With a great deal of help from his friends, Eddie Sharp's attempt to raise £5,000 in memory of his son more than doubled its target at the weekend.

Well over half came from an auction on Saturday evening of signed shirts and footballs - two shirts topping £600 each - most of the rest from a sun-blessed match the following morning.

Both occasions also featured Dennis "the Refrigerator" Foster, familiar in the Backtrack column in the days when a journalist's principal activity between the sheets was putting in carbon paper, but long since absent without leave.

Then he was little more than a chest freezer; now he personifies the fridge mountain.

Last Tuesday's column told how Eddie, for many years a familiar Northern League player and manager, hoped to buy equipment for Newcastle General Hospital's intensive care unit as a memorial to Eddie junior, 23, who died a week after a road accident in February.

Young Eddie was a good footballer, too, Crook and District League player of the year before joining Tow Law, and then Consett, in the Northern.

"The hospital tried so hard for him," said his dad, from Newfield, near Bishop Auckland.

The auction was at Tindale Crescent workmen's club, the other side of Bishop, a boisterous, roisterous, bitter-sweet occasion in a crowded, community caring concert room.

Father and son had also played Sunday morning football for the club, alongside familiar Northern League names like John Lang, John Hussey and the admirable Jackie Foster.

The Refrigerator, himself a renowned striker - they still remember how he broke the net at Kingsway, Bishop v Ossett Albion - is team manager.

We squeezed between Dale Swainston, West Auckland's long-serving assistant manager, and Mike Rudd, a passionate Sunderland fan.

Ruddy implored us to include a message for Reidy, the effect of which was that the SoL manager has so greatly lost the plot he couldn't find his way around a Wear Valley Council allotment.

Earlier there'd been a wedding, Looby Bryan and his new wife Sylvia, Jackie Foster best man. The two happily overlapped, and with barely a pause between pints.

A signed Newcastle United shirt raised £350, a Man United ball £300. Ruddy paid £260 for a Sunderland shirt. "It doesn't mean I don't still love them," he said.

Sylvain Wiltord's Arsenal shirt, signed by the French squad, realised £200, a pristine shirt worn by Bolton's Michael Ricketts - "it mustn't have been very clarty that day," said Royce Carson, the artful auctioneer - added £90.

Kevin Bennett paid £600 for an England shirt signed by Gazza, Terry Spence £610 for a Magpies' shirt signed personally by Alan Shearer - "and not," said Royce, "the bloke who works for him."

Terry worried his mates, nonetheless.

"I expect he's got summat left," said Dale Swainston, "it's his round next."

It lasted over an hour, the turn tongue tied in the diminutive dressing room and some bad heads - bad heads, big hearts - for the match at West Auckland next morning.

Mark Tinkler and Paul Connor, Spennymoor area lads now with Hartlepool United and Rochdale, led opposing teams. Over 30 players turned up.

The column arrived late from a meeting at Durham City - expect news from New Ferens Park before the week's out - but in time to see the Fridge, cool as they come, hammer a superb 12 yard volley past Bradford City 'keeper Aidan Davison.

The ball had bulged the net before Aidan, Close House and Northern Ireland, could say "great grandmother on the distaff side."

Dennis is 43, his waist line commensurate. "Mind," they marvelled, "what a player he was...."

Eddie Sharp kept goal at the other end.

"I was magnificent," he said, and none would have argued for a moment.

The match finished at 1.30pm, the socialising much later. It was the sort of Sabbath on which Sunday dinner becomes a moveable feast, and the devil take the hind roast.

They gave Eddie the match ball, signed by all concerned.

"It's on days like this that you realise there's still so much to be grateful for," he said, a proud and a grateful father.

Among many other familiar faces in Tindale Club on Saturday night was that of long-serving former Carlisle and Southampton defender Mike McCartney, a colleague of Eddie Sharp senior on building work at Hexham General Hospital.

Now 47, he also spent ten years as player, manager, groundsman and much else at Gretna - whose finest hour arrives on Saturday, when they make their Scottish league debut, against Morton.

McCartney, however, will be conspicuously absent, still unhappy at the manner of his departure two years ago. "I don't watch football and I don't miss it," he insists.

"I've discovered that Saturday afternoons can be quite enjoyable without it."

Others are advised to head north early for the all-ticket match.

"The interest is incredible; things have been quite frantic up here," says Helen McGregor, Gretna's assistant secretary.

More of the great Gretna romance next Tuesday.

John Dobson, golf playing Vicar of All Saints in Blackwell, Darlington, found himself on the same team as Fr Michael Higginbottom, Roman Catholic priest of St Augustine's, in an annual Rotary Club competition - "what better way to further ecumenical relations," he writes in the parish magazine. That Fr Higginbottom outscored him was simply because his congregation provided him with a caddy, John insists.

"Next year I'm putting out an appeal."

A Saturday morning caller refers us a) to page 61 of the Daily Mail and b) to the 3.55 at Redcar, where Helen Garner - "lovely little girl" - was to ride Platinum Duke for Middleham trainer Keith Ryan.

The Mail's "Missing and Found" column reprised the story of the 40 Clapton (now Leyton) Orient players and staff who in 1915 volunteered en masse to join the 17th Battalion of the Duke of Cambridge's Regiment.

It became known as the Footballers' Regiment and three of the best players - Sgt Major Richard McFadden and Privates William Jonas and George Scott - died at the Battle of the Somme.

Leyton Orient historian Steve Jenkins knows plenty about the first two but next to nothing about George Scott, save that he was born at West Stanley, Co Durham and scored 34 goals in 213 Clapton Orient games.

We'll happily pass on further information.

Young Helen, from Kirkby Fleetham near Northallerton, subsequently rode her maiden winner at 8-1.

A lucrative afternoon hereabouts? You wouldn't bet on it.

Another blast from the past: Derek Parker in Bishop Auckland sends the tanner programme from the 1958 schools international, England v Scotland at Wembley.

England included Terry Venables and future full international winger Peter Thompson; Scotland had 15-year-old William Bremner ("requires watching," said the programme) and Ian Gibson, later with the Boro.

The band played Colonel Bogey. Derek, who was there, doesn't reveal if they sang along with the merry words.

He's particularly interested, however, in Wolsingham Grammar School boy Morris Emmerson, who'd kept goal in the previous international against Germany but was reserve against the Scots.

Emmerson, born in 1942 at Sunniside - between Crook and Tow Law - subsequently played a handful of Football League games for Middlesbrough and Peterborough but then vanished from the professional game.

The usual Crook suspects respond blankly.

Anyone else know what happened to him? The Football Association's reforming zeal will lead to big changes in refereeing this season; among the smaller ones is that refs' e-mail addresses will now appear in the FA handbook.

The official whose electronic address is "redcardref" has therefore been "counselled" to think again.

Administrators at a meeting in Billingham the other night were told that "advice" has been given to "sendemoffsmithaol.com", an' all.

And finally...

The Football League club whose first five letters are consonants (Backtrack, July 26) was, of course, Crystal Palace.

Fred Alderton in Peterlee knew that one and in turn seeks the present-day identity of the clubs formerly known as West Hertfordshire and St Jude's.

Jude, it will be recalled, is the patron saint of hopeless cases.

We return, with that invocation, on Friday.

Published 30/07/2002