SATURDAY, 3rd OCTOBER 2026.
Darlington Swept Aside at Morecambe…
Today was one of those which underscored how far Morecambe FC has fallen in recent times: the Third Qualifying Round of the FA Cup.
Before I get too sniffy about this, there was a time when – for our club almost as much as is still the case for local outfits like Lancaster City and Milnthorpe Corinthians – getting this far in the first place was an achievement not to be sniffed at.
For today’s opponents – Darlington – the very fact that they are still able to play in any sort of football competition at all following their death as a football club altogether just a few short years ago should make us all realise how lucky we have been not to have suffered a similar fate.
Whatever, this is what knew about today’s visitors from the North-East with the key bit – the legacy of former Chairman George Reynolds – added after the match report (otherwise, we would be here all day…)
Darlington can be found 84 miles north-east of Morecambe in County Durham almost on the other side of the country.
A bewilderingly large number of places including Liverpool and Manchester have claimed to be the Midwives responsible for the birth of the railway industry not only in Britain but internationally.
Darlington, however, has a better claim than most. Opened in 1825, the twelve-mile-long track between the town and Stockton-on-Tees was designed by Robert Stevenson to be the first one in the world to offer public transport provided by steam locomotives.
The entire enterprise was underwritten by local Quakers and gave the railway its nickname of The Quaker Line.
Railways have dominated the history of the town and anyone who has driven around the A66 ring-road will be familiar with Scottish artist David Mach’s astonishing Train Sculpture to be found there outside Morrison’s supermarket,
whose original ownership sponsored it in the first place. This extraordinary creation is formed of an astonishing 181,754 red bricks which portray the A4 Pacific class Mallard – the fastest steam locomotive of its time and possibly ever – billowing smoke behind it as it emerges from a tunnel in a hillside.
The beautifully-kept Georgian Darlington Hippodrome (built in the style of Morecambe’s Winter Gardens) offers more culture to Darlingtonians – or, in their case, simply `Darlings’. There is a market; a plethora of independent shops (unusual in these Internet Shopping days) and the town is a generally tidy little place well worth a visit in my own humble opinion. But…
Durham Constabulary tells us:
“In the year ending December 2025, the crime rate in Darlington was higher than average for the Durham area.”
This criminality has not been centred solely on the town. In recent years – in a story so absurd that it sounds like someone has simply invented it – Darlington Football Club was taken over by a convicted criminal who – right under the noses of the English Football League (EFL) who, as always, did absolutely nothing to stop it happening – drove it to oblivion.
So there are two bookends as far as the history of the club is concerned. It was founded by Quaker idealists who believed in honesty, integrity, altruism and a simple way of living. At the other extreme, it was wrecked by a man who always indulged in selfish, dishonest and totally unscrupulous behaviour as he lived a conspicuously ostentatious lifestyle.
The founders must be still spinning in their graves.
So where do we start in untangling this mess?
The club has the nickname `the Quakers’ because- as we have seen as far as the railway alone was concerned – people of that faith had a big influence in post-industrial and industrial Darlington.
A Quaker family called Pease owned the ground that `Darlo’s’ base for most of its life – Feethams – was built on as soon as it was established in 1883. The plain Black & White strip it still plays in was also inspired by Quaker ideals of simplicity and lack of ostentation.
Contrast this with their flashy, foul-mouthed safe-breaker Chairman with his big cars and even more grandiose ideas for a club which he personally brought to the edge of ruination – and beyond.
Darlo were founder-members of the Northern League in 1889 and won it in 1896 and 1900. The club made the momentous decision to become professional in 1908 at a time when most football clubs were proudly amateur and moved to the North Eastern League, which they won in 1913. They had already turned heads by beating Football League First Division giants Sheffield United during the 1910-11 FA Cup campaign. The Quakers had started this in the First Qualifying Round and finally played eleven games before being beaten 3-0 by Swindon Town in the quarter finals.
However, the club ran into financial trouble after the First World War. Many other clubs were in the same boat as the human toll taken on professional footballers – as virtually a whole generation of Englishmen was wiped-out in the trenches of Flanders and elsewhere – had a profound effect on post-war Britain. The club was saved as it was basically swallowed-up by local rivals, the Forge Albion. Their Chairman settled the Quakers’ debts and paid for a new stand to be built at Feethams as what was effectively a new club in all but name still played as Darlington FC.
