MATT BARLOW: 46 years on, the pesky corner flag that ruined Blyth Spartans' epic Cup run still rankles…

These are important times at Blyth Spartans even without Maidstone United’s attempts to disturb their place in FA Cup history.

Blyth of the National League North were taken over last week by Irfan Liaquat, a local businessman who hailed his new acquisition as the ‘most famous non-League club in the world’ as he swept into Croft Park.

If they are as Liaquat says it is chiefly down to their FA Cup exploits in the Seventies, and specifically a giant-killing run when they embarrassed Chesterfield and Stoke City on the way to a classic duel with Wrexham in the fifth round in February 1978.

They remain the lowest ranked team to reach that stage of the competition and it still rankles in the Northumberland town that they did not make it to a quarter-final against Arsenal.

Revisiting those days, nobody I spoke to failed to mention referee Alf Grey. Nor the corner that never was. Nor the flag that refused to stand up on a breezy day in North Wales.

‘The flag, the bloody flag,’ chuckles Brian Slane, a maths teacher who scored 242 goals for Blyth Spartans as a player and had returned as manager for the epic cup run. ‘People are still talking about it.’

Slane’s team were the first non-Leaguers into the last 16 since Yeovil Town, 29 years earlier. They had made it through eight rounds and were darlings of the national media by the time they went to the Racecourse Ground.

In former Sunderland defender Ron Guthrie, they had an FA Cup winner in the ranks and Slane’s charismatic assistant Jackie Marks was a rich source of copy for newspapers, not least the secret pre-match servings of what he liked to call ‘speed oil’ that turned out to be tots of whisky.

The BBC cameras were rolling and Barry Davies was telling Match of the Day viewers how