Just tidying a cupboard which is my dumping ground lol. Found my stash of my newspaper reports from 1999-2001, some good memories.

Remember the York Wasps away game where we had our first away victory for 2 years, I covered the Yorkshire post that day.

A photo of me with alex murphy which i think was in the donny star, when i was getting a signed copy of his book.

The report from the house of rain, instead of house of pain, when the posts came down at half time at Belle Vue in a freak storm.

Some great memories here.

what we would do now for a money man to bring us back some good times

i have sweet memories of dave sampson

i remember him saying the modern game did,nt need hookers so he sold gibbie to fev.then he said parky was to old,and got graham idle in to replace him

oh yes sweet memories indeed.what ever happened to dave

Quite rightly, with decisions like that, he drifted out of the game.

That was also against York IIRC.
I was there ....what a laugh.
An announcement went out for anyone with a hacksaw in their car boot.......'any burglars present?'
The 45 degree sleety rain....what a laugh


Happy days.

... and of course someone did.

Did they also ask if somebody had any allen keys on them!! Great stuff!

Also a one of the best memories always for me was when we came back from the dead at Rochdale and Anton Garcia went over in the corner with about a minute left to win the game.There wernt many of us behind the sticks but everyone went mental!! The same game where Mansson was sent off after about 5 minutes.

That was a fantastic day out and Jamie Fielden was virtually in tears.

Thats the one mate.It was only a league game but the scenes were as if we'd won the cup final!

Was that as good as the Leigh game at Belle Vue with the Johnny Woodcock last minute winning try?

I would go for the Rochdale one over the Leigh game to be honest.

Though the Batley Promotion game would take some beating

Me too - done in the face of much adversity.

August 1994 - Beating Saints at Saints is one of my all time favorites.
I couldn't speak for a week!! Brilliant

Shocked the whole of Rugby League with that one!

Also, the way Tattersfield looked at the start of the 94/95 season.

I started watching the Dons regularly in 1987 but had been going
to Tattersfield on and off since the late 70's and to be fair it was a bit
of a state but at the start of the 94/95 season it looked great.

In fact it wasn't finished until 20 mins before kick off for our first Home
game, live on Sky, against Widnes. We won 21-6 and held top spot for
48 hrs. "Little Doncaster" as Eddie Hemmiings called us!

I often wondered how the Dons would have got on if Tattersfield had
not been sold off and demolished. I drive by every day on my way to
work and it has never been built on....such a waste



Watching RL in Doncaster has never really been the same since.

Absolutely spot on. I too pass it on my way to work.

If only?

I can remember that day pretty well. IIRC, they got lads from Hatfield Borstal to go and help with the efforts, I can also remember Calendar News doing a report from there that night.

Heard that Dave Noble can't drive past the old place cause he gets too upset.

I know the feeling.

I can count on the fingers of one hand the amount of times I've been past Tattersfield since it was demolished, and I have the same feeling. I'm 26, and Tattersfield was the place of my introduction to Rugby League, forget Stainforth, forget Belle Vue, and forget The Keepmoat, Tattersfield was the home of the Dons, and always will be.

Even took away the pain of having a parking ticket waiting for me.

Remember Jamie Bloem pushing Alan Tait (I think) into the advertising hoardings or throwing snowballs at Martin Offiah.

Always remember being frostbitten at Crown Flatt, & old Rochdale ground but struggling to remember its name.

Can remember Bloemy ripping defences apart that season, and nearly doing Offiah in with the Snow balls..

The old Rochdale ground was the Athletic Grounds.

We threw snowballs at John Helm as well while he was trying to record
the introduction to 'scrumdown'. I think we were the featured game that
night and I was glad to see that when it came on they actually
used the take where he got snowballed!

They should bring back Scrumdown. I rather see highlights of all the
games than one game live.

[uMemories From The Past[/u
TATTERSFIELD, the modest home of Doncaster's rugby league side, will be filled once more this afternoon by the 3,000-odd locals who never thought their town would host a Division One fixture. And among those present for the game against Hull will be TonyFisher, the former Great Britain hooker, who coached the Dons to promotion last season and was sacked eight months later. For much of the most eventful year in the club's 43-year history, Fisher has been paid to come to Tattersfield and has sat not in the midst of the crowd but in a front-row pew.

The highest point during a journey on sport's roller-coaster came on 24 April when Doncaster travelled to West Yorkshire to play Batley. Promotion was the reward for the winners, and kick-off was delayed by 15 minutes as Batley's biggest crowd for a decade squeezed in to see. By half-time not a single point was on the board, but in the final quarter, Doncaster scored two tries to win 10-5. Visiting fans flocked on to the pitch, bore the players on their shoulders, and when their heroes had all been delivered to the dressing-room, they stayed and chanted Fisher's name. After 15 minutes the police tried unsuccessfully to budge them, and finally Fisher was persuaded to come out. At the head of the throng, he gave one sweep of his arm and they were quiet. "I'd seen Bill Shankly do that," he recalls, "but I never thought I'd do it myself."

That the euphoria took a considerable time to subside is not surprising. For 12 of their 43 years, the Dons had finished bottom of the league, and for most of the other 30, they were the whipping boys. After a record run of 40 defeats in the 1970s, theirstatus as the biggest jokes in the game became official when a documentary, Another Bloody Sunday, was filmed so they would not be forgotten.

So Fisher's achievement certainly stirred the town. His reputation as one of the game's hard men had spilled over into his coaching style where he was aggressive and demanding and proved inspirational as a motivator. John Sheridan, the club's director offootball, says he has not seen anyone since the former Britain coach Mal Reilly stir a team in such a way, and he was so impressed with the signings that Fisher made in the summer of 1993 that he laid £10 on them at odds of 100-1 to win promotion to theFirst Division.

