THERE’S a mural of former striker Robbie Dale on the gable end of a chippy outside Blyth’s Croft Park. It resembles the street art you’d see in Belfast.

My mate’s dad had the fish shop in the 1970s when Spartans became the most famous non-league club in the world after reaching the fifth round proper of the FA Cup.

His bedroom window looked out over the pitch. His dad used to peel the spuds in the back yard and shout up asking the score.

He still goes to watch the side today, when he’s not away watching Sunderland. Pays monthly into a supporters’ club scheme, drinks in the bar, and shakes his head at the fortunes of the green and whites since they were sold last season and relegated from the National League North.

Irfan Liaquat was introduced to the Blyth Spartans fans as a “successful business magnate, angel investor, and philanthropist.” The Tyneside businessman’s takeover at the Northumberland football club raised questions almost immediately, however, as fans began scrutinising his business records at Companies house.

The now NPL Premier side’s chairman wears a suit to games and drives around in a white Porsche. It all seems a bit flash and out of place at a ground retaining the character of old green painted boards, metal struts and concrete terraces. Spartans brought in former Newcastle player and Peruvian international Nobby Solano as manager, but he only lasted a few games. Ex-Leicester keeper David Stockdale is in charge now.

The fans, many of whom boycotted last weekend’s FA Trophy game against Stockton, have been frustrated by a lack of engagement and worry over the future.

The former colliery port was once somewhat unfortunately known as the north-east’s heroin capital. Blyth had two communist councillors in the 1930s. William Henry Breadin and Robert Swinney Elliott represented the Croft ward. Bob Elliott joined the International Brigade and was killed out in Spain during the civil war.

That was when there was a community feel of social clubs, allotments, pigeon duckets, flat caps and whippets and all, when the pit at Bates was in full flow. Of course, it’s almost 40 years since the colliery closed in 1986, and Blyth famously became part of the crumbling so-called Red Wall when Labour lost the formerly solid seat to the Tories in the 2019 general election.

Ian Lavery won it back as the new seat of Blyth & Ashington at the last election, retaining some of that link to the coal-mining pitmen and the NUM that were so influential in south-east Northumberland for decades.

When you look at what has been achieved at the former mining area of Wrexham – the Welsh club who famously knocked Spartans out of the Cup in the ’78 run, in a replay at St James’s Park, Newcastle, in front of 42,000 – it’s clear to see what investment can do for a club, and a town.

But Irfan isn’t Ryan Reynolds, and the Hollywood dream seems a long way removed from the large white turbine that dominates over the grey slate roofs of Blyth and the pigeons that rise in a flock off the main street, in a smattering of applause, to settle on the end of a boarded-up shop.