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Post by hatter_in_macc on Aug 3, 2019 16:20:55 GMT
My second series of these pieces about visitors to EP returned today after a year's absence - starting with the one from this lunchtime's programme...
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GUEST INFORMANT: MAIDENHEAD UNITED
Hatter in Macc revives an old series from the programme to find out more about a new collection of opponents filled with some we have never met, others that we know from various league levels in years gone by… and today’s visiting ‘Magpies’, who, for the purposes of this column, are in a nest all of their own!
All told, this year’s National League contains eight clubs with whom the Hatters last did league battle as part of ‘the 92’ up to and including 2010/11, three in the Conference (as was) between 2011 and 2013, and half a dozen during the same number of years that County spent as members of the North section prior to this year’s promotion.
Five more - namely, Boreham Wood, Bromley, Dover, Eastleigh and Sutton - are sides that we shall encounter for the very first time this term in any form of competition. And Maidenhead’s name would have been added to that group, were it not for our being drawn together in the course of County’s run to the FA Trophy Quarter-finals two seasons ago.
We did get to know each other a little more than originally planned in early February 2018: over a combined total of some 210 minutes within three days, to be precise, as our one-all draw at a rainy York Road was followed by a replay (one of four in which the Hatters partook during that Trophy campaign), involving a two-goal County comeback over the final eight minutes of normal time and Jimmy Ball’s extra-time winner on a near-freezing night in SK3.
Time now to look in a little more depth at what these Magpies were getting up to over the very many years before our paths initially crossed - although it is worth pausing just a tad longer to note the several County landmarks arising from those two Trophy meetings.
1. A series of firsts in 2018
The Hatters found themselves in all sorts of new, or near-forgotten, territory as a consequence of having their name pulled out with Maidenhead’s. The tie in Berkshire took County south of the River Thames for the first time in five years to contest our first-ever Third Round match, as one of the last 16, in a competition that led to a first taste of Trophy extra time and, during that additional half an hour, the first red card issued in nearly two years to a Hatter (then-captain Harry Winter). Moreover, of course, we had never before faced these particular ‘Magpies’ - even though, following their formation, as Maidenhead Football Club, in 1870 (making them the fourth-oldest, current National League club), they had been around for nearly 150 years.
2. Maidenhead: history makers
The club is especially rich in history from its formative years: most notably from having been one of the teams to play in the inaugural set of FA Cup-ties, against Marlow, on 11 November 1871; and from beginning, just under nine months earlier, to ply their trade at York Road, which is acknowledged by the Football Association and FIFA - and marked with a Blue Plaque on the boundary wall of the stadium’s main standing area - as the oldest senior football ground continuously used by the same club. Maidenhead have since entered the FA Cup every year excepting 1876, when the club, after reaching the Quarter-finals in three consecutive earlier seasons (from 1872/73 to 1874/75), decided not to take part with a view to saving money. And the Maidenhead-Marlow coupling is the oldest repeated fixture in the history of the competition.
3. The long ‘tail’ of the Magpies since then
They divided the time over their first couple of decades playing friendlies and cup matches, as well as merging with other, charmingly-named clubs from the town, including Maidenhead Excelsior, Maidenhead Temperance (formerly Maidenhead Band of Hope) and Boyne Hill. Then, in 1894, they became founder members of the Southern League - before flitting between the West Berkshire, Berks & Bucks and Great Western Suburban Leagues in the period up to the Great War. Another merger, with Maidenhead Norfolkians, followed World War One, before the club truly became Magpies by adopting their current black and white colours in 1919. The ‘United’ suffix was added the following year, just after Maidenhead had been crowned Great Western Suburban League champions.
Home Counties competitions with names derived from Ancient Greece provided the Magpies with successive footballing nests for more than 80 years, as they competed in the Spartan, Corinthian, Athenian and Isthmian Leagues between 1922 and 2004 - whereupon they were among the clubs admitted to the newly-formed Conference South. A return down to the Southern League in which they had last played over a century previously was for one season only, as they bounced back into the Conference South, via the play-offs, at the first attempt in 2007. And a further decade in non-league’s second tier was rewarded in 2016/17, when Maidenhead pipped Ebbsfleet to the title by two points and earned automatic promotion to the National League. The same campaign also saw them lift the Berks & Bucks Senior Cup for a 22nd time; only Wycombe, with 29 triumphs, have won it more often.
4. He played for both clubs
Who he? Michael Malcolm, who formed part of the County attack between 2005 and 2007. The Hatters provided the former Tottenham trainee with his only experience of English League football - and, after arrangements for a trial with Werder Bremen fell through to blow any chance of appearing in the German equivalent, he spent the rest of his career at some 18 non-league outfits adjacent to, or well south of, the Watford Gap. MM turned out seven times for Maidenhead during the first half of 2013/14 - and was still playing as recently as 2017/18, when he joined Greater London club Hanwell Town in the Evo-Stik Southern League (South East).
5. Two matches - two sets of Magpies
As coincidence would have it, County’s two opening fixtures are against outfits carrying the same nickname - with the other ‘Pies’ of Notts County waiting to receive us three days hence. Here’s hoping it will be a case of ‘two for joy’, and six points on the board, by the middle of next week!
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Post by hatter_in_macc on Aug 13, 2019 23:31:18 GMT
Tonight's programme-piece on the 'Bluebirds'...
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GUEST INFORMANT: BARROW
The wheel of fortune has once again reunited County and Barrow - with whom the Hatters have enjoyed something of an on-off relationship so far as encounters in the current decade are concerned. But it was not always thus: for nearly 40 seasons, once upon a shared era in the Football League, we were scarcely out of each other’s sight - and then a similar passage of footballing time was to pass that saw our path and that of the ‘Bluebirds’ fail to cross at all. Hatter in Macc gets a handle on the history…
1. 1926-72: the (almost) inseparable years
Barrow joined the Football League in 1921 - upon its expansion to include two regional Third Divisions - and, in doing so, became fellow founder members of Division Three North with the Hatters, who, two decades or so on from first assuming FL membership themselves, proceeded to become the inaugural champions and bid the Bluebirds an initial farewell for the second tier.
So far, so fleeting - although the relationship had already been cemented, historically speaking, on the opening day of the Third Division North, when the two clubs met at Holker Street. And it was to resume following County’s relegation after four campaigns in Division Two, subsequent to which, remarkably, only another two seasons - 1937/38 and 1958/59 - would pass between 1926 and 1972 when they were not doing battle together. Even more quirkily, and following the FL’s further reorganisation, the Bluebirds and Hatters accompanied each other in the promotion places out of Division Four during County’s 1966/67 championship-winning year, before dropping back down to the Fourth together in 1970. Within another two seasons, a second successive bottom-four finish saw Barrow voted out of the League and replaced by 1971/72 FA Cup giant-killers Hereford United - although the Holker Street outfit had that term finished eight points above basement side Crewe, and five ahead of a rather relieved County.
The earliest League meetings between County and Barrow had established something of a notable sequence for the Hatters, who won the first 11 of them - notching up, in the process, a 7-0 victory at Edgeley Park over the 1926 Christmas period - before falling to a single-goal away-reverse in 1931.
2. Early and later non-league seasons
The Bluebirds, following the club’s establishment in 1901, spent a dozen years before the Great War, and a couple after it, plying their trade in the Lancashire Combination - of which they were champions in 1920/21, immediately before assuming FL status. For one of those seasons - 1904/05 - they actually shared Combination membership with County, who had temporarily dropped out of the Second Division, but the clubs competed in different tiers, with the Hatters securing an immediate FL return as champions of theirs.
After leaving the League 47 years ago, Barrow have proved a consistent force by remaining at one of the top two non-league levels ever since. A first challenge, on joining the Northern Premier League in 1972, was observing a promise to remove a speedway track around the Holker Street pitch - a factor which, together with the club’s geographic isolation, and Hereford’s sensational Cup exploits at Edgar Street that had seen the ‘Bulls’ defeat Newcastle and draw against West Ham, had not helped the re-election cause. But after seven years in the NPL, Barrow became founder members of a new Alliance Premier - and today’s National - League, where, following a series of five relegations and the same number of promotions from either the NPL or, more recently, the National League North, the Bluebirds find themselves today. They have also lifted the FA Trophy twice - in 1990 and 2010 - making them the only club to have won the competition at both the old and new Wembley Stadiums.
County and Barrow resumed playing contact in 2011, after the Hatters were relegated from League Two, and, once again, the clubs’ fortunes aligned two years later when both dropped into the NNL. Would that we could have bounced back together - but while the Bluebirds returned to the top tier as champions in 2015, County’s quest, as if any Hatters needed reminding, was to take an additional four years!
