ENTERPRISE NATIONAL LEAGUE NORTH. SATURDAY, 8th AUGUST 2026.
Well, the season has started and we kick-off with even more bad news about our club. As has become the norm, Morecambe AFC is embroiled in yet another controversy due to an ownership which have already put us in the history books for all the wrong reasons by being the first club ever to be formally investigated by the new Independent Football Regulator (IFR).
Local Labour MP, Lizzi Collinge, had this to say about the latest scandal to the local media earlier this week:
“I was made aware by constituents of allegations that pension contributions have not been paid by Morecambe FC so I immediately contacted the Pensions regulator for more information and to make clear that I expect them to take any allegations seriously. These allegations are very concerning and, if true, will be extremely worrying for staff who rely on these contributions for their future income. If any staff member thinks they may have been affected by this, please get in touch with me so my team and I can support you as this is investigated.”
You can do this at lizzi.collinge.mp@parliament.uk
Two quick updates from my Preview of the Season. Club Icon Yann Songo’o has signed for Hyde United, against whom he scored for us in last season’s friendlies under Derek Adams. Good luck to him there. I had also feared that Jake Cain had been forced to retire but his name featured in a PFA Eleven this week advertising the talents of unsigned professionals. He clearly performed well enough to impress Morecambe Manager Adam Lakeland because he has been re-signed until the end of the season. This is an excellent development. If he is able to remain injury-free, Jake will be a key player for us – this is a man who has the talent to play at a much higher level of football.
A further development was the signing on-loan of Stoke City Midfielder Ruben Curley until January 2027. He is a 20-year-old graduate of the Manchester United Academy and has had previous experience at this level with Curzon Ashton. He went straight into the first team this afternoon.
Today marked the beginning of the new campaign and today’s opening fixture in Morecambe’s National League North crusade. The visitors to the Halo Aerospace Stadium for the Shrimps’ first-ever match in this competition were Spennymoor Town.
Spennymoor is a town in County Durham eighty-five miles north-east of Morecambe which was once synonymous with heavy industry. It can be found about eight miles south of the county town and has a population of about 20,000 people. Both the town and the club’s motto is Spe Nemo Ruet. This has nothing to do with a Disney cartoon about fish apparently. It actually means – in Latin: “With Hope; No-one Will Fail.”
Oh really? So why isn’t our old pal Hallam playing for them then?
Moving quickly on, the latest incarnation of Spennymoor Town was founded in 2005 following the failure of our old friends from Northern Premier League days Spennymoor United – who had gone spectacularly bust earlier in the year. United were quite a force in non-league football back in the day when the north-east region in general was a productive industrial area producing coal and steel and all sorts of manufactured and chemical products. The regional Northern League there was one of the strongest of the one-time amateur leagues to be found anywhere in England.
The club was founded in 1904 as a result of the merger of the original Spennymoor Town and Weardale Ironopolis. Ironopolis briefly played in the Football League a long time ago but were the works team of the huge steelworks once to be found in Tudhoe, which can be found at the northernmost end of Spennymoor. It was here that Sir Henry Bessemer established his ground-breaking method of producing high-quality metal in the massive steelworks which took up masses of space in what had once been a rural village.
But the demise of so many regional industries since the 1970s has been reflected by the reverse in fortunes of the club. Spennymoor United were relegated for the first time in their then almost century-long history in the year 2000. Things got even worse when their uninsured Clubhouse was burnt to the ground in an inferno which it took five fire appliances to control on Christmas Day 2003. This immediately deprived the club of key income (c.£2,000 a week in lost takings even all that time ago) and proved to be its death-knell: deprived of the financial resources to complete the campaign, United were forced to resign from the Northern Premier League top division actually during the 2004-5 season with only 33 games completed.
Once they had gone bust, local rivals Evenwood Town put in a bid to take-over United’s suddenly defunct home ground. Evenwood is ten miles to the south west and what effectively became the merger of the two clubs did not go down well with many of its own supporters. They saw it as basically a Milton Keynes/Wimbledon takeover as their club and position in the Northern League was basically shifted lock, stock and barrel to The Brewery Field in the territory of a rival north-eastern tribe.
(Evenwood Town had started life in 1890 and had a distinct history all of its own which lives on with a shadow club that still plays at their old Welfare Ground in the Crook & District League, sharing its facilities with the Cricket Club which uses the same space. All the stands which could be found there have been demolished but their second-hand floodlights – ex-North Shields FC – still remain, albeit very incongruously.)
