WHEN the subject should really have been done and dusted years ago, the saga of Worcester City Football Club’s search for a new home within the city limits cropped up again this week.

Apparently the long hoped for – in some quarters – building of a new ground on land at Parsonage Way alongside the M5 near Junction 6 is faced by bigger obstacles than even Bob Beamon managed to jump and it looks like a case of everyone back on the bus and back to the drawing board.

Meanwhile the club’s old ground in St George’s Lane, where it entertained all and sundry for 108 years, has long been concreted over by developers and is now an estate of new homes.

Should Harry “Knowles for Goals” Knowles, the legendary centre forward of the late 1950s/early 60s, dive for a header today, he’d probably bang his head on someone’s patio. Which admittedly would likely do more damage to the patio than Harry.

Memories of non-league soccer at the canal-side venue abound with top of the list undoubtedly being the dank afternoon of January 15, 1959, when Worcester City, then in the Southern League, knocked Second Division Liverpool out of the FA Cup.

About 15,000 spectators packed into the ground that afternoon for the postponed third round tie, but it still wasn’t the highest attendance ever.

That came shortly afterwards in the fourth round game with Sheffield United at St George’s Lane. The match pulled in 17,042 spectators, some of whom were quite literally hanging off the lamp posts.

Sadly from those heights City’s fortunes declined. There were some notable highlights in the intervening years, but overall the direction was down not up and the club’s finances got into a pickle. However, it believed it always held a trump card in owning its own ground, where it had played since 1905 and which over time had become a prime location for housing.

But even the real estate sale to clear mounting debts didn’t go to plan and more than eight years after playing its last game at The Lane, against Chester in April, 2013, Worcester City FC is still homeless.

Between it vacating the ground and Careys New Homes bulldozers moving in, photographer Sally Robinson stopped by with her camera to record a few nostalgic scenes.

The place was eerily quiet and empty, but if you gazed across the green pitch you could still hear the noise of the crowd and imagine the ghosts of Bobby Skuse skipping down the wing, Bobby Tudor standing imperious at centre half or Jim Standen, diving to make a goal line save.