Part 5 of my look back at Darlington's 1990/91 season, click the links for August, September, October and November. Be sure also to read the comments as there's a lot of good extra stuff there that I hadn't remembered.
With Mission Impossible advertising a pantomime "Goldilocks and the Three Mares, featuring Frank Gray, John Borthwick, and Paul Emson", which I think was very harsh on Gray, Darlington started the month at fellow promotion contenders Stockport County. Injuries to Les McJannett, Gray and David Corner meant a makeshift defence including Gary Coatsworth, who scored our goal, as well as Steve Mardenborough and Paul Emson, with player/physio Drew Coverdale on the wing, all of which led to an inauspicious 3-1 defeat described in Mission Impossible as a performance of 88/89 standards.
Having been knocked out of the FA cup, already, Darlo got a week off before playing the 2nd group game of the Leyland DAF trophy, at home against Grimsby Town. This game, played in front of just 1,106 people on a Tuesday night should be memorable for Andy Toman scoring a hat trick, or for the return to first team action of defender Jimmy Willis, or maybe for featuring probably the oldest, slowest, fattest striking partnership in our history, Davids Cork and Geddis. Instead the main talking point and memory is that Grimsby had 2 players sent off, for fighting each other! After receiving their red cards, one player chased the other down the tunnel, leading to rumours of one player sleeping with another's partner, if only the internet existed back then. The 3-1 win meant we advanced form our group along with York City to the next round
The following saturday saw us play again at home, against Torquay in what was one of the matches of the season. Torquay had been the early pace setter in the league, and were still doing well so this had a real top of the table feel to it, and The Quakers came out very much on top with a 3-0 win. The goals came from Coverdale, Toman and John Borthwick, but the star of the show was Lee Ellison, putting in his best first-team performance and giving a brief glimpse of the form that he would display for a fantastic 2 month spell the following season before slipping back to mediocrity before we even had a chance to cash in on him.
This was followed by another home game the next week against Chesterfield and Gary Gill scored to give us the 1-0 win, and with returns from injury for McJannnett and Gray, we now had the back 5 that would see us through the rest of the season, McJanett at RB, Gray at LB, Kevan Smith and Willis at CB and Mick Tait as sweeper.
Our Boxing day game was called off but not before the team and some fans had made the trip all the way down to Aldershot. Insult was added to injury when on the way home, Steve Mardenborough, getting dropped off at the Watford gap services, fell out of the bus. Mardenborough was quoted in an article from the South Wales Echo, reprinted in Mission Impossible saying "I just fell out of it from quite a height. All the lads were laughing and so was my wife. I dared not turn around and look at the bus."
The month ended with a trip to Scarborough, in the rain with no umbrellas allowed, and a first minute goal from Drew Coverdale was followed by other missed chances, and then a poor second half which saw us just hang on to a 1-1 draw, Scarborough scoring from a penalty. This game saw a first appearance of the year, on the bench, for perma-crocked striker Phil Linacre, which wasn't good news for David Cork, who missed a very good chance when through with just the goalie to beat, leading to the following joke in Mission impossible, Why was the Cork sad? Because he lost his bottle! Boom-boom.
As always please feel free to add your own memories in the comments section to fill in the gaps. Cheers.
Coming up, January: Top o' the league Ma! and Tom Fitzharris!
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