A trip across the city...

Bradford Park Avenue 1 Hereford 0 (Northern Premier League, Saturday 22nd October)

When you decide to start up a football blog about Yorkshire non-league football, you have to accept that for every time you see Thackley hitting six against someone or a storming match between Guiseley and FC United, there will be some not-so-stellar games in there as well.

Although this game could technically be described as a battle of former league clubs, it was never actually a league fixture at any point in the past as Hereford weren't actually admitted to the football league until 1972 when they replaced Barrow and Park Avenue had lost their league status two yearss before, making way for Cambridge United. It's probably a moot point anyway as both clubs are actually phoenix ones, the original versions that played in the league having folded due to financial irregularities. But sod it, let's do a bit of background here anyway.

It seems weird to think some fifty years later given City's struggles since the halcyon days of their brief Premiership run around the turn of the millennium that there actually used to be two league clubs in Bradford but for over 60 years, that was indeed the case with City, based on the north side of the city centre in Manningham joining the League in 1903 and Avenue, based just south of it in Great Horton, following them five years later in 1908. Both teams were in the top flight in the 1910's but after World War I, both would find themselves dropping down to Division 2 and then Division 3 (North) as it was then. Ironically, it would be Avenue who would be the more successful of the two Bradford clubs in the inter-war years as they would return to Division 2 in 1928 and remain there right up until 1950 while City would also get promoted the same year but were back in the bottom flight by the time the Second World War broke out.

Following Avenue's relegation to the third tier, both Bradford clubs would spend the decade struggling although an upturn in City's form towards the end of the decade would see them placed in the new Division 3 when the League was reorganised in 1958 with Avenue dropping into Division 4. However, the 1961 season would see the clubs swap places with Avenue getting promoted and City relegated although Avenue's spell in Division 3 would be brief and two years later they would return to Division 4. Thereafter, they never really looked like getting out of the division again and their fourth re-election campaign in a row in 1970 turned out to be one too many with the club voted out of the League.

Avenue would struggle on for a few seasons in the Northern Premier League before financial problems caused the club to fold in the mid-'70s. A phoenix club would form at the end of the 1980's, starting off in the North West Counties League and slowly climbing the ladder to the Conference North where they currently reside. Ironically, within fifteen years of their demise, City had been promoted all the way back to Division 2 for the first time in half a century and would then go on to the Premiership fifteen years later. And of course it's been downhill ever since for them. But I'll come to that when I deal with Pools' away game at Valley Parade next March.

Hereford's demise is altogether more recent and I can certainly remember Pools playing them a few times in the '90s and '00s. Indeed, they had a reputation of being one of our eternal bogey teams along with Southend and Wycombe. Pools used to get the odd win over the Bulls at the Vic but Edgar Street was never a happy hunting ground for us and I think it might be the only ground where I've seen Pools bow out of the FA Cup twice. The second time was especially galling as I remember watching the second round draw on the Monday night after we'd hammered non-league Gainsborough 6-0 in the first round and seeing our number come out to face either Hereford or Leeds away. The teams had drawn at Edgar Street the previous evening and I think most people thought Leeds would finish them off at Elland Road. At the time, the Whites were having a dreadful season in League One, hopelessly adrift in mid-table (this would've been the dying days of Gary McAllister's reign as manager) and the fans were quickly becoming restless and turning on the team (so what’s new I hear you say). A couple of months before we'd played them at their place in the league and they'd been lucky to scrape a 2-2 draw against us - all we had to do it seemed was to get an early goal to set the discontent off and the atmosphere would work against the home team and bosh, Round 3 and hopefully an away trip to Newcastle, Sunderland or Middlesbrough would be ours.

What we didn't count on of course was Hereford having exactly the same idea - they won the replay at Elland Road 1-0 and people as far away as Barrow could probably hear the groans emanating from Pools fans as we realised we had to go to Edgar Street instead. Sure enough, despite being a division below us, the Bulls saw us off depressingly easily 2-0 and that was the Cup run over for another year.

Of course, fans of lower league clubs of a certain age will always associate Hereford with being the club that lost out to Brighton in the infamous battle to avoid relegation to the Conference on the last day of the season in 1997 where both the bottom two teams played each other and Brighton took the point they needed at Edgar Street to survive by the skin of their teeth. I have to be honest, as a fan of one of the teams who were in the group of strugglers at the sharp end of the table that season (again, the more things change…) and who only secured their safety a week or so beforehand, I felt desperately sorry for the Bulls that day. I'm sure no-one would deny how atrociously Brighton were being run at that time with a chairman who'd ruthlessly asset-stripped the club including selling the team's ground from under them to property developers and leaving the Seagulls homeless and having to play their away games 70 miles away in Gillingham and their rise from the ashes as a fan-owned club afterwards which eventually took them all the way to the Premiership is something you can't help but admire but the continual presence of people in the press that season droning on about "poor old Brighton" and how it would be such a shame if the club that gave the world Steve Foster and the Tesco carrier bag kit went out of the league at the expense of a bunch of nobodies like Hereford or Pools or Torquay or Darlington definitely stuck in a few of us' craws a bit. I remember reports from Pools' away game at the Goldstone Ground that season where the travelling fans decided to goad the home support with a chant (to the tune of "the *insert team name here* are going up") of "Thirty pounds a week, thirty pounds a week, GM Conference calling, GM Conference calling, GM Conference calling, thirty pounds a week!" We went on to lose 5-0 and gave Brighton their first win in about two months. Proof that sometimes it's best to wait until your team's actually ahead before getting cocky...

Hereford would return to the league eight years later and would even manage to scrape a season in League One but their fall afterwards would be rapid with the club only managing one season in the third tier before bombing back out of the League altogether a couple of years later and going bust shortly afterwards. A phoenix club, now dropping the United and simply called Hereford, has slowly worked its way back up the League to Conference North level (exactly how in any way you could describe Hereford as being in the north is a mystery to me but that's a whole other rant for another time).

