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.

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...