Relax, Latics know this road very well

THE FRIDAY THING: RELATIVELY recent Latics fans, especially those brought to the fold on a tide of Premiership football and Wembley appearances, should not despair at the present plight of our blessed but beleaguered club.

Some of us - shall I say longer-serving adherents to the noble cause – have been here before.

All right, so the club can’t pay wages on time and the players can’t score goals; this is what being a Latics fan has been about for decades.

Some years ago, when the club was owned by a group that included a blunt-speaking (I am being polite here) builder from Failsworth, a man who owned a shop in High Street that sold corsets and knickers, a chap who had a petrol station and garage in Royton and the owner of a local engineering firm, bailiffs visited the destitute club demanding to take away the goal posts an hour or so before the kick-off of a match.

Ignoring for a second the fact that you could make a good case for Boundary Park not needing goal posts at the moment, the bailiffs’ demand was, to say the least, badly timed. I know they could have put coats down for goal posts but it wouldn’t have been quite the same and there just might have been some disputes among fans and players.

And why the goal posts? Maybe someone in the bailiffs’ office thought their spies said that Latics had gold posts.

Anyway the builder, the knickers and corset seller and co scrambled together enough money to send the bailiffs on their way, the goal posts stayed where they were and, for all I know, are still standing waiting for someone in the Latics blue to score a goal. It could be a long wait.

So, you see there is nothing new under the sun at Boundary Park, and Alan Hardy and Simon Corney and co can take comfort out of the fact that Oldham Athletic have survived crises before and will do so again.

You, of course, can help by going along to watch. You never know your luck, you might be there when they score and win. Something to tell the grandchildren, I’ll be bound.


CAN you feel the excitement mounting as the Royal Wedding nears?
Are you planning a street party? Is April 29 a red-letter day on your calendar? Have you cleared your diary for this special day? Maybe you should see a doctor.

At chez Williams there is talk of bunting although, to be honest, when it was first mentioned I thought she said “bunker”, as in somewhere we could go to escape from the blitz of faux emotion, tears (apparently of joy) and hours of “oooohs” and “aaaaahs” over the dress, the shoes, the flowers, the loving looks, the first kiss (ignoring the fact that they have been shacked up together in a cottage on Anglesey for the past few months), the carriage ride back to the palace, the honeymoon plans and oh, so much more I am too overcome with emotion and excitement to go into any more detail.

And despite the complaints about we fellows hogging the telly to watch the cricket world cup (weren’t we terrible, incidentally), the odd footy match, rugby game and boxing bout, to say nothing of the beach volleyball, the telly, the remote control and the best chair will be commandeered and it will be wall-to-wall wedding pictures of Kate and her Willie in households across the land.

I did suggest getting in a commode or installing a second TV set on the stairs and a third in the loo so that none of these precious moments would be missed but my helpful hints were dismissed as sarcasm. As if I would!


FINAL WORD: It is no surprise that the cost of living is going up in Oldham, but it is something of a shock to learn that the cost of dying is on the increase, too. Cremation goes up by £90 from April 1 (how appropriate).
It makes that patch in the garden where Freddie the fish and Pansy the poodle are already buried look decidedly attractive...