Conker Editions

Category: News

Barnet and Oldham Athletic – Welcome Back!

We are delighted to celebrate the return to the Football League of Oldham and Barnet. Oldham featured in our book, Football’s Black Pioneers, but Barnet did not.

You can see highlights of Oldham’s thrilling play-off win against Southend (a team that also features in our book) here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8deYqJLYFCM

Barnet, on the other hand, do not feature in the book and so we have added a piece about them, and their first Black player, to our website. You can read it here:

https://footballs-black-pioneers.com/barnet-fc-1991-92/

If you don’t yet have a copy of our book and would like to know the story of the first Black player at Oldham (or Southend) it is still available through Amazon or any good bookshop.

Uriah Rennie 23/10/1959 to 8/6/2025

 

It is sad to report the death of Uriah Rennie the first Black referee in the Premier League.

In Football’s Black Pioneers we wrote about the first Black player at each of the Football League clubs, we mentioned the first Black manager (Tony Collins at Rochdale) and we recorded the trials, tribulations and triumphs of them all. They were true pioneers.

We made no mention of Black referees.

Born in Jamaica in 1959, Uriah Rennie moved to Sheffield as a child. He took up refereeing in local football in 1979. He rose to the top and was on the FIFA list from 2000-2004. As a referee he would have faced the same issues as the pioneering players and no doubt the popular chant ‘who’s the bastard in the black’ would have taken on a whole new meaning when he was the referee.

He was every bit a pioneer too and deserves to be remembered as such.

As I wrote this I thought ‘there should be a book’ and, of course, there is: