoswald’s title chances. I suspect we will see a few more games in the Westmoreland League, as much for the surroundings as the football.
Well, how enjoyable was that? There’s nothing like a last gasp winner to put a smile on your face. Harry reckoned it must have been the best Boro comeback ever. “Could be,” I hedged, casting my mind back to Bucharest and Basle. Nobody wants to hear old blokes rattling on about things that happened before you were born though and so I passed on the opportunity to piss on his chips.
It was freezing in our East Stand seats. So cold that earlier in the day I’d just about killed off the rescue fish that have been living in a bucket in the kitchen. Their new home is going to be a big sink in the garden originally intended to be a planter. A two hour outdoor acclimatization spell in near freezing temperatures had caused them all to float on their backs and, whilst I’m no vet, that’s rarely a good sign in fish. After being brought back inside and having some warm water added they returned to normal. Maybe I’ll have to postpone their move for a bit longer.
If you were wondering what rescue fish are, they are minnows, sold as live food for other bigger fish to eat. I thought they might enjoy a life in a garden sink a bit more. I’m not so sure now.
Anyway, the game. We had a few chances first half but let them back into it after the break. Andy Carroll scored from a header for them and with time running out Mat Crooks headed an equalizer and then deep into injury time, a winner.
It wasn’t as good a performance as against Forest but I was pleased that Wilder had a Plan B. And then a Plan C.
The lunchtime kick-off at Mansfield meant that there was an opportunity to take in a second game of the day at the more traditional time of 3pm. We could have gone to a game just five minutes drive away but decided instead to head north for half an hour to Woksop.
There was a lot of congestion around the Mansfield ground and if I’d given it a little more thought and parked maybe a hundred or so yards further away we might very well have missed most of it and made the kick-off at Worksop.
As it was, the game was fifteen minutes in by the time we had parked up and paid the nine quid admission.
There looked to be five different stands with a main seated and covered one running along a lot of one side of the pitch. A further four covered standing areas were dotted around the ground and gave plenty of choice to the 455 in attendance. I particularly liked the one behind a goal that looked as if a roof had been fastened to an existing wall and then some steps added at ground level.
Worksop were hosting Pickering in the Northern Premier East Division. The home side, who are pushing for a play-off place, were in yellow and black with the relegation threatened visitors in their blue kit. It was still nil-nil as I took up a place on the barrier near a corner flag.
Pickering opened the scoring midway through the first half. I saw the buildup but was unsighted for the finish as I was in the queue for a coffee. I did see the equaliser a few minutes later at the other end though when a six yard box scramble was concluded with a headed goal.
The goals kept coming with the little bloke who I’d seen score the winner for Pickering the previous week finishing well on the half hour to put his side back in front. Worksop were level before the break though with another headed effort.
In the second half Worksop gradually got on top and the lad who had scored their first two goals added his third, again from a header. We had some drama in the last fifteen minutes with a melee that kept re-breaking out. Eventually one from each side was sent off but it could easily have been more.
There were no more goals though and Worksop ran out time to take the points.
I’ve been attending each round of this season’s FA Cup since the opening Extra Preliminary round back in August. As we’ve now reached the Third Round I had the option of continuing my streak to a ninth successive round by taking in a Boro game away at Mansfield.
The bad news, however, was that we had only been allocated 1700 tickets. At fifteen quid a pop they would be in high demand and I knew that I wouldn’t have sufficient priority points to get one. With that in mind I got in touch with Mansfield early on and nabbed a couple of hospitality tickets in the 1861 lounge for forty quid each. Result, as they say, and a bargain too.
Stadium parking wasn’t included in the price but I was ok with that as I didn’t want to be trapped at the ground after the game. We ended up in a car park about five minute’s walk away and Jen and I just followed the locals on a route that included a short cut through someone’s garden.
We had an hour to while away in the lounge before the 12.15 kick-off and after my second breakfast of the day, this time a full English, we were entertained by the recollections of former Mansfield player Micky Laverick. His heyday was the mid-seventies and I got the impression that era was Mansfield’s peak to date.
As kick-off approached we made our way out to the Ian Greaves Stand and our centrally located seats in the upper tier. My records state that I’d been to the ground before, thirty-five years previously in the first Rioch promotion season. Even after looking around, I’ve no recollection whatsoever of the game or even the day.
We were sat two rows behind the media people. I’ve no idea who does the Boro commentary these days as I gave up trying to connect when I was in Russia. I didn’t see anyone behind a microphone that I recognized but I was able to keep an eye on the young lad from the Northern Echo typing his updates.
The Boro support had the stand to our left. They kept up a decent volume throughout the game and the “Mansfield’s a shithole” ditty raised a few laughs from the home fans around us. “It is, mind” said one, “but it’s our shithole”. I know the feeling.
I was a little worried to learn that this was the strongest team that Mansfield had been able to field for a while. As we only had three players starting that I’d consider to be in our first-choice XI there was potential for an upset. It all went well to begin with though and we were two up early on with chances to put the tie out of Mansfield’s reach within the first twenty minutes.
The home side were better in the second half and we struggled to stay on top. It seemed to take a while for Wilder to get his instructions understood and as we gradually replaced the fringe players with regular starters Mansfield got back into it.
There were joyous celebrations all around us as they pulled one back and then equalized. Had the game gone to extra-time then I’d have made them favourites to win. As so often happens these days though Isaiah Jones made the difference when his injury time cross was diverted into the net for a match-winning own goal.
Trail of the Lion King 