Tuesday On Tyneside

Boldon Community Association  2  Ryton & Crawcrook Albion  5

Northern Football League – Division Two

Admission / Programme - £5 / £1

I can’t day as I was filled with joy when we got summoned to do a presentation in Gosforth on a Tuesday afternoon.

The MD said we’d be done by 5pm, and bearing in mind Gosforth sits on the North side of Newcastle, as much as it was a ball ache, it did give me an opportunity to get to a new ground that ordinarily wouldn’t be on the radar.

Redcar Athletic, that ticked the boxes, it was on the way home (with a bit of a detour), and in terms of getting to it from North Newcastle, that didn’t look to be a major obstacle.

Wrong! It was almost 6pm by the time we were set loose, and when I finally got back into the car my sat nav was telling me I’d got something like twenty minutes to spare to make the 7.30pm kick off. It was just too tight for comfort, it wouldn’t have taken much to mess it up, so I elected for Plan B, and that was a much shorter journey with far less stress involved.

It seems Boldon Community Association have had pitch problems at their home ground, and since the New Year they’ve been playing on the plastic at the Ford Hub in Sunderland, a venue that ordinarily is used by fellow Northern League Division Two side Sunderland West End.

I could make it to the Ford Hub, or Ford Quarry as it was formerly known, in about half an hour from Gosforth, so that made more sense, Sunderland here we come!

The A1 behaved itself and then as we cut across to Sunderland and the A19, all was good in the World. The ground is not far from the A19 in the South Hylton area of Sunderland, with the railway line running to the rear, and the River Wear just beyond.

Obviously with the game being a very late Plan B, I wasn’t too sure what to expect in the sense that I’d not done any research whatsoever, but what I did find was a smart facility very much like many of the football hubs that are springing up around the Country.

You enter into a good sized car park, and alongside are three pitches, all floodlight, all of the plastic variety, however the pitch nearest to the main building was complete with a couple of small Atcost style stands and a pay booth. The main building, or the only building, depending on which way you look at it, was complete with the dressing rooms, and a good sized cafeteria area that served pies and cider in equal measures.

So what’s the deal with Boldon Community Association then?

The club was founded as Boldon Villa in 1892, becoming inaugural members of the Wearside League. The club waited until 1976 to take it’s current name, a year after they won their third Wearside League title, with it then being won again for a fourth time in 1997.

The Northern League was only joined in 2022, this after the 2021-22 season was curtailed due to Covid with the club fifteen points clear at the top. In the clubs first campaign, last season, they reached the play-offs in the second tier but lost out to Tow Law Town.

Ordinarily, the club would play home games at the Boldon Colliery Welfare Ground, which sits almost equidistant between the current temporary home at South Hylton, and the Tyne Tunnel at Jarrow. Are they Sunderland or Newcastle, well, on the basis that they are South of the Tyne I will go with Sunderland, but I will happily be corrected on that critical point!

It turned out to be an interesting game, not least for the Ryton & Crawcrook Albion centre forward Aaron Costello. After seventeen minutes he’d netted a hat-trick to put the visitors 3-0 up, but then less than ten minutes before half time he saw red, for presumably something he said to one of the officials. At this stage Boldon had pulled a goal back from Desejado Da Silva, so what was the second half going to give us?

Robbi Gateshill narrowed the deficit to just the one goal, but two quick fire strikes from Lucas Lowery-Matondo and Rhys McLeod with just over twenty minutes remaining pretty much killed the contest and secured the 5-2 victory for Ryton.

72 people paid to watch it, and I bet no one had the journey home I had to suffer!

An A19 closure at Easington meant a journey that pretty much took me to the seafront at Hartlepool, and then once back on track we had to leave the M1 at Aberford and take a detour round the back way to the next junction down!

Throw in the umpteen miles of speed restrictions between Sheffield and Chesterfield, and you’ve engineered yourself an arrival back at base for 12.45am.

I’ll think carefully before getting too excited about a meeting in Newcastle in future……