3. They played for both teams
Perhaps not surprisingly, given the convergence of our histories, there have been relatively frequent instances of players turning out at EP and Holker Street. Back in our shared Football League days, the likes of one-time Liverpool players, centre-half Billy Matthews (who arrived at County in 1930) and striker Bobby Murdoch (1960), did so later in their careers, while defender Ron Staniforth (1946-52) subsequently took up the managerial reins for Barrow. And since re-uniting in the non-league world, the list has included, among others, goalkeeper Danny Hurst, defender Daniel O’Donnell, midfielders Richie Baker, Sean McConville and Sam Sheridan, winger Danny M Rowe and striker Rhys Turner. Not that County’s players were averse to later stints at Holker Street, while the Hatters remained in the FL, either - with midfielders Michael Oliver (1994-96) and Terry Park (1976-80), as well as strikers Bob Colville (1987-89) and Andy Mutch (1996-98), all enjoying spells in Cumbria.
Today’s match has potential added interest, too, given that it could see ex-Hatter and current Bluebird Jason Taylor go up against County skipper, and one-time Bluebird, Paul Turnbull in midfield. Both of course were part of County’s victorious League Two Play-off squad (with Taylor an unused substitute) in 2008.
4. He managed both teams
Andy Beattie (for it is he) may just about be remembered by more senior Barrow followers, for having, between 1947 and 1949, transformed the Bluebirds from perennial Third Division North re-election seekers to genuine promotion contenders that could, on occasion, attract five-figure crowds to Holker Street.
His managerial reputation there attracted County’s interest, and he moved down to EP in March of the 1948/49 season - albeit some seven months after an unrelated dispute with the Bluebirds’ Chairman ahead of that campaign’s start had provoked him into resigning. In a turn of events that few could imagine today, the Board refused to accept the resignation, and Beattie continued in post (at least before eventually departing for County) while his Chairman stepped down instead!
5. Buttoning the Barrow Badge
The submarine at the top? Easy one - given the shipbuilding industry synonymous with Barrow-in-Furness. And the red rose on the right represents Lancashire - the county of which the now-Cumbrian town is historically part.
But the rebus of an arrow and a bee on the left? Ah, yes - ‘Bee-arrow’! Utterly brilliant.
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Post by hatter_in_macc on Aug 17, 2019 12:35:34 GMT
A third successive set of flying things to write about! Here is today's article on the 'Spitfires':
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GUEST INFORMANT: EASTLEIGH
Today sees the Hatters take on the first of five clubs in this season’s National League with whom they have never before done battle. Hatter in Macc takes to the skies to find out more about the ‘Spitfires’ of Eastleigh.
Our visitors from Hampshire were formed in modern-day Southampton suburb Swaythling during May 1946 - making them effectively the ‘middle child’ of the quintet that County have not previously met: a couple of years older than Boreham Wood (established 1948) and nearly four decades senior to Dover Athletic (1983); but considerably younger than Bromley and Sutton United, who both opened for business in the 1890s.
That said, the ‘Spitfires’ were launched in a manner that had led to the birth of a good few professional clubs in the late 19th Century: by a group of football enthusiasts in the local pub!
The Fleming Arms, which still stands today alongside the Monks Brook stream that runs through the old Swaythling village area, was the venue for a meeting involving Derik Brooks and his friends, who concluded their meeting having established Swaythling Athletic Football Club. This outfit dropped the ‘Athletic’ from its name in 1973, before becoming Eastleigh seven years later.
As it happens, the nickname - taken from the Supermarine Type F37/34 fighter aircraft that was built in Southampton and first flown, in 1936, from Eastleigh Aerodrome (now Southampton Airport) - did not come about until as late as 2005, following a competition run among the club’s supporters. But let us suspend thoughts of such timing, as we revert back to the immediate aftermath of World War Two and bring you the ‘plane’ facts…
1. Post-war Spitfires
Swaythling Athletic’s early home matches were played on Southampton Common and then on the Westfield pitch in Swaythling, at a level that, had the football pyramid existed at the time, would have been beyond the officially-recognised base. For it was in the Southampton Senior League (West) where the club first plied its local trade for a couple of seasons, before gaining promotion, in 1950, to the wider Hampshire League.
Thirty-six years of playing at county level were to follow, although that period did include, during 1957, a move to the Ten Acres ground that the club occupies today. And for 1986/87, Eastleigh became founder members of the Wessex League - in which the recently-renamed outfit enjoyed a decade’s worth of quiet campaigns, ahead of half a dozen successive top-seven finishes and the arrival, in 2002, of Paul Doswell, whose six years in the managerial hot-seat (punctuated halfway through by the club’s formal adoption of its fan-nominated monicker) were to see those Spitfires really flying!
2. Latter-day Hurricanes
Doswell - who, coincidentally, was to move on to manage Sutton from 2008, until stepping down at Gander Green Lane this April - masterminded a promotion in his first season, as Eastleigh won the Wessex League in 2003. Another followed 12 months later, courtesy of the club’s fourth-place finish in Division One East of the Southern League, combined with the formation of the Conference (now National League) North and South sections in a new second non-league tier, that together resulted in an upward transfer to the Isthmian League’s Premier Division. And a third promotion in as many years was earned through victory in that League’s 2005 Play-offs - propelling the Spitfires into the Conference South.
Doswell’s departure did not see them grounded, either. An inaugural appearance in the FA Cup First Round proper during 2009/10 was followed by victory the following season in the Hampshire Senior Cup - the final of which, against AFC Totton at Southampton’s St Mary’s Stadium, featured the first live testing of goal-line technology, trivia fans! - and, in 2014, promotion to non-league’s top tier as Conference South champions, five points clear of Doswell’s Sutton, as well as with Bromley and eventual Play-off winners Dover also in the top five.
3. Levasseur
Who knew that there were once French biplanes and bombers flying under a name so close to that of the most famous footballer to have pulled on a shirt for Eastleigh?
Well, we do now! For Guernsey’s and Southampton’s favourite son, Matt Le Tissier, spent a season at Ten Acres after announcing his retirement from weaving his creative attacking midfield magic for the ‘Saints’ in 2002. In 17 games for the Spitfires during their Wessex League championship campaign of 2002/03, ‘Le God’ weighed in with three goals, before taking his curtain call the following August for Eastleigh’s Hampshire Chronicle Cup Final second-leg victory against Winchester City.
4. (Sop)With Both Clubs
Remarkably, given that our clubs’ paths have not crossed before, there are enough players to count on all the fingers of one hand who have turned out for each of them - including, rather appropriately, midfielder Jamie Hand, whose five appearances in a County shirt during 2013/14 were preceded, in 2012, by a couple of loan cameos at Eastleigh.
The other four ex-Hatters, who all moved to Ten Acres at later stages of their careers, were defenders Matty Bound (at Edgeley Park from 1994 to 1997) and Jordan Rose (first spell, 2010/11), left-winger Gary McSheffrey (on loan, 2001/02) and midfielder Jason Taylor (2006-09), who, of course, returned to SK3 only four days ago with current club Barrow.
5. Calling the Shots
While the Spitfires were finishing a creditable seventh in the National League last term, before reaching the Play-off Semi-finals (only to get edged out on penalties by eventual winners Salford City), they had to prepare themselves for the absence of any Hampshire ‘derby’ matches in the season to follow - with fellow clubs from the county, Aldershot Town and Havant & Waterlooville, ending up in the top two relegation places.
The rivalry with near-neighbouring Havant, which had especially ignited in recent years after former Southampton striker Ian Baird had left the ‘Hawks’ during 2007 to manage Eastleigh, will have to be put on ice for now - although the two clubs did meet in pre-season last month, ironically with another former Spitfires’ gaffer Doswell now in charge, and Baird as his assistant, at Westleigh Park.
And Aldershot’s close-season reprieve, due to Gateshead’s demotion, has at least reinstated an opponent within the county boundaries for 2019/20 - albeit one that, at over 40 miles away, is rather less local!
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Post by hatter_in_macc on Aug 26, 2019 13:01:27 GMT
Was given an extra, third page in today's programme for the column. When you see how convoluted Chesterfield's early years were, you will appreciate why...!
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GUEST INFORMANT: CHESTERFIELD
For the third time this month, we become re-acquainted with one of eight clubs against whom we last played during our shared Football League days. Hatter in Macc does some research under dreaming spires…
Of those eight (Aldershot, Barnet, Dagenham & Redbridge, Hartlepool, Notts County, Torquay and Yeovil being the other seven), the ‘Spireites’ from Chesterfield have undoubtedly featured in most matches to stir the collective County memory - for better and for worse!
Most recently (although it comes as a rather sobering thought that this was actually 22 years ago!), Brett Angell’s early headed goal on a rainy Monday night at Saltergate not only made sure of promotion for the Hatters from the League’s third tier in 1996/97 - but also went some way towards exorcising the nightmares that Chesterfield’s old ground held for Hatters following their four-goal thrashing on a sunny Sunday seven years earlier in a first leg of the Fourth Division Play-offs that had rendered the second at Edgeley Park (a 2-0 reverse, in any event) sadly academic.
You would have to be a very well preserved Hatter, or a convincing fibber, to recall the bizarre circumstances surrounding County’s heaviest-ever FL loss - also in North East Derbyshire - towards the end of our second season in Division Two during April 1902. With four players having missed the train from Edgeley to Chesterfield, the Hatters took to the field with a seven-man line-up - which shortly became six after inside-left Frank Chesworth broke his ribs - and despite, by all accounts, a blinder of a game for goalkeeper Joe Butler, slumped to an 8-1 defeat, as well as being fined £5 by the League for ‘playing but seven players’.
But beyond our own history with the Spireites, they can boast a mightily rich - and, it turns out, quite complex - heritage:
1. It tran-Spires there have been several Chesterfields!
Until recent seasons, every serious football ‘statto’ could reel off the FL’s top five oldest clubs - into which Chesterfield sneaked behind Notts County (1862), Stoke City (1863), Wrexham (1864) and Nottingham Forest (1865). Nowadays, of course, only Stoke and Forest are left to fight it out for the accolade - with the Nottingham outfit currently seeking to claim this on the basis that the ‘Potters’ did not really and truly get under way as a going concern until 1868. But the traditionally-held belief that Chesterfield were formed in 1866 now bears serious scrutiny, too - given a number of seasons that passed from that year over the next five decades with an active club conspicuous by its absence in and around the town with the crooked spire.
Contemporary reports suggest there to have been a ‘Chesterfield Football Club’ playing as early as 1863/64, ahead of the incarnation that is associated with the 1866 formation-date - although a theory now abounds that ‘Chesterfield mark two’ came into being in 1867, and the earlier year was subsequently put out there for the record by club director George Oram with a view to making the Spireites appear older than near-neighbours, and fellow 1867 babies, Sheffield Wednesday!
Beyond dispute are the facts that the club, which, for 10 years from 1871, plied its trade at Saltergate, closed in 1881 - and that there followed three years without any ‘Chesterfield FC’ in existence, while some of the defunct outfit’s players carried on as ‘Chesterfield United’ and others joined the Spital and Chesterfield Livingstone sides whose own histories thereby became entwined with that of their fellow town club whose descendant outfit we know today.
A third entity was formed in 1884, and turned professional in 1891, before gaining admission as Chesterfield Town to the FL, a year before County, for the 1899/1900 campaign. But after dropping down in 1909 into the Midland League from whence the club had come a decade earlier, Chesterfield Town underwent voluntary liquidation during 1915.
Enter ‘Chesterfield (Town) mark four’, established upon the demise of its immediate forerunner by a local restauranteur, Mr CW Everest, to play domestic wartime matches using locally-based guest players from FL clubs. Everest’s one-man project hardly scaled the heights, mind - lasting just two years before a Football Association enquiry banned all its players and management, along with Everest himself, and the club was shut down, in the wake of an illegal payments scandal.
Stick with me, readers - almost there… following two further years of footballing inactivity, and the establishment, in April 1919, of the present-day club. Quite a landmark event this was, too, given that the latest entity was formed by Chesterfield Borough Council - who saw it as a means of spearheading improvements in local recreational provision - and, as such, became the first (and, to date, only) local government outfit in senior British football. In its first season, the Chesterfield Municipal FC won the Midland League title - although both the FL (to which the Spireites, in their latest form, would ascend in 1921) and the FA refused to give their countenance to a council-run club, which, 20 months following its formation, was forced to become independent and change its name to plain Chesterfield.
And the rest, as they say, is history - albeit not quite so tricky to unravel as in those first 50 years or so!
2. A goalkeeping acro-Spire
Any club looking for a new goalkeeper in the 1960s and ‘70s was well advised to scout at Chesterfield - where, like the ‘acrospire’ shoots that emerged from germinating seeds, good young Number Ones appeared to grow at will.
The most-oft-quoted example is always the recently-departed, much-lamented legend Gordon Banks, who spent three years in the Saltergate Youth Team, before turning professional, and turning out for just under a season in the senior side, during 1958/59 - whereupon Leicester City snapped him up, and he proceeded to win 73 caps for England. Two of those saw him become a 1966 World Cup winner and produce, four years later, what was, in the minds of many, an even more career-defining moment with THAT save from Pelé in Guadalajara.
Successors to Banks between the Chesterfield sticks included John Osborne (at Saltergate, 1960-66), Alan Stevenson (1969-72) and Steve Ogrizovic (1977), who went on to have long and legendary spells at West Bromwich, Burnley and Coventry, respectively. But, in fact, a much earlier Spireite set the club’s trend for producing excellent ‘keepers, half a century before Banks first donned the gloves as a 15-year-old for amateur Sheffield side Millspaugh Steelworks.
And Sam Hardy, another future international who played for Chesterfield (Town) from 1903 to 1905, before enjoying top-flight football with Liverpool, Aston Villa and Nottingham Forest, would arguably have earned a haul of England caps to rival that of Banks, had The Great War not put his career on hold for four years and restricted him to 21.
3. They as-Spire-d to manage (1)
County players who went on to occupy a managerial hot-seat - or at least that at Chesterfield - tended to do rather well… although we Hatters will only grudgingly congratulate former defender Paul Hart (at Edgeley Park, 1970-73), who, in his first job as a gaffer, steered the Spireites to the 1990 Division Four Play-off Final at our expense, only to lose at Wembley against Cambridge United.
Lee Richardson, who had a spell playing on loan in SK3 during 1997, also narrowly missed out on getting Chesterfield promoted from the fourth tier in 2009 (despite picking up the divisional Manager of the Month award for March of that year). But another midfielder, Paul Cook (1997-99), did manage the feat in 2014, before steering the League Two champions to the League One Play-offs a year later.
4. They as-Spire-d to manage (2)
Back we must go, I am afraid, to 1990 - when Danny Bergara’s Play-off hopefuls were trounced 6-0 over two legs by a Chesterfield side that included 18-year-old centre-half, and present-day Burnley boss, Sean Dyche, who had been handed his FL debut by Hart just three months previously. Dyche went on to captain the Spireites, and gave an early-career indication of his leadership qualities by skippering them, as a third-tier side, to the FA Cup Semi-finals - a run in which ex-Hatter Chris Beaumont contributed the only and winning Quarter-final goal against Wrexham, before providing the assist for Jamie Hewitt’s extra-time equaliser at Old Trafford that took the Semi-final tie with Middlesbrough to a replay.
5. They con-Spire-d to play for both clubs
Attacking midfielder Beaumont (at EP, 1989-96) was among a number of popular Hatters who subsequently won the affections of the Chesterfield faithful - along with respective future Northern Irish and Welsh internationals, Jamie Ward (2006) and Craig Davies (2008), who both enjoyed successful loan spells in SK3. Moving to equally impressive effect in the opposite direction have been: Chesterfield’s all-time highest FL scorer, Ernie Moss (1986-87), who retained an eye for goal at EP after three separate stints banging them in for the Spireites; another prolific striker, ‘Sir’ Luke Beckett (2002-04), who proved doubly as prolific in his two years with County; and defensive midfield maestro, Lewis Montrose (2015-17), who was on loan at Saltergate half a dozen years before joining the Hatters, and in the old ground’s dying days before Chesterfield’s move, for 2010/11, to the new (currently-named Proact) stadium in Whittington Moor.
And then, bringing us right up to the present, there is Connor Dimaio - with our visitors between 2016 and 2018, but now making his presence felt behind the County front-line, and no less so than in our last match here, for which he received the sponsors’ nod as Man of the Match. Hitting his stride at precisely the right time, some might say, to in-Spire a victory over his old club this afternoon!
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Post by hatter_in_macc on Sept 3, 2019 17:35:19 GMT
Another of these features... erm, 'fylde' - and in this evening's programme!
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GUEST INFORMANT: AFC FYLDE
One of the National League’s younger outfits - albeit one with which we are already very familiar, following our trilogy of shared seasons in the National League North and last term’s FA Trophy adventures. Hatter in Macc rifles through the cabinets to find what is ‘Fylde under F’, and gets Yakety Yak-ing about the ‘Coasters’!
The inexorable rise up the non-league pyramid in recent years of AFC Fylde, to a point at which the club is among the serious contenders for entering the Football League, inevitably carries with it a ‘new kids on the block’ tag. And yet, the club itself only just scrapes in as one of the National League’s top five youngster outfits - behind the merged Dagenham & Redbridge (1992) and Solihull Moors (2007), as well as the reformed Aldershot Town (1992) and FC Halifax Town (2008).
The current Fylde title, and its consequentially more extensive spread within the local and national footballing consciousness, did come about relatively recently, 11 years ago, around the same time as the phoenix Halifax Town’s birth, in readiness for the 2008/09 season. But the club itself had been in existence, and plying its trade on the western Lancashire coastal plain, for two decades prior to that - and not without success, either.
