Friday 3rd April 2026 ko 15:00

Northern League Division Two

FC HARTLEPOOL 1 (Gavin 78p)

Cook penalty saved 77

SEAHAM RED STAR 0

Cowan sent off 78 (second booking)

Att 633 (ground record)

Entry £5

Programme £2

I did wonder what we’d find at FC Hartlepool. While I was aware that the Northern League had scheduled all the games on the hop as local derbies, I did wonder whether we’d lose groundhoppers to alternate games. The way we at GroundhopUK look at it is to see each time slot over a weekend in terms of how many alternate games are there? Obviously that will be a lot, when kick off is anywhere near 3pm, so I was happy to struggle to park when we reached the Grayfields Enclosure.

FC Hartlepool date from 1993 as The Fens Hotel FC playing in the Hartlepool Churches League (!). In 2002, they rebranded as Teesside Arriva due to a sponsorship deal from the bus company who provided the club with transport. Thankfully that arrangement was terminated on elevation to the Northern League in 2019- they’ve been FC Hartlepool ever since!

The Grayfields Enclosure shows the club’s progress. They took over the site from Hartlepool Borough Council in 2021, opened a new clubhouse a year later with floodlights and a stand following in April 2023. It does everything the club needs it to, but the club were severely tested with a 600-plus crowd. It is a wonderful side project of what we do – stress testing non league stadia!

They coped- just, and take that as a massive complement to all at FC Hartlepool. Yes, there were queues but they kept moving, and I’d like to think the club turned a tidy profit. They certainly worked hard at it!

The game was a hard attritional watch. In fact you could have turned up at the 77th minute in time for Sam Cook’s missed penalty, caught Lewis Cowan’s dismissal in giving away another penalty for handball then watch Tom Gavin bury the spot kick. That was close to being everything of note!

Of course not every game can be a classic- this wasn’t, but like so many successful hop games, I tend to remember the success of the day in terms of the success of the clubs; in that regard FC Hartlepool won in spades.