Avenue now play their home games at Horsfall Stadium in Odsal right out on the south side of the city although the bus ride there took me past their original home on Horton Park Avenue which has now reverted to its original use as a cricket ground (Yorkshire used to play the occasional home game there back in the '90s but it's been years since I followed cricket so I dunno if they still do). At one point there was even talk of them moving up the road to Odsal Stadium to groundshare with the similarly fallen Bradford Bulls rugby league team who at the time had been turfed out of their ground due to not getting sufficiently high attendances to make staying there cost-effective and had been reduced to groundsharing with Dewsbury Rams but that never came to fruition. Given that Avenue's average attendance these days is somewhere around the 500 mark and Odsal has a capacity of over 10,000 you can kind of see why it neve got off the ground although these days the Bulls struggle to attract more than 3,000 to their home games - a sad state of affairs for a team that was one of the dominant forces in the Super League in its early years.

Horsfall Stadium reminds me a bit of a smaller version of Gateshead's ground in that it's primarily an athletics stadium with one big stand at the side and the rest being people standing around next to the barriers. There were a fair few Hereford fans who'd made the long journey north and were sampling the beers in Avenue's clubhouse before the game while I was catching up with an old school friend who I hadn't seen in twenty odd years and is now a regular at Avenue - it was good to see him again.

I wish I could tell you that this was a great end-to-end game with plenty of action but I would be lying. Going into the game, Avenue were stuck at the bottom of the table after a terrible start to the season (my friend had commented that there'd been a LOT of 1-0 home defeats for them) with Hereford firmly ensconced in the bottom half of the division as well. It showed. Both sides looked incredibly hesitant on the ball and the result was 45 minutes of long balls to no-one in particular. In fact the only thing of note was that I decided to head over to the snack bar for a burger midway through the half and the service was so slow that I ended up gone for about 15 minutes while the staff were...well, I'm not sure what they were doing to be honest. Upon finally returning to my seat, I asked my friend if I'd missed anything. His reply was that I very much hadn't.

Avenue did at least start to pick themselves up a bit in the second half and Hereford made a couple of substitutions to inject some pace into their decidedly lethargic midfield. There were even a couple of attempts on goal at this point but I mentioned with about 15 minutes to go that this one seemed to have nil-nil written on it from a mile off. In the end though, Avenue sneaked it via a penalty with about five minutes to go. An attack broke down in the box but the Hereford defence made an absolute hash of their clearance and sent it straight to Bradford's giant number nine Jacob Blyth. He ran into the box, a Hereford defender panicked and flailed out and brought him down and he promptly got up and scored.

To be fair, it was deserved - Avenue hadn't been great on the day but they'd looked marginally more threatening than Hereford for the previous twenty minutes. They would hold on and take a crucial three points to move them off the bottom of the division with the defeat dropping Hereford two places to 17th.

I'm sure I'll be back at Avenue again later in the season - hopefully their form will have picked up a bit by then and the game'll be a bit better than this one was!

Pennine derby in miniature!

Guiseley 2 FC United of Manchester 1 (Northern Premier League, Tuesday 18th October 2022)

To be honest, I was in two minds about whether to go to this one - the match at the weekend had left me a bit down to put it mildly. But sod it, sometimes you pick yourself up the floor and try and restore your faith in football. Which, happily, tonight's match very much did.

As I mentioned earlier in the season, the original plan was to go and see Guiseley play Marine for their first home game of the season before a heatwave (and, if I'm honest, a reluctance to leave the nice air-conditioned pub we were having a pre-game pint in!) intervened. However, the visit of FC United of Manchester intrigued me sufficiently that I decided to forego watching this week's Bake-Off to head to the game.

FC United are a bit of a funny one - they were formed as a breakaway club from Man United about twenty years ago following the Glazers' takeover at Old Trafford. So in a way the blueprint was for them to be kind of a northern version of AFC Wimbledon but they never quite reached the same heights. The team started out in the North West Counties League and after a few rapid promotions ended up reaching the Conference North (two divisions below the league) but then kind of ran out of steam and found themselves relegated back to the Northern Premier League a couple of years ago.

I kind of feel a bit sorry for FC United really as the emergence of Salford City in the last few years has kind of overshadowed them a bit - while there's plenty of goodwill and an impressive support behind FC (they must have brought a good 200-300 fans with them this evening swelling the attendance at Nethermoor to over 1000, almost double what Guiseley normally get), they don't have the likes of Scholes, Giggs, Beckham, Neville et al putting money into the club hence why they hit the glass ceiling while Salford have gone on to get promoted all the way up to League Two. I'll be honest, as a Pools fan I've always had a bit of a bee in my bonnet about clubs coming into the league in the last 10-15 years who would be several divisions down the pyramid if it wasn't for some sugar daddy investing in them as a plaything to swiftly be discarded when the novelty wears off. Ah sod it, let's name names - Crawley, Forest Green, Harrogate, Salford...sure they might have the money but when you've got a club who've only come good in the last couple of decades and are still struggling to attract 1500 most weeks despite their lofty league position taking the place of the established likes of Chesterfield, Notts County, Oldham et al in the league...well maybe it's just me but it doesn't feel right somehow.

Of course, this whole thing is nothing new - arguably the first club to fit this description to break into the league were Rushden and Diamonds back in the early noughties, formed when Dr Martens took over two local Southern League clubs, merged them and invested frankly stupid amounts of money to get them into the league. Rushden were promoted with Hartlepool in 2002 but while Pools would consolidate, the Diamonds were rapidly found out as the money dried up when the boot company ran into financial difficulties and were relegated straight back down to the fourth tier before bombing out of the league altogether two years later and into oblivion soon afterwards. You'd think it would be a lesson from history but I guess as long as there are people like Ryan Reynolds et al willing to plough stupid money and push clubs beyond their means only to abandon them as soon as they want to go and find a new toy to play with, the cycle is doomed to repeat eternally.

Anyway, rant over. The first thing we noticed upon getting to Nethermoor was a police presence, almost unheard of at Guiseley. I s'pose when you've got Man United fans travelling to a suburb of Leeds, you can't help but be careful. To be fair, both sets of fans were in good voice for the game and it made for a cracking atmosphere (although the holding up of play due to one of the players having racist abuse shouted at them was a disappointment - no need for that sort of thing in the game nowadays) and it made for a cracking game.

Guiseley seemed to have put their disappointment against Marine behind them, going into this game unbeaten in six, and although FC United were clearly no slouches as their position at the top of the league testified, apart from a few dangerous red attacks in the opening minutes, Guiseley pretty much grabbed this one by the scruff of the neck right from the word go, using their pace to torture the United defence. They took the lead on 25 minutes from a well worked goal which saw centre half Ellis lash a loose ball into the net. They held on to the advantage for the rest of the half and were good value for their lead at the break.