Join me, then, in the Guest Informant time machine, as we coast back to 1988…
1. Fylde under Formation
Football is not entirely new to that central southern part of the square-shaped peninsula between Blackpool and Preston where the Coasters now live. A club combining resources from the neighbouring town of Kirkham and village of Wesham once competed, before the First World War, in the West Lancashire League - although that ‘Kirkham & Wesham FC’ was long gone by the time subsequently-formed, separate outfits Kirkham Town and Wesham amalgamated to play under the same name, and at the same level (six tiers below today’s National League), in 1988.
It was not only in sport that the two communities bandied their names about together - as any trainspotter will tell you. More than 80 years previously, the rebuilt Kirkham Station - where the railway was laid beside the Wrangway Brook that marked the town’s border with Wesham - had also been renamed, as it remains to this day, with the village’s title incorporated. And it was less than half a mile’s jaunt down the B5192 from Kirkham & Wesham Station to the Council-owned ground on Coronation Road - where Kirkham Town had played for 10 years, before it became home to the newly-merged club.
The first decade of Kirkham & Wesham (mark two) witnessed something of a yo-yo existence, with two promotions and relegations apiece between the West Lancashire League’s First and Second Divisions, but a WLL restructuring for 1998/99 placed the club in the Premier Division - which Kirkham & Wesham proceeded to dominate, becoming champions in seven out of the eight seasons (and runners-up for the remaining campaign) between 1999 and 2007. On the back of the seventh title, admission into the North West Counties League was secured for 2007/08 - a campaign that also saw Kirkham & Wesham not only enter the FA Vase for the first time, but also go all the way and win it, after seeing off Lowestoft Town - a team the Coasters would meet again in National League North action half a dozen years later - by the odd goal in three at Wembley.
That, combined with promotion from the NWCL Second Division, as runners-up, at the first time of asking, was a last hurrah - albeit a rather doubly glorious one - for the team known as Kirkham & Wesham, but not for the club, which changed its name ahead of 2008/09 to that of a wider geographical area, and in the hope of appealing to a broader fanbase across Fylde borough.
2. Fylde under Fields of Dreams
The 2007/08 campaign had also marked the club’s launch of its publicly-stated dream, by way of a 15-year plan aimed at reaching the Football League in 2022. And two years earlier, it had made the first of its moves to a new field on which that later proclamation could begin to progress.
Kirkham & Wesham’s relocation, in 2006, from Coronation Road to Kellamergh Park - a new stadium, purpose-built to meet NWCL requirements - established a base for the club near the village of Warton, just under four miles away. There the freshly-retitled AFC Fylde would follow up the twin successes of 2007/08 by winning the NWCL Premier Division title (in 2008/09), becoming Northern Premier League First Division champions (2011/12), and gaining a further NPL promotion, through the Premier Division play-offs, into the (now) National League North (2013/14).
A further ground-move, to the current Mill Farm community sports complex for what turned out to be the NLN title-winning 2016/17 campaign, has taken the club that started off life around Kirkham in a neat direction geographically - as it now has a Wesham postal address! In another nice nod to the past, the road leading to the new stadium has been named Coronation Way.
3. Fylde under Former Hatters (1)
The 2011/12 campaign brought to Fylde the managerial double act of ex-Hatters, under whose guidance the club has ascended through three non-league tiers. Manager Dave Challinor (at Edgeley Park, 2002-04) and Assistant Colin Woodthorpe (1997-2002) only played alongside each other in County’s defence for a few months, prior to Woodthorpe’s departure for Bury in the summer of 2002 - but they later resumed their working association in management at Colwyn Bay, before returning to this side of the Welsh border and taking up their present posts. Along the way, they have been helped by another former Hatter, with responsibility for Strength and Conditioning at Fylde, Jake Simpson (2010-11).
4. Fylde under Former Hatters (2)
The tally of Coasters once of the SK3 Parish runs into double figures. Four of them - Scott Duxbury, Danny L Rowe, captain Lewis Montrose and former Under-19 Hatter Matty Kosylo - are, of course, still at Fylde, with every probability of appearing against us tonight, as well as facing, in County’s net, Ben Hinchliffe, who featured in four successive play-off campaigns whilst at Kellamergh Park between 2012 and 2016.
Midfielders Richie Baker, Adam Nowland and Jason Taylor, together with front-men Bohan Dixon, Danny Lloyd and Keigan Parker, have also played for both clubs - while everybody’s favourite serial County loanee Jamie Stott also squeezed in one FA Cup-tie appearance as an on-loan Coaster during 2017.
5. Fylde under FA Non-league Knockout Competitions
The Coasters’ Wembley victory over Leyton Orient this May earned them a worthy place in history as the first-ever club to have won both non-league flagship knockout prizes, the FA Trophy and FA Vase. As closely-beaten semi-finalists in the former competition last term, we shall - ahem - naturally claim a modicum of credit…!
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Post by hatter_in_macc on Sept 14, 2019 12:31:22 GMT
This afternoon's pun-loaded (oops - there's another one!) programme-piece on the 'Shots':
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GUEST INFORMANT: ALDERSHOT TOWN
Time to line up those Shots! Hatter in Macc stands his round and gets them in…
This afternoon we welcome our second guests of the season from Hampshire - just under a month after Eastleigh’s visit here - and will be hoping to make it third time lucky after failing to beat the ‘Shots’, in their current guise, over the pair of matches the Hatters contested during our last Football League season of 2010/11. Let us trawl the Guest Informant files for some snap-Shots of the club, and its predecessor, from the town nicknamed ‘Home of the British Army’; the various battles fought by both Aldershots, over a good few campaigns, on and off the field; and what is, at least for County, an impenetrable fortress of a stadium, set in a public park, that Simon Inglis described in his classic book, The Football Grounds of Great Britain, as being like ‘part of an arboretum, with the nicely mildewed air of its surrounds’. Mmm…
Between the wars we go first, then - to December 1926, and the birth of Aldershot’s original club:
1. Calling the first Shots
Aldershot Town’s predecessors, as it happens, were first known as Aldershot Town, too, albeit only for their first five seasons, which - following formation at the suggestion of a national sports journalist, Jack White, who had moved to the garrison town - they spent in the Southern League.
The original Shots dropped the Town suffix after becoming Southern League champions, and being elected to the Football League, in 1932 - one year after the original Chester FC had done so via the Cheshire County League. I mention this connection, as the two clubs would become engaged in a long-drawn-out race over the next four decades to go for the longest spell without enjoying the sweet taste of an FL promotion. In the event, Aldershot, after 41 years, achieved one first - and did so courtesy of a final-day Fourth Division draw at Edgeley Park, to pip another County (Newport) on the then-deciding factor of goal average. Chester followed suit a couple of years later, in 1975 - at which stage goal average had once again done the Shots a favour, keeping them up by the skin of their teeth for a third season of Division Three fare, before they dropped back down to the Fourth the following spring.
Would that Aldershot have had the chance to compete for honours during the Second World War! All major, official sporting competitions ceased for its duration, but when the Football Association sent some of its best players to teach physical education to soldiers in barrack towns, the Shots, for their regional wartime matches, fielded several stars - including Frank Swift, Matt Busby, Joe Mercer, Jimmy Hagan, Stan Cullis, Cliff Britton, and Tommy Lawton - who, as well as guesting at the Recreation Ground, accumulated between them a dozen League titles and eight FA Cups.
Ah, yes - the Recreation Ground. Not, it must be said, a happy hunting ground for the Hatters, who, in 25 visits over the last 60 years, have never won there. All but one of the jaunts were undertaken in the Fourth Division against the original Shots, who, in the course of their home domination, hit County for five in 1971, six in 1986 and seven in 1964. Our most recent trip to the council-owned ‘Rec’ saw the Hatters concede just the once, but still lose, over eight years ago - by which time the current, reformed Aldershot Town were in situ. And that leads us neatly to:
2. Shot to pieces
Mounting debts towards the end of the 1980s left Aldershot’s Football League future, and, indeed, the club’s very existence, under constant threat until the latter stages of 1991/92, when the Shots went out of business and were obliged to resign with 36 Fourth Division matches played - thereby becoming the first FL team to fold during a season since Accrington Stanley 30 years previously.
Less than a month later, a group of fans set up the club that operates today, with a phoenix both on its crest and for a mascot, in place of the liquidated outfit. Starting off in the Isthmian League Third Division, five levels below that at which the original Shots had ended their days, Aldershot Town proceeded, over the next 16 years, to propel up through the leagues - visiting well over 200 different grounds (a fair number of which in the home counties saw attendance records broken by the ‘new’ Shots) along the way - and into the FL for 2008/09. After five seasons, the phoenix club dropped down to the (now) National League - but it had been a remarkable rise from the ashes.
3. Shot by both sides
Connections with the original Aldershot focus on playing Shots who later turned to management duties in SK3. Midfielder Jimmy Melia’s spell as a Hatters’ gaffer in 1986 is best forgotten, featuring as it did just one win in 14 games that, but for successor Colin Murphy’s managerial magic, would surely not have ended well for County in the first season of automatic relegation from the FL. Striker John Sainty fared rather better at EP, however, serving as assistant to manager Danny Bergara, as the Hatters enjoyed the beginnings of their boom years in the 1990s.
