In 1909 Sir Thomas Lipton, he of the tea company, organised a football tournament in Turin in thanks to the Italian Government for an honour he had been awarded. Top teams from Italy, Germany and Switzerland were invited but for some reason the invitation to a British team was given to West Auckland FC, an amateur side struggling in England’s Northern League.

I had heard of this in my youth but had forgotten about it till last June when I passed through West Auckland village in County Durham, where I stopped for a break and found this statue had been erected on the village’s green.

For, amazingly, West Auckland won the tournament, beating Switzerland’s Winterthur FC 2-0 in the final on 12/4/1909. The plaque mispells Winterthur as Winterhour.

Even more amazingly when the next tournament was played in 1911, West Auckland won it again and so got to keep the Trophy. This time they beat Juventus 6-1.

An information board at the bus stop tells the story.

Note: Renton FC have a prior claim to being the First World Football World Champions having beaten West Bromwich Albion 4-1 in 1888. Both were their domestic Cup winners at the time, the relevant national leagues not having been established yet. This was a World Championship by default as there was little football outside the UK then. Similarly, West Auckland can only really claim to have been European Champions.

I was sad to hear of the death of Cyrille Regis, a stalwart of a West Bromwich Albion side which finished third in the English top division in the late 1970s and fourth a couple of years later. Imagine that happening now!

Prior to his career along with Laurie Cunningham and Brendan Batson (nicknamed the Three Degrees though that seems excessively patronising now) there had been few black players in the British game since its very early days.

Albert Johanesson of Leeds United and West Ham United’s Clyde Best were trail-blazers and the amount of racist abuse all these had to suffer doesn’t bear thinking about.

Regis and the other two degrees helped to show that players like them could, “do it on a wet Wednesday afternoon in Stoke.” Not that that should ever have been doubted.

Regis’s five caps for England is not a true reflection of his abilities and stands as an indicator of the difficulties he faced in forging a career in football.

Cyrille Regis: 9/2/1958 – 14/1/2018. So it goes.