RAY Grant, scout master, celebrated his 97th birthday on Wednesday. He is the man who discovered Brian Clough, who mined Tony Mowbray, who saw Stan Cummins and remembered what they say about good stuff and little bundles.

"I always looked for a delicate touch, " he says. "You were no good if you were clumsy."

For Ray, now a long-retired head teacher, it was as if scout's honour necessitated a permanent conveyor belt of young talent from North-East football fields to the game's great stadia.

"I reckoned to find Middlesbrough one good player, one quality player, every year, " he says. "There was a first team match with five of mine at the same time.

I didn't think I'd done badly that day."

Others included Alan Peacock, Mark Proctor, Peter Beagrie and Stuart Ripley.

Still he keeps all his reports - all but one, anyway, and we shall come to that later. Each buff-backed volume is written in immaculate, tiny, schoolmasterly royal blue, each page headed "Middlesbrough Football and Athletic Club, secretary T H C Green." The young Mowbray was on page five thousand and something.

Still he has many friends in football.

Clough, Cummins and Mowbray all rang on his 90th; Stan looked in to see him ("still talking the hind legs off a donkey") shortly after his return from America.

The indomitable Jack Watson, still living in Shildon and scouting for Hibernian, was among Wednesday's well wishers at the bungalow in East Rounton, near Northallerton, where Ray is looked after by his niece and her husband.

"Don't be giving away any of our secrets to the Press, mind, " said Jack, but he's a mere 84. A boy scout, as it were.

Ray had played a bit as a lad, reckoned he was quite good, might have done better had he not always been so skinny - "never any muscle, just bone." Being small helped, of course, when his uncle hauled him over the turnstile at Ayresome Park.

He became a maths teacher, then head of Denmark Street School in Middlesbrough where football, inevitably, featured prominently on the curriculum.

He also played cricket for Middlesbrough and - "in my declining years" - village football for Osmotherley.

A teaching colleague, he recalls, had recommended he talk to Boro director Tommy Thomas. "I asked him why they had so few local juniors coming through into the first team. He sent me to see David Jack, the manager. We had a good talk and we agreed I should go out and find some."

The rest is the stuff of history and of anecdote. Though he received no wages and only half expenses - "I didn't believe I should get money both for being a teacher and a talent scout, that way people couldn't point the finger at me" - he worked among rich seams, Clough perhaps the greatest find of all.

He was playing for the village team at Great Broughton, near Stokesley, on a ground - remembers Ray, like it was yesterday - where they retrieved the ball from the river with a bucket on the end of a pole.

The scout pack, inexplicably, had missed the young Clough. Grant, ever the lone wolf, liked what he saw and arranged a trial with Boro's juniors, away to Huddersfield Town.

"I always sat with the new boys on the bus, tried to talk to them and ease some of the tension out of them. Brian was different, there was nothing tense about him. With most of them I thought they were a bit thankful, but he was confident right from the start."

Ray himself became more confident when Albert Mendum, later to make his name in West Auckland's 1960 Amateur Cup final side, whipped in a cross from the right.

"Clough had his back to the goal and the ball was crossed in front of him. He brought it down, flicked it over his shoulder, turned his marker, ran a few yards with the ball and scored. That wasn't confidence, that was genius."

Tony Mowbray was playing in a school match at Marske. "I'd been recommended to look at a particular boy but there was no-one there that I liked so I asked if they had any useful players in the year below."

Mowbray was two years below, just nine years old. The first time Ray saw him, he was on the phone to the Boro.

"That set me up, really, finding a nineyear-old like that. When I retired from teaching, I got much more involved with the juniors."

Stan Cummins, 11-years-old and very much the bit bairn, was playing at Ferryhill School on the sort of day that not even Ray would get out of his car. He didn't have to. "A big lad was brushing everyone out of the way, scoring all the goals, but little Stan laid everything on for him - perfect timing, remarkable positional play. They were tap-ins.

"Jack Charlton said he'd be the first £1m player and he should have been. Instead I think he was the third."

Registered blind but still twinkling, he claims to have stopped watching football on television not because of his eyesight but because the game has changed. "I've watched football for 90-odd years, " he says. "Probably I've seen enough."

On Sunday he hosts an open-house party, at which the most welcome present would be the return of the volume of scouting reports on B Clough, "borrowed" by a well-known county cricketer of those parts.

Now that he's 97, he'd like the full set.

"If you see him, " says the chief scout as we leave, "tell him I want my b. . . . . book back."

Critics' Corner could remain quiet a while

LAST of the summer whine, we noted after the annual September visit to Durham Riverside that Critics' Corner seemed conspicuously quiet.

It was because Mervyn Hardy, the querulous convenor, had been relocated to one of the disabled bays after inadvertently running over his wife's foot in the car park - a real blue light job.

"She's had more pots than Shotton pit canteen, " said Mervyn, sympathetically.

Pat's foot's now coming on fine. Mervyn, alas, faces major surgery. "If anything goes wrong, " he says, "I hope my MCC membership card will get me into the other Lord's place as easily as it gets me into Lord's NW8."

It also offers the chance to reproduce this year's MCC Christmas card: "I say old boy, you're not allowed in here without a tie."

HARRY Sharratt's snowman is in danger of becoming abominable, if not just yeti. Previous columns had wondered if the fabled Bishop Auckland goalkeeper really did build a snow sculpture on the goal line at Shildon, one wintry Boxing Day.

Alan Adamthwaite, who this year published The Glory Days, an acclaimed history of the Bishops' Amateur Cup heroics, offers contemporaries' accounts that the white man in question was only between 10-12 inches high; Arnold Alton finds footprints in the snow in an earlier history, Chris Foote Wood's Kings of Amateur Soccer.

The book also recalls a 1950s poll which named Harry as the world's fourth best goalie. "What?" he replied, "only fourth?"

Arnold also bumped this week into former Northern League player Ray Tate, who recalls another snowman, at Penrith.

Apparently, says Arnold, the keeper had been snowballed by a couple of kids.

"He chased them and clipped their lugs, as they used to when kids were about one per cent as cheeky as they are today. The crowd took a dim view of it. The snowman was to appease them."

AMONG life's great mysteries is how you can buy a half-time raffle ticket at an Arngrove Northern League game with 100 people present and still be 10,000 out when it's drawn.

Perhaps it's what happened to Horden CW programme editor John Collings, who - reports Northern Ventures Northern Gains, the League magazine - has finally got lucky after six years of trying, home and away.

It was at Ashington, John so excited that he forgot to pick up the prize. "I don't even know what it was, " he admits, "but over six years I reckon it's cost me £300."

AND FINALLY . . .

A GRATIFYING e-mail from John Milburn in Chester-le-Street: "Of all the inane ways in which to persuade a man to waste 20 minutes of his valuable time. . . ."

He refers, of course, to Tuesday's question - seeking the identity of the only Premiership or Football League club which has no letters in its name which can be coloured in.

It's Hull City, and among other readers who had their colouring books out was Alan Adamthwaite, who now poses something similar.

Using capital letters - upper case, as typewriter mechanics used to say - which is the only one of the 92 that can be spelt out in matchsticks without having to bend or break one?

We hope to strike it lucky again on Tuesday.

Published: 16/12/2005