Sport
The town's other famous association is with Accrington Stanley F.C., the butt of many (largely affectionate) jokes. The club's name is often invoked as a symbol of British sport's legion of plucky but hopeless causes.
The club entered the Football League in 1921 with the formation of the old Third Division (North); after haunting the lower reaches of English football for forty years, they eventually resigned from the League in 1962, due to financial problems, and folded in 1965. The club was reformed three years later and then worked its way through the non-league divisions to reach the Nationwide Conference in 2003. In the 2005–06 season, Stanley, after winning against Woking with 3 matches to spare, secured a place back in the Football League and the town celebrated with a small parade and honours placed on senior executives of the team. Coincidentally, one of the teams relegated—and thus being replaced by Stanley—were Oxford United, who were voted into the Football League to replace the previous Accrington Stanley. The football stadium is called the Crown Ground. Until the 2012-13 season, when Fleetwood Town entered the league, Accrington was the smallest town in England and Wales with a Football League club.
Accrington Stanley Football Club has officially had its own pub in the town, the Crown, since July 2007.
The club was ridiculed during the 1980s with a milk advert on television, in which a young boy boasted that Ian Rush had told him that "if didn't drink lots of milk, when up, only be good enough to play for Accrington Stanley".
An earlier club, Accrington F.C., were one of the twelve founder members of the Football League in 1888. However, their time in league football was even less successful and considerably briefer than that of Accrington Stanley: they dropped out of the league in 1893 and folded shortly afterwards due to financial problems. The town of Accrington thus has the unique "distinction" of having lost two separate clubs from league football.
Local Swimming Club Pioneer 79 is based in the area and uses Acrrington Swimming Pool. The club coaches a broad spectrum of age groups, including local swimmer Niamh Robinson who is sponsored by local company TP Properties.
Read more about this topic: Accrington
Famous quotes containing the word sport:
“Every American travelling in England gets his own individual sport out of the toy passenger and freight trains and the tiny locomotives, with their faint, indignant, tiny whistle. Especially in western England one wonders how the business of a nation can possibly be carried on by means so insufficient.”
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)
“I wish glib and indiscriminate critics of industrialists had some conception of the problems that have to be met by factory management.... General condemnation of employers is a favorite indoor sport of the uninformed intelligentsia who assume the role of lance- bearers for labor.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“If a walker is indeed an individualist there is nowhere he can’t go at dawn and not many places he can’t go at noon. But just as it demeans life to live alongside a great river you can no longer swim in or drink from, to be crowded into safer areas and hours takes much of the gloss off walking—one sport you shouldn’t have to reserve a time and a court for.”
—Edward Hoagland (b. 1932)