Jarrod Sammut’s 77th-minute field goal against Bradford Bulls earlier this month earned Barrow Raiders their first win at Odsal in more than 59 years.
But technically speaking, the 29-0 victory back on November 23, 1963 never happened.
For the meeting with the then-Lancashire side (Cumbria didn’t come into existence until 1974), was among 16 matches played by the original Bradford Northern that were expunged from the record books.
That was after the club, founded in 1907, failed to complete the campaign after going into liquidation on December 10, 1963, after the bank refused to loan any more money.
A decade earlier, on March 14, 1953, Bradford had recorded a club-record 69,429 attendance for the Challenge Cup quarter-final clash with eventual competition winners Huddersfield at Odsal.
Northern’s average league attendance as they finished third in the single 30-strong division that season was 16,862.
But when Barrow visited in 1963 – the day after the assassination of US president John F Kennedy in Dallas, Texas – there were just 324 spectators rattling around the vast old bowl.
Put simply, Bradford were in a terminal spiral of poor results, falling crowds, decreasing income and lack of investment, which led to debts – and eventually liquidation.
The loss of charismatic and entrepreneurial Chairman Harry Hornby to ill health was a big blow, particularly in a period when Northern were competing for paying customers in the Yorkshire city with two Football League clubs, City and Park Avenue, two greyhound tracks (City and Greenfield) and a successful speedway team.
The club had to go cap in hand to the Council to try to renegotiate the rent for Odsal, which, because of its size, has always been costly to maintain.
They also dispensed with the services of Malcolm Davies, who was not only a prolific try-scorer and crowd-pleaser, but also the architect of a lucrative pools scheme that pretty much collapsed when he left.
With other talented, and popular, players sold off, Bradford’s league position plummeted, and in 1961/62, they finished rock-bottom, with just five wins and a draw from 36 games.
That season, Northern also suffered their then-record defeat, 73-5 at Wakefield in the Yorkshire Cup.
The splitting up of the league into two divisions for the 1962/63 season was a further setback, with Bradford in the bottom section and therefore deprived of money-spinning visits from the ‘big boys’.
As neighbours Keighley won promotion, Northern were wooden spoonists once again, this time with only two wins and a draw from 26 matches.
With the club continuing to haemorrhage money and with no prospect of any meaningful level of investment, the outlook at the start of the following season was bleak – and so it proved.
There had been only one win, 27-6 at home to Salford, before the clash with Barrow, which brought in only £30 in gate receipts, and the clock was ticking.
The presence of an estimated 500 travelling fans for the follow-up 33-5 home home defeat to Leigh, pushing the crowd up to 841, provided only a sticking plaster.
The never-ending battle with financial troubles reached its predictable outcome, with the club’s debt topping £8,000 and the local Telegraph and Argus newspaper proclaiming: “End of the road for Northern.”
While the Rugby Football League was wiping Bradford’s results from the league table, legendary former forward and coach Trevor Foster was putting together a consortium to create a new version of the club.
Preparatory work had begun before the demise of the original, whose RFL membership was officially terminated on March 18, 1964.
It was to the credit of Foster, and his former team-mate Joe Phillips, that Bradford Northern (1964) Limited was formed on April 20 of that year, six days after a public meeting at St George’s Hall in Bradford, which was attended by 1,500.
By mid-May, the £5,000 needed to get the new venture up and running had been raised and soon after that, the governing body rubber-stamped the membership application.
Bradford Northern were back in business – with a spring in their step and far more public support than previously.
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