Legion comes up for air

Ten to make and the match to win –

A bumping pitch and a blinding light,

An hour to play and the last man in.

And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat

Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame,

But his captain’s hand on his shoulder smote –

Play up, play up! and play the game!

Sir Henry Newbolt, Vitai Lampada

ON SEPTEMBER 26, it may be recalled, we chewed over the claims of the Sausage (from Bishop Auckland), marvelled at Sheer Class (Consett) and decided even so that Blackhall Breathless were the most gloriously improbable football team in Co Durham.

Blackhall’s on the coast, between Hartlepool and Peterlee. The coal owners named the streets First to Tenth and when they’d run out of fingers digitally redirected to East, West and North Streets instead.

These days there’s a Daffodil Close, an’ all.

Breathless, it transpires, is the name of the former British Legion club in Middle Street. Middle Street’s round the back.

We looked in on Sunday dinner time, the Breathless hushed. There were five men and a dog and even the dog had its tail between its legs. They’d lost 3-2 away to Hartlepool Supporters, Sunday league premier division, worst performance of the season.

Though it lay naked on the bar, the lads couldn’t even be bothered to read the News of the World.

Jackie Welch, social club owner and football club chairman – said to provide excellent financial backing and cracking beef buns – was welcoming, nonetheless.

They’d bought the place six or seven years ago, put a lot of names into a hat and Breathless came first up for air, he said. “It’s a club where there’s a lot of dancing,” said Jackie.

“They’re always coming off the floor breathless.”

No less shattered, supposed Jackie, the players had probably gone for a lie down but would be resurfacing about tea time.

A suitably last-gasp winner? “Nah,” said Jackie, “about quarter of an hour to go.”

So what of Sir Henry, and no matter that he was talking cricket? What of those breathless sporting aspirations, those higher thoughts?

Breathless has a good website, too. Manager John Bell, for some reason known as Potter, reckoned the players needed to stop arguing among themselves and blaming others but that it was all the referee’s fault, anyway. The ref, said Potter, was atrocious.

In the Breathless they thought the ref shocking.

Worse than that, said a big lad in specs, he was diabolical. Play up, play up and play the game!

Legend Pogatetz provides the answer

THREADS, when we were but bairns, were something with which you sewed on trouser buttons. A message board, at least in the Co Durham coalfield, was the slate out the front on which the poor miner would chalk the ungodly hour at which rudely he’d to be awoken.

Times change.

Message boards now chatter ceaselessly in cyberspace. A thread – cotton on? – is what they call a sequence of messages on the same, sometimes surreal, subject.

It beats the hell out of exchanging picture postcards, for sure, and a rich tapestry of threads – did no-one think of it first? – has just been worked by a bunch of Middlesbrough fans.

Basically it’s an irreverent resurrection of risible remembrances ping-ponged across the Internet and by no means only to do with football. Did Terry Scott, the comedian, really drive his car off the end of the Transporter Bridge – yes, he did – was Salmonella Sam the hot dog man really so poisonous a character?

The book’s called Teesside Urban Legends, the 21st century irony that an ingenious idea brilliantly executed could only work as what’s now termed hard copy.

The cover sums it up: “Jam-packed full of wit and humour, knowledgeable insights and drunken latenight ramblings.”

Born on the Boro websites, it’s reworked by Steve Goldby, Andrew Morgan, Dave Byrne and Rob Nichols, former archaeologist and long-time editor of the Middlesbrough fanzine Fly Me to the Moon.

The websites have moderators; this is immoderately admirable.

On-message, they encourage rich reminiscence, and no matter that some of the more regular contributors might be better off getting more frequent fresh air.

Urban legends being what they are, of course, some are universally familiar, like the Sunday league referee – they swear it’s true – who asks the transgressor if he’s a pop fan, brandishes a red card and says “Take that.”

Salmonella Sam may also long have been thread worming across the national consciousness, as may Ernie Ragbo and sundry soundalikes who offered all that-glisters goldfish in exchange for any old clothes.

The book also reprises the familiar football song about Harry Roberts, the police killer, though it was never more entertaining than when, in honour of their local newsagent, reworked by Crook Town fans at Doncaster Robers about ten years ago.

“Hughie Roberts is our friend, he sells papers,” they chorused, and arrested South Yorkshire constabulary in its tracks.

The book’s equally entertaining when sticking strictly to footy, as in the chapter examining what happened to make so much blood pour from Boro captain Emanuel Pogatetz’s head.

Since they clearly love the guy, the soubriquet “Mad Dog” entirely affectionate, theories abound. Pogatetz himself not only provides the foreword – “an amazing piece of humour because so many people combined to make this weird comedy” – but answers the question, too.

“It was Kevin Davies’s elbow.”

■ Teesside Urban Legends, around 250 big pages, costs £14.99 from the usual Middlesbrough outlets.

Wheatley’s finest

THOUGH several record books put his birthplace 100 miles to the west, Backtrack readers weren’t to be taken in – the England international goalkeeper born in the former Co Durham mining village of Wheatley Hill (Backtrack, October 10) was Eddie Hopkinson.

Bob Crosby in Morpeth, among many readers who twigged it, confesses local knowledge. He was a Wheatley Hill lad, too.

It’s Davie Munday in Dunfermline, however, who recalls Hoppy’s starring role in one of Darlington’s finest (and most frustrating) hours – the 2-1 League Cup defeat to Bolton Wanderers, Monday November 14, 1961.

The Quakers had already seen off Crystal Palace and West Ham United.

Hopkinson, capped 14 times though just 5ft 8in tall, stood between them and the biggest scalp yet.

The little big man was among five internationals in Bolton’s side, the great Nat Lofthouse another. Though the rain poured, a 21,023 crowd – beating the 18,808 against Cardiff City 36 years previously – thronged Feethams. It remained the ground record.

Joe Rayment gave Darlington an 18th minute lead. Ron Greener and Ken Furphy said to be magnificent at the back, the young Lance Robson – dentist and part-time professional – always threatening up front.

Hopkinson, wrote Bob James in the following morning’s Echo, proved a “formidable goalmouth barrier.”

Wanderers equalised after 69 minutes, Roy Hartle’s 35-yard shot slipping through heroic goalkeeper Chris Tinsley’s hands on the wet turf. In the last minute Doug Holden, five times capped by England, hit a lucky winner.

“Twenty-one thousand rainsoaked fans went home with a lump in their throats,”

said Bob James.

Eddie Hopkinson died four years ago, aged 69, said by his son Paul – 30 games in goal for Stockport County – to have had very long arms for a small man and to have had “hands like a bookmaker.”

It was Bolton Wanderers, alas, who’d cleaned up.

They may have had five internationals at the time, but readers are today invited to name the last Bolton player to be capped by England.

The column wanders around again on Friday.