Mum's the word.... Lynn Briggs has qualified as a referee after deciding that touchline parents didn't know what they were shouting about.

Elder son James, 15, plays for Darlington Albion, 13-year-old Mark for the 21st All Stars. "They were absolutely distraught when I told them what I was doing," she admits.

Lynn, personal assistant to the head of Co Durham's magistrates courts system, is the first female member of Darlington Referees Society to whistle in a competitive game - the 21st All Stars under 11 side against Seaton Carew - after two months of being snowbound.

She enjoyed it so much, however, that now she fancies mixing it with the big boys.

"I was terrified until I heard one of the players saying that the referee was a girl. Since I'm 37 I felt much better after that. The more I got into refereeing the more I realised that the average parent didn't really know what they were talking about.

"It makes you realise what a tough job referees do but also helps you take it with a pinch of salt if ever they start to criticise in the future.

"The hardest bit has been running and thinking at the same time. My eyes have been completely opened"

Though most promotion avenues close at around 40, she hopes at least to reach class one status. "The boys are getting used to it. They'd say I'm bossy, but really I've just always been confident.

"One thing's certain. I'm confident I know more about the laws of football than the average dad yelling his head off on the sidelines."

Still amid the refereeing ranks, a snippet - as it were - from the incomparable Northern League magazine Northern Ventures Northern Gains.

Washington whistler Steve Sunley, NVNG reports, was at short notice offered a Saturday hospital appointment for "minor but rather personal surgery."

Suffering what might be termed withdrawal symptoms, Steve said he'd have to ask his boss - Northern League referees' secretary Ted Ilderton - if he could have the time off.

Needing little persuasion, Ted agreed that he couldn't - "on condition that no paternity suit be filed against the Northern League, should the unthinkable happen to Mrs Sunley."

Mackem or Magpie? Maybe the Prime Minister is simply neither.

Last week's columns pointed out that though Tony Blair had made much of his St James' Park browtings up, he told lyricist Sir Tim Rice that he was "a Sunderland devotee."

Now, however, Tom Lynn - editor of the splendid Sunderland fanzine The Wearside Roar - points us towards a Sunday Telegraph column on January 28 written by former Labour publicist Charlie Whelan.

Whelan - isn't he a Walsall fan, or something? - recalls the stunt shortly before the last election when Alastair Campbell invited then Newcastle United manager Kevin Keegan to the Labour party conference, a move intended to link Blair to football's growing popularity.

It led to the famous "head tennis" photo call.

"The television pictures were superb for Blair as he looked like a superb header of the ball, even though it was Keegan who did the hard work by placing the ball on Blair's head," wrote Whelan.

He recalls subsequently helping a Blair aide trying to establish whether the PM could have watched Malcolm Macdonald at Newcastle - even though he didn't.

That's also when the famously undone claim about sitting behind the goal at the Gallowgate End came up and when the Prime Minister claimed not to be able to remember his first Newcastle game.

"I don't know any genuine fan who can't remember his first game," wrote Whelan. "When it comes to football, Tony is a phoney."

Knowing that you are a dedicated domino man, writes Melvyn Wealleans from Croxdale, have you ever come across a player picking up all seven doubles in one hand?

Nope, it just sometimes seems like that.

It happened, however, to Peter Hamilton, playing for the Croxdale Inn in the captains' game.

So what are the odds against such an extraordinary double whammy? Perhaps our old Shildon friend Robert "Knocker" Bacon - or indeed any other reader with a mathematical brain and a calculator - can oblige. Needless to say, adds Melvyn, the unfortunate Mr Hamilton came second.

Since there wasn't much else to watch, many of the Usual Suspects were among the 1,359 crowd at Marske United's FA Carlsberg Vase quarter-final with Bedlington on Saturday.

They included Hartlepool postman John Dawson, the world ground hopping champion, though for John - as everyone - it has been a winter of discontent.

