Boro thoughts from abroad after travelling to Old Trafford

Had things been different, had Middlesbrough not been the place he always had to come back for, he could have been running out at Old Trafford instead.

Dalton - famously, doubtless uniquely - is the player who willingly swapped Manchester United for Hartlepool United.

"Maybe I should have given Manchester another two or three months," he reflects. "I wouldn't say I walked out, but it was certainly my decision to leave."

"A fabulous player, he should have been a millionaire now and he knows it," says Ray Gowan, then manager of humble Brandon United - the Northern League club from whom Alex Ferguson signed him on his 21st birthday.

He's 33 now, lovely lad, tremendous player. "Sensational on his day, a class above anyone else in the Unibond League except Chris Waddle," says Gateshead chairman John Gibson.

He lives, to no surprise whatever, in the Boro.

He was 20, labouring on a building site in Eston and had never lived away from his parents, when a mate from Sunday football recommended him to Ray Gowan.

What the schools of excellence, the youth academies and the myriad patrols of those who claim scouts' honour had missed, Chris Lynn thought he recognised. Gowan - "Chrissy's lot weren't even a good pub team" - soon agreed; the late, late developer was finally making his move.

"The first match he was good on the ball but obviously unfit, the second he came on as a sub against Bishop Auckland and scored the winner," Gowan remembers.

Five months later, more scouts than spectators watching Brandon's match at Tow Law, two men asked for a quiet word. They represented Manchester United, wanted him to report for training the following Monday morning. Dollar, as among other things he is known, asked for time to consider.

"Basically I panicked, I thought it was a wind up at first" he says. "It was too early, I couldn't get my head around it. On the Sunday afternoon they rang again, said that Mr Ferguson insisted it was Monday morning or nothing. Obviously I had to go."

The week previously he'd been digging drains, that Monday he was lunching alongside the likes of Bryan Robson, Gordon Strachan and Mark Hughes.

A fortnight after that he played so well against Sunderland Reserves that he was asked to sign a contract at half-time. "Brian Whitehouse, the reserve team manager, just said that Mr Ferguson would like to see me," says Dalton.

"Even then I wondered if he might be going to tell me I could go back home. It's a good thing it was half time because I was absolutely knackered in the second half."

It was April 1988; Brandon, remarkably, were paid £35,000. The following July he was preferred on United's Scandinavian tour to Strachan, said to have been targeted by Leeds. If Strachan went, Ferguson told the media, he had a possible replacement from the North-East who could save the club millions.

"He borrowed £200 from me to buy a suit for that trip," recalls Gowan. "I was still a bit like a nursemaid for him."

In Sweden, however, Dalton received news from his girlfriend, later his wife, that doctors feared the baby she was expecting might be born with spina bifida. "It knocked me for six, I had a bit of a bad patch after that and then the season had started."

Their daughter born healthy, they contemplated a move to Manchester but decided (he says) that the sort of house they could afford would be in an area where they didn't want to bring up children.

He began driving home after Saturday matches, returning on Sunday evening. It wasn't working - "I was a one day a week father," he recalls.

"Alex Ferguson was really good, understood my background and looked after me very well, but after a few months I was really struggling and asked him to cancel my contract.

"He wouldn't do that but said he would tout my name around North-East clubs and told me to go home for a week. Bobby Moncur offered me a trial at Hartlepool."

Gowan's more critical, principally because Dalton was put into digs with players several years his junior. "If Alex Ferguson was honest, I'm sure he'd admit he made a mistake and wasted a talent," he says.

"It was because he had no company of his own age that he got homesick. He was a tremendous snooker player, still is, but had no one to play against."

He stayed for three years, scored the North-East goal of the season against Exeter - there are those who can still fill fully 15 minutes describing it - moved to Plymouth Argyle, of all the faraway places, for £275,000.

"I was three years older, three years stronger, but all I knew about Plymouth was that it was near Lands End. I got a hell of a shock when I looked at the map," says Dalton. The family moved west, enjoyed it, but insisted on ten return flights each season as part of the contract.

Because away games were invariably closer to home than Plymouth, he was back in the Boro every fortnight.

In 1995 he moved back north, joined Huddersfield Town, played - amid injuries - the best football of his career. When former Newcastle United player Peter Jackson became manager in November 1997, Town had four points. In the next two months, Dalton scored 12 goals.

"If the season had started in November, we'd be in the Premiership now," he insists.

When Steve Bruce became manager his fortunes changed, however, barely able to get a game in the reserves. Homing instinct, he headed back to Middlesbrough.

In Gateshead's first round win at Halifax he scored one and made the other. If Swindon underestimate them as Halifax did, there could be another shock, he says.

"I still think I had the ability to do well in the Premiership but maybe my mind wasn't right, maybe I didn't push myself enough. I could still do a job for someone in the Football League."

Meanwhile he's in the gym six mornings a week, trains two nights, is taking a Uefa coaching badge in the hope of coaching work in the spring.

It's in America, a canny hike from the Boro. The homing bird is spreading his wings at last.

FORMER Hartlepools United footballer Jackie O'Connor, known generally - affectionately - as the Little Black Rat, has been getting his teeth into some poetry.

We'd written of him in July last year, an Ushaw Moor lad who was on Leeds United's books during the war, spent nine years with Spennymoor and seven with Consett - both paid more than Hartlepools - and only hung up his boots after a tib and fib at 38.

"If I'd not broken me leg I'd probably have had a heart attack," he mused, philosophically.

His poetry's drawn to our attention by Durham County Cricket League chairman Peter Metcalfe, another Ushaw Moorman, in advance of a sculpture unveiling in the village.

It'll be of a roundy, a large lump of coal. "In mining villages the coal allowance was very generous," explains Peter. "Small coal was thrown on the fire back by the bucket full to give a roaring blaze, but if you wanted the fire simply to smoulder, you'd put on a roundy instead."

Jackie, 72, has written a poem ("apparently he has boxes full") to commemorate the occasion: his mate Peter sends instead an O'Connor original on a famous Ushaw Moor cup victory over Gateshead Fell.

Norman Ferguson's inevitably in it, and Eric his brother, one time Durham County player Graham Johnson who was allergic to grass ("it could only happen in Ushaw Moor", says Peter) and Geordie Coxon, an Eppleton character who opened Ushaw's bowling for years.

"He was slightly deaf," recalls the league chairman, "especially when Norman suggested he take a break from bowling."

Room, after all that, for just the final two lines of the Black Rat rhapsody to the glorious night:

This is the tale that I'm proud to tell

Of that drizzly night that Gateshead Fell fell.

A GLORIOUS exercise in 22 carat smugness, the latest edition of the Sunderland fanzine The Wearside Roar devotes about 300 pages to events at St James' Park on Saturday November 18.

Among it all is something called Ode to a Magpie, written by someone called M Liddle, a Sunderland fan living (dangerously) in Newcastle.

Space allows only the last verse of that one, too:

The Blaydon races fades away

The weather's damp and bleak,

The song that springs to mind is -

"Can we play you every week".

The only footballer to have been on the losing side for three different clubs in an FA Cup final at Wembley (Backtrack, December 5) is John Barnes - with Watford, Liverpool twice, and Newcastle United.

Today, a little stinker: readers are invited to name the three players with a "v" in their name who scored in FA Cup finals in the 1980s.

More sign of the v next Tuesday.