Further successes on the field saw the club, which had just won the North Eastern League, elected to the newly-formed Football League’s Third Division North in 1921.
They won this as well and were promoted to the Second Division in 1925.Their encounters with teams like Wolves; Nottingham Forest, Chelsea and Fulham as equals didn’t last long though and Darlington were relegated again in 1927.
Little changed for the club until long after the Second World War had come and gone. They made history by playing at Newcastle’s St James Park in November 1955 in the first FA Cup tie ever to be lit by floodlights. The Quakers had drawn at Brunton Park but won the second round replay 3-1 against Carlisle United.
Three years later, they drew an FA Cup tie 3-3 at Stamford Bridge against Chelsea but then walloped the then First Division club 4-1 at Feethams. By this time – with regional divisions in the EFL scrapped – Darlo were members of the Fourth Division along with clubs such as Watford, Crystal Palace and Coventry City.
Floodlights were installed at Feethams in 1960 but whoever was responsible didn’t do a very good job. An electrical fault started a fire in the West stand, which then burnt to the ground.
This bad fortune was eventually to be repeated on the field.
Darlington became one of the Basket Cases which the reactionary EFL should have allowed more dynamic clubs such as Macclesfield; Wigan: Barnet or ourselves to replace in the Fourth Division – but wouldn’t let in until 1987. In the ten years between 1969 and 1979, Darlington had to apply for re-election to the Football League on no less than five occasions because they kept ending-up in the bottom four of the Fourth Division. They should have been booted-out first time of asking. But the always reactionary EFL preferred the hopeless to the unknown and resolutely allowed the Dead Wood among its ranks to keep on floating rather than allow any New Blood into a moribund league badly in need of a transfusion.
So the Quakers staggered on, surviving more financial crises until they were promoted to the Third Division for two seasons in 1985. Normal Service was soon resumed, though and the club suffered successive relegations: back to the Fourth Division in 1989 and then, finally, out of the EFL altogether at long last in 1990.
It would be easy to say that little changed after that, but Little actually changed the fortunes of the club: They bounced straight back and the rejuvenated team immediately won the Fourth Division Championship in 1992 only for the Manager who had driven them forwards – former Aston Villa and England striker Brian Little – to leave and them to slip back into Division Four once more. They blew a chance to return to the higher Division in 1996, when they lost the Play-Off Final at Wembley to Hereford United. This is what the club’s official website tells us happened next:
“In 1997 the east stand at Feethams, which had stood for many years, was demolished and a new one built in its place, but soon after the chairman, Mike Peden, resigned. Local businessman George Reynolds took over, paid off the club’s debts and started construction of a new 27,000 all seater ground elsewhere in the town.”
That sound pretty good, doesn’t it? There follows a glaring gap in the narrative which completely ignores the role Mr Reynolds played in the future of the Quakers and simply mentions in passing that `crowds slowly dwindled, and within months the club was put into administration’.
Maybe they are still in denial about what actually went on…
Perhaps they don’t have space on their website to tell the whole story…
We shall return to the George Reynolds interlude in due course.
Chairman George’s legacy to the club was to leave it with a White Elephant of a Stadium and a mass of debt which even more enlightened Chairmen and owners who tried to save the Quakers ultimately failed to do. They managed to struggle out of Administration in later 2004 after Mr Reynolds had departed and actually reached the League Two Play-Offs in 2008 only to be beaten by Rochdale. The following year, despite a bright opening to the season, the club went into Administration for a second time.
This was the Kiss of Death for the club: points were deducted by the as always totally unsympathetic EFL; players left and the Management team finally went with them.
In 2010, they were relegated from the EFL for the second time. The unrelenting bad news was interrupted by an FA Trophy win at Wembley (at the third time of asking) in May 2011, when the Quakers beat Mansfield one nil with a last-minute goal. The club’s website tells us:
“Unfortunately the win was not a springboard for success, and by the turn of 2012, the club was back into administration for the third time. After overcoming several difficult hurdles and negotiating for many hours, a supporters group took control of the club with the aim of making it stable once again, but the FA controversially ruled, despite an appeal, that Quakers should be demoted from the Conference back to the Northern League — an unprecedented drop of four divisions.”
