December 23 - Darlo’s Dodgy Dealer

FOOTBALL chairmen are a strange breed of people, and they don’t come more eccentric than former safe-breaker George Reynolds who used to rule the roost at Darlington. During his five-year tenure as chairman he gave the club more headlines and headaches than they’d seen in their 125-year history. But today in 2003 it starting to go horribly wrong, as the club was issued with a winding-up order and the end was nigh for Reynolds.

Reynolds story is a traditional rags-to-riches-and-back-to-rags affair. Orphaned as an eight year old he grew up on the gritty streets of the East End of Sunderland, often competing in bare knuckle fights and had a hat-trick of prison sentences under his belt at an early age. Whilst in prison he taught himself how to read and by hook or by crook (mainly crook) he found himself worth £260m and clocking in at 112 on the 2000 Sunday Times Rich List after establishing a series of businesses.

As so often happens, the beautiful game seems to attract such nefarious characters, and Reynolds took over the Quakers in 1999, promising Premiership football and a shiny new stadium. “One day we will be in the Premiership with millions in the bank and others will be wondering how we’ve done it” he claimed in 1999. Needless to say, it didn’t take too long for everything to go wrong. The new stadium came at a price of £25m and was grandly named the Reynolds Arena. However, the average crowd of 5,000 tends to look a bit lost in the flat-pack 26,000-capacity stadium.

Other comedic promises made by ol’ Georgie boy were the signings of Gazza and Columbian striker Faustino Asprilla and there’s also the time where he ‘outed’ a north-east DJ and made a series of threats to local journalists. “People are all right until you knock on their front door at 20 past two in the morning,” Reynolds explained. “Nobody has a go at me. I find out where they live and go and knock on their door.” Lovely chap.

It was obvious that the club were living beyond their means and when even more skeletons came out of Reynolds’ closet he was out of the club. His Direct Workshops company soon went out of business with £4.7m of debt mysteriously disappearing and Reynolds was back in the slammer on a tax evasion charge. Sighs of relief broke out amongst the Darlo fans who ended up putting their money where there mouth was as it was the Supporters’ Trust who saved the club from extinction.

See some footage from happier days as Darlo romped to the Division 4 title back in 1991 and once you’ve got all your Christmas shopping done head over here again for more tales from the days of yore.

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