I remember Bolton’s Burnden Park when it was a proper ground, without a supermarket in the middle of the away end. It looked bloody ridiculous after this monstrosity was inserted, but it did give you the chance to buy out of date Easter eggs for dinner on our last visit in 1995. During the75-76 season, almost 100,000 people watched the two games between SAFC and Bolton, and we were in the crowd at Burnden for the away game.

We travelled in style to this one – Lino borrowed the Simca 1100 van from work. If you’ve never seen one of these, you’re not alone – they weren’t a very popular vehicle, although we couldn’t say so at the time, for fear of offending the driver and not getting a lift. This van had two front seats, and a coarse mesh between them and the cargo bay where most of us sat. Lino’s driving can probably be best described as adventurous, and it often resulted in us in the back making like spacemen in an anti-gravity chamber. We were tossed about at every corner, and frequently came out of the van with the imprint of the coarse mesh stamped on our faces, making us look like waffles. We used to exact revenge by scrawling obscenities on the interior of the van, in the hope that he would get into trouble at work.

Anyhow, Lino offered to drive us to Bolton. In fact, he offered to drive most of South West Durham to Bolton, but we didn’t complain, as he had a claim to fame. His grandad had played centre forward for Sunderland in the 1920s, he said. Subsequent checking of records revealed that the ancestor in question played one game before being transferred to Dundee or somewhere like that. I probably spent more time on the Roker Park turf than he did, but it is still a claim to fame.

There were no seats in the back of this van, but we were packed so tight it didn’t really matter. Big Harrier got the front seat, as usual, and sat with the crate of beer beneath his legs, passing bottles over the mesh on request. I don’t know whether there were three, four, of five of us in the back that day, but, when we got to Tebay, the van stopped. Lino had decided to play the good Samaritan, and pick up two hitch hikers, complete with mountaineering –size rucksacks. Oh joy!

We made the rest of the journey pass quickly by singing, drinking, sitting on top of each other, drawing on the walls, and generally frightening the poop out of our two new friends. We also found that we could open the tailgate from inside by pulling on a wire, but the expressions on the faces of the motorists following down the M6 persuaded us that this was not the best idea in the world, so we went back to graffiti and beer.

The match looked like it was going our way when ex-Man U defender Tony Dunn put away a Bobby Kerr cross for a superb OG, but we showed true SAFC generosity and let them score twice to send us home pointless. We endured a dry trip home, watching in surprise as hitchikers hid behind bushes as we passed – word sharp gets around, eh? And Lino’s van got decorated some more – he never let on whether or not he got into trouble at work or not, but, knowing him, he’ll have talked his way out of it