The Reynolds Arena had never been financially sustainable and Darlo started playing as Darlington 1883 (a suffix referring to their original incarnation which was quickly dropped) at Bishop Auckland’s ground, Heritage Park, twelve miles away to the north-west. And from here, the long grind from the Northern League where life had originally started for them began anew.
They ran away with the new league in their first season and then took just two years to gain promotion from the Northern Premier League First Division North to its Premier Division. They also won this at the first attempt.
On Boxing Day, 2016, the club moved back to Darlington to share the town’s Rugby Union Club’s Blackwell Meadows ground – and they are still there.
Last season, they finished ninth in the National League North.
Morecambe and Darlington have met six times in League Two. The Quakers have won just one of these; the Shrimps three. Players who have featured for both clubs include Neil Wainwright; Ben Hedley and Adam Campbell.
We shall be visiting the rugby ground in Darlington on Tuesday 16th February 2027 for a 19:45hrs kick-off. Prior to that, we shall host the Quakers on Tuesday 27th October 2026 with a kick-off also at 19:45hrs.
Ironically, the Darlington (formerly Reynolds) Arena is now also the home of another Rugby Union club: Mowden Park (average gate about one thousand fans and frequently fewer.)
It also regularly features Car Boot Sales and the occasional concert. Fans of 1980s chart music might have been at the last one on August 8th 2026: Level 42 were the headliners, with Marc Almond; Heaven17; Haircut 100; Go West and Jaki Graham also featuring.
—
Darlo arrived in Morecambe today in twenty-second position in the National League North; a relegation position. They have lost four of their last six league games and only won one and Manager Steve Watson would be hoping for a cup run to take the pressure off him and his staff as far as their futures at the club are concerned.
Morecambe Manager Adam Lakeland said the following prior to the fixture this afternoon:
“Darlington are a team we know well. They’ve had a difficult start to the season. That will count for very little this afternoon. Steve Watson is an experienced Manager with some good players at his disposal and – as we all know – anything can happen in Cup football.”
He was forced to play the game without an actual Centre-Forward, because of the late withdrawal of Joe Garner during the warm-up.
Adam’s starting eleven was also changed from the last league line-up with Jake Cain on the bench and Isaac Buckley-Ricketts starting alongside Stoke City loanee Ruben Curley, who played a really key part in midfield from the start.
It rained really heavily in north Lancashire last night but today dawned bright and the game was played in warm sunshine with very little breeze.
There were few chances in the first half but the match was good to watch.
Visiting goalkeeper Bobby Jones held a shot from Isaac Buckley-Ricketts after nine minutes. Then he got down well after just over a quarter of an hour to keep out an effort from Matty Daly but pushed to ball into the path of Elliot Newby, who missed the target on the rebound. Ruben Curley then headed a corner just over the crossbar with just over half an hour played.
Shortly afterwards, the visiting keeper stopped a header by Paul Lewis after an excellent cross by the impressive Lewis Leigh. He was beaten after 38 minutes as Daly put the ball in the net but it was clear that the Shrimps’ forward was way off-side in the build-up.
Darlo didn’t offer much going forward but Myles Boney had to palm a powerful effort from Jacob Render away for a corner after eighteen minutes.
Despite this, the game ended scoreless at half time.
The visitors fell behind almost immediately after the re-start though.
It took just five minutes for the hosts to go ahead. The ball came in to the danger area from the Morecambe right and – in an instant – Daly hammered it into the net so quickly that Jones would probably not have even seen it before it was already past him.
The Shrimps scored again with almost an hour on the clock. Ruben Curley played a tremendous ball forward right through the away defence for Newby to latch on to – and he scored really confidently as Jones advanced to try and narrow the angle.
Darlington had looked beaten since conceding the first goal. But they fell even further behind in the sixty-ninth minute. Isaac Buckley-Ricketts had been switching wings for some time before the ball fell to him on the right-hand side of the away penalty area from his point of view – and he made a difficult angle seem easy with a slight feint to his left before slotting home. I felt for Jones in the away goal at the time: no amount of training can prevent goals like these when you are totally exposed as a goalkeeper – as had been the case with Morecambe’s second goal.