Players who have plied their trade for both Aldershot Town and County are relatively few and far between - with none of the likes of defenders Chris Blackburn (at EP in 2011/12), Aaron Brown (2011) and Anthony Tonkin (2002/03), midfielder (and son of Tony) Anthony Pulis (2011) and, most recently, striker Richard Brodie (2016) having managed as many as 25 appearances as a Hatter before or after joining the Shots.
4. Hot Shot
One other footballer to have turned out for both clubs had an even briefer - indeed, among the very briefest ever - County career. But forward Roy Young, whose only showing for the Hatters was one off the bench in the Auto Windscreens Shield at Rochdale during 1994/95, is fondly remembered in Aldershot, where, over the second half of the ‘90s, he netted 75 times in 174 appearances, and was twice leading scorer for the season, as the Shots were… erm, shooting in the right direction through the Isthmian League.
5. Parting Shot
The ‘old’ Shots may be no more, but can boast of a FL record that will never be taken away from their memory. For in 1987, after finishing sixth in Division Four, they reached the final of the divisional play-offs - and, by proceeding to beat Wolves 3-0 over two legs, became the League’s first-ever play-off winners. Not a bad way to leave your mark on history…
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Post by hatter_in_macc on Sept 28, 2019 11:30:08 GMT
Here is today's programme-piece. If you read nothing else, go straight to '5' at the end for a cheery memory... ***************************************************************************************************** GUEST INFORMANT: TORQUAY UNITEDThis afternoon sees us prepare for another of those ea-Gull-y awaited reunions from our Football League days. Hatter in Macc gets down to business, and talks turkey about Torquay!The ‘Gulls’ are our second successive visitors to have begun their league assignments with County in the second year of Division Four’s operation during 1959/60 - although Torquay, unlike Aldershot (in the Hampshire outfit’s original incarnation), had visited Edgeley Park over a decade prior to that, when both the Hatters and the club from the English Riviera, in the course of mid-to-lower-table campaigns in the regionalised Third Division (North and South, respectively), got as far as the Third Round of the 1947/48 FA Cup. County scored three without reply on that occasion, in front of a bumper crowd approaching 18,000 that typified the immediate post-war boom years for domestic football (and on an occasion that was was in stark contrast to our clubs’ most recent Cup meeting, more than 60 years later, which saw the Hatters hit for four, with only 1,690 watching, in the mid-December gloom of a Tuesday evening at Macclesfield), before renewing acquaintance with the Devonians after the FL’s two lower tiers were restructured to go nationwide. In welcoming Torquay today, for the first time since our final FL season in 2010/11, we also face, with September not yet out, a fifth club this term with a bird monicker. All went well here, of course, against the ‘Bluebirds’ from Barrow - although, after coming away with just one point from our games with the identically-nicknamed trilogy of Chorley, Maidenhead and Notts County, we can at least breathe a sigh of relief that the Gulls are not ‘Magpies’ in disguise… Or can we? 1. They have not just had a sin-Gull nickname! No, they were once dubbed the ‘Magpies’, too, following their entry to the Southern League, and adoption of a black and white striped kit, in 1921 - the same year in which the club became known as Torquay United on a permanent basis, consequent upon merging, as Torquay Town, with the resort’s other remaining outfit, Babbacombe. The stripes were still being worn when Torquay won the Southern League’s Western Division, and gained election to Division Three South of the Football league, in 1927. And even when they had ceased being stripy, their black and white colour scheme prevailed for another two decades from 1934 - until a post-war image makeover, aimed at aligning the club more closely with Torquay’s traditional seaside character, saw them sport a more distinctive yellow and blue garb to represent the sun, golden sands, blue sky and the sea. A simultaneous change during 1954 to their current nickname also put the surrounding coastal area more clearly in the spotlight, as they switched their association from the crow family to the larine sub-order of seabirds. 2. Sporting Trian-GullsIn the early years, Torquay’s footballers became used to sharing their playing facilities with practitioners of other sports. Indeed, the trend was set almost immediately, and rather unusually, upon the club’s formation in 1899, by way of its inaugural friendly fixture against an Upton Cricket Club XI on the field of local farmer, John Wright, off Teignmouth Road. A season of friendlies later, the club - which had been founded as Torquay United - moved to Plainmoor, where the modern-day Gulls ply their trade. But the initial stint there was not to last long on a site that was occupied by Torquay Athletic Rugby Club and, within four years, leased to rival footballing outfit Ellacombe - leaving United homeless. After two campaigns back on John Wright’s fields, a further four-year groundshare with Torquay Cricket Club followed between 1906 and 1910, whereupon United, without any messing about after being evicted in 1904, merged with Ellacombe to become Torquay Town and reoccupy Plainmoor - for good this time - ahead of the Babbacombe merger and the return of the ‘United’ suffix 11 years later. 3. Seasons of Strug-GullTorquay’s Football League career never saw the Gulls quite take flight into the top two tiers, although they did come mightily close to doing so in 1956/57 - missing out on the single Third Division South promotion place to Ipswich Town by virtue of the then-deciding goal average. The club’s early FL campaigns until the outbreak of World War Two - which saw the Gulls finish no higher than 10th over a dozen years - were beset by financial problems, and those were further exacerbated by having to replace the Plainmoor roof when it was blown off in 1930. Some 55 years later, the stadium’s infrastructure suffered again, when up to one half of the grandstand was destroyed by a close-season fire that significantly reduced the capacity. And then there were Torquay’s seasons of struggle that turned into miraculous escapes. A finish in the fourth tier’s basement position, 11 points adrift of next-to-bottom Scarborough, for 1995/96 would have seen the Gulls plummet into the non-league ocean, were it not for Conference champions Stevenage’s Broadhall Way being ruled unfit to meet FL ground requirements. But that lucky break pales into footballing folklore obscurity when compared with the role that a Devon and Cornwall Police-dog by the name of Bryn played nine years earlier in helping his local side to secure a point against Crewe at Plainmoor that kept Torquay up in the first season of automatic relegation from Division Four. With Torquay trailing by the odd goal in three, Bryn - under the apparent impression that home player Jim McNichol was running to attack his handler - bit the centre-half’s thigh seven minutes from the end. In the time added on as a consequence, the Gulls snatched an equaliser and sent Lincoln City down instead. Never was a draw so literally, as opposed to metaphorically, grasped from the jaws…! 4. County Guys and GullsJust a small number of players have turned out for both clubs - of whom the best known is County’s winning Wembley captain Gareth Owen. A couple of years ahead of arriving at EP, initially on loan, in 2006, Gaz had made five appearances, also as a loanee, for the Gulls. Half-back Tommy Spratt came close to making an identical number of them - playing on 65 occasions as a Hatter in the early 1970s, after clocking up 61 at Torquay during the mid-60s. And two strikers, in Mark Loram (at EP, on loan from the Gulls, in 1992) and Martin Gritton (2011/12), each registered a three-figure total in yellow and blue, but only 15 between them in SK3. 5. G-uuuuuuu-llllllllllllll! 2-1 County!!If only Twitter had been around at the time to herald - with an appropriate pun - Andy Kilner’s sensational, left-footed half-volley from the Pop Side of the box that edged out Torquay here towards the business end of 1990/91 in Division Four (although both sides ended up winning promotion). Still the greatest goal I have ever had the pleasure to see at EP.
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Post by hatter_in_macc on Oct 9, 2019 17:32:19 GMT
My programme-piece on tonight's visitors...
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GUEST INFORMANT: HARTLEPOOL UNITED
The timing of Hartlepool’s arrival in SK3 offers an interesting (well, quite interesting) link between sequences of visitors with whom County did regular battle in the Football League and those with FA Amateur Cup victories to their, or predecessor clubs’, names. Hatter in Macc stops Monkeying around and gets to Hang with the ‘Pools’…
Or the ‘Monkey Hangers’, if you will (more of which anon). Whatever their nickname of choice, though, they directly follow Aldershot and Torquay in returning to Edgeley Park for the first time in a good few years - 10 in Hartlepool’s case - but having enjoyed frequent meetings with us during our shared FL days. And we go back even further with our fellow northern Pools than with the ‘Shots’ (in their original guise) and the ‘Gulls’ from the South. All the way to 1921, in fact, and the third tier’s regionalisation, whereupon County (who ended up as inaugural champions) and this evening’s visitors both became founder members of Division Three North.
Hartlepool, as it turned out, were one of eight teams (Accrington, Barrow, Crewe, Halifax, Rochdale, Southport and Wrexham being the other seven) to chalk up an ever-present record for the 30 seasons of the North Section’s existence until 1958. With County spending 25 of those campaigns in that division, and then sharing 30 of the next 33 in the new nationwide basement Division Four, it is little wonder that our ‘Port and their ‘Pool got to know each other rather well. And when both finally managed to bid a happy ‘farewell to the Fourth’, they did so together in the 1990/91 promotion places! No other club can surpass, and only Crewe can equal, the 126 League encounters of County’s in which Hartlepool were engaged up to 2010.
