Once upon a Tyne. ..
Over the years, and we have made no secret of it, we have been delighted to see football fans visit the club here at New Grosvenor.
Whether you support Distillery, have an affinity with the club, or are simply calling in on a visit, you are most welcome.
We have had visitors from the mainland, Ireland, other parts of Europe, the USA and elsewhere drop in, and on Saturday we were delighted to welcome two separate groups from Newcastle upon Tyne.
A spokesperson for the larger group of four said; “We are four Newcastle fans, we love football, two of us are tour guides at St James’ Park. We wanted to come to Northern Ireland to watch football, ideally a team in black and white, hence the black and white scarves.
There is the Bill McCracken connection with Distillery and we talk about him when we do the tours, it’s really interesting – he changed the offside law, won trophies at Newcastle and we wanted to see the club he started out with.”
The lads started their tour with a trip to the The Oval (Glentoran v Portadown) last Friday night – the Tommy Cassidy connection – and were heading to Solitude on Sunday (Cliftonville v Linfield) – their Willie McFaul connection of course being Linfield. (And in recent times Willie was chief scout here under manager Tommy Wright…and Tommy of course played in goals for the famous Tyneside club).
The second group were father and son as they explained; “We are from Newcastle, my son’s grand-parents are from Belfast and Lisburn and he just loves football. He loves to watch grass-roots football, real stuff , different from the Premier League. And he is interested in all football and Ollie plays football pretty much six days a week. He plays for the Newcastle Foundation, Newcastle Blue Star, he plays Futsal and has a lot of skills training going on, so it’s quite intense.”
Young Ollie is a defender, so when asked about what he was looking for at the game on Saturday, perhaps it was no surprise, when he said “Goals”.
There were goals of course and whilst on this occasion The Whites could only manage one, we hope that on any future visits the lads make, that we will score more.
Thank you once again to all the guys from Tyneside who visited us – we hope that you will return at some stage in the future and we were delighted to see you.