I think some words must have been had in the United dressing room as they came out for the second half with an added urgency to them, taking on the demeanour of an Alsatian that's just had its bone nicked.  The attacks started getting more and more dangerous and it wasn't a surprise when their substitute Rodwell-Grant, a youngster on loan from Wigan, equalised midway through the second half.

"Bugger," said my mate, "they're gonna lose this, aren't they?" As it turned out, quite the opposite happened - United's parity only lasted seven minutes before Guiseley got what turned out to be the winner as a quick break upfield saw their giant number nine and captain Jake Cassidy slot home.

I remembered Cassidy from his days at Hartlepool a few years earlier - it's safe to say he wasn't exactly a success there. One of a number of "guaranteed twenty goal a season strikers" signed by the various managers we had in charge during our National League years (Craig Harrison, Richard Money, Matt Bates etc), he never looked like getting anywhere near that during his sole season at the Vic, mostly just coming across as big and slow. Here though, he looked genuinely dangerous, using his size well to dominate the United defence and proving a thorn in their side all game.

The final whistle was greeted with a huge ovation from the home support. United remain top of the table but with just six points separating the top fifteen sides in the division (!), it really does look like this could be anybody's season at this point. Hopefully it'll be Guiseley's but we'll wait and see. Either way though, after the disappointment of the weekend, this was a good reminder of just how much fun a night out at the football can be sometimes. Much needed.

Dark times

Harrogate Town 2 Hartlepool United 1 (League Two, Saturday 15th October 2022)

The problem with trying to do a football blog is that sometimes life gets in the way hence the gap in entries for the last month or so. I had planned to go and see Eccleshill play Emley the week after the Thackley vs Maltby game but obviously a certain royal death put paid to that one. Then the weekend after that we had my in-laws staying at the house. Then the weekend after that we had friends up visiting from Cornwall. Then the week after that my wife was ill with Covid. Then the week after THAT, we were in London for my wife's birthday. However, this fixture had been in the diary for a couple of months and I wasn't going to miss it as it's the second nearest away game to where I currently live this season. And rest assured that lost time will be made up for in the next few weeks.

The last time I went to see Pools play at Harrogate, it was a pre-season friendly, they were in the Northern Premier League and we were in League One having come within a whisker of the Championship the previous season ("Where were you in the great play-off final defeat of 2005, dad?" "Row Z seat 34, son. God, it was hell.") And we lost the game 3-1. Looking back, it was a foreshadow of things to come that season as a Pools team "bolstered" by half a dozen new signings who were considerably worse than the players they were supposed to replace and a manager, Martin Scott, who was pretty much a textbook definition of ineptitude, crashed to relegation.

And speaking of inept managers and relegation...it's safe to say the start to our season this time out wasn't going well either. Paul Hartley, brought in from the Scottish League with quite a bit of fanfare a couple of months before, had been summarily sacked after failing to win any of his nine league games in charge, a record which must put him down there as one of the worst Pools managers of all time - quite an achievement given some of the clowns we've had in that post down the years (Bobby Moncur, Viv Busby, Craig Hignett, Colin Cooper et al)

For once, the club had acted quickly to bring in a replacement in the form of Keith Curle, arguably the sort of grizzled veteran League Two manager that Pools needed at this point. Thus far, the club had managed to get a win, two draws and a defeat from Curle's first five games which had seen them edge up the table. The style of play had become a lot more direct with the club moving to a 4-4-2 formation which seemed to be working well - certainly in Josh Umerah we had a striker who was big and burly but deceptively quick enough to benefit from playing this way and the signs were promising. Having seen Pools struggle badly when trying to play "total football" in the past and often get bullied off the park by teams as soon as they realised that by pressuring us that we'd quickly fall to pieces, it was quite nice to see Pools dishing this sort of treatment out for a change. Incidentally, a lot of the managers guilty of the "try and walk the ball into the net...oh and by the way, there's no plan B" approach had previously been coaches at Middlesbrough under Gareth Southgate. Draw your own conclusions from that.

Add to that we were playing a team who were, shock horror, actually below us in the table and I was actually feeling quite optimistic coming into this game as I hauled my half-asleep carcass across to North Yorkshire for the stupidly early 12:30 kick-off. Harrogate had been promoted to the league for the first time in their history a year before Pools returned but after a respectable mid-table finish in their first season, they'd got off to a storming start in their second only for their form to completely collapse after Christmas and the club to finish 19th. The rot had continued into the new season with an impressive 3-0 opening day win over Swindon at Wetherby Road proving to be something of a false dawn and the club only winning one further league fixture since. Surprisingly, there was no talk of the manager's job being under threat...but I suspect that's mainly because Town's manager Simon Weaver (who I remember as an absolute brute of a centre-half for Lincoln during his playing days) is the son of their chairman Irving which is probably why I had them down as one of my relegation favourites at the start of the season. As I'm sure the aforementioned Gareth Southgate will tell you, once opposition teams have worked out how to undo your tactics easily, it's a slippery slope.

Unfortunately, it didn't turn out that way. Two shocking defensive lapses saw Pools 2-0 down after 40 minutes and there was no way back. The first goal saw two defenders go for the same ball, both miss it and give former Pools transfer target Alex Pattison an easy run through to open the scoring while the second saw a cross evade everyone apart from Harrogate's Jack Muldoon who got a free header at the far post. A change of formation in the second half and a late consolation through Umerah who capitalised on some poor Harrogate defending was little consolation.