Let us now, however, rewind from there over a century and turn our attention to what was once football’s most prestigious competition for non-professional clubs…
1. (West) Hart to Hart
The County Durham outfit, as we know it, came into being in 1908 - albeit with the plural name of Hartlepools United, in the hope of attracting support from the then-separate boroughs of the coastal ‘Old’ Hartlepool and West Hartlepool. The latter, more industrial, settlement already had its own team, which, two dozen years after its establishment in 1881 had lifted the FA Amateur Cup, but within another five was to be dissolved - with its assets and liabilities being transferred to the new ‘Pools’.
Oh - and before moving on - that Amateur Cup link mentioned in the preamble: tonight’s match marks the beginning of a run of fixtures in which four more of our next five league opponents (Barnet, Woking, Bromley and three separate Dagenham & Redbridge antecedents) can list that trophy on their respective honours boards. But I digress. Back to those Hartlepools - and the ‘Summer of Love’, when two were about to become one. For it was in 1967 that a coming together of the Hartlepool and West Hartlepool boroughs into a single administrative entity saw the club dreamily drop the ’s’ and become plain Hartlepool.
2. Hart-breaking records
Well, there was Sammy King’s tearjerker single, ‘Where Do You Go From Here?’, for a start. In the course of that tune - from 1975, two years before the club’s ‘United’ suffix was restored - our beleaguered hero checked his football pools to find that ‘Chelsea won, and let him down. And so did Hartlepool.’
On the non-musical front, Hartlepool hold Football League records - and, on the fair assumption that automatic promotion from and relegation to non-league’s top tier, having now operated for over three decades, will not be scrapped, one of them, relating to the most re-election campaigns fought, is likely to remain forever. Pools had to re-apply for their FL place on 14 occasions between 1924 and 1984, and avoided being voted out each time.
Another record attributed to the club could be broken, and no tears would be shed at Victoria Park if it ever were - for Hartlepool went a whopping 1,227 minutes, over 11 League Two games in 1992/93, without scoring. A third one, jointly held with Barnsley and Wigan, was a great deal more enviable - although, after winning an eighth successive match without conceding a goal on New Year’s Day 2007, Hartlepool only got to enjoy that for two months and two days before certain Hatters not a million miles from here embarked on a tidy little run to achieve ‘nine in a row’!
3. Leading with the Hart
Hartlepool, like Aldershot and Torquay, never made it into the Football League’s second tier - but came mightily close during 1956/57 when finishing as runners-up to Derby in Division Three North (from which only the champions were promoted). The club’s manager back then, in his 14th year of office, was Fred Westgarth, who previously, from 1934 to 1936, had been a Hatters’ gaffer. Another boss to serve in both our clubs’ hot-seats was Chris Turner (at EP, 2004-05), whose first of two spells with Pools saw him achieve a hat-trick of play-off finishes in the fourth tier between 2000 and 2002.
On the pitch, and of the numerous players to have turned out for both outfits, former County skipper Michael Raynes is still going strong, and will be likely to feature tonight, in Hartlepool’s defence. Other long-serving ex-Hatters who registered three-figure appearances here, and also plied their trade at Victoria Park, include defenders Tommy Sword and Lee Todd, as well as midfielder Dean Emerson and winger-turned-physio Ali Gibb.
4. Where the Hart is
While the Hatters have not travelled to play Hartlepool since 2009/10, they did have cause to visit Victoria Park three seasons later to take on Gateshead in their penultimate Conference Premier fixture - while drainage problems were rendering the latter club’s International Stadium pitch unfit to stage matches. Although Adnan Cirak’s scrambled added-time equaliser earned County a first-ever point against the reformed ‘Heed’, it is not a memory on which to dwell - given that the failure to win made a drop into regional non-league football almost certain, and, sure enough, was ignominiously followed by relegation at Kidderminster four days later.
5. Ape piece of the Hart
Was a monkey really washed ashore from a shipwreck off Hartlepool during the Napoleonic Wars, mistaken for a French spy and hanged on the beach by the townsfolk of the day?
No-one knows for sure, or ever will conclusively, as historians continue to argue about the story’s authenticity (although to the mind of this one, it does have a feel of being too bizarre to make up!). But, these days, it is a proud part of Hartlepool’s heritage - inspiring songs, books and even (ooh, err) a graphic novel - while the club’s monkey mascot H’angus (aka Stuart Drummond) has thrice been elected mayor of the town. Did a rather good job, too. Are you listening, Westminster…?
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Post by hatter_in_macc on Nov 2, 2019 13:12:07 GMT
Well, it's been a while since I posted one of these. But with four home matches in November, I'll probably be 'Woking' day and night...!
Here's today's Jam-packed piece:
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GUEST INFORMANT: WOKING
By Hatter in Macc
Uh Huh Oh Yeh - bogey team alert! Full of hope that another defeat against today’s visitors won’t be on the ‘Cards’, Gareth Evans finds himself In the City and, later, Down in the Tube Station at Midnight, to Jam with Woking.
Ah, Woking - musically speaking, we love you. For the town’s Sheerwater Secondary School included among its pupils Rick Buckler, Bruce Foxton and, two years below them, future ‘Modfather’ Paul Weller, who together formed The Jam - for five years in the later 1970s and early ‘80s, one of Britain’s most successful and respected rock bands, who finished up playing Wembley Arena, having started life gigging at rather more intimate venues in and around Woking, such as Sheerwater Youth Centre, near the School, and the Walton Road Working Men’s Club, adjacent to the Weller family home (later immortalised by Paul’s Britpop solo album) on Stanley Road. Some 37 years after the group’s break-up, Woking’s redeveloped town centre contains, by way of fond tribute, a sculpture based on interpretations by local children of Jam tunes.
But oh, Woking - in footballing terms, we Hatters are not so keen on you, following three previous encounters which have all gone your way. It’s Too Bad - and, frankly, The Bitterest Pill - but, hopefully, this time, Saturday’s Kids in blue and white will earn three Precious points instead!
Enough song puns already? Heck, no! Time to concentrate a tad more on our visitors, though…
1. Start!
For which we must go back 130 years, when Woking FC came into being. The club - nicknamed the ‘Cardinals’ (shortened nowadays to ‘Cards’), not due to any Christian, navigational or numerical connection, but to the Cardinal Red colour appearing on their halved shirts - entered the West Surrey League, and won it, in 1895/96, before making an announcement to the wider world of football on 11 January 1908 by battling through five FA Cup qualifying stages to take on the then-top-flight Bolton Wanderers at Burnden Park in the First Round. The hosts won 5-0, but, suitably impressed by the Surrey team’s gallantry, schlepped all the way down to Woking the following season to play a friendly - receipts from which kept the Cards from… erm, folding.
A little over three years later, the financially-revitalised club joined the invitation-only Isthmian League. And, as was the wont of clubs from the London area competing in an amateur competition that eschewed promotion and relegation until the ‘70s, the Cards kept their place there for a whopping 71 seasons uninterrupted - albeit with little more than a runners-up finish (in 1956/57) to show for the first 65 of them. By the time they did claim an Isthmian honour (and were able to accept a trophy and medals, now that the league once dedicated to amateurism allowed them), they did so as Division Two South champions for 1986/87 - having slumped to the bottom tier of three to which the IL had expanded a decade previously.
The early second half of the club’s life was not entirely without silverware, mind. In 1958, just one year after getting pipped to the title by Wycombe Wanderers for the want of a single point, Woking scored thrice against Ilford at Wembley to emulate our most recent opponents, Bromley, and next league hosts, Barnet, in winning the FA Amateur Cup - on the occasion of the last Final that was to be televised live.
2. Beat Surrender
Ok, let us get this bit out of the way!
The Hatters’ encounters with Woking have thus far seen the ‘double’ done unto them in the Blue Square Bet Premier (as was), during the relegation season of 2012/13, and, in November 2016, a rather pulsating, but ultimately deflating, 2-4 reverse at Edgeley Park by way of the first County appearance back in the FA Cup First Round-proper for four years.
By then, the Cards were firmly established as a non-league force to be reckoned with at the highest level. They had bid the Isthmian League farewell in 1992 by clinching the title 18 points clear of second-placed Enfield and with seven games to spare, and in 1997 defeated our next (and, simultaneously, last-scheduled) visitors to EP, Dagenham & Redbridge, to lift the FA Trophy for a third time in four years - having also done so for 1994 and 1995. (Woking since became the only three-time winners still in existence, when Scarborough and Telford United, in their previous incarnations, went to the wall during the noughties.) Since first joining what is now the National League 27 years ago, they have spent 23 campaigns there - returning most recently, as National League South Play-off winners, at the end of last term with us.
