Gone But Not Forgotten (Part 6)

Southport, possibly more famous in sporting terms as the home of the Royal Birkdale golf course, suffered the ignominy of becoming the last town to lose its Football League status in 1978. Southport fell victims to the Seaside Curse, which saw the likes Barrow, New Brighton and Workington lose their place amongst the lower reaches of English professional football before the introduction of automatic promotion and relegation with the Conference, but their continuing presence in senior non-league football is a testament to the hardiness of the club and the durability of non-league football.

Formed in 1881, they played for forty years as a non-league club. They created an unwelcome first when they were bought out by a tyre company in 1918 who changed their name to Southport Vulcan after their company (the experiment only lasted a year before being quietly dropped - it did, however, leave them as possibly the first senior English club to adopt a sponsor's name into their club name) before, in the great Football League expansion of 1921, being co-opted into the new Third Division North.

Initially, whilst their League form was unimpressive, they did briefly gain a reputation in the FA Cup, becoming the first team from Division Three North to make the quarter-finals in 1931 (though they did contrive to lose 9-1 to Everton once they got there), but they remained a bottom division club until 1967, when Billy Bingham (who would, of course, go on to lead Northern Ireland to the last, umm, twelve of the 1982 World Cup finals, beating the hosts Spain on the way) took them up into Division Three, where they lasted three years before being relegated back to the basement. In 1973, they were promoted back up again, but the board sacked their popular manager Jimmy Meadows just after Christmas, and they were relegated back into Divisions Four. This time, there was no way back. The mid-1970s were a bad time for smaller English clubs. Crowds had dropped to well below 2,000 in an era with very television money and almost no sponsorship money at all. In 1978, they were replaced by Wigan Athletic (Wigan were voted in having finished in sixth place in the Northern Premier League, though they had barely finished outside the top two or three for the previous ten years).

At the end of their first season in the Northern Premier League, the Southport management made an almost fatally bad decision in the summer of 1979, when they rejected an invitation to join the newly-formed Alliance Premier League (which would later change it's name to the Conference). They cited concerns over extra expenses for travel, but failed to consider the fact that they were effectively awarding themselves relegation. They spent most of the 1980s struggling to keep themselves solvent, and failed to make the Conference until 1993, when they won the Northern Premier League at the fourteenth time of asking. After a couple of seasons flirting with a Conference championship challenge, they became mid-table regulars, managing a first Wembley appearance in the 1998 FA Trophy final (losing 1-0 against Cheltenham Town) and dumping Notts County out of the FA Cup in 2002, before being relegated again in 2003. This time they were down for just one season, winning the Conference North in 2004, but they were relegated back at the end of last season.

The Football League and the Conference eventually negotiated automatic promotion and relegation in 1987, and this was expanded to two places in 2003. The experiences of the promoted clubs have varied widely. Some, such as Wycombe Wanderers and Yeovil Town, have established themselves in the League, whilst others, such as Kidderminster Harriers and Rushden & Diamonds, have had a go before falling back through the trap door. Although it still results in a considerable amount of wailing from the supporters of clubs struggling on (what is now known as) League Two, the Conference is stronger and more professional than ever. A number of former League clubs have stabilised in the Conference, whilst a couple (most notably Doncaster Rovers and Carlisle United) ended years of crisis with a stabilising couple of years in the Conference before re-emerging in a considerably better state than they had been for many years. We'll probably never see the heroics of the Wimbledon team that went from the Southern League to Division One in less than a decade again, but we have meritocracy now at the foot of the football ladder now, and the more idiosyncratic decisions of the Football League's re-election committee are now, thankfully, largely merely footnotes in the history of the game.

Six Of The Best - Former Southport Legends

Stan Mortensen - Still the only scorer of a hat-trick in an FA Cup Final (for Blackpool in 1953), Mortensen played a season for Southport just four years after his unparalleled achievement.

Bill Perry - The man who scored the winner in the aforementioned 1953 FA Cup Final also played one season for Southport, in 1962-63.

Mark Wright - The 1992 FA Cup-winning Liverpool captain managed Southport in 2000/01, before being sacked amid rumours of racist abuse. He then repeated the trick five years later at Peterbrough United. Classy.

