Since they like to be known as the Black Cats, it might be supposed lucky when Sunderland FC cross your path. Crook Town take a different view.
Town hosted Sunderland’s under-23 side on Wednesday in the Durham Challenge Cup, 534 spectators attracted to the Millfield. After the usual deductions, the balance was £1,421.
Frequently these days, the big boys waive their right to half of the gate on such occasions – as did Newcastle United when 1,300+ turned out at Ashington the evening previously.
No such luck with Sunderland. Crook this morning received a request for £710 (and fifty pence.) Club chairman Vince Kirkup, the most urbane of men, is angry.
“We have to work hard for every penny we get and they’re a multi-million pound club. I know they’re entitled to their cut but it’s become an accustomed and much appreciated gesture that the big clubs don’t take it. To be honest, I’m disgusted.”
The score? Oh aye. Crook Town 1 Sunderland 0.
*An altogether more festive spirit prevails this afternoon at St Philip and St James’ church in Tow Law, when the Christmas flower festival is officially opened. It’s simply magnificent.
These things have been organised at Tow Law church since 1984, the brainchild of Norman Deacon, pictured above, who has won many national flower arranging awards. Now 89, as smart as a Christmas carrot, Norman had been at Gateshead market at 5 30am on Monday to ensure the pick of the bunch.
Outside, the stalwart Salvation Army band plays Christmas’s greatest hits, including Joy to the World, the greatest of them all.
Norman had also been mentioned in the December 4 blog, recalled in a history of the next-door village of Sunniside for his football prowess in the late 1940s. “The Dally Duncan of the Wear Valley Junior League” it said.
Douglas Duncan, as few may now recall, was an outside left from Aberdeen who spent a lengthy Football League career with Hull City, Derby – FA Cup winners in 1946 – and Luton Town and managed Blackburn Rovers in the 1960 FA Cup final. They called him Dally, apparently, because he seemed to have ages on the ball.
Norman – “I had a decent left foot, but the trouble was that my left leg and my right leg didn’t know what the other one was doing” – later became a Lawyers’ committee member and near single-handedly built the toilet block behind the goal.
“There were 6,500 bricks” he recalls, like a man who’s laid every one. “Bernard Fairbairn (the long-serving secretary) was a brickworks manager. He was in the right place.”
They’d asked if he’d serve five years on the committee. He served 35. Mind, adds Norman, it didn’t take 35 years to build the netty.
These days his efforts are a little more creative. Helped by a marvellous all-female team, the flower festival has 19 arrangements, ranging from The Holly and the Ivy to Ding Dong Merrily on High and from Santa’s Workshop to Frosty the Snowman.
Other themes include the Polar Express (an any-old-iron exhibit brilliantly created by Richard Craggs) and something with penguins, neither perhaps central to the original Christmas story but gloriously vivid, nonetheless.
The festival is open on Saturday, Sunday and Monday from10am-5pm and really does wonders to spark the Christmas spirit. Since the Lawyers’ match at Willington is off, my old friends Messrs Moralee and McCormick wil doubtless be first in the queue.
*En route to Tow Law, I look into the new Bishop Auckland club shop/heitage centre where club chairman Steve Coulthard has kindly offered to try to shift a few copies of Unconsidered Trifles. The place, corner of Newgate Street and the Market Place, has really taken off.
Those for whom Bishop Auckland may be a bit far away, can still buy my 400-page memoir in time for Christmas – tenner plus postage softback, £22 hardback. Details from mikeamos81@aol.com
Grass Routes 