The First Vuvuzela in Darlington

I was actually sitting on the toilet when I heard it.

At first, I imagined that my level of concentration had caused me to emit the kind of noise occasionally heard in football ground toilets (and no I don't mean 'They were effin' shite.')

But this wasn't the case.

If the World Cup wasn't happening, I'd probably not have recognised it. A plaintive, muted drone, a little like the mother in Charlie Brown, slowed down - but probably most closely resembling the noise made by the Ox in Kurtz' settlement in Apocalypse Now as it is beheaded in slow motion.

The first vuvuzela on my street.

Played disinterestedly by a middle-class child, the kind of curly-haired fop more interested in computer games than football, but the kind persuaded by the wall-to-wall hype to give England Town and David Rooney a look until he gets bored. Dad, a successful local businessman, has of course timed his holiday to perfection; and while his partner runs the office, has slipped over to SA for a few days - purchasing outside the Paraguay game, at a cost way-over-the-odds, said horn from a dreadlocked roadside seller. Probably his only encounter with an authentic South African on the trip.

Got to be, hasn't it?

Surely only the most-middle class of places has people who could afford to bring home a real vuvuzela? Well, up north at least - I would imagine Highbury and Stoke Newington rock to the sound as we speak.

My point is that the ubiquitous sound, heard live by me for the first time, surely captures a point in the zeitgeist - a point before next season when every scally is selling knockoff zelas with Michael Lampard's picture all over them.

A future point at which the sad trumpet has lost its novelty value, and is now simply an annoyance (if it wasn't already.) Imagine that 16-stone bald guy in front of you who yells 'ponce' at every player who doesn't actually kill to get to the ball, while spitting small pieces of pie into the air. Are you going to jauntily point your zela at his head when Cristiano Nani does a pony trick?

I thought not.

So rejoice, in a pre-zela world, where innocence - and relative social order - still pertains.
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Smells Like Teen Linament

It's getting cold again. Today was the first example of the kind of pre-winter damp fug that envelopes the north east in October and doesn't let go until around May: then, after the briefest flicker, resumes its place, sitting like a fat Cheshire cat on the skyline. Only without smiling.

Except that of course it's bloody June.

I braved the cold to pop out for a sandwich and then it happened.

Deja vu - by smell.

As I passed a group of chatting teenagers I caught the faint yet unmistakable whiff - of linament. People who have played football as an organised thing, in particular in the 70s and 80s, will know what linament is. It's a kind of warming embrocation - the consistency of calamine lotion; white like the stuff you put on trainers; and smelling of dettol. Delicious. When you rub it on, however, the true magic of the lotion is revealed. It emanates a kind of deep heat that warms muscles and is supposed to relax you. Here's some:















It seemingly being minus 12 and a howling gale for the entire 1970s the warming properties of this embrocation on your legs were much appreciated. Every team used it, and the dressing room would stink of it before we ran out; hence the smell staying with me. We looked like a bunch of Brit-abroad sunbathers who had put on too much Factor 45.

Flashback.

1975. I am captain of the school football team and all-round heartthrob. I am playing for my Sunday league team against our greatest rivals, Netherton, and their star player Danny Thomas, later to be a fixture of the Spurs team of the 80s. My personal rival. He has probably forgotten all about me, but not me him.

Netherton are the Harlem Globetrotters of the area. They are a feeder team for Coventry's youth system and as a result get to wear that amazing chocolate brown Admiral kit that Cov had in those days. See below. They've also got Stylo Matchmakers - the boot-de-rigeur of the period. Two white flashes either side of the lace. Don Revie's Leeds team were their most famous models. Unspeakably cool boots. I could never afford them, and the only player who could in our team, Andy Dickens (Dicko) was of course the best player in the team by far. It was as if you weren't allowed Stylo Matchmakers unless you were any good. The entire Netherton team had them, of course.

Anyway, back to the match.

It's a typical 70's northern industrial town pitch: cowshit at one end and broken glass at the other. In the middle a sea of mud, and yet each goalmouth as barren of anything remotely reassuring for a goalie to dive on as your average car park. What grass there is is 6 inches long.

....and Didier Drogba or whoever moans because he's turned his ankle on the Wembley surface. Are these people complete jessies?

It's about halfway through the second half. Danny and I go in for a tackle. The two titantic captains go head to head.

What Danny doesn't know is that about a year earlier I have been diagnosed with a congenital weakness to my back - basically the last vertebra in my spine doesn't fit onto my pelvis - just sits on top of it. As I grow, it stretches away from my pelvis, the nerves get trapped, the pain goes down my legs and I can't walk. I have to wear a metal corset - not a good look - to hold myself in place until the growth spurt passes. It turns out this will be my last year as captain, because the injury will force me out of the game as a player. I wake up each day in pain, but won't tell my Dad because he would stop me playing. So I'm often struggling by the time the second half approaches.