Looking at the team performance, while it looks as though Curle has the right idea, the truth is that thanks to Hartley, he's inherited a team that's simply not good enough for League Two. Both of Pools' centre-halves Murray and Lacey had the look of a pair of rabbits in the headlights for most of the game. Jamie Sterry, brilliant for much of the last couple of seasons, looked decidedly rusty after being rushed back from injury while our captain Dave Ferguson struggled due to being played out of position at centre-half and our left-back Brody Paterson, an ex-Celtic youngster, just looked lost and was subbed off at half time. The midfield wasn't much better - Mark Shelton, a star of the promotion campaign a few years earlier, was completely anonymous as was Tom Crawford, another who looked much better last season. The introduction of Wes McDonald who'd been our super-sub in the last couple of games, did at least add a bit of pace on the left but he ducked out of a lot of challenges and his final balls into the area were pretty poor mostly. Add to this others in the squad such as Tumilty and Hastie who had been signed by Hartley and quickly proved to be way below the standard required at this level to the point where they were now just taking up a slot on the wage bill that could be better allocated elsewhere, and the picture was pretty bleak. The only bright spot in the midfield was Mo Sylla who at least showed a bit of urgency in the first half, making the runs and tackles that his teammates were conspicuously failing to do and getting involved before mysteriously being subbed off at half time to be replaced by Callum Cooke who at least tried but looked well short of match fitness and was struggling to keep pace with his opposite numbers in the Harrogate team. Up front Josh Umerah had his usual decent game and new signing Theo Robinson, thrown into the team a mere two days after signing from Bradford, looked decidedly short of match fitness but did at least put himself about and put some pressure on a shaky Harrogate defence.

The annoying thing is that in truth, Harrogate weren't much better and were really there for the taking. Aside from Pattison who was a thorn in Pools' side all afternoon, they looked decidedly short on quality and I get the impression a better side than Pools would have punished them. Ex-Poolie Luke Armstrong buzzed about a bit but missed a couple of sitters and was mostly ineffective - if anything he looked as if he'd gone backwards since his days banging in the goals at the Vic a few years ago while the rest of the team were largely anonymous. My view that, like us, they're in for a season of struggle hasn't changed on this evidence. Incidentally the attendance at the game was 2100, 700 of whom had come from Pools. Again, draw your own conclusions from that.

As for Pools...to be honest, I think the best thing to hope for right now is that we can at least keep pace with the rest of the pack at the bottom over the next couple of months and avoid the gap growing too wide before the transfer window comes around and we can clear the dead wood out and hopefully get some players who can roll their sleeves up and put up a fight. We shall see...

Things go a bit mad at Thackley…

Thackley 6 Maltby Main 2 (North Counties East League, Saturday 3rd September 2022)

"I've got to be honest," my mate says as we drink our first pint of the day, "I'm already leaning towards staying in the pub."

We've just got our first pints of the afternoon in at the Great Northern pub in Thackley and are watching the second half of a Merseyside derby that's not so much about as dull as watching paint dry as sitting around waiting for it to peel.

"Nope," I say, "We're going. It's become a running joke this and I'm determined that we can make it to a Thackley match."

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago in the “report” of the Guiseley game that wasn't that we don't have a great track record when it comes to getting out of the pub and going to games. Even when I mentioned to my wife this morning what the plan was, she burst out laughing and said "I don't believe you, send me a photo as proof or I'm just gonna assume you've just stayed in the pub again!"

But we manage it. I dunno if it was the fact that the weather today's actually pretty much just right for watching football (no rain but not too hot either) or the fact that after the snorefest that was the Everton vs Liverpool match that whatever Thackley served up HAD to be more entertaining than that. Interestingly I did send my missus a photo. No response. One nil to me I think.

Thackley are based up in the leafy northern suburbs of Bradford, just a mile or so up the road from where I live in Shipley making it my local club by default (well, there's another one which is probably about equal distance and we'll deal with them next week). The club were founding members of the North Counties Eastern League in 1983 and have remained there ever since. I think it's safe to say that there'll be quite a few NCEL match reports in this blog as the Bradford area has a LOT of clubs at this level. It's a bit odd really - obviously you've got City in the football league then Park Avenue in the Conference North but then there's a huge gap of three divisions* down to the NCEL where suddenly you get Thackley, Eccleshill, Silsden, Campion and Albion Sports (not to mention Steeton and Ilkley Town who play in the North West Counties League which is at the same feeder level...but that's a whole other complicated kettle of fish for another time).

(* - if you really want to stretch things, Farsley Celtic in the Conference North and Guiseley and Brighouse Town in the Northern Premier League are all one postal district outside the city boundaries but we haven't got all day here...)

Thackley play their home games at Dennyfield just on the edge of the green belt with Buck Wood which runs from the edge of Thackley village down to the Leeds-Liverpool canal just opposite. Similar to Guiseley's Nethermoor ground (albeit a smaller version), it's a nice picturesque ground in a rural setting and sitting in the gentle early autumn sunshine with a pint from the clubhouse (the clubhouse is actually outside the ground but the guy on the turnstile was happy to let us nip out to grab beers from there - "It's alright lads, I'll remember you both"), it makes you realise that sometimes the best football experiences come from being away from the big crowds further up the league (sorry, non-league football cliche number 728 there I know)

Neither Thackley nor their opponents Maltby Main (Maltby is between Doncaster and Sheffield just off the A1) had got off to a great start to the season with the Dennyboys starting the day in 18th place, two below their visitors. It didn't exactly promise to be a classic but you never know. The first thing we noticed as the players ran out was that Maltby were a proper Land of the Giants team - I'm not sure they had a single player who was under six foot tall. Their number 15, playing at centre-half, in particular looked as if he'd been lying on a table in a scientist's lab until five minutes ago when someone had stuck a couple of electrodes on to the bolts on his neck to kickstart his pre-match warm-up.

Thackley actually looked half decent at the outset with the strikers firing in a couple of shots at Maltby's Kasper Schmeichel lookalike keeper but it was the away side who took the lead with about 5 minutes gone. Maltby's winger fired in a cross which wrong-footed everyone including the Thackley keeper to creep over the line. Thackley's response was to pile upfield for an equaliser but unfortunately in doing so they left themselves open at the back and Maltby promptly doubled their advantage from a quick counter which their striker clinically headed home.

I was fearing the worst at this point - I'd visited Thackley once before in the middle of January last season to see them play Penistone Church. In that match, Thackley had played well until a collision midway through the first half had seen their keeper stretchered off injured (he subsequently spent the night in hospital). Unsurprisingly, they were a bit shellshocked by that and crumbled to a 3-1 defeat.

Which made what came next against Maltby all the more remarkable. Clearly stung, Thackley quickly subbed off their number 2 (who I actually thought had been one of their better players at that point) and I'm not sure what instructions the sub came on the pitch with but there's no way you could have predicted how the rest of the game would turn out at that point.

