A damp demise as Lewes lay down Law

Remember Sam Gordon?

Sam was the club mascot, a shy and spindly-legged ten-year-old who - until pressure from the club, the column and from Graham Kelly - had been forbidden to lead out the team at Wembley because rules, as we all know, is rules.

On Saturday the Lawyers were again in the last 16 of the FA Carlsberg Vase - at Lewes, county town of East Sussex - and Sam made a welcome re-appearance. Played it again, it might be said.

He is now 14, of course, a 6ft 2in goalkeeper with size 12 feet, hands that could shift snow off the A68 should the County Council ever run out of ploughs, and a trial with Manchester United in May.

He is no longer mascot and no longer diffident, as the policewomen he was charming would doubtless be happy to testify.

The Lawyers were also backed, as usual, by the maverick Misfits, about 20 irregularly angled into Weekend First on the 7.14 from Durham. These days every GNER train has a "quiet coach." It sure as shindig wasn't Coach H.

Lewes is a quaint old place amid the South Downs with castle, climbs and carbuncular county hall. Locally it is pronounced "Lewis", so that every time someone at the match shouted "Come on, Lewis" you half expected Kevin Whateley to come trotting like some Oxonian lap dog at the behest of his imperious chief inspector.

"Not much like Tow Law, is it?" said Sixer, also in attendance, but in truth it was exactly like Tow Law because it was tossing down.

Apart from Harvey's Brewery, not Bristol Cream but ambrosia in East Sussex, the town is probably best known for the exuberance of its Bonfire Night celebrations, when effigies of the Pope are burned to commemorate the occasion in 1757 when Paul IV ordered that 17 Protestant martyrs be burned at the stake in the town.

Still there are several Bonfire Societies with quasi-military watchwords like "Death or Glory" and (possibly) "Nope, Pope"; still there is a Pope's Passage and a Pipe's Passage (which may be a sign writer's error), still devotions to St Pancras, a martyr from an earlier age.

In one pub we bumped into Lawyers' chairman John Flynn, looking as uncomfortable as a good Catholic might, in another into Sam Gordon and Sandra, his mum. "There must have been a very high tide at Brighton," said Sandra, "they've left half the sand on the pitch."

The team, most of them anyway, had begun the journey the previous day on Newcastle United's motor home, stopping overnight at the Travelodge in Dunstable and awoken at 2am not by the sort of thing which keeps certain Magpie men up until all hours but by a fire alarm activated by a dozy plumber.

Committee man Steve Moralee persuaded management to let them all have breakfast by way of compensation. "Shy bairns get nee sweets," he explained.

The club's home since 1885 is famously called The Dripping Pan, though not so much dripping as sodden, as a Tow Law lad might say. Suppositions vary.

Some say it's because of the ground's amphitheatrical banking - in which case it would have been the Lewes Bowl - others that it's because the monks who lived behind the bottom goal panned for salt in the River Ouse.

Proponents (like the Backtrack column) of the two-word headline would simply welcome the chance to write "Dripping Yarns" as an alternative to Lewes Ends.

Pan Crack would be excluded because of its uncertain etymology.

After many changes of fortune - ups and Downs, as a Sussex man might suggest - Lewes are enjoying the best of their 117 seasons: top of the league, beaten by Stoke City in the FA Cup first round, in the Vase last 16 for the first time.

Now they were favourites to reach the quarter-finals, the atmosphere as admirably amiable as always on these occasions. "Their fans are so nice I almost want them to win," said one of the Lawyer lads, though the same might not have been said of Machiavellian manager Graeme Forster, again accompanied by the alluring Amanda, a Morticia to his Gomez.

His team was behind just two minutes after the silence for the Princess, suffered further after 28 minutes when Mickey Vasey was sent off for apparently kicking an opponent - had he dived, as some suggested, it would certainly have been in the deep end - but equalised through Peter Maughan's header and were desperately unfortunate when the same lad hit the bar a minute later.

After 45 stop-start minutes the fourth official held up a 9. "I thought for a moment they were subbing the centre forward and thought 'Champion'," recalled Doc Forster afterwards. "Then I realised it was nine minutes added time."

Lewes scored again in the eighth of them, got a third after 78 minutes and another at the leg-weary end. Sam Gordon didn't cry as he had done at Wembley, Gomez hugged Morticia, the Lawyers' lawyer shrugged, smiled and got the beers in.

They'd done awfully well to get so far, anyway. As the man in the song almost said, every which way but Lewes.

Speaking of team coaches, as almost we were, Friday's column not only carried a picture of the young Brian Clough on a bike but suggested that, as a cost cutting manager in the mid-60s, he had driven the Hartlepools' team bus.

(Before proceeding down that road, there has also been much debate over the suggestion that the straight handlebar bike was a Palm Beach and, if it were, who made them. We cry Triumph, others reckon Raleigh; some have sung down the telephone that old doggerel about "Ride a ****** ride a wreck", others irrelevantly recalled that former sports minister Lord Howell began his working life as a 15-year-old at the Hercules bicycle factory in Birmingham.)

Three separate authorities suggest that, though Cloughie took a PSV test, he never drove the bus - his autobiography, long time former Hartlepool Mail football man Arthur Pickering and Mr Ron Hails (by appointment to the Backtrack column, purveyor of all things Hartlepudlian.)

The book, as several kind readers have pointed out, chronicles Clough's claim that he was merely providing emergency cover for the regular chap - "probably the oldest coach driver in the country."

Arthur Pickering reckons he not only never drove the bus ("though he put it about that he did") but rarely rode the bike to work, either. "I think he did it once for the photographers then got the Merc back out of the garage on the Fens."

The real bus driver, all are agreed, was Angus McLean, Clough's pipe-puffing successor. Mr Hails even sends the tape of a Radio 5 Live recording as sound evidence.

"He wanted an extra string to his bow," says Arthur. "It wasn't a crew bus but a snazzy little job with tables provided by Tom Lormor, who had a one-man operation in the town and became a big mate of Gus's."

McLean, the first man to steer Pools to promotion, left after a row with the chairman. He died in 1979, aged 53, during a family holiday on Guernsey.

Stephen Smailes, leader of the Conservative groupette on Stockton Council and domino board doyen at the town's cricket club, rings about that well-known sport "last in the box".

Rules vary. In Stockton, they put the first seven dominoes "blind" into the box before beginning the attempt - 10p a corner - to draw the last double.

The cricket clubbers never found one; the seven "blind" dominoes were all doubles. "In 40-odd years playing, I've never known anything like it," says Steve.

Not quite the blind leading the blind, we recall a case last year at the Croxdale Inn, near Spennymoor, when a domino player picked up all seven doubles at odds of 1,010,040-1.

The Stockton probability is presumably the same, the financial consequences severe.

"We had to play it again for double stakes," says Steve. "Instead of losing 10p, I lost twenty."

The first knight to manage a Football League club (Backtrack, February 8) was Sir Alf Ramsey, at Birmingham City in 1977.

Several readers, including Bill Bambrough in East Boldon, have pointed out that it wasn't Burnley but Wolves who were the first club to win all four divisions of the "old" Football League.

Readers may today care to suggest why so many racing men had much to rejoice about on May 1 1961. An each-way bet, the column returns on Friday.

Published: Tuesday, February 12, 2002