It is 30 years since a Rothbury side last met Gateshead
Redheugh, and the memory of that match still makes me grin. The fixture was in
the Tyneside Junior League, with the Rothbury team being run by Michael Arkle
and Thomson Rutherford.
It was soon apparent that the Coquetdale juniors were in out
of their depth in the Tyneside when Fenham turned up for the opening fixture at
Armstrong Park in their cars with moustaches, beards… and their own kids.
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| The great Thomson Rutherford |
It was meant to be an under 16s League, but Darren Arkle
revealed years later that we’d been entered into an under 18s by mistake. When
Redheugh made the trip up to the Coquet valley, there were some afters
following the game and two or three of the lads from Addycombe were ran up the
field by a mob of around 10 Gateshead lads looking for blood. When Adam
Hutchison stopped them from chasing the lads over his fence, they started
giving him gip.
That was when John Tait senior spotted them from the window,
leapt over the fence in a bounce of moppy, curly hair, jeans and black cowboy
boots, and charged headlong at them, cursing low expletives. They scattered as
they legged it off down the field, tumbling and slipping and skidding over in
sheep muck, panicked and shouting that a ‘lunatic was going to get them,’ as he
ran them all the way back down to the paper shop. Oh, happy days.
The young Reds brought in some older players of their own
after that Redheugh game back in the mid-80s, with the likes of Andrew Stewart
and Paul Cardwell-Hounam adding a bit of experience to the side. And when we
played our new-found friends down at Fenham and told them what had happened,
they said not to worry - they’d sort them out for us!
Rothbury will be expecting something less of an eventful
visit to Redheugh, off the pitch at least, when they travel down on Saturday in
the Northern Football Alliance Reeves Independent George Dobbins League Cup. Expect
a (sensible) preview with other Cup news in mid-week.
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