The comeback started a few minutes after the second goal when the Dennyboys won a free kick 35 yards out and their number 11 Aiden Chippendale promptly stepped up to smash an absolute rocket of a shot into the Maltby net. I thought I recognised Chippendale’s name and it turns out he’s had more northern clubs than Lee Westwood, having started his career at Huddersfield in the late noughties then moving on to spells at Bradford (both City and Avenue), York, Accrington, Chester, Stalybridge and Bury (both the original club and the phoenix one) among several others. By halftime, the score was level as Thackley were awarded a penalty after Maltby's keeper collided with Chippendale which Thackley's number 9 Greaves dispatched. 2-2 at half time and a pretty good match but I don't think anyone could have foreseen what was coming next.

The second half started with Thackley dominating after an early spell of Maltby pressure and on the hour they went in front as Chippendale lashed a ferocious shot into the net from the edge of the area. Chippendale then got his hat-trick and Thackley's fourth with almost an exact replay of Maltby's first goal as a cross into the area deceived everyone and ended up the back of the net.

By now, Maltby were pretty much falling apart and Chippendale added his fourth and Thackley's fifth just before being subbed off with an absolute rocket of a shot from outside the area which the keeper couldn't do a thing about. Definitely the goal of the game but Thackley weren't finished yet as some keystone cops defending from Maltby in injury time allowed sub Murphy to tap in at the far post to make it 6-2.

"Tell you what," says my mate as we wander back into Thackley and towards the Great Northern for a quick pint before heading off our separate ways, "We should definitely do this again". I suspect this won't be the last match report from Dennyfield this season.

A trip to Guiseley goes astray…

Guiseley 0 Marine 3 (Northern Premier League, Saturday 13th August 2022)

It's a bit of a running joke with me and my mate that on the occasions we attempt to go to a non league game, there is a good chance we won't actually make it if there's a decent pub nearby. I s'pose it doesn't help that non-league football and pubs pretty much go hand in hand - our local, the Great Northern, is about five minutes' walk from Thackley's ground and more than once last season we ended up meeting there for a pre-match pint before going on to watching the Dennyboys play only for us to end up staying in the pub because it was tanking it down outside or someone we hadn't seen for ages turned up or...well, you kind of get the picture.

I thought that by changing our destination to Guiseley that I'd manage to avert this. I was wrong. We somehow picked an absolutely scorching hot day to go to Nethermoor and after a pre-match pint at the Potting Shed pub nearby, set off for the ground. We got about halfway across the car park of the Station pub over the road, realised that there was no way we were standing in the open air in these conditions for two hours especially as both of us tend to burn to a crisp after five minutes of midsummer sun (my mate’s a redhead and I’m a middle aged goth, go figure) so we decided to call this one off and headed for the coolness of the pub.

It's a shame and I fully intend to make a proper trip back to Guiseley some time later in the autumn. Not least because in my teenage years, it was the nearest ground to where I grew up in Otley and on the occasions when Pools were playing at the other end of the country and a trip to Bramall Lane wasn't on the cards, I frequently ended up there. At the time, Guiseley were having one of their intermittent successful spells and were challenging for promotion from the Northern Premier League to the Conference (this was in the days before the Conference North).

Nethermoor’s a tidy compact little ground under the shadow of the nearby Chevin hill and me and my dad spent many an afternoon there in the mid-'90s. That Guiseley team was an enjoyable one to watch playing fast-paced attacking football. Indeed, two of them would go on to play in the football league - Lutel James, a tricky winger who would frequently leave opposition fullbacks floundering in his wake with his runs downfield would go on to play for Bury under Neil Warnock in the late '90s and was subsequently a part of the Accrington Stanley side that enjoyed that meteoric rise up to the league in the early noughties. He even represented St Kitts and Nevis at international level.

However, it's the other player that you might have heard of - Geoff Horsfield. A proper old school English centre forward, Horsfield was a big burly striker who was also deceptively skillful for his size. Picked up by the Lions after failing to make the grade at Scarborough, he and his strike partner Bob Colville, a thirtysomething Yorkshire non-league veteran, were borderline unplayable that season with the strike partnership yielding close to forty goals, twenty plus of which came from Horsfield. Soon afterwards, Horsfield would be snapped up by local Conference neighbours Halifax and bang in 30 goals as the Shaymen romped home with the Conference title. He would continue his goalscoring exploits in League Two and after netting seven in his first ten games, newly minted Fulham would spend £350,000 on his services. Horsfield would be a key part of the Cottagers' rise up to the Championship under Kevin Keegan before going on to taste Premiership football with Birmingham and West Brom.

Guiseley would end up finishing the first season I saw them in 3rd place in the NPL, even surviving the loss of manager Ray McHale to Scarborough (then still a league side) with hulking centre half and captain Steve Richards taking over as player-manager after his departure. The season saw a three way battle for the title between the Lions, Leek Town and Marine, the latter of whom just happened to be the Lions' opponents today hence my interest in attending the game. Ironically, the whole thing turned out to be a moot point as both Guiseley and Marine's grounds failed to meet the Conference standards hence Leek, who finished 2nd, were promoted by default.

It's safe to say that Guiseley and Marine's relevant paths have diverged a bit since those days - that season was pretty much as good as it got for Marine who missed the boat when it came to joining the Conference North a decade or so later and would spend most of the next two decades floundering around the Northern Premier League. However, a good Cup run in the Covid season a couple of years ago saw the group reach Round 3 and get the plum tie of Spurs at home. It's the sort of tie that in the old days would have seen the club play the fixture at a local lower league ground (probably Tranmere in Marine's case) and draw in the extra supporters for the big day. However, with supporters not allowed in the ground, BBC viewers were treated to the somewhat surreal sight of Kane, Son et al plying their trade on Marine's tiny astroturf pitch. Spurs would win the tie comfortably in the end but the television money had helped Marine return to the NPL Premier after being stuck in Division 1 West for the previous few years.

Guiseley, on the other hand, had achieved the near unthinkable and, after relegation in the early noughties, had bounced back impressively culminating in the club reaching the National League for the first time in its history in 2015. They would then go on to confound everybody by staying there for three years, avoiding relegation on the last day in 2016 and 2017 (with larger neighbours Halifax and York being the respective fall guys for the Lions' great escapes) before finally succumbing to the drop in 2018 (though the buggers would still beat Pools at Nethermoor that season).