Starved of football, he has found the pleasures of hearth and home too tempting. Telephoned last Thursday with news that Middlesbrough and Newcastle's second strings were playing that night at Billingham, Hartlepool John replied - honest - that he was stopping in to watch The Weakest Link.

Thus enervated, he has seen a mere 175 matches all season. "It was a reserve game, they don't count," he insists.

News also at Marske of our old friend Tony "Jesus" Day, familiar on every cricket ground in the region and pining so greatly for warmer days that he has had a spell in South Cleveland Hospital. It is because of overcrowding, however, and not the miracle implicit in his universal nickname, that he finds himself laid up in the maternity wing. Get well soon.

A paragraph in the Darlington and Stockton Times reports that the Rev Bob Miles - soon to become Anglican priest-in-charge in the Wensley area of North Yorkshire - has chosen hymns for his licensing which reflect his love of the countryside and of cricket.

All Things Bright and Beautiful, perhaps, but what hymn might reflect a passion for cricket?

Though the full licensing service has been postponed - another foot and mouth casualty - the "cricket" hymn would have been God Whose Farm is All Creation, written (not many people know this) by the immortal John Arlott.

Readers may have suggestions of their own.

the three footballers who've scored hat-tricks in major Wembley finals (Backtrack, March 2) are Stan Mortenson (FA Cup, 1953), Geoff Hurst (World Cup 1966) and David Speedie, (Full Members' Cup, Chelsea v Man City, 1986).

Tantalisingly, Paul Dobson from Bishop Auckland today seeks the identity of five current Premiership players - all England internationals - whose names begin and end with the same letter. You know, as in Sid Bloggs or Norman Brown. An answer, as you were, on Friday

Benny Edwards, a hero in Bishop Auckland and a legend in amateur football, has died. He was 76, and the one occasion on which we met will forever remain memorable.

"The most engaging and obliging of fellows," said the column on March 31, 1995 and, in truth, we still didn't say half of it.

His funeral is at 9.45am today at St Saviour's church, Shotton Colliery.

The story had begun when a pub customer in Bishop left behind a carrier bag containing a fading two blues shirt - No 11 - and a corncrake.

The shirt, it was said, had been Benny's. The corncrake, it transpired, had been used - before being transferred to football duty - to summon Shotton colliers to union meetings.

We traced Benny. He was living in Peterlee, playing off 12 at Castle Eden Golf Club and only too happy to backtrack to Bishop Auckland where the red carpet - or something hospitably akin - awaited both at Kingsway and at the nearby Tut and Shive.

He'd not been back since the eternal glory days, when the dressing rooms were upstairs, the wooden stairs precarious and the little brown envelopes contained expenses and innuendo in perhaps unequal proportion.

"People talked about all the money we were supposed to be getting, but I wasn't getting anything really," Benny insisted.

The Bishops, in any case, were probably too mean.

After the 1956 Amateur Cup final he and left half Jimmy Nimmins were asked to pay a fifth of their London hotel bill because their bairns had shared the room.

Talk of a players' revolt led the committee to think again.

After appearing for several colliery welfare teams, he'd joined Bishops in September 1950, played the following Spring in the Wembley defeat by Pegasus, and after spells in the North Eastern League with Horden and Stockton returned to Kingsway to help inspire the Amateur Cup trilogy of 1955-57.

After the 1956 final, in which his wing skills bewildered Corinthian Casuals full back Gerry Alexander - later the West Indies cricket captain - he received not just a letter from the Bishop committee but another from Sir Stanley Rous, inviting him to join the Olympic training squad.

Though he didn't make the final party, he always treasured the letter.

For reasons too complicated to reprise, he didn't get his shirt back, either.

Benny took it all with great good grace. As others will know much better but one pub lunchtime abundantly proved, he wasn't just a fine footballer but a perfect gentleman, as well.

Publsihed: Tuesday, March 6, 2001