So we go in for the tackle.

Now, I'm not saying Danny was a dirty player, but he was hard, as kids who make the grade tend to be. However, what happened next would undoubtedly result in him getting an early bath if he was a Premiership player now.

Danny goes in head first. Whether he slipped or something I don't know, but the effect is that I get nutted, Zidane-style, in the chest. I go over the top of him and land in a heap. Not only are two of my ribs broken, but my back has also pinged and I'm an invalid.

Danny gets up, sniffs, trots off - much in the manner of Billy Bremner in those staged matches in The Damned United.

Ref doesn't see a thing, natch. Then has a go at me for swearing. I think the actual appearance of the ambulance persuaded him to blow the whistle a few minutes early.

Funny thing is - looking back at it. Danny did me a favour.

I was a very promising player - on the verge of trials at City - but I probably wouldn't have made it in the way Danny did. My Dad felt so sorry for me he bought me my first record player; which kick-started a lifelong obsession with music; which led to me being in a band from my mid-teens; which led to Peel sessions, record contracts, TV, major gigs.

Unfortunately, however, I did not write Smells Like Teen Spirit. That was another fella, who apparently was injured in a horror tackle by Alexei Lalas, trying out for Seattle Sounders.
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Black And White All Over

Rejoice Geordies worldwide, for your beloved team have once again attained the promised land of the Premiership.

Now the fun begins.

I don't mean the beginning of another financial catastrophe, or even the inevitable 0-1 loss at home to Blackpool on a wet Monday night in November.

No, for your average Mag, the real problem is what to wear.

Last year's striped-banana faux pas is today's paint-rag. Fashion-conscious north-easterners have quickly consigned that one to the (literal) dustbin of history. It's been bad enough having to go to Plymouth or Scunthorpe without having to run the gauntlet of mock-gay wolfwhistling at the merest sight of the sickmaking yellow away shirt yanked over your giant gut. Only a South American with long hair who pulls a Spiderman mask out of his jockstrap when he scores could find it attractive.

And he rarely scores.

But how precisely do you redesign what is, has and will always have to be black and white stripes to make them any more interesting or fashionable than last year's black and white stripes? It's the conundrum exercising every Geordie mind.

So I decided to do some research into the sartorial history of the shirt which has graced the backs of Milburn, Keegan and Supermac. Is there/could there be a correlation between the fashion status of the garment and the relative fortunes of the team that wore it - and could the present team learn from this relationship?

This one is from 1927-28. League position: winners. A fetching little corset-style collar and stripes the same width. A good start to my research.

It was an era and a style revisited in the Shearer/Asprilla/Ginola era - perhaps the club's most-revered recent period in 2003 - in which they ascended to the heights of 3rd in the Premier League. Of course they messed up royally and should have won it, but we'll not go there.

This one's the classic shirt of the 1968 Fairs Cup (children look it up) winning side. The side of Pop Robson and Bobby Moncur. The side that Geordies of my age remember as I do my beloved Manchester City of Bell, Lee and Summerbee.

However, as with City, the team underachieved, only finishing 10th in the same season. So, the little circles on the collar and socks only correspond with inconsistency.

Here's the 1976 shirt, with the famous 'winged' collar, modeled by the spud-like Terry Hibbert. Fortunately City were able to hammer these losers into oblivion in the '76 League Cup Final (Yes I know it's the last thing we won, Rags.) That year the Mags finished 15th in the league for the 3rd consecutive season. So, trendy collar does not equal success.

Moving to a more contemporary era, because basically nothing happened in the 1980s, the ill-fated Mags go and choose the ill-fated NTL as their sponsor, resulting in this, which many might see as the template for the more modern fashions. Here, the stripes have widened, like the club's ambition, and the old Newky Brown sponsors have gone, just like the brewery which once stood by the side of the ground.

This one from 2002 screams Blairite ambition, corporate sponsorship and largesse. This is the era of Blair and Keegan doing keepy-uppies together on the news. The club actually finished 3rd, but the shirt's a fashion disaster.

And finally, perhaps the most infamous of recent shirts, the one worn by the ludicrously-overpaid Owen/Butt/Smith/Barton et al, as the primadonna softies nosedive ignominiously to failure and financial meltdown.

It's mainly black, like the mood of the supporters.

I visited the ground several times in this period, and each time you couldn't get away from the ground because there was a mass protest of some kind against the team/owners/directors/staff/programme sellers/ice cream man.

I mean, look at them in this picture. They look like they don't have a clue. Meanwhile, they are laughing all the way to the bank.

