The day Darlington Football Club signed 50,000 worms

The Skerneside pitch had had drainage problems for some time, and had been re-sown that summer. It wasn’t a successful solution, and a relentlessly wet early winter caused five home games to be postponed.

Two players splash across the sodden pitch at Feethams in 1998

With fixtures piling up and no turnstile income, the club were casting around for a fix.

Then someone from Manchester United came on the phone. They’d had similar problems on their seriously wet side of the Pennines with their Old Trafford pitch, and reckoned they’d solved them by placing a load of earthworms on the pitch.

The wriggly critters had burrowed into the soil allowing the water to drain away.

Even better, the caller from Manchester United had the telephone number to hand of the worm-farmer who had supplied them.

Now, it does seem to be true that in the summer of 1998, United had indeed sprinkled 50,000 blue nosed lobworms onto the Old Trafford pitch – the lobworm, as everyone knows, has a blue nose and spade-like tail which makes really good drainage holes.

Darlington were desperate – the final straw came when they had to switch their FA Cup tie against Burnley to Middlesbrough’s Riverside ground because the Feethams pitch was so bad.

They called the worm-farmer who said he would let them have 50,000 worms for just £100.

“Darlington rocked the footballing world yesterday with their latest signing – 500lbs worth of worms!” chortled The Northern Echo, on November 12, 1998. “The Quakers are trying to wriggle their way out of irrigation problems by employing an army of worms to breathe new life into the Feethams pitch.”

General manager Ken Lavery (above) even said that the worms would be deployed at night to give them a chance to buried themselves before the birds woke up and ate them. As everyone knows it is the early bird that succeeds, so the worms had to get a wiggle on.

Sadly, it went tragically wrong, and it was not the birds to blame. Within a week of the Quakers putting the worms to work, the sodden pitch was covered with 50,000 floating lifeless bodies.

Mr Lavery later explained: "Unfortunately, the water beat the irrigators and they all drowned.

"It seems they came up for air and found themselves lost in the middle of a puddle. Consequently, they died.

"There were loads of dead worms left on the surface. They eventually went away naturally by the birds taking them.''

There is a suggestion that rather than take delivery of 50,000 blue-nosed lobworms with their fancy tails, the Quakers had actually received a consignment of sludge worms that like to bury themselves deep in sewage and do nothing at all to benefit irrigation.

However, it doesn’t seem that it was the wrong sort of worms that caused the failure at Feethams, merely that worms cannot be turned into underwater scuba divers.

Groundsman Andrew Thompson and his assistant Steve Shevels try to fork off the water at Feethams, watched by club chairman Bernard Lowery and vice chairman Gordon Hodgson

• With thanks to Bob West of Ferryhill for asking about this strange story. If you can tell us anything more about it, we would love to hear from you...