This coming Saturday (18th August) we start season 2018/19 with 180 miles plus journey to Workington. We start the season with optimism with a new manager in Steve Burr and an almost completely new playing squad.
This is not the first time Rangers have started a season with an away game at Workington, as this was the opening Northern Premier League game for season 1977/78, but the circumstances were somewhat different.
Workington Joined the Football League in 1951, and 11,000 attended their first home league game with Chesterfield. However, in the 70’s things started to go wrong. Remember in those days the bottom club had to seek re election to the League and therefore get more votes than the aspiring non-league teams. This brought about the “old pals act”, re-electing the bottom club, rather than bringing in non-league teams. At the end of 1973/74 and 1974/75 Workington had finished second from bottom, and in 1975/76 they finished bottom. In 1976/77 they won only four games, and again finished bottom of the league with attendances falling well below the 1,000-mark. This poor run led to the club being voted out of the League to be replaced by Wimbledon.
One interesting historical fact that appears to go unnoticed, is that the Workington manager from January 1954 to November 1955, was Bill Shankley. In a recent documentary about his life, Bill Shankley tried to switch on the lights in his office to find the Workington ground had no electricity.
Anyhow, back to that first fixture in August 1977, Workington’s first non-league game for 26 years, which saw Rangers come away with a comfortable 3-0 win. I am sure many fans will settle for a repeat of that score line to us on Saturday.
A Workington forward who may play on Saturday, has a very famous surname. Workington have recently signed, from Barrow a player called Niall Cowperthwaite. He must therefore be related to the famous Colin Cowperthwaite from Barrow. Colin Cowperthwaite was considered Barrow’s greatest ever player after making his debut in 1977 and over a 16-season career scoring 282 goals in 704 league and cup appearances. He made history when, one day at Kettering, he scored the fastest ever goal in English Football when he struck after just 3.5 seconds. He was recently voted third in the poll of the greatest players in the 50 years of Northern Premier League football.