Unfortunately since then, the club had been on a downward spiral culminating in another relegation in the season just gone. The Lions had been hovering around the drop zone all season but a terrible run-in saw Telford and Farsley Celtic overhaul them in the last few games to send them back down to the NPL with even the return of Steve Kittrick, the manager who'd got them promoted a few years before, failing to fire the team to safety. I remember checking the results on the last day of the campaign - with ten minutes to go, Guiseley were 1-0 up against Alfreton and looked to be heading for safety at Farsley's expense only for two injury time goals to sink them and send them down.

As it turned out, we didn't miss much by staying in the pub - Guiseley's hopes of a flying start to the season were comprehensively derailed as Marine won 3-0. By all accounts it was a much closer game than the scoreline suggests - Marine took the lead in the first 20 minutes, Guiseley spent much of the next hour or so pressing hard for an equaliser only to be hit with two late suckerpunches. Sitting in the Hawkhill Tavern, at least we were gifted some light relief by watching Brentford dismantle Man Utd 4-0. There's always someone worse off than yourself etc. Hopefully when I make it back to Nethermoor in the coming weeks, the performance'll be a bit better.

I'm away in Norfolk for the next couple of weeks but should hopefully be back in business with a trip to Thackley at the start of September...if we ever make it out of the Northern that is...

A Tale Of Second Comings in Accrington

Accrington Stanley 2 Charlton Athletic 2 (League One, Saturday 30th July 2022)

Well, seeing as one of the general themes of this blog is a "where are they now?" section on clubs who went out of the league, it seems apt that we're starting with a trip to arguably the most infamous one of them all, Accrington Stanley (cue the Scouse kids from the '80s milk adverts - "'oo are they?" "Exaccccctly.")

The plan was simple - when I moved away from London a couple of years ago, I'd agreed with one of my former bandmates down there, a die-hard Charlton fan, that if the Addicks had any away fixtures nearby then he was welcome to come up and visit. Of course, with the number of Yorkshire clubs in League One these days exclusively confined to the mythical South Riding (Barnsley and Sheffield Wednesday, both of which are a bit of a trek from Bradford - Barnsley because it's on the slow train route to Sheffield and Wednesday because it takes half an hour on the tram from Sheffield city centre even once you've got there), this seemed a bit of a remote prospect but Accrington on the first day was deemed to be just about near enough and so off we went.

One thing about the Bradford to Blackpool line is that almost every stop on it has a football club nearby (Halifax, Burnley, Accrington, Blackburn, Preston and Blackpool itself) so perhaps unsurprisingly the train out was a mixture of home and away fans heading up to Ewood Park to see Blackburn play QPR or Bloomfield Road to see Blackpool take on Reading plus the usual group of people off for a Saturday night getting absolutely paralytic on the Golden Mile meaning it wasn't exactly a quiet journey. Ah well, welcome to the new season Andy.

Once it's left Halifax, the train winds its way up Calderdale through Sowerby Bridge (home of a few nice pubs) and Hebden Bridge (home to a weird mix of hippy types and townies, former home of both Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath and Jon Richardson and Lucy Beaumont and the town with the highest percentage of lesbians among its population in the UK - make of that lot what you will), you get to what can best be described as the borderlands - the two or three mile boundary that seems to switch between Yorkshire and Lancashire every time some government bureaucrat decides to try and do a bit of gerrymandering to stop whichever party they belong to losing the next election. Todmorden, the stop after Hebden Bridge, is traditionally a Yorkshire town but during one boundary review in the 1970s they attempted to move it across to Lancs. Urban legend has it that when the "Welcome to Todmorden Lancashire" sign was put up, it was quickly obliterated by a less than impressed local wielding a shotgun and the boundary was quickly moved back to where it was.

Todmorden isn't quite the last bastion of civilisation before you cross the Pennines, the mist rolls in and the rain starts (as indeed it did on the day), as the train climbs the hill out of the town, you go through a small town at the top of the mountains, very much the last Yorkshire outpost before you cross the border and possibly the most inappropriately monikered place you're likely to find around here. Its name? Portsmouth. Even Wikipedia seems at a loss to explain why it's called that. Certainly it's about as far away from the sea as you could possibly imagine (even the nearest river has to be a good three miles away at least) and it bears absolutely no resemblance at all to its more famous south coast namesake (I'll leave it up to you to decide whether that's a good or bad thing). There's been a campaign to bring back a station to Portsmouth (Yorks) for a fair few years now and I for one hope it succeeds. Just for the sheer look of confusion it's likely to produce in any away fans heading to the clubs around here passing through...

We ended up deposited in Accrington with about an hour and a half to kick-off with the endless rows of mill cottages stretching out up the hill before us as we exited the station - it's no wonder Mark E Smith sang "He came from Accrington/He came from Hovis land" about the place. It would be my first visit to the stadium since I saw Pools win there 1-0 in late 2006. At the time, we'd just been relegated to League Two after Martin Scott's disastrous reign as manager which saw him inherit a team that had made it to within ten minutes of the Championship the year before and with the aid of a truly disastrous bunch of signings (Chris Llewellyn, Lee Bullock, Darren Williams, Michael Proctor etc) which suggested that Scotty very much had the mentality of a kid in a sweet shop when it came to strengthening his team, managed to send us back down to the fourth tier just twelve months later. By the time the next campaign kicked off, Scott was thankfully long gone, we'd got a new manager in Danny Wilson who, shock horror, actually seemed to know what he was doing and Pools would make sure their spell in the bottom flight was a short one with us getting promoted straight back to League One the following May.

Accrington, I suspect, were just happy to be there at that point. 2006 saw them returning to the football league after 44 years away. In fact, as early as twelve years before that I'd seen them play against Guiseley at Nethermoor in the Northern Premier League. I remember the programme that day having a column by a journalist for the local paper who'd detailed the Lions' away trip to Stanley earlier in the season and, not being sure where the ground was, ended up asking an old bloke with a flat cap and whippet who he saw walking down the street. The guy's response apparently was "Nay lad, tha's thirty years too late."