Jimmy Melia - The man who took Brighton & Hove Albion to the 1983 FA Cup final (and also played nearly 300 matches for Liverpool) had a short and unsuccessful time in charge of Southport in 1975.

Luther Blissett - The former Watford striker (and the man who unwittingly gave his name to "The Luther Blissett Project" - Google it if you don't know what I'm talking about) played for Southport in the 1990s.

Andy Mutch - Steve Bull's often forgotten striking partner at Wolverhampton Wanderers in the late 1980s and early 1990s topped and tailed his playing career at Southport, starting out there in 1984 and playing his final match there in 1999.

Gone But Not Forgotten (Part 5)

England played a friendly last night, apparently. To be honest, I had better things to do, like reading up on the history of New Brighton FC, who graced the Football League for thirty years until 1951, before falling away and into obscurity. I have to say that this will be the last one of these for a while, because the information on the clubs is becoming more and more difficult to find without lengthy trips to the library, which I sadly don't have the time for, and also because there doesn't seem to be a great deal of interest in them. In case you happened to be wondering, New Brighton isn't a second club from the coastal town in East Sussex that I call home. New Brighton is a small resort on the Wirral peninsular, opposite Liverpool. Popular with tourists (in the way that British seaside resorts were in the nineteenth century), the local authorities built an 80,000 capacity stadium called The Tower Grounds, and formed a football club called New Brighton Tower FC to play in it. Having been elected into the Football League just year after they'd been formed in 1898, the club was successful on the pitch, finishing just short of the promotion places twice, but they had over-stretched themselves financially, paying for international players to play for them whilst subsisting on crowds that barely stretched into four figures, and folded in 1901.

It took two decades for football to come back to this particular corner of the Wirral peninsular, but a new club was formed as New Brighton FC, in 1921, and was elected into the Football League two years later. The club chose not to play at The Tower Grounds, moving into a new stadium at Rakes Lane, whereupon they embarked upon one of the least distinguished football histories of any Football League club. They finished third on goal average behind Nelson in the newly formed Division Three North in their second season, narrowly missing out on promotion, but failed to trouble the top of the table in the rest of their League career. They finished in tenth place for two seasons in a row in 1927 and 1928, but that was the best that they could manage in the rest of their time in the Football League. Their lack of League success was mirrored in the FA Cup, though they did embark on a run to the Fourth Round in 1938, where they held Tottenham Hotspur to a draw at home before losing the replay 5-2 at White Hart Lane.

The outbreak of war in 1939 obviously had a drastic effect on the finances of football clubs, as the League programme was suspended, but New Brighton were affected worse than most. Their Rake Lane ground was destroyed by German bombs during the war, and the club was forced to move into the (by now crumbling) Tower Grounds in 1945. They struggled on until 1951, when they were voted out by the League in favour of Workington. They joined the Lancashire Combination, and it looked for a while as if they would be capable of holding their own as a successful non-league team. In 1957, they beat three Football League clubs (Stockport County, Derby County and Torquay United) in the FA Cup before losing 9-0 to Burnley in the Fourth Round, and two years later they won the Lancashire Combination - the old club's only championship win. After this, however, the club declined slowly, before folding in 1981. The lure of the name, however, remained too strong to resist - a new New Brighton FC was formed in 1996, and they still play at the very bottom of the game, in the West Cheshire League.

There are plenty of other teams that failed to keep hold of their place in the Football League - Thames FC, Aberdare Athletic, Nelson, Darwen, Glossop North End and more. The reasons for their removal and replacement were many and varied, but they serve as a reminder to anyone that supports a Football League club that their place at the top table can never be considered perpetual. Automatic promotion between the League and the Conference was introduced in 1987, and in the two decades since then, the non-league game, after decades in decline, has started to grow part of the way back towards the popularity that it once enjoyed. Crowds are up, while they continue to slide in the Premier League, and relegation from League Two, although still an anathema to clubs that have never suffered it before, is no longer the death knell that it once was. Some clubs, such as Doncaster Rovers, Chester City and Carlisle United, endured years of agony rattling around at the foot of the League before slipping through the trapdoor, only to re-emerge at a later date in considerably better health as a result of their time away. The English game is more meritocratic as a result of this, and its strength in depth is possibly the only thing that we can justifiably proud of about it these days - we can hardly hold the England national team with any affection any more, can we?

