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:
“The sport of digging the bait is nearly equal to that of catching the fish, when one’s appetite is not too keen.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“For generations, a wide range of shooting in Northern Ireland has provided all sections of the population with a pastime which ... has occupied a great deal of leisure time. Unlike many other countries, the outstanding characteristic of the sport has been that it was not confined to any one class.”
—Northern Irish Tourist Board. quoted in New Statesman (London, Aug. 29, 1969)
“What sport shall we devise here in this garden
To drive away the heavy thought of care?”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)