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...