Gone But Not Forgotten (Part 4)

There seems to have been three main reasons why a football club would be voted out of the Football League in the days before automatic promotion and relegation with the Conference:

1. Being so spectacularly bad that there was no earthly reason why they should have been allowed to carry on playing professional football.

2. There just having been a non-league club that had caught the media's attention, somehow.

3. Being from a geographical location that was a bit of a pain in the arse to get to.

Barrow FC fell foul of the second and third of these conditions, and lost their place in the League in 1972, even though they had been challenging for a place in the Second Division just four years earlier. The drama at Holker Street didn't end with their demotion, either. Over the last thirty years, they have been to Wembley and a suffered a financial meltdown in 1999 took three years to resolve fully and took them to the brink of liquidation.

It's fair to say that the vast majority of Barrow's career in the Football League was unspectacular, to say the least. They only managed three seasons outside of the bottom division in their fifty-one years, in the mid-to-late 1960s, and seldom (if ever - the club's own website is rather scant on information regarding their history) got any further than the Third Round of the FA Cup. Once relegated back to Division Four in 1970, however, they went into a rapid free-fall, which saw them finish bottom of the League the following season, and then third from bottom in 1972. That summer, they were replaced by Hereford United. Quite whose fault this rapid fall from grace was is open to question. Some blame their manager Norman Bodell, who arrived at Holker Street during the 1968-69 season and immediately saw the team tumble down the divisions. Others blame the introduction of speedway, which ruined the pitch drainage (personally, I'm not buying this as an excuse - if the Barrow team were used to it, it would, if anything, give them something of an advantage at home - over-watering the pitch was a tactic regularly used by managers until it was outlawed by the Football League in the 1930s).

Hereford United had become media darlings with their FA Cup run during the 1971-1972 season, during which they beat Newcastle United in a Third Round replay and held West Ham United to a draw in the Fourth Round before losing the replay at Upton Park. Strangely, some Barrow fans still hate Hereford United for being elected into the League in their place. It's perfectly reasonable to say that Hereford's promotion into the League wasn't, strictly speaking, deserved. They'd won the Southern League just once, in 1965, and had only finished second in the season in which they were voted into the League. However, to continue to blame Hereford United for applying to get into the League in the only way in which they could at a time when the Football League effectively acted as a cartel, and finding that their luck was in. The vote was a tight one - Barrow and Hereford scored the same on the first ballot, before Hereford won the second one and, with that, Barrow were out.

A further blow would come to the status of the town of Barrow-in-Furness in 1974, when the 1972 Local Government Act kicked in, shuffling Barrow from Lancashire into the newly-formed county of Cumbria. Barrow FC were more fortunate than most other former League clubs as they were invited to join the Alliance Premier League in 1979. They were unable to build on this, though, and spent most of the 1980s bouncing between the Conference and the Northern Premier League. In 1988, though, they reached the FA Trophy semi-finals (going out after two legs and two replays to Enfield), but went a stage further and won it at Wembley two years later.
The good times weren't to last long at Holker Street. In 1996, they were taken over by a Liverpool-based businessman called Steven Vaughan. Vaughan, to put things mildly, could be described as an unsavoury character. A long time friend of the convicted drug trafficker Curtis Warren, it was widely believed that Vaughan was acting as a front for Warren, and in January 1999 the club was suddenly wound up and a protracted investigation was launched to establish exactly who the owner of their stadium was. Demoted from the Conference in the summer of 1999, they were placed into the Northern Premier League upon the request of the FA. It took three years for them to complete the purchase of Holker Street. Since then, Barrow have struggled on the pitch, though they have managed to retain their Conference North status. Their last brush with controversy came earlier this year, when one of their players became the first to be jailed for an on-field offence, when he was sent away for punching a Bristol Rovers striker during an FA Cup match. It's not ideal, but it must be better than having to worry about whether the man running your club is a convicted drug trafficker or not.

