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...