Oh, hang on, the bank's Northern Rock.

Position: relegated.

Burn this shirt, if you have one.

So, what have we learned? That there is an inverse relationship between the modernity and fashionability of the club's shirt and its success on the field.

But it is when one begins to look at the away kits that the real horror begins.

It's as if, starved of a creative output by the sheer boredom of redesigning black and white stripes, the shirt designers went all Jackson Pollock on the away kit.

I cannot possibly do justice to the sheer horror of the away kit situation historically by highlighting any individual kit. The yellow peril of last season is simply carrying on a tradition.

This site expresses the nastiness in (thankfully) graphic rather than photographic terms:
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.historicalkits.co.uk/Newcastle_United/photos/newcastle-2004-away-400.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.historicalkits.co.uk/Newcastle_United/Newcastle_United-change-kits.html&usg=__FHgHRqu5zRtauZ03eb0suyWi8kY=&h=484&w=400&sz=36&hl=en&start=73&sig2=6REp6YKxp_lPMa9r_PkeqA&itbs=1&tbnid=5Ll61LxLX_R80M:&tbnh=129&tbnw=107&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dnewcastle%2Bunited%2Bfootball%2Bkit%26start%3D60%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26gbv%3D2%26ndsp%3D20%26tbs%3Disch:1&ei=SWEOTOmmNoue_gbdv923DA

I think the 1914 away kit is ultra-cool and should immediately be adopted as the first team kit.

I have no idea what was going on in 1951 but Sunderland fans will be horrified.

In '73 the club apparently thought it was Brazil, despite clear evidence to the contrary.

In '83 the real horror begins with the grey Newky Brown monstrosity. I assume like Man U in the same period they excused their rank crapness by saying they couldn't see each other against the crowd.

Then it just goes mental.

1990 is vomit on a Norwich shirt. '93 looks like the sea has washed in and taken away with it any vestige of style. '93 also has a 3rd kit so puerile it looks like a South American prisoner who has escaped into in the jungle is using it as camouflage to escape detection.

'95 is a rugby shirt.

'97 simply defies description.

Adidas get hold of it and have a go for a few years but eventually they lose interest and hire Jackson Pollock again for the execrable 2005 and poncey 2007 3rd kit.

In 2008 they decide they want to be Fiorentina - a theme continued with last year's 3rd kit in which they want to be Inter Milan.

But, senator, they are no Inter Milan.

Which brings us full circle to the bananas and custard of last year.

Somewhere, there is some poor bastard who has spent his entire life savings on this tat.

I can't wait for next year. Remember the rule - the crapper the shirt the better the team do.

Gok Wan is filing his nails as we speak....
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League Ladders

As the Summer yawns before us (small matter of the World Cup notwithstanding) in an arid chasm of football-less-ness, any sane person has one of three responses:

1) Play golf

2) Go to the pub

3)...er, that's it

Otherwise there is seemingly no alternative to a diet of reality-TV with the missus (and the frighteningly-inevitable potential for conversation this might engender) or the crap that Sky uses to fill up the schedule (called Cricket I believe.)

The beginning of the season seems like a distant planet in a far off galaxy, viewed through a pair of kids' binoculars.

When I was a child, the signal for all this tedium to come to an end was not the endless and pointless set of retrospective-previous-season-taster-for-the-next-season TV punditfests, nor was it the onset of the first good weather of the season, just as it is typically ending.

No.

It was the publication of the Shoot League Ladders.

It will seem almost quaint to anyone who has never known anything other than a computer age, but boys all over the land would use this system to meticulously track the fortunes of every club in the Football League (that's Divisions 1,2,3 and 4 in old money.)

In a nutshell, it was a large piece of card with slits in it, on which was printed from 1-24 (again, before they faffed with the number of teams) all the possible positions in each division. Each position had a slit.

Then there was a second piece of card, which had pop-out tabs with the name and colours of each team in the league (14-year-olds countrywide are probably slitting their wrists by now.)

You pressed out the tabs (STAY WITH ME) and on a Saturday night when James Alexander Gordon read out the results, or on a Sunday when they printed them in the papers, you would meticulously re-organise all your tabs to reflect the new standings.

It really was brilliant - imagine the fun of having to reorganise 92 pieces of card once a week. But children had patience then. Shane or Chlyamidia nowadays would have ripped the thing up and binned it.

So maybe, like Shoot itself, the demise of the League Ladder has been a sad one. Now you can get scrolling up-to-the-minute information on the infobar of most sports programmes and websites. But where's the fun in that? The anticipation was the thing. Remember most kids at that time hardly saw any football on TV at all, so there was still something exotic about, er, putting little bits of card into another big piece of card. This was also the era in which I glued the sellophane wrapper which was wrapped round a bottle of Lucozade onto the screen of the black-and-white telly so I could pretend it was in colour.

