IT went into injury time for six Skipton football fans who secured gold dust tickets to the England v Scotland Euro 2000 qualifier, just days before they went on sale to the public.

Stephen Sowerbuts, of Regent Crescent, who is a member of the England Supporters Club, applied for tickets for the cross border battle in July.

He started panicking several weeks ago when the tickets never arrived and the big match day was drawing closer.

Days before thousands of fans blocked Wembley's ticket hotline Stephen, his wife and friends spent hours on the phone trying to find out what had happened to the application.

Stephen's wife spent 14 hours ringing the Wembley box office, whilst he and one of the other supporters tried all day at work by pressing redial on their mobile phones only to be met by the engaged tone.

They then spent the rest of the week trying to contact the England Members Club only to find out their application had never been received.

"We were gutted when we found out they had lost our application. Luckily we had kept a copy of the application form, so we had to fax a copy down to try to get the tickets. It was a hard job getting them to let us have even one never mind six.

"We waited with baited breath but thankfully they came up with them at the last minute before the tickets were supplied to the public," said Stephen.

The tickets arrived for Stephen and friends Steven Chatham, Gary Stevens, Stuart Stead, Tony Fowler and Peter Meller just before the deluge of 10,000 hopeful supporters jammed Wembley phone lines for the 36,000 English tickets.

The Skipton men, who have been following England for the past two years and have been to all the qualifying matches at Wembley, are now counting their lucky stars that their application was finally accepted.

The men are a dedicated mix of Leeds and Manchester United fans but always put their differences aside to support their national team.

Stephen has unsurprisingly predicted an England win but would not hazard a guess at the score. "Obviously we are going to win, we will be very upset if we do not. But I do not care about the result," he said.

The lads have hired a space cruiser for the November event so they can travel to the game in comfort and have a few pre-match beers on the way.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.