The controversial `new’ Spennymoor Town club won the Northern League Division Two division in 2006–07. The Moors then won the Northern League’s top division no less than four times before finally joining the Northern Premier League in 2014. In the meantime, Town had won the FA Vase during 2012–13, beating Tunbridge Wells 2-1 at Wembley.
Spennymoor then won two automatic promotions via the play-offs to reach the National League North by 2017. Last season, the part-time professional club ended-up tenth in the table.
Now, seeing the name of the club’s ground – The Brewery Field – and its curious choice of a Mascot: Brewery the Badger, I put two and two together and got five. I assumed the Beer-making establishment referred to was the Badger Brewery. But that particular extant brewery can be found in Blandford Forum, Dorset. It turns out that the name of the ground refers to the long-defunct Tower Brewery in King Street in the Tudhoe Grange part of the town which would once cater for the thirsty workers from the swelteringly hot local steelworks. Ironically, it was the very nature of that plant which led to the demise of the brewery: it used water from local wells which became so polluted by the industrial nature of Spennymoor in the middle of the Nineteenth Century that it was shut-down by the local authority as unfit to drink as long ago as 1877. It re-opened in 1883 when Scottish Brewer Patrick Bruce Junor arrived from Durham and found an uncontaminated remote water supply with which to produce his own range of beers. Junor’s had between 25 and 50 tied houses, some of which still exist and the football club’s own community pub – the very smart Moors Tavern – is almost certainly one of them and probably the original Taphouse. The Brewery ceased production again in 1901 and was then used as a depot by a larger conglomerate of north-eastern breweries, including Vaux of Sunderland, which once owned `The Brewery’ in Kendal before it was transformed into an arts centre. The Tower Brewery was demolished in 2003 after serving as a car repair bodyshop for many years and the only sign of it that remains is the Brewery Field which was once attached and on which Spennymoor Town still play.
Would the Moors have anything to raise a glass to today? Whether they did or not, our return visit Spennymoor Town will take place on Tuesday 8th December 2026 at 19:45hrs.
Morecambe Manager Adam Lakeland had this to say the day before today’s match:
“We’ve virtually got a whole new playing squad and we’re still not done yet. We still need to add to the group. Pretty much everything’s been changed. I think it probably needed that. Immediately, we’re obviously looking to get off to a good start tomorrow. I think one thing that my teams have always been is fit; hard-working; organised. And I’ve had a good team spirit. Spennymoor are a fantastic football club. They’re very well established and respected at this level of football. I think it’s a very difficult opening game for us. But we want to win every game we play. That’s got to be the aim. So it’s going to be (a game) that’s going to show everybody at the club just what this league’s about. We want to get out of this league but it’s not going to be easy. It’s not going to be straightforward. Every single team is going to make it difficult for us. There’s a lot of good teams; a lot of good players at this level of football. And Spennymoor are one of them. To get a result tomorrow, we’re going to have to work incredibly hard for it.”
The weather was really pleasant in Morecambe today: the air as clear as clear could be as you could virtually see individuals walking up the slopes of the Adam Lakeland© hills far across the Bay, so perfect was the view. It was warm without being hot and the recent very keen Westerly wind had relented somewhat to a gentle breeze. It was a lovely day for playing football on a perfect surface which is a tribute to the skills of the Morecambe groundstaff – assuming that we have got any left, of course…
It was noticeable from the moment they walked onto the pitch that Spennymoor’s was a far bigger team than ours physically. In centre forward Cameron Salkeld, they have a really big lad who is very nimble for his size. Sadly, he seems to have been born without any sense of balance (the poor thing) because he kept falling over all throughout the game.
If I was his Manager, I’d be really unhappy with him: if he had spent as much time keeping up with play as he did on the ground rolling around looking for free-kicks which were rarely awarded, the Moors could very well have won today.
They started very positively in front of a very vociferous and excited home crowd and took the game to the Shrimps right from the kick-off.
They clearly had a plan, looked confident with it and were the better team for the first forty-five minutes by quite some way. Whereas Morecambe looked disjointed and unbalanced – there is no way that the impressive Elijah Buckley-Ricketts can lead the line, for instance, but he played as Centre Forward the entire time he was on the pitch today – the visitors played like a team that understood the system and were used to each other.