At the end of the game, this turned-out to be a routine win forcambe – with another Clean Sheet in front of a goalkeeper who played really well and caught lots of crosses when he had no right to do so.
This is what the Manager made of it at the end:
“After half time, we came out of the traps. We started well. We scored an early goal and from there on in we were comfortable winners and probably should have scored more goals. We took the game away from them in that second half. I’m so delighted with another clean sheet. That’s four in a row now here at home. If we can keep on performing well – and keep on performing and getting clean – it’s going to give us a chance of winning plenty more games.”
Thanks to the official Darlo website (ours doesn’t do things like that), you can see the goals here:
Morecambe: 13 Myles Boney; 2 Cameron Coxe; 3 Ben Williams (26 Lennon Dobson 89’); 4 Liam Hogan (C); 6 Lewis Baines; 8 Lewis Leigh; 10 Matty Daly 11 Elliot Newby (7 Teddy Collis 78’); 14 Isaac Buckley-Ricketts (27 Adam Fairclough 87’); 17 Paul Lewis; 22 Ruben Curley.
Subs Not Used: 31 Alfie Scales; 20 Jake Cain; 30 Corey Goodyear.
Darlington 1 Bobby Jones; 2 Ben Hedley; 5 Toby Lees; 9 Mark Beck; 10 Ellis Stanton; 15 Brad Walker; 16 Jacob Render (20 Tom Bryant 62’) (6 Max Kilsby 89’); 17 Ethan Fitzhugh (18 Sam Hetherington 52’); 22 Ciaran Thompson; 25 Aidan Rutledge (11 Dylan Stephenson 62’); 29 Paddy McLaughlin (C).
Subs not used: 13 Liam Mason.
Att: 2,184 (395 from Darlo.)
All that’s left to do is complete the account of Darlington FC’s descent into oblivion when a man who been approved as a `Fit And Proper Person’ by the utterly useless EFL in the first place wrecked the original club. Just how bent do you have to be not to receive this accolade from these overpaid and utterly complacent morons?:
This gentleman – as we have seen – has been basically airbrushed out of the club’s official history as their website portrays it.
This literally Larger-than-Life character (with his huge beer gut and infamous Bobby Charlton-like comb-over) could have been plucked from such gritty north-eastern dramas as Get Carter – or, perhaps even more appropriately, O Lucky Man:
Darlo Chairman George Reynolds.
If you don’t already know this story, put the kettle on and then settle down with a nice cup of tea to read something so utterly mind-boggling that if you made the whole thing up, nobody would believe you.
George Reynolds was 61 when he took over Darlington Football Club in1997. The EFL in their infinite wisdom decided in their Preston Ivory Tower that – naturally – having completed their extensive vetting processes – George was a `fit and proper’ person to be a Chairman of one of their clubs.
We all know how this works – as evinced by our own experiences with the lovely Mr Jason Whittingham. So do Bury Supporters. And Macclesfield’s:
Basically, the overpaid halfwits in Preston will pass anybody as a `Fit and Proper’ person because they don’t have the commitment, the integrity or the intelligence to do the vetting process properly. And of course, there’s no question of any impropriety as far as the EFL is concerned in this matter, is there? Bungs and other inducements are totally unknown in professional football in this country, aren’t they? If you’ve any doubt about this – just ask the supporters of original `Crazy Gang’ Wimbledon…
So what had the man so disingenuously described as a `local businessman’ by the club’s current website made his money from?
He owned a company that manufactured kitchen worktops – and made a fortune from doing so.
But George Reynolds had also served a four-year term for safe-breaking during the 1960s. He had also been in prison for six months for burglary in 1970 followed by another spell inside during 1976 for theft.
He claimed – in the `Rags to Riches’ version of himself that he missed no opportunity to tell anyone who would listen – that he was a burglar only because if he hadn’t stolen other people’s belongings, his own family would have starved. How very heroic. But apparently, the EFL had no problem with any of that. Maybe they would have thought differently if it had been their own safe George had cracked; one of their own houses he had broken into or themselves personally he had robbed…
Whatever – Mr Reynolds was a convicted safe-breaker, thief and burglar with a reputation for indulging in thuggish behaviour as well: this street-fighter from the slums of Sunderland prided himself on being an authentic tough guy. The Daily Telegraph described him in 2021 as “the most feared man in football since Colonel Gaddafi bought a slice of Juventus.”