Accrington's first spell in the league was pretty much a non-stop story of underachievement. Although the original Accrington FC (they would later merge with another club from the town, Stanley Villa, to gain their more unique name) were founder members of the League, they would only stay there for four years before being voted out. The new version, Accrington Stanley, would return in 1921 but their time in there would be an unremitting struggle with the club only finishing in the top half of Division 3 (North) a handful of times. The splitting of the leagues in the late 1950s however coincided with a sudden upturn in the club's form and they would end up on the right side of the line to be put in the new Division 3 in 1958 after a run of four Top 5 finishes.

It didn't last. The club's first season in the new third tier saw them struggle before finishing bottom of the division in 1960 and be relegated to Division 4. Two years later, the club would resign from the league midway through the 1961-62 season due to financial difficulties to be replaced by Oxford United. After four years in the Lancashire Combination League, the death knell was finally sounded in 1966.

The club would reform at the end of the '60s and by the time I saw them play Guiseley twenty five or so years later, had clawed their way back up to the Northern Premier League, then two divisions below the Football League. However, they would end up leaving the division downwards after being relegated in 1999 after selling their star striker Brett Ormerod to Blackpool for £50,000. However, the aftermath of that transfer would eventually more than undo the damage - Stanley had insisted on a 25% sell on clause and soon afterwards after banging in the goals for the Tangerines, Ormerod would move on to Southampton for £1.75 million netting Accrington over £400,000 - pretty much a king's ransom for that level. The money was invested wisely - Stanley would return to the NPL Premier Division at the first attempt, move up to the Conference three years later and win it to return to the Football League in 2006. Stanley fans would note with satisfaction that the relegated club who they would replace in League Two would be Oxford United, the same team who had ousted them 44 years before.

The first decade or so would see Stanley revert to type, mainly finishing in the bottom half of the fourth tier. John Coleman, the manager who'd masterminded their rise up the divisions, would leave for Rochdale but his spell there was an unsuccessful one and three years later he would be back at Stanley after being sacked following Dale's relegation (the club would have gone through three managers in the interim including future Ipswich and Portsmouth boss Paul Cook and former England striker James Beattie). The big surprise came in 2018 when Stanley confounded their usual position as relegation favourites to seal promotion to League One. Even more surprisingly, they've managed to stabilise in the third tier since including mounting a play-off challenge in 2020-21 which ultimately foundered due to a poor late season run. The club had finished 16th the season just gone but with top scorer Colby Bishop snapped up by Portsmouth (the south coast one - maybe his geography wasn't too good and he thought he was just heading up the road?), the general consensus among the pundits was that a season of struggle was in store.

Charlton were coming into the 2022-23 season from pretty much the opposite angle. A Premiership side 15 years ago, the club had been on a downward spiral ever since. The appointment of local lad done good Lee Bowyer as manager had given the Addicks hope after he'd guided them to promotion in 2019 but the departure of top scorer Lyle Taylor just before the run-in post-Covid had seen them slump from a situation where they'd looked to have their destiny in their own hands to being relegated straight back down to League One. Since then, the club had been treading water with two mid-table finishes and with a new manager in Ben Garner, fresh from leading Swindon's play-off charge the season before, the pressure was on for them to make more of an impression this time out.

We would grab a quick pint at the Crown pub (or rather the beer stall they'd set up in the car park), just round the back of the Crown Ground, before the game. Looking at the stadium, it's pretty clear that Accrington have at least done a bit of work on it in the last 16 years with one new stand and the others having had at least a bit of a refurb. Although obviously the away stand is still an open terrace subject to the elements - just what you want on a rainy day! (which, let's be honest, is most days in Lancashire). Luckily, our tickets were valid for the covered seating area as well so we took full advantage.

Despite the ground improvements, attendances at the Crown Ground are still pretty poor - the visit of Charlton saw a 2500 crowd, a third of whom had journeyed up from South London. I suppose when you've got two decent sized Championship sides, Burnley and Blackburn, either side of you it's always going to be a bit difficult to get the fans in. As a Hartlepool fan who's often given to muttering darkly about fair weather supporters drifting off to watch Middlesbrough and Sunderland, I can sympathise.

Charlton started the game much the stronger team and deservedly took the lead ten minutes before half time when a break saw their attacking midfielder Fraser slot home. There seemed to be a bit of unease among the away fans though that they hadn't put the game out of sight by the interval given that they'd looked menacing going forward with masked fullback Clare and winger Jaiyseimi both looking dangerous. Accrington on the other hand had only threatened a few times in the opening stages of the game but the Charlton defence hadn't looked as solid as they should've done in dealing with the attacks when they happened with their new keeper Wollacott (who'd followed Garner from Swindon) pulling off a couple of decent saves but looking decidedly uncomfortable at dealing with crosses.

The fears were justified - after the break, Stanley stepped it up a gear, Charlton sat back and the inevitable equaliser came when Stanley winger McConville (the home team's best player on the day) took advantage of some good midfield work to slot home a through ball. Both teams were attacking now and with six minutes injury time, it looked as if it could go either way.

In the end, we got a double suckerpunch. Two minutes into injury time, a counter attack saw the Charlton forward line swarm into the area and 18-year-old debutant Miles Leaburn, son of '90s Charlton great Carl, was on hand to turn a cross home. The away support went absolutely bananas with the fans jumping up on to the barriers and digging the Leaburn chants they'd not had a chance to use in a good couple of decades out of storage.

Which was then followed by Accrington going straight up the end and scoring an equaliser. Obviously. It's the sort of spectacular shooting yourself in the foot strategy that brought back a lot of memories of Hartlepool teams past. To be fair, a draw was probably a fair result - Charlton had looked very much the better side in the first half but Accrington were probably the stronger team in the second and their comeback very much epitomised the never say die attitude that's been probably the key factor in their rise from the ashes. I suspect that if they keep playing with that attitude all season then there's no reason why they shouldn't be able to manage another season of mid-table safety in League One. Bizarrely then it makes Accrington a bit of a unique case - a club who went out of the league, returned and have managed to actually go on to greater heights than their original incarnation ever managed. Fair play to them.

Walking back to Accrington station, I decided to check how Pools had got on in Paul Hartley's first game in charge away to Walsall. Fuck. We'd got stuffed 4-0 with Danny Johnson, a former youth player at the Vic, scoring a hat-trick against us. Suddenly it looked ominously like it was going to be a very long season...