3. Bricks and Mortar
The Kingfield Stadium has been home to Woking since 1922, and, as it happens, the Hatters have once triumphed there! Not over the Cards, alas, but on a wet final-day afternoon in late April, by the odd goal in three, against Hayes & Yeading United who were duly relegated from non-league’s top flight in their first of three seasons as Woking’s tenants.
4. Just Who is the Five O’Clock Hero?
That would, at one time, have been ex-Hatter Alan Morton, who, while plying his trade for Ashford Town in 1972/73, netted 46 times to establish the Kent club’s modern-day record for goalscoring in a single campaign. And the striker will be remembered with pride, too, by today’s visitors - for whom, over four separate spells between the start of his career in 1967 and its end 22 years later, he played a total of 361 games in all competitions, hitting the back of the net on 178 occasions.
All but one of those 22 years were spent around London and the Home Counties - with his only ventures north of the Watford Gap comprising a brief spell in 1970 at Nuneaton and, immediately prior to that, a two-month stint leading the line for County. He managed a couple of goals as a Hatter, too - thereby, incredibly, finishing as joint-fourth-highest scorer in a wretched 1969/70 campaign that saw County not only finish bottom of Division Three, but also manage to trouble the scorers no more than a paltry 27 times - which remains to this day a goals-for low by any FL club over a 46-game season. Ever.
5. Strange Town
‘Strange’, that is, as in unusual or surprising!
Woking, from the later 19th Century, can boast having the UK’s first-ever custom-built crematorium (in 1878) and purpose-built mosque (in 1889). And Horsell Common, near the town, was the imagined site of the martians’ landing in the War of the Worlds novel by the ‘father of science fiction’, H.G. Wells - first serialised in 1897.
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Post by hatter_in_macc on Nov 9, 2019 13:54:57 GMT
This afternoon's delayed, long and involved piece about Daggers and Redders:
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GUEST INFORMANT: DAGENHAM & REDBRIDGE
It’s about family, innit? Hatter in Macc turns genealogist in and around modern-day East London/historical Essex to take a butcher’s at Daggers and Redders!
The ‘Daggers’, in their current incarnation, were just teenagers when they made it into the Football League - commemorating the achievement with a visit to Edgeley Park at the beginning of the 2007/08 campaign. County rather spoiled the party on that occasion, courtesy of Liam Dickinson’s winning strike - while Leon McSweeney’s only goal of the return fixture at Victoria Road saw the Hatters do a ‘double’ en route to promotion through the League Two play-offs. And, ahead of this afternoon, there were no further meetings between the two clubs - with our visitors, who went on to complete a nine-year FL residency, having passed us in the opposite direction as we dropped out of League One during 2009/10 and into non-league football one season later.
But, for all its recent professional accomplishment, the amalgamated entity formed in 1992 can also boast a family tree of amateur outfits that had proud histories, rich in achievement, before falling on hard times. And only one of them was ‘Made in Dagenham’ - home to the Ford plant where, in 1968 (and as dramatised in the film of the same name over four decades later), the success of a sewing machinists’ strike was to help bring about the landmark 1970 Equal Pay Act.
Here then, As You Like It, are the ‘Seven Ages of Dag’:
1. Ilford (1881-1979)
Formed, according to a report at the time, by a ‘band of village youths’, and featuring in its early years a number of players from the Porter family of the Ilford High Street Furniture Shop, Ilford were founder members of both the Southern League (in 1894) - and then the Isthmian League (1905), of which they finished champions in the second season, before winning further titles back-to-back in 1921 and 1922. The same decade later saw Ilford lift the prestigious FA Amateur Cup in successive years (1929 and 1930), and make three more appearances in that competition’s final - including defeats against our next league visitors, Woking, in 1958, and Bishop’s Stortford in the very last running of the competition (1974). A planned relocation to a new stadium saw the club leave its Lynn Road ground in 1977 and, by way of an intended interim measure, share the use of near-neighbouring Leytonstone’s Granleigh Road. But a failure to have budgeted for land development tax from the sale of Lynn Road meant that a new ground could not be financed, and that Ilford - at the time one of only two teams to have competed in the Isthmian League during every season since its inception - would sadly very soon be no more.
2. Leytonstone (1886-1979)
Leytonstone had been a little later in joining the Isthmian League - having initially been founder members of the Spartan League from 1907 - but would go on to enjoy even more title-winning success than Ilford, after becoming champions for 1919 in the IL’s first, shortened season following the Great War. Eight further titles came the club’s way in the course of fewer than three decades between 1938 and 1966 - including two sets of back-to-back championships, and, from 1950 to 1952, a hat-trick of them. Two of the consecutive title years became ‘double’-winning campaigns, as Leytonstone, in 1947 and 1948, also lifted the Amateur Cup - a trophy that returned to the Granleigh Road cabinet for a third time in 1968, thereby enabling the club to compete in, and win over two legs on away goals, the inaugural Coppa Ottorino Barassi against Italian Amateur Cup-equivalent holders, Stefa Roma.
Those, for Leytonstone, were the salad days - or the anni insalata, if you prefer! But after the 1970s dawned, the Isthmian League, which, true to the ideals of amateurism, had always admitted clubs by invitation - and, in keeping with its honor sufficit motto, refrained from awarding trophies or medals to the winners - introduced a more competitive edge with additional divisions, promotion and relegation (as well as, for the first time anywhere on these shores, three points for a win, and goal difference as a decider in place of goal average, trivia fans!). And Leytonstone’s past glories, alas, counted for nothing when 1978/79 saw a second-to-bottom finish lead to demotion from the IL’s top flight.
3. Leytonstone & Ilford (1979-83), becoming Leytonstone/Ilford (1983-89)
It also meant the end of Leytonstone, although, with Ilford ground-sharing, the two clubs decided to pool their resources and resume life as a merged entity. It was a good call, too, as Leytonstone & Ilford stormed straight back up to the Isthmian League’s Premier Division as Division One champions for 1979/80. They proceeded to win the top-flight title on two occasions - both with an ampersand in the club’s title in 1981/82, and also in 1988/89, after a forward slash had replaced it half a dozen years previously. For the latter season, the club had also amalgamated with another neighbouring IL outfit, Walthamstow Avenue, and, following the sale of Granleigh Road for development, was plying its trade at Green Pond Road ground - home of ‘The Avenue’ - albeit, and perhaps a tad ungratefully, without finding a way to incorporate its new partner’s famous old name! As it happened, a further change of designation would very soon rid the club of Ilford’s and Leytonstone’s, too - but, first, a quick trip down Memory Avenue…
4. Walthamstow Avenue (1900-88)
Walthamstow had started life in the London League in 1901, before joining the Athenian League in 1929/30 and winning its title for the first time that very season. Two sets of back-to-back championships came Avenue’s way during the 1930s, before the club made an equally impressive start to life in the Isthmian League immediately following the Second World War and finished top of the tree as debutants for 1945/46. Further IL titles were claimed in 1953 and 1955 - meaning that in a dozen campaigns contested up to the latter date from 1937, either Avenue or Leytonstone were champions for 10 of them.
Avenue also lifted the Amateur Cup in 1952 and 1961, and engaged in knockout competition with County on two occasions, too. Over the course of three FA Cup-ties - which attracted a staggering accumulated attendance approaching 34,000 - the Hatters edged through the Second Round in 1938, courtesy of a Charlie Sergeant hat-trick in a replay at Green Pond Road, although the amateurs exacted revenge at ‘The Pond’ during their title-winning 1952/53 campaign by putting out County in the Third Round and earning themselves a trip to Old Trafford in the Fourth. Walthamstow remained in the IL until 1988 - spending a last campaign under the name in the First Division, following demotion the previous season, and before becoming part of Leytonstone/Ilford.
5. Dagenham (1949-92)
A dozen miles south-east of Walthamstow, and not long after Avenue had begun to tear up post-war trees in the Isthmian League, the original ‘Daggers’ came into being in 1949 and immediately became founder members of the Metropolitan and District League, before transferring, two years later, to the newly-formed Delphian League - a competition in which they finished as champions and runners-up in precisely equal measure over six consecutive seasons from 1951 and 1957. A six-year stint in the Corinthian League, and then a decade in the Athenian League - which included respective title wins in 1959 and 1971 - followed, before Dagenham joined the Isthmian League’s second tier upon its creation in 1973. By that time, the Daggers had been beaten Amateur Cup finalists twice - but were subsequently to fare better in the FA Trophy, which they won in 1980, a year before moving up to the National (then the Alliance Premier) League.
6. Redbridge Forest (1989-92)
Dagenham’s APL stay ended with relegation back to the Isthmian League in 1988, a year before Leytonstone/Ilford (and now including Walthamstow Avenue) underwent further rebranding in anticipation of a relocation to a site bordering the London boroughs of Redbridge and Waltham Forest. In the meantime, Redbridge Forest moved into Isthmian League rivals Dagenham’s Victoria Road - and continued ground-sharing there when plans for the new stadium fell through. The absence of a place truly to call home did not prevent Redbridge from adding yet another IL title (in 1991) to the ever-growing dynasty’s collection, but, within another year and following a seventh-place finish in non-league’s top tier, the tenants were to merge with their landlords.