But apparently this was exactly the sort of man you need at the sharp end of a football club.
Because the Football League apparatchiki in Preston clearly had no objection of any sort to this reality and Mr Reynolds duly became Chairman George.
When he actually took on this mantle at the club, his behaviour didn’t change. This is what the BBC told us in 2007:
“He was renowned for confronting journalists on their own doorsteps, and publicly warning fans that he would go to their homes if they criticised him or his family. George Reynolds famously said that his detractors could “expect confrontation at home or at the ground. People are all right in groups until you knock on their front doors at twenty past two in the morning. If anyone has a go at me, I find out where they live and go and knock on the door. They don’t like that. As soon as I do that, they ring the Police.”
But the man himself couldn’t understand why this caused such a negative reaction with journalists and the club’s supporters.
“Why should they be scared of me? I’m 67… so who’s the coward?” said Reynolds. He added, “The fans can be very temperamental at times.”
He had his own very special remedy for this. When he was still Chairman of the club, George Reynolds made this statement:
“Never listen to the fans or the manager ‘cos they never get it right.”
As a result, it would seem that he personally chose the team on occasions. At other times allegedly – his second wife (or was it his third: his advice about spouses was to change them regularly `like you would a washer-dryer’) Susan did so too.
I remember reading somewhere at the time that she did this on the basis of how personally attractive she found the individual players. In any other context, you’d have to dismiss this claim as possibly misogynistic – or simply not credible. But in the context of the Reynolds era at Darlington FC, it simply can’t be dismissed so breezily. Matthew Beard of the Independent wrote the following about this woman during 2002:
“Not even the imaginative scriptwriters of Footballers’ Wives would have dared to guess what was to follow when the flamboyant spouse of Darlington’s millionaire chairman stood up to address the football club’s supporters and staff.
After a series of poor results for the third division side, Susan Reynolds, the second wife of reformed safe-cracker George, had decided it was time to tell a few home truths in front of the first team and several hundred fans.
Reading from a prepared script, Mrs Reynolds, who is 24 years younger than her husband, kicked off a tirade by branding supporters and the local media a let-down and accusing one director of being a “backstabber”. More than half an hour into the rant, in which Mrs Reynolds’ remarks were as spiky as her Prada heels, she unleashed the verbal equivalent of a studs-up tackle, accusing the players of throwing games as they languished in mid-table.
Having already accused the team of being money grabbers, she treated the stunned audience to her pet theory behind last Saturday’s 3-1 defeat at home by lowly Torquay United. She said: “It isn’t unknown for games to be thrown deliberately at this time of year, by way of favours.”
It was, at the end of the day, a snub too far. The fans jeered in disgust and the players, who had been ordered by the chairman to attend the “Fans’ Forum” stormed out, led by Craig Liddle, the captain.
Mr Reynolds, whose chipboard empire has helped to bankroll the club since he bought it in 1999, was in no mood to placate the fans or his team. After his wife’s outburst, the chairman, 66, who is one of Britain’s wealthiest men, threatened to abandon the club and turn its modern stadium into a bullring.
He added later: “Susan spoke the truth – and if she hadn’t, I would be looking for a new wife. She meant the players were not trying 100 per cent and that is how they were throwing matches, from not trying hard enough.
“I have got top players here earning £120,000 a year, and top surgeons don’t get that. But the fans are watching players who just aren’t trying. If these players don’t like what I or my wife has said, they can f*** off.”
Many of them took his advice. But Chairman George carried on with his hare-brained scheme to abandon Feethams and build a brand-new stadium on the Darlington Ring Road which could hold 25,000 fans: about ten to fifteen times more than usually came through the Quakers’ turnstiles on match days. It was an act of absolute insanity: the sums would never stack-up. But, with characteristic modesty, he named the new ground The Reynolds Stadium and, once it was luxuriously finished (with features such as marble bathrooms), abandoned Darlington’s home for the previous century altogether. Feethams was left to gradually rot away and become the target of arson attacks until the entire space was flattened and new houses were built upon it in 2013.
