Nothing foul about this

Published on 06/12/2012 16:25

Alnwick Town are top of the league – as part of an initiative to give foul language the boot.

The Ebac Northern League’s Secret Shopper scheme, chiefly targeted at giving offensive behaviour in grassroots football the red card, has gone public for the first time.

Based on around 150 anonymous visits so far this season, the league has just published a table of all 46 of its clubs, detailing those who’ve performed almost impeccably and others where concerns remain.

And Alnwick Town – ironically bottom of Division Two – are currently leading the way in the Secret Shopper league, topping the table as the best-behaved club.

Club chairman Tom McKie said: “I’m really pleased and I hope we can continue to be top for the rest of the season.

“It is a credit to everyone involved with the club.”

The Northern League appointed a 17-strong Secret Shopper panel to visit matches and report on the behaviour of both teams.

They mark out of five in each of four categories – players’ language, technical area language, technical area discipline and spectator behaviour.

The Secret Shopper league was compiled on November 26 and each team’s score in the table is the average out of five across all four categories.

Table-topping Alnwick scored 4.60, followed by Team Northumbria with 4.57.

At the other end, West Auckland and Spennymoor Town – who are both flying high in Division One – are at the bottom of the Secret Shopper table, with marks of 3.25 and 3.32 respectively.

Morpeth Town are in a lowly position, with a score of 3.39.

League chairman Mike Amos described Alnwick’s performance as a ‘fantastic achievement’.

All clubs have been made aware of their position in the table, and of any concerns.

The initiative, to run until the end of the season, has attracted national attention and is running in tandem with the FA’s own Use Your Head scheme.

Sport

Local Sport

Looking for...

Featured advertisers

Jobs

Search for a job

Motors

Search for a car

Make Model Price from Price to

Property

Search for a house

Buy Rent

Bedrooms Price from Price from Price to Price to

What is a Cookie?
What is a Flash Cookie?
Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?
About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.
This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.
Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.
The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:
- Revenue Science ►
  
  A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Google Ads ►
  
  Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Webtrends / Google Analytics ►
  
  This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.
- Dart for Publishers ►
  
  This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.
- ComScore ►
  
  ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.
- Local Targeting ►
  
  Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.
- Grapeshot ►
  
  We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.
- Subscriptions Online ►
  
  Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.
- Add This ►
  
  Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.
- 3rd Party Cookies ►
  
  We use Advertising agencies to provide us with some of the advertising on our websites. These include (but are not limited to) Specific Media, The Rubicon Project, AdJug, AdConion, Context Web. Please click on the provider name to visit their opt-out page.

Top stories

Sport

Local Sport