THAT should get something moving, I remember thinking.

And the lads will have me to thank.

It was one of my first stories in the Last Sports, the Saturday night “Pink”, and in it I was highly critical of the poor facilities at Blacksnape Playing Fields.

As a 16-year-old reporter I must have had a rather high opinion of the Power of the Press which I had just joined.

Something certainly did get moving.

There’s an excellent new pavilion, plenty of parking and levelled pitches as good as anything for miles.

It’s just a pity that it took nearly 50 years. So much for the Power of the Press.

The new pavilion looks splendid, and drainage and re-seeding is well under way. It’s a £750,000 project, most of it coming from the coffers of the Football Foundation.

All too late, unfortunately, for the Darwen Amateur Football League which would soon have been celebrating its centenary. It folded about ten years ago, following into oblivion the Darwen Amateur Cricket League, which also played most of its matches at Blacksnape. Park Hotel did the double that last soccer season. Now even the pub itself is shut and shuttered.

Plumber Joe Haworth can look back to playing at the storm-lashed playing fields back in the late 60s. He later squelched through the mire as a referee for several years.

“We can’t just blame the awful facilities for the loss of the league,” he says.

“When I began playing nearly every factory had a football team.

“There were church teams and teams from various districts.

“But gradually the factories closed and, of course, everybody had a car by the 70s and it was as easy to play in the Blackburn Combination.

"Times were changing. Youngsters had a different approach to sport. It was too much like hard work.

“In the old days everybody knew everybody. Giant conga lines of players and supporters used to head up Marsh House and Pole Lane and Roman Road, and no-one really bothered too much if they had to squint through hailstones and wash the mud off in rain pools by the side of the pitch.

“Friday night was wind-up night, on Saturday came the match and on the Sunday you either strutted around town proudly sporting a black eye, or a busted nose, or you stayed home nursing your bruises. It all depended on how you’d gone on.”

But those “facilities”; the crumbling brick shed, the wooden huts and the muddy pitches?

“Well, yes,” Joe recalled with a shudder.

”You were quite happy to get sent off towards the end of a match so that you might get a trickle of warm water before it ran out.”

St Joseph’s, Corinthians, Darwen Olympic, Shaws, Worth Avenue, Evertaut, DPM, Crown... Great teams from the great days of the local league.

I hope that the youngsters at the new academy, children in local junior teams and players in the occasional Combination match enjoy themselves at the new Blacksnape.

They’ll certainly have better facilities. But perhaps not as much fun.