Lives in Cricket No 29 - AN Hornby

50 wealthier and better supported clubs in the new professional era and were forced to fold in 1889. But Rovers were the predominant team in the town, remarkably winning the FA Cup five times in the next eight years after Olympic’s sole success in the competition. At the time of writing, Rovers have won it just once since (1928) in the intervening 120 years. They won the Premier League title in 1995 but, 17 years later, in May 2012, they were relegated to the Championship. Just as in cricket Hornby extended his football-playing career and in 1886, eight years after that game against Partick, he was turning out for Nantwich Town against Crewe Alexandra in the semi-final of the Cheshire Cup. He was later elected president of the club, which had been founded two years earlier. They are now semi-professional, and members of the Evo-Stik Northern Premier League. Hornby later became president of the Lancashire Football Association, and is remembered – warts and all – in this remarkably frank appraisal which forms part of the history of that organisation: He carried his strict methods of refereeing into all phases of his work. Only his closest friends understood him, for he was so obsessed with his own ideas, so convinced that his judgement was always right, and he had so little sympathy with anyone who did not act as he thought they ought; that he was at times a stormy petrel and never hesitated to attack, in what seemed to many of us the most savage and violent fashion, some of his best friends. At times [he was] too hasty in jumping to conclusions and too prone to regard a rumour as true, and guilt before proof had been tendered, there was a danger of him doing the very thing he prided himself that he would never do, that was to act unfairly. There were times when I almost felt that he went out of his way to interfere with matters that did not concern him, and it became necessary for someone to act as peace-maker. Occasionally he conceived some new idea and with so much faith in himself he believed in its serviceability. At times it might have been better had he exercised a greater patience before committing himself and taken counsel of others. Married to Sport