At the start of 1994, the new outfit started to gel and one of the fresh faces, Jamie Bloem, the South African full-back, led them on the first of two runs of eight consecutive victories. The second ended at Rochdale, but the following weekend the Dons rolled up at Batley and Sheridan collected his £1,000. "When Tony first approached me," says Sonny Whakarau, one of the three New Zealanders who arrived the previous summer, "I thought 'Little old Doncaster, Jeez'. But he told me his big plans and it's like a fairy-tale come true."

Outside town, few gave them much chance of surviving in the top flight, but come August, the fairy-tale endured. On the season's opening Sunday, they won 29-20 at St Helens and, five days later, having beaten Widnes 21-6, they spent 48 hours looking downon Wigan and the rest on top of the league.

All of which served to overshadow a deep financial crisis. In July, a winding-up order had been narrowly avoided, and despite the increased gates and sponsorship which came with promotion, the debts of more than £1m with which the club started the seasonhave not decreased, largely because £200,000 has been spent on the 20 players who have joined the club since April. In early October, before the home game against Halifax, the club were unable to pay the players, but Fisher stood by his men, voicing their objections to John Desmond, the club chairman.

Without him, there would be no rugby league in Doncaster - he came to the club's rescue in 1986 and is himself owed £800,000. "But as the weeks passed by in the autumn," Fisher says, "his integrity left a lot to be desired." Desmond, however, claims that Fisher did not stop at demanding wages, but badgered him for cash to widen the player pool further.

The Halifax game ended in a disastrous 72-0 defeat. Fisher managed to restore team spirit, but worse was to come on 29 November when Bloem, still the club's outstanding player, was found guilty of taking steroids and was given a two-year ban. His team-mates were not universally surprised. "I actually knew he was taking them and it was generally a case of 'keep your lips sealed'," Whakarau says. "He had been playing on a different plane. He was like a never-ending battery."

Bloem had brought shame on the club by being the first player in Britain to be found guilty of such an offence. At Warrington five days later, they were greeted by home fans with chants of "Donny, Donny, Where are your drugs?"; Doncaster were defeated 44-14, the whipping boys again.

Just when the club needed a boost, they lost the man most capable of giving it. From his office in Castleford, Desmond dispatched a member of staff to deliver a letter to Fisher's house in Bradford informing him that he had been sacked. The shock waves were felt throughout the club, as no one had the remotest idea it was coming. "It was like hearing that someone who you were only talking to five minutes previously, had just died," said Ian Brooke, Fisher's assistant, who took over as coach the followingday but worried, at the time, that his head would be next.

At Brooke's request, Desmond attended the team's next training session and explained what had happened as a character clash. "If we had let Tony have his head, the club would have gone to the wall," he explained later. This was just enough to appease theplayers. "There was some isolated talk about us not playing as a protest," says Whakarau, "but it didn't get very far."

Two days later, watched by Fisher, they did take to the field, and while they were going down to a 28-14 defeat at Wakefield, Fisher's name was chanted by the travelling fans, just as they did on Boxing Day, when they were beaten 30-22 at Sheffield. Theynow lie one point off the bottom of Division One. "Ian has got the hardest job in the game at the moment," Sheridan says. "Tony was so well liked that if we lose a couple more games, the fans will take everything out on him."

The future is still unsettled. An administrator has taken over the running of the club; Rocky Turner, the captain, has quit, ostensibly to give more time to his business, but also because he was tired of not being paid, and Bloem is back in town, planning to tour local schools to speak out against drug abuse and also to appeal against the ban which drug abuse brought him.

Characteristically, Fisher is fighting on. He claims he is owed £11,700 by the club and says he is putting together a consortium to take it over. Meanwhile, six days before Christmas, he went to Bradford to sign on the dole for the first time in his life. And that, he says, was almost as unforgettable as that day in April at Batley.

[uDoncaster 21 Widnes 6[/u


IF THERE had ever been more unlikely First Division pace setters than Doncaster, even at this early stage of the season, then their names are long forgotten.

This second magnificent display of a campaign that had promised little but a struggle against relegation, however, gave them the right to look down on the rest, at least until Sunday.

There was nothing complicated about their approach, but a ferocious physical commitment that Widnes could not match gave them the edge in all departments.

Nowhere was that more apparent than in the front row, where Wayne Jackson showed just why Doncaster had been trying all summer to sign him despite minor problems like having no money.

Jackson scythed through Widnes's defence in the 17th minute and the alert Brendan Carlyle was in support to send David Evans on a run past Christian Tyrer to the try-line.

And Doncaster's South African full-back, Jamie Bloem, another excellent performer, exploited some slack defence at the play-the- ball to force his way over.

Two conversions, one from the touchline, and a drop goal, all from Alex Green, gave Doncaster an 11-point half-time lead they thoroughly deserved.

Less than two minutes into the second half, Bloem did it again, picking up from dummy half and side stepping past a shell shocked Widnes defence.

Green surprisingly missed that kick and Widnes belatedly put together some incisive rugby when David Hulme's well-timed pass put Darren Wright through a gap for a try.

But Doncaster's tackling held firm against sporadic Widnes pressure and Green emphasised their astonishing all-round superiority by going 50 yards from a scrum, four minutes from time.

Doncaster: Bloem; Roache, Rowse, Evans, Tomlinson; A Green, Carlyle; Lingard, Whakarau, Matautia, Miller, Pennant, Turner. Subs: Fletcher, Jackson

Widnes: Tyrer; J Green, Hammond, Wright, Hadley; Ruane, Kelly; Ireland, McCurrie, Hansen, Halliwell, Myler, D Hulme. Subs: Thorniley

Thanks for them Dragonfan, fantastic reading. wonder what it would cost to bring back Tattersfield. We need someone to win the euromillions and make it happen