UPS AND DOWNS ALONG THE COAST ROAD

A road trip this week to the North-east took me through Scarborough where football has had a complicated  history, the town having had a proper league side until 2007, boasting Neil Warnock as an ex-manager. The Scarborough FC, founded in 1879, collapsed financially, despite gaining considerable accolades for appearances in FL division 4 and 3 play offs. The town footy fraternity after 2007, had two further stabs at club formation with Scarborough Town FC forming in 2008 but it failed to register any genuine support despite some success and there is a team called Scarborough Athletic ground sharing with Bridlington FC.
I found more stability at Whitby where the road north took me to the Seasiders' ground and what a beauty of a day it was. The Northern premier side have a compact stadium that holds around 3,000 and I watched the groundsman carefully white lining his sacred pitch in preparation for the weekend game against Kings Lynn. There's a lot of travelling to do in this 7th tier division.
Further down the road, I had lunch at Staithes, where the lady in the cafe on the harbour assured me that their local club ran lots of teams and her daughter played for Sunderland Ladies. That was a coincidence because that is where I ended up, at the Stadium of Light and what a delight.
But Man City showed no mercy, despite a three-quarter waxing moon overlooking the pitch, the Blue Mooners and Aguero especially took the piss. I use that word constructively because en route along the Northumberland coast, at Sandsend Bay, I witnessed the remnants of the Alum industry. If you don't know the chemistry then look it up, but safe to say the soil gives up advantageous elements that when saturated with urine (once brought in boat loads from the industrial cities of London and Newcastle-no not coals) to create a compound used in the textile and leather industries. It was booming a business which no longer gets the  "squeeze" and never fear other massively polluting chimneys poke out of the ground on the edge of the National Park to bring a pink haze to the horizon.