Ghosts Under The Floodlights - An Introduction

So welcome to yet another football blog to join up with the millions already out there on the Internet. So what is it that makes this one special then you might ask?

Well, I'm not sure to be honest. I first had the idea of setting up a football blog to go with my music one (Nite Songs) a while ago but there's been about three different ideas of what it could be. And, in the true spirit of indecision, I eventually decided to just make it a bit of all three. So expect a bit of a hotch-potch of randomness on here - I always find that makes for the best kind of reading anyway.

So a bit about myself - my name's Andy and I'm an early fortysomething Hartlepool United fan. Given that I've spent the majority of my life living in West Yorkshire (apart from a decade away down in London), it probably seems like a bit of an odd choice of football club to follow. The reason is that my family originally hail from Teesside and we moved down to Yorkshire when I was just a few years old in the early '80s. However, the majority of them are Middlesbrough fans rather than Poolies. I suppose it's a bit of a convoluted story but when I started to get interested in football in my early teens, my Dad was understandably worried that growing up away from Teesside there was a chance I could end up supporting Leeds the way a lot of my friends from school did (which would have probably meant instantly being disowned - understandable really). At the time I'd started taking an interest in following Sheffield United and I think he was keen to try and steer me away.

(As an aside, I literally have no idea why I initially chose the Blades over Leeds which was much nearer, more successful and would have been an easier choice. I think it was three things - partly the fact that I liked the fact that back then in the Dave Bassett era they seemed to lose every game in the first half of the season before turning into absolute world-beaters after Christmas and finishing mid-table much to the annoyance of everyone who'd been tipping them for relegation a few months before and partly because the Leeds fans I knew at school were just really really annoying - bad losers and even worse winners. It's safe to say that my opinion of that club hasn't really changed much in the intervening three decades. We also had a few Man United fans there but I never had any truck with that - I can't for the life of me understand how any self-respecting Yorkshireman could support a Lancashire club. The third reason, which would become apparent later on was that it actually worked out cheaper to get into the Kop at Bramall Lane than it did at Elland Road - £9 instead of £14 which more than cancelled out the additional £1.50 on the train to Sheffield)

I think ideally Dad would’ve preferred me to become a Boro fan as well but they’d recently been promoted to the Premiership and moved to a new stadium meaning that opportunities to see them were a bit limited. So in a fateful decision he opted to take me to a nearby game involving Teesside’s other club instead. And so it was that one dark November afternoon in 1994 we ended up going to see Hartlepool play Doncaster at Belle Vue and stood on the away terrace. Pools were shocking that day - they got turned over 3-0 and were lucky to get nil quite honestly. But I think, much in the same way as a newborn chick thinks the first thing that it sees is its Mum, it stuck with me. A month or two later, I made my first trip to the Victoria Ground (it would become Victoria Park a year or so later), again with Dad, to see us play Cambridge. Again, we were crap, we lost 1-0 and the attendance was about 1200. But the seed had well and truly been sown. Pools initially became my second team to Sheffield United (and as I'll discuss in future episodes of this column, there were others vying for my affections at that time as well) but in the summer of 1996, the board at Sheffield United in their infinite wisdom decided to put the price of getting into the Kop End up from £10 to £20 in one fell swoop. Being an 17-year-old sixth former relying on the £15 a week he got from his Sunday job at a garden centre to provide his money to go not just to the football but for nights out and the occasional gig as well, that instantly ruled out going to Bramall Lane anymore but I realised that my Dad was happy enough to take me up to the odd game at Victoria Park (as he'd been doing for the previous season) and that away days with Pools generally tended to be much less expensive than following Sheffield United, by this time relegated from the Premiership and in what was then Division 1. To be honest, even back then I was going to more away games with Pools than I was with the Blades, not least because Division 3 in that era seemed to have a LOT of Yorkshire and Lancashire clubs in it. The decision was made - my trips to Bramall Lane ended, I became a full time Poolie and have been that way for the last 25 years.

So yes, Hartlepool United are going to feature a lot in this column and I make no apologies for that. As well as the reports for a few home and away matches, I plan to put a few memories of away games past in here (usually on weekends where I've not been to a match for whatever reason). As I write this, Pools are looking at our second season back in the League with a new manager (Paul Hartley, who seems to have a good record at past clubs north of the border so touch wood he can carry that form over south of the border) and a two thirds new squad. While I think a play-off push is unlikely, touch wood we can hopefully at least improve on last season's 17th place finish - personally I'll happily settle for the top half.

The second part of this blog is covering non-league football in Yorkshire (mainly around Bradford where I currently live). Football in Yorkshire is a bit of a weird one as the county tends to mostly be known for rugby (suffice to say as a Teessider originally, I've never really had much truck with egg-chasing) but the number of non-league clubs in this area is pretty impressive from Halifax in the Conference through the likes of Bradford Park Avenue, Farsley Celtic and Guiseley in the Conference North and NPL down to the likes of Thackley, Eccleshill and Campion in the North East Counties League. I've been planning to try and visit a few more of these grounds to tick them off my list and hopefully this blog will be an excuse to get off my backside and do that on the weekends I can't go to see Pools.

The third part of the blog was an idea for a book I had which was due to be a sort of "where are they now?" about former league clubs (and which essentially gave this blog its name). As a Pools fan, I'm painfully aware that my club has sailed closer to the wind than most down the years (and indeed dropped out of the league to spend four years in the basket case division that is the National League). This along with reading the excellent book "Hell Of A Season" (about the worst seasons various teams have had in league football and which covers a fair few of the teams whose decline proved to be terminal) gave me the idea. At the moment there are 55 clubs who once played in the football league but no longer do and I thought it'd be interesting to cover the stories of some of them and how they recovered after the fall - if indeed they even did. Add to that other stories of clubs who gambled everything on reaching the football league only for it to spectacularly backfire on them and blow up in their face and there's the potential for some interesting stories in there. This though is very much a work in progress to be updated as and when although with a few such cases around here (Halifax and Bradford PA both being ex-league clubs and others nearby like Farsley, Colne and Emley who bet the house on trying to reach the promised land of the Football League only for things to backfire horrifically) there’s likely to be a bit of overlap.

So that's it - the various disparate threads of Ghosts Under The Floodlights. How this will go or and how it will do remains to be seen. But in the meantime, welcome to yet another alternative look at northern football...