Five Bluebirds Of A Feather

Peter Withe - The European Cup-winning Aston Villa and Nottingham Forest striker played one match for Barrow in the 1971-1972 season, their last in the Football League.

Mike Marsh - Formerly of Liverpool and West Ham United, Marsh was playing for Southend United when he picked up a serious injury, the insurance policy for which meant that he could never play League football again. He played for Barrow in the 1998-99 season.

Colin Methven - Voted in 1998 as Wigan Athletic's greatest ever League player, Methven, who played over 500 matches for Wigan, Carlisle, Walsall and Blackpool, finished his playing career at Barrow in 1994.

Tony Parks - The Spurs reserve goalkeeper, who saved the winning penalty in their 1984 UEFA Cup win against Anderlecht, also played in the financially ruinous Barrow team of 1998-99.

Gone But Not Forgotten (Part 3)

The far north-west of England had a bad time of things in the 1970s, in football terms. In 1970, there were three clubs from (as it was to become known in 1974) Cumbria. By the end of the decade, that would be down to just the one club and, in the 1990s, even the one remaining club, Carlisle United, would go on to spend most of their recent history struggling to keep losing their place, even losing it for a season in 2004 before winning it back. There'll be more on the other club, Barrow, on here later in the week, but tonight we'll be taking a look at Cumbria's forgotten club - Workington AFC. Stuck up on the north-west coast, and (perilously, some would say) near to the Sellafield Nuclear Power Plant, Workington managed twenty-years in the Football League club without much conspicuous success, though their recent form seems to suggest that they might finally be on the up again.

Founded in 1921, they spent their first thirty years playing in various regional leagues, before being voted into the Football League in 1951, in place of New Brighton. Their early years were a struggle, although they managed the occasional run in the FA Cup. In 1958, they became one of the last clubs to play against Matt Busby's original Busby Babes team in the Third Round of the FA Cup, shortly before the Munich air disaster, that killed the majority of the United team. The 1960s were the club's heyday. In both 1964 and 1965, they made the quarter-finals of the League Cup (taking Chelsea to a replay), and in 1964 they earned promotion to the Third Division for the first time. In 1966, they narrowly missed out on promotion to the Second Division but, the following year, were relegated back into Division Four.

Falling crowds at Borough Park started to take their toll and, although the club rallied to mid-table a couple of times in the early 1970s, the decade was mostly a torrid time for the club. They finished in the re-election positions for four seasons in a row, and finished the 1976-77 with just nineteen points from forty-six matches, and were regularly playing matches in front of crowds of well under 1,000. They were replaced by Wimbledon, whose FA Cup exploits over the previous couple of seasons had earned them considerable national attention. As often happened at the time, Workington struggled to adapt the the harsh reality of life as a non-league club. They regularly struggled in their new home, the Northern Premier League, and were relegated again in 1988. The following decade wasn't much better, and in 1998 they fell through the trapdoor again, this time into the North West Counties League - the bottom rung of senior football in that part of the world.

This time, though, the steady decline was arrested. They lasted just one season in the NWCL before winning promotion and stabilising themselves in the Northern Premier League. In 2004, they were shuffled into the Premier Division of what was by then called the Unibond League and, the following season, went up again to the Conference North, this time via the play-offs. Last season they finished in third place, and made the play-offs for a place in the Conference, but were less successful this time, losing to Hinckley United. They start this season as fifth favourites for the Blue Square North, in a division alongside Tamworth and Southport (both relegated from the Conference), Boston United (relegated from the Football League in a Monopoly-esque "go directly to jail style at the end of last season) and the upward looking Trust-run club, AFC Telford United. They'll have their work cut out to succeed against that little lot, but their future is the most secure that it has been in three decades.

Five Famous Former Reds

Bill Shankley - The legendary manager would be the manager at Borough Park from January 1954 until December 1955, before taking over at Huddersfield Town. He ended up at... somewhere or other.

Keith Burkinshaw - He would later go on to win two FA Cups and a UEFA Cup at Spurs, but he started out his managerial career at Workington, where he played almost 300 games and spent six months as player-manager.

Scott Carson - The erratic Liverpool reserve goalkeeper was spotted playing for Workington Youth team and offered a transfer to Leeds United's academy in 2002. Within a year, he was the England under-21 goalkeeper.