Everything was in black-and-white then.

So Shoot began to die.

Its circulation fell from approximately 120,000 copies per week in its heyday to less than 35,000 in Autumn 2007. Its sad demise has led to it now becoming an online-only publication. The home of You Are The Ref , the esteemed organ that told us that footballers ate steak and chips and were fans of Lionel Ritchie - is now scrapping around for business in cyberspace along with everything else - including this article.

I guess it's hard to shove a piece of cardboard into a computer, and even harder nowadays to find that magical moment of excitement when the Summer ends and the season proper is about to start.

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Feet Of Clay

This is part of what remains of Feethams, former home to Darlington FC: they as of last month a former Football League team.

Accessible only by trespassing over a disused bridge and down potholed path strewn with broken glass and urban detritus, it's a metaphor for the demise of the club itself. No Highbury-style redevelopment here, despite the land being in the prosperous part of town and close to the centre. Property prices in Darlington being amongst the most stagnant in the country, apart from a nearby Sainsbury's no developer has yet dared to chance his arm.

And yet the story of Darlington FC in recent years has, of course, been the story of one particular chancer: George Reynolds.

Reynolds built his early reputation in criminal activities during the 1950s, and spent time in jail for smuggling watches in the 1960s. Amazingly, he went on to amass a £300 million fortune. He became the chairman of Darlington Football Club in 1999 and spent £20 million on a new stadium. He initially had big plans for the club, including the near-legendary near-signing of the near-notorious Faustino Asprilla, a man not averse from activity on the edge of legality himself. Many fans at the time were seduced by these almost-romantic gestures of faith.

However, Reynolds turned out to be all promises, and left the club in January 2004 to face impending tax evasion charges and a further jail sentence - since which time the club has struggled to cover the huge operating costs of what has become a huge white elephant. Feethams, originally a cricket ground which had been in existence since the 1860s and which had been leased to the club since its inception in 1883 (that's 1883) was left to the rack-and-ruin which you see above, although part of the land has thankfully at least reverted back to its cricketing roots.

Walking around the deserted and overgrown space now, it's possible to hear distant echoes of the cloth-capped and rattle-wielding railwaymen which must have formed its initial fan base. This alley, for example, winds round the back of the ground, its cobbles burnished by the thousands of passing feet which must have shuffled to and from league and cup games of yore. The club's history site tells of how in 1868 the club ventured into the FA Cup for the first time, receiving a to-become-ubiquitous 8-0 hammering by Grimsby Town.

There have been some highlights - the club reached the last sixteen of the cup in 1910. In 1923, 13,000 people squashed into the ground to watch a famous tie with Nottingham Forest, their first game on promotion to the old Second Division. In November 1955 the club made history, participating in the first FA Cup match to be played under flood lights at St. James' Park, Newcastle. By 1960, the club had its own floodlights, but in another stroke of ill-luck an electrical fault caused the entire West Stand to be burned to the ground.

I think perhaps the uninitiated reader may be beginning to get a sense of the history of this club.

In the 60s and 70s the club repeatedly flirted with demotion from the Football League. In the 1980s only donations from fans enabled the club to survive, and a small period of stability under Brian Little began which lasted into the early 90s. Following the move to the new stadium, some progress on the pitch under David Hodgson was notable and more than once the club just missed out on the play-offs.

Which, given the odd win, just about brings us up to date. After a disastrous 0910 season, mainly under the stewardship of Steve Staunton, who should - but ultimately didn't - know better, the club finished bottom of Division Two, fourteen points behind the club above (ironically nemesis Grimsby Town) with a lowest attendance of 1296 and a goal difference of minus 54.

And yet the club fights on. The official website crows proudly of how new signing 'Jamie Chandler admits he could have been playing League One football next season - but the persuasive powers of (new manager) Simon Davey prompted him to rejoin Darlington. The 21-year-old has penned a two-year deal at the Northern Echo Arena and is already looking forward to the 2010-11 season.'

Isn't that just football all over? All over the land, fans and clubs in a similar position scrape on by the skin of their teeth; last year's (in Darlo's case the last 100 or more years') results forgotten and a bright new dawn potentially emerging amid the broken glass and detritus of last season's disaster.

Season ticket news is available on the club's website, and if you hurry up before June 11 you can still get an adult ticket for £250. Under 16s can see the entire season for 46 quid. They're almost paying you.

Forget your replica-Lampard/England/Chelsea-etc pretend-success. Spend the average overall cost of going to one 'big four' Premiership game to buy into the history and future of this club and many others like it.
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