Back at the new ground, though, things weren’t going well for Darlo either on the field or off it. On it, he infamously appeared wearing a fake ball-and-chain and a mock prison suit complete with arrows during 2001. Two years later, the man who carried a Business Card which stated “Managing director, chairman, gentleman, entrepreneur, adventurer, maker of money and utter genius’’ published a memoir which was called Cracked-It. But he hadn’t: as the sparse crowds diminished, the team kept losing. As we have seen, Chairman George blamed the players.
So in a move worthy of fellow-traveller Donald Trump, he threw his toys out of the pram, said that his genius and foresight wasn’t appreciated and announced that he was going to relinquish the Chairmanship and thus abandon all responsibility for his own literal folly – plus the huge debt (about five million pounds at the time and rapidly getting bigger) which his catastrophic ownership of the club had caused.
Whilst he was still club Chairman, though, the police – acting on a tip-off – stopped him on July 14th 2004 and found half a million pounds in cash stashed in the boot of the top-of-the-range Mercedes he was driving. He was arrested and held overnight in police custody, suspected of money laundering.
The local Northern Echo tells us that George couldn’t understand the fuss his arrest had caused. Didn’t everybody drive around with £500,000 in loose change rolling around in the back of their cars?:
“Mr Reynolds declared: “They can do what they like, they know and I know I am whiter than white.”
The application, under the Proceeds of Crime Act, involves £500,000 in banknotes, which were recovered by officers after Mr Reynolds’ car was stopped in an intelligence-led operation at High Etherley, near Bishop Auckland, County Durham. The money, he said, was deposited in the Co-op bank in Darlington from where on Monday he withdrew £500,000 from the account.
“I have always dealt in cash and the money was legally transferred to me with all relevant payments made on it such as Stamp Duty.” He added: “The money is mine and I am perfectly entitled to take it out if I wish. The police described it as a large amount of cash but for someone like me who is used to dealing in millions it is small.”
Just before his trial for tax evasion during 2003, he told the media:
“I have not the slightest doubt that I will be cleared of this allegation.”
He then pleaded guilty, having presumably spoken to his lawyers in the interim. George Reynolds was jailed for a further three years for attempting to defraud the HMRC of £650,000. The local paper added:
“In 2002, he even declared the only money he received was his old age pension – a sum of £4,697, of which he owed £14 in tax.
In fact, he led a lavish lifestyle.
The court heard he splashed out on:
* A luxury yacht in Spain
* His mansion in Witton-le-Wear, County Durham
* Two Rolls Royces with personalised number plates.”
Having effectively destroyed Darlington Football Club, George was not particularly repentant. In fact, he was very far from it:
“I took Darlington because it was a lame duck. I’ve built £30m of stadium, and then they have the audacity to have a go at you. If I turn the clock back, I probably should have looked into getting Sunderland instead of Darlington. It’s like Robin Hood. They made out how he was a wonderful person, and really he was a villain… Sometimes I find that the bad guys are the good guys.”
So who were the bad guys? According to ex-Chairman George, the police were. He continued to be in trouble with them even as a really elderly man:
“In 2019, aged 83, he was found guilty of harassing a Durham county councillor following a row over planning permission for holiday cottages he was building near Bishop Auckland.”
Later, he was taken into custody for failing to respect the terms of a Tagging Order and locked-up for a further two weeks. He responded thus:
“When I was jailed for a four-stretch, I never made a single complaint, I pleaded guilty and I took it on the chin like a man. I did my porridge. Now I have been shouting for nine years about one night in a cell because I know there has been a great miscarriage of justice and a police conspiracy.”
The only crime he had ever been guilty of, according to the man himself, was this:
“In the north of England it is a very serious offence to be successful, ambitious and to work hard. When you reap the benefits, like a Rolls Royce, people think, ‘what’s he doing? – he’s nothing but a criminal!’ I am dyslexic, backward and illiterate, according to a school report, but I have more common sense than them. I am street wise. I know the difference between right and wrong.”
Obviously.
George Reynolds passed away in the Covid era on the unlucky-for-some thirteenth of April 2021, aged 84.
There is an old saying about only the good dying young. I couldn’t possibly comment but let’s give a man who some people in the north-east (particularly in Sunderland) still think was the greatest thing since sliced bread the final word:
“Me Mam always told me that if I fell into the river, I’d come up with a fish in each pocket.”