Ken Furphy - The manager that took Watford to an FA Cup semi-final in 1970 whilst in the Third Division (beating Liverpool on the way) and also had a spell in charge at Sheffield United also started his managerial career at Borough Park.

Alan Ashman - The former West Bromwich Albion manager, who won the FA Cup with The Baggies in 1968 and was, famously, sacked by them in 1971 while he was on holiday in Greece (and found out from a Greek waiter) finished his managerial career in England before moving into scouting.

Gone But Not Forgotten (Part 2)

The story of the end of Gateshead FC's stay in the Football League may be one of the great forgotten story's of post-war British football. In an age in which it was practically impossible to just get chucked out of the League, why were Gateshead, who had not done very much wrong on the pitch, chucked out so arbitrarily? It's a tale that the League has chosen never to spill the beans on in full, but it sparked a series of deaths and rebirths that have been ongoing now for nearly five decades. Whilst Gateshead FC has shown tremendous durability in continually bouncing back when it has seemed as if the odds have been continually stacked against them, it's worth recalling that decades of instability on north Tyneside could have been avoided had the Football League not made one of the stranger decisions of it's 119 year long history.

Gateshead owed their very existence to a financial crisis at another club. South Shields FC had been founded in 1907, and elected into the Football League in 1919. During the 1920s, the Great Depression hit the north-east particularly hard, and the very existence of South Shields was very much a hand-to-mouth one. In 1930, they moved ten miles west, away from the coast and to Gateshead, just to the south of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. On paper, the move made sense. Newcastle supported just one professional team, and was a much larger city that North and South Shield were combined. They also had a ready-made ground to move into at Redheugh Park, paid for by the local council. It seemed as if the decision was the right one to start with. A crowd of 15,000 turned out to see their first match against Doncaster Rovers, and in 1932 they narrowly missed out on promotion to Division Two to Lincoln City.

Redheugh Park was, it has to be said, not one of English football's more salubrious venues. A hotch-potch of various stands, and surrounded by a greyhound track, it was always going to struggle to be filled, especially when nearby Newcastle United could comfortably fit over 60,000 people into St James Park. Gateshead, sadly, never really caught on. None of this is to say that the club didn't have its moments. The early 1950s were the club's golden years. In 1950, they missed out on promotion to Division Two again, this time by just two points, and two years later they had a run to the FA Cup Fourth Round. The following year, they would better even that, beating Liverpool 1-0 in the Third Round before going on to lose by a Nat Lofthouse goal to Bolton Wanderers in the quarter-finals at Redheugh Park, in front of a record crowd of over 17,000 people. When the Football League re-organised in 1958, Gateshead were placed in the Fourth Division, and finished the following season needing to re-apply for re-election. When the same thing happened again the following year, it might have been a small cause for concern, but nothing could have properly prepared them for what happened next.

Gateshead finished the 1959-60 season in 22nd place out of 24 in the Fourth Division. Southport and Oldham Athletic, who finished below them, had both been required to apply on more occasions than them. What exactly happened is lost to the mists of time, but the Football League shocked everybody by voting to replace Gateshead with Peterborough United. Some have said since that the league was concerned by Gateshead's small crowds. Some have said that smaller clubs were tired of having to travel so far north. Some have blamed the Gateshead directors of the time for complacency (the club's refusal to serve free alcohol to visiting directors has also been cited). Some simply think that Peterborough was simply better placed, geographically whilst other, darker voices have even suggested that money might have changed hands.

The following years were years of slow decline. Unsurprisingly rejected in their application to join the Scottish League, and with northern non-league football lacking a big league for semi-professional clubs (the North West Counties League accepted them for a couple of years, but the north-eastern Northern League - home to the likes of Bishop Auckland - was resolutely amateur. They bounced around various semi-pro leagues until 1968, when they joined the newly-formed Northern Premier League. They were demoted from this in 1970 after finishing bottom, and spent three years playing regional football before folding in 1973.

