[Lord Snooty]

November 30:

It's a happy 39th birthday today to Nathan Clarke, who was born on this date in 1983 in Halifax. Our Player of the Season in 2005, he scored one of the famous goals of that decade when he nodded home from a corner at the McAlpharm in 2009 to beat the Leeds Urinals, completing a league double over the Beeston Bums.

Before that, he was a member of our glorious Play Off winning squad of 2004, though he was injured and missed the Final. He almost made 300 appearances for us, but was eventually out for 299, leaving him in 22nd place in our all time appearances chart.

On this date in 1994, Iain Dunn of Huddersfield Town made a little bit of history. It came in a Football League Trophy match, then known as the Auto Windscreens Shield, in a match at home to Lincoln City, played in the first season at the McAlpine Stadium.

If I remember correctly, we were 2-0 down to the Imps when we started to rally in the second half and pulled it back with goals from Gary Crosby and a Ronnie Jepson penalty, to take it to extra time. The FA, at the start of the season, had toyed around with the idea of introducing the Golden Goal rule for extra time and so the Football League went ahead and brought it in for this competition.

So when Dunny struck the winner from the edge of the six yard box, in front of the open end (the Panasonic/Fantastic Media/Big Red Stand hadn't been built yet) to make it 3-2 to the Terriers, it was the first ever Golden Goal. So that was it. Full time. Game over. And those of us in the 5,738 crowd who hadn't gone home before the 90 minutes were up, could now go home and look forward to the draw for the next round, the area quarter final, which we lost against Bury at Gigg Lane. 

Five years later, on this date in 1999, we had another extra time game at home. The Golden Goal rule had been dropped by now and so we had a full 120 minutes of play, though it wasn't without controversy.

It was in the League Cup, known as the Worthington Cup in that season, the 4th round aginst Wimbledon of the Premier League. We'd won at Chelsea in the previous round and the scorer of the winning goal there, Kenny Irons, was in the line up again. As were Nico Vaesen, Steve Jenkins, Kevin Gray, Chris Beech, Dean Gorre, Ben Thornley, Marcus Stewart, Ken Monkou, Jamie Vincent and Clyde Wijnhard.

Beech had scored a brillant goal at the weekend to beat Man City, but he limped off after 34 minutes to be replaced by the woefully inadequate Scott Sellars. Dear, oh dear! Why has he brought this numpty on?

He may have been a numpty, but it was he who opened the scoring, just six minutes after coming on and Town led 1-0 at the break.

It was all Town in the second half and it was just a matter of time before we got the second goal to take us through to the quarter finals for only the second time, when Wimbledon went and equalised through Alan Kimble. We kept pressing for the winner, which should have come from the most stonewall of stonewall penalties you can ever imagine. Obviously it was turned down by the chief blind mouse, a certain Jeff Winter from Middlesbrough. Town chairman, Iain Ayre would later embarrass the club by threatening to take legal action against Winter for not awarding the pen.

So it was 1-1 at full time. Replays in this competition were a thing of the past, so it would be a penalty shoot out if we don't get a winner in the added 30 minutes. Sadly, it was Jason Euell who won it for the Wombles and we had failed once more to get to the quarter finals.