The first corner-kick they won – early doors – had alarm bells ringing in at least my head. Probably half of the visitors’ side were taller than most of our players and goalkeeper Joe Young looked like a child as he tried to defend his line surrounded by giants. But the training-ground routine the Moors attempted to implement turned into a farce worthy of the circus as it went completely wrong and the ball was played harmlessly into touch beyond the far post to the delight of the packed ranks of the home terrace.
But the Moors’ second corner – after nine minutes – resulted in the opening goal. Morecambe couldn’t clear it and Shrimps’ Old Boy Richie Bennett tried his luck from the left side of the penalty area from his point of view with a shot which the otherwise excellent Liam Hogan deflected high into his own goal in trying to head it over the bar.
Tommy Miller’s team had the best of the rest of the half as well. Young did really well to save a good effort from Junior Mondal with a quarter of an hour played. The same player then almost connected with Rob Ramshaw’s low cross from the Moors’ right at the far post right at the death of the first period. At the other end, Morecambe offered few chances despite occasional good approach play, with Elliott Newby giving the visiting defence plenty to think about but not actually testing Zac Hadi, the huge goalkeeper Spennymoor signed from Bradford City on-loan just yesterday.
Morecambe started the second period with exactly the same line-up which the Manager had chosen to start the match. From the off, though, they played further up the field and took the game to the visitors. They stated their intent when Cameron Coxe latched onto Ben Williams’ clever ball over the top to force a first – and absolutely outstanding – save from the visiting stopper within three minutes of the re-start. But Hadi could do nothing to stop a Matty Daly strike a couple of minutes later. This was from the penalty spot after a clumsy foul on Elijah after the ball had gone was spotted by Referee Oliver Noonan, who otherwise made a lot of mistakes this afternoon.
The game changed markedly after that. Spennymoor looked panicky at times as their first half assurance seemed to evaporate. For a welcome change, Morecambe’s much smaller squad looked far fitter than the opposition (who are all part-timers, to be fair to them) and asked nearly all the questions during the second half. Despite their dominance of possession, though, they couldn’t create the chance that could have won them all three points and the game finally ended in a draw.
Tommy Miller would have been the happier of the two Managers with the result. His side certainly did enough to be leading by more than one goal in the first half. But long before the end, they were just playing for time.
As Adam Lakeland had warned before the game, what we saw today will probably become Par For The Course. Teams won’t roll over and let us walk all over them: we always need to play at our best to earn the three points.
But there were several positives to be taken out of today’s draw: Morecambe played the better football and improved as the match got older. At the end, there was only one team which was going to win.
This is what the Manager made of it at the end of the contest:
“I probably feel that a point was about right. We were disappointed with how the first half went and how we performed. We started OK but the goal rocked us a little bit and it certainly drained all the atmosphere out of the stadium. I thought we struggled – to be honest – after going behind. We were too passive in our play. But I was very pleased with how our lads reacted after half time. We came close a few times but they also posed a threat going the other way. This is going to be tough. Teams are going to come here and they’re going to raise their game. In a way, I’m glad that that’s happened today. It’s a real sign of what’s to come. I’m encouraged by a lot of what I saw in the second half. I think we have many lessons to learn from the first half.”
Morecambe: 1 Joe Young; 2 Cameron Coxe; 3 Ben Williams (9 Joe Garner 83’); 4 Liam Hogan; 5 Will Smith (C); 6 Lewis Baines; 10 Matty Daly; 11 Elliot Newby; 14 Elijah Buckley-Ricketts (19 Ronnie Blois 93’); 17 Paul Lewis; 28 Ruben Curley (Y).
Subs Not Used: 13 Myles Boney; 7 Teddy Collis; 99 Jake Cain; 27 Adam Fairclough.
Spennymoor Town: 99 Zac Hadi; 3 Dan Jones; 4 George Cantrill (Y) (6 Ben Beals 94’); 5 Frankie Whelan; 8 Jack Jenkins; 10 Rob Ramshaw; 11 Junior Mondal (99 Jack Young 72’); 14 Campbell Darcy; 16 Ben Pollock; 36 Cam Salkeld; 28 Richie Bennett.
Subs Not Used: 1 Brad James; 17 Harley Dawson; 29 Matty Dolan; 98 Cole Raine. I think that the Manager had also named himself as a substitute but I’m not sure. I beg forgiveness from Soccer Nerds for inventing the larger squad numbers shown above: I’ve not been able to discover what they actually are.
Ref: Oliver Noonan.
Att: 2,579 (186 from Spennymoor.)