What happened next was a strange case of history repeating itself. A new South Shields FC had reformed in 1936, but by the mid-1970s they were struggling in the Northern Premier League. In 1974, they changed their name to Gateshead and moved into the Gateshead International Athletics Stadium, an 11,000 capacity stadium in the borough, In 1974, they changed their name to Gateshead United and quickly became a powerful team in the Northern Premier League, before themselves folding. Immediately, a new Gateshead FC was formed, and took their place. This time, there was a degree more permanence. The new Gateshead won promotion into the Alliance Premier League (now the Conference) in 1983 and, although relegated again, won promotion back in 1986. Relegated again, they finally got back there. in 1990. Supported by strong local sponsorship, this time they stayed there for eight years, finishing 7th and 5th in 1995 and 1996. Crowds, however, remained low, and they were relegated in 1998, and since then have been in the Unibond League.

The International Stadium, with its running track and vast cantilever stand, had been the very reason for the club's existence in the late 1970s, but in the long-term it has come to be regarded as a contributing factor to the club's struggle to attract large crowds. Current chairman Graham Wood, however, is ambitious, and hopes to be able to move the club into a "proper" football stadium, hoping that this will finally persuade the people of Tyneside that a viable alternative is available to the all (well, not quite) conquering behemoths of the area, Newcastle United. You can read more about the possible sites for the club - one of which, intriguingly, is the original site of Redheugh Park - here. Times, certainly, have changed since Gateshead FC struggled to make crowds of 500 in the Conference when they were a top six club eleven or twelve years ago. Newcastle's fans are amongst the longest-suffering of any in the top flight, and there might just now be a place for a smaller club to take a small bite out of the Magpies' cake. Freddy Shepherd has, after all, been having it and eating it for many years now. They might never beat Liverpool in the FA Cup again, but I wouldn't bet against yet another revival from Tyneside's most robust club.

Gone But Not Forgotten (Part 1)

Yes, indeed - yet another occasional series, this one celebrating the clubs that we have loved and lost. Nowadays, relegation from the Football League is far from the end. As Carlisle United and Doncaster Rovers have demonstrated, it can even be the jolt that a complacent lower division club needs to spring back into life. Prior to the introduction of automatic promotion and relegation, however, it was more often than not a death sentence. Before 1987, the Football League had a system of re-election at the end of each season. The bottom four clubs in Division Four had to be voted back into the club, alongside any non-league clubs that wished to be considered for admittance. It was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a somewhat arbitrary process. Hartlepool United, for example, had to apply for re-election on a staggering eleven occasions, but were successful each time. Some clubs, however, were less fortunate - Gateshead applied just three times before being kicked out in 1960, without even having finished bottom of Division Four the previous season. As often as not, the clubs that were voted out ended up out of business. The notion of a football club, however - it's spirit and soul - are somewhat more difficult to get rid of, and many of those that passed on have since re-formed and are playing somewhere further down the pyramid.

It might seem surprising that the city of Bradford had two Football League clubs Bradford City and Bradford (Park Avenue). Cities twice the size, such as Leeds and Newcastle, only support one league club. How this came about was a quirk of the development of football in the city, and had long term ramifications in the world of rugby league, too. The Bradford Football Club was formed in 1863, splitting with the other northern clubs to join the Northern Rugby Football Union in 1895 (subsequent rule changes would make rugby union and rugby league appreciably different games, but the initial split came about over a dispute over payments - the union clubs wanted to remain amateur, whilst the rugby league clubs wanted to turn professional). The club adopted the name Park Avenue (after their stadium) to distinguish themselves from Bradford City and the new Bradford Northern Rugby Football Club. In 1907, they decided to switch codes from rugby to football, and applied to join the Football League, but were rejected. As a stop gap, they joined the Southern League (strange times indeed - the Southern League was the only league outside of the Football League that professional clubs could play in at the time, so BPA had little choice), where they stayed for three years before finally joining the Football League the following year.

One of the most distinctive things about Bradford Park Avenue was their Park Avenue stadium. Designed by the celebrated architect Archibald Leitch, it held 37,000 people in its prime, and was notable for a small pavilion in one corner called the "Doll's House", and a vast stand (as can be seen at the top of this article) with three gables built into the roof of it. It was, in its heyday, a considerably better stadium that Bradford City's Valley Parade. There was some talk of a merger between the two clubs when Park Avenue joined the League, but nothing ever came of it, and City's FA Cup win in 1911 (which turned out to be their only major trophy win) but the idea to bed for good.

On the pitch, Park Avenue were initially very successful. They were promoted to Division One in 1913 and finished in ninth position in their first season there. Football, however, was disrupted by the outbreak of the First World War, and Park Avenue never recovered from the forced break, and were relegated twice in successive seasons, in 1921 and 1922. Promoted back to the Second Division in 1928, though, they would hold their place in English football's second highest division for over two decades for being relegated back in 1950. In the immediate period after the Second World War, they earned themselves a reputation as a tricky team to draw in the FA Cup. In 1946, the made the FA Cup quarter-finals, in 1948 they beat Arsenal 1-0 at Highbury and in 1949 they held Manchester United to two draws before falling after a second replay. Their first brush with re-election came in 1956, and they were placed into the Fourth Division in 1958 when the Football League reorganised itself into four divisions. Their final promotion would come in 1961, but they were relegated again in 1963.

Their decline after this is not easily explained. Throughout the rest of the 1960s, they became an almost permanent fixture near the bottom of the Division Four table, finishing in bottom place in 1968, 1969 and 1970. Their luck ran out in the summer of 1970, when they were voted out of the League and replaced by Cambridge United. The club limped on in the Northern Premier League, but massive debts forced them to sell Park Avenue and move in to share City's Valley Parade in 1973, and they folded the following year. The clubs debts at the time of its death were recorded as £57,652 - £5,000 less that had caused the death of Accrington Stanley twelve years earlier. It was a tiny amount for the club to go bust over, but they had no assets following the sale of Park Avenue, and the death of their chairman and benefactor Herbert Metcalfe in 1971 had left them without their biggest source of income. Park Avenue stadium fell into disrepair - everything bar the terracing had been demolished by the early 1980s - but remained unused to the extent that the Park Avenue Sunday League team played a match there in 1987.

The club reformed immediately as a Sunday League club, and transferred over to senior football in 1988, moving swiftly through the amateur leagues into the North West Counties League, and playing their home matches at Bramley and Batley Rugby League Football grounds. In 1995, and by now playing, as they do now, at the Horsfall Athletics Stadium in Bradford, they were promoted to the Unibond League, and in the big non-league reorganisation of 2004 won a play-off match to take a place in the newly-formed Conference North. They were relegated in their first season back, and again in 2006. Last season, however, they finished amongst the play-off places in the Unibond One, and will start this season alongside FC United of Manchester as the favourites for promotion. After thirty-seven years away from the bright lights of the Football League, Park Avenue don't look like making a swift return there any time soon. It is, however, a testament to the dedication of their small band of supporters that thirty-three years after their original club gave up the ghost, there is still a team bearing such a proud name at the bottom of the football pyramid.

Six Of The Best - Former Bradford Park Avenue Players

Craig Bellamy - The tattooed, neck-free West Ham "star" was picked out by Norwich City after a few matches at Park Avenue had earned him an successful trial at Bradford City.

Paddy Kenny - The Sheffield United goalkeeper started his career at Bradford, before going on to Whitby Town and Bury, before being signed by Sheffield United.

Neil Redfearn - Redfearn has made 790 Football League Appearances (the fifth most of any player), and played his 1000th competitive match for Bradford against Solihull Borough in the FA Trophy in 2006. He also managed them briefly, and is now the manager of another former Football League club, Northwich Victoria.

Ron Greenwood - The former England and West Ham United manager made 49 appearances for Bradford between 1945 and 1949, before moving on to Brentford. In 1955, he won a League Championship medal for Chelsea.

Kevin Hector - Hector was Bradford's regular top scorer in the mid-1960s, before transferring to Derby County in 1966. He went on to play nearly 500 games for Derby, and won two League Championship medals for them, in 1972 and 1975.

Len Shackleton - The legendary Sunderland striker scored 166 goals before being transferred to Newcastle United in 1946 for £13,000. Two years later, his transfer to Wearside for £20,500 was a British record at the time. He went on to score 101 goals in 348 games for Sunderland, before retiring through injury in 1957.