A complicated history, then (and it could be made even more so by the formation of new clubs in recent years bearing the Ilford, Leytonstone, Walthamstow and Redbridge names, who continue to play in local Essex leagues today!)! But, following a 20th-Century classical history tour through things Athenian, Corinthian, Delphian and Isthmian, our epic Odyssey is almost at its end…
7. Dagenham & Redbridge (1992- )
And back to where we started - with our visitors this afternoon. A club that, in its 27 years to date, has set records for the highest-ever scoreline in a first-leg Football League play-off (6-0, at home to Morecambe in 2010) and for the most goals scored by a losing side in the League Cup (going out on penalties to Brentford, following a 6-6 draw after extra time, in 2014). The modern-day Daggers can also boast (albeit in hushed tones) about having the only goalkeeper ever to be sent off during an FA Cup-tie… whilst in the opposing area! Step forward (as he obviously did rather too much at the time), current Welsh goalkeeping coach, and Dagenham and Redbridge’s appearance record holder, Tony Roberts, who was dismissed for a foul in the Southend box on Peter Clarke in 2008.
Not the same Peter who once turned out for County, before you ask (ours was a Clark without an ‘e’) - although, while we are talking ex-Hatters, there is one who happens to have also been a Dagger. Striker, and one-time 'Fergie Fledgling’ from the late 1980s, Deiniol Graham briefly led the line for us during 1994/95, before heading south for a spell at Victoria Road the following season.
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Post by hatter_in_macc on Nov 23, 2019 13:41:50 GMT
The second of three consecutive sets of visitors with an interesting family tree! Here is today's programme-piece:
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GUEST INFORMANT: EBBSFLEET UNITED
By Hatter in Macc
‘Hey there, Mister! You’d better hide your sister, ‘cause The Fleet’s in!’ Gareth Evans looks back at the ‘Ebbs’ - and, naturally, some flows - in the history of today’s visitors, as they land in our ‘Port.
It was 1942 when the Hollywood musical from which our opening lyric was taken first brought a little romantic comedy the way of cinema-goers during wartime. But across this side of the Atlantic, while the callow, fictional sailor played by William Holden was ashore in San Francisco and endeavouring to share a kiss with Dorothy Lamour’s aloof nightclub singer, a deterioration in the health of real-life and longstanding amateur footballing legend, Joe Lingham, was about to lead to a pivotal development at Stonebridge Road - the present-day home of our guests this afternoon.
Lingham had, for over half a century, been the mainstay of Northfleet United - helping to found the club, as Northfleet Invicta, in 1890, and then serving it as a player, chairman, president and, moreover, benefactor. His death during 1943 left the original ‘Fleet’ outfit without much more than the Stonebridge Road ground into which it had moved for the 1905/06 campaign - and when the Second World War ended, there would have been no hope for the club’s continuation, were it not for the efforts of directors from near-neighbouring Gravesend United, a couple of miles east on the south bank of the Thames Estuary, who put together a plan to bring together the two as a merged entity, which, as Gravesend and Northfleet, would enter the Southern League in 1946.
That newly-created club is the one that today, under its modern-day name, pays its third visit to SK3. Oh, but I’m telling you the plot! 'Anchors Aweigh', as we sail back in time to the beginning…
1. Northfleet Invicta/United (1890-1946)
The town perhaps best known for its large complex of cement works that once lined the Thames had a football club to call its own a decade before the dawn of the 20th Century. Additionally and appropriately dubbed the ‘Cementers’, this first Fleet first dipped its toes in competitive waters by joining the Kent League and becoming its second-ever Champions in 1895/96. Two consecutive bottom-three Southern League finishes followed between 1896 and 1898 - before Northfleet amended the second part of its name from ‘Invicta’ to ‘United’ in 1902, moved, three years later, into its new ground on a plot of land at the bottom of Stonebridge Hill leased by local cement works APCM, and proceeded to become a major non-league force in Kent. The club was at its zenith between the wars - lifting five of its 10 Kent Senior Cups in succession during the 1920s, as well as dominating over the next decade the Kent League which, all told, the Cementers won on 11 occasions. These successes corresponded with an era, from the early ‘20s, in which Northfleet operated as Tottenham Hotspur’s nursery club. Among the ‘Spurs’ Greats to have plied their trade as young players at Stonebridge Road were goalkeeper Ted Ditchburn and wing-halves Ron Burgess and Bill Nicholson - all of whom went on to form part of the North London club’s 1950/51 League-winning side, and to be forever immortalised in its Hall of Fame.
2. Gravesend United (1893-1914, and 1932-46)
Northfleet’s neighbours became ‘United’ in more ways than one during 1893, after adopting the suffix for a new outfit that came about courtesy of merging Gravesend FC with the Iberian-sounding Gravesend Ormonde. The merged club was a founder member of the Kent League in 1894, and, like Northfleet, subsequently joined the Southern League in 1896, faring slightly better and lasting a little longer (until 1901) than the Cementers. They also emulated their local rivals by gaining some silverware before the 19th Century was officially out, thanks to Kent Senior Cup wins in 1898 and 1900 - and co-existed with them as title contenders back in the Kent League during the years leading up to the First World War (although Northfleet claimed the bragging rights with a hat-trick of championships between 1907 and 1910). Gravesend remained dormant from the outbreak of war in 1914 - and did not return to active service for another 18 years, by which time they had some catching up to do. The club did renew contact sporadically with the Kent League, but rather found its level in the lower Kent Amateur League, which it won, four seasons after resuming, in 1936. While not quite hitting the heights of earlier times on the pitch, Gravesend were well run off it - with an active board that was to be the prime merger mover a decade later…
3. Gravesend & Northfleet (1946-2007)
And so it was, in 1946, that the current Stonebridge Road outfit was created under its original designation: with Gravesend United providing most of the merged club’s directors; Northfleet United contributing the facilities, the Fleet nickname and the kit’s red and white colours; and each of the two enjoying an equal share of the new name. Gravesend & Northfleet remained in the Southern League from the outset and for 33 years before becoming founder members of non-league’s new top-tier Alliance Premier League (National League, in today’s money) in 1979/80. As an SL outfit, this latest Fleet became the first Kent club to install floodlights (in 1953), won the League title (for 1957/58), and also included among its playing ranks (from 1969 to 1971) one Roy Hodgson, who, in 1970/71, helped his side bounce back up to the Premier Division from Division One following relegation eight seasons earlier. The club dropped back into the SL in 1982, after three APL campaigns, but, after transferring across to the Isthmian League for 1997/98, and winning it five years later, the Fleet - who simultaneously during 2002 won the Kent Senior Cup for a sixth time - returned to top-flight non-league football in what was, by then, the Conference.
4. Ebbsfleet United (2007- )
Five years into the club’s second National League equivalent residency, and 61 following Gravesend & Northfleet’s formation, it underwent a change of name to align itself with the ongoing regeneration and growth of the Thames Gateway in North West Kent - with Ebbsfleet Valley as a redevelopment area, Ebbsfleet Garden City as a new town for the 21st Century and Ebbsfleet International Station as a European high-speed rail hub. Within a year, Ebbsfleet United lifted the Kent Senior Cup, as well as becoming the first Kentish side to win the FA Trophy - with some 28,000 supporters, either from the locality or from the club’s then-owner-members under web-based venture MyFootballClub.co.uk, cheering the Fleet on to victory against Torquay at Wembley. The club has since had two spells in the Conference South - returning to its current level most recently in 2017 - and won the Kent Senior Cup on one further occasion.
5. German Hand-Ball
Not a proposed new sport for the Olympics, but an easy-to-remember summary of former Hatters who have also turned out for the Fleet! Jimmy Ball played 14 times in an Ebbsfleet shirt earlier this term, before joining our next visitors Solihull Moors. Another midfielder, Jamie Hand, was at Stonebridge Road in 2008/09, five seasons before joining County. And striker Antonio German made a single Cup appearance there two years ago.
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Post by hatter_in_macc on Nov 26, 2019 19:12:24 GMT
You want Moor? You got it! Here is tonight's programme-primer...
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GUEST INFORMANT: SOLIHULL MOORS
By Hatter in Macc
Tonight’s guests, following in the footsteps of Dagenham & Redbridge and Ebbsfleet United earlier this month, complete a hat-trick of visitors to Edgeley Park whose clubs in their current incarnation were preceded by at least one merger of predecessor outfits. Gareth Evans discovers Moor about Solihull.
Moors also have something in common with the other side to have played at EP during November - for they, like Woking, are one of County’s 21st Century bogey teams. Not quite in the league of the ‘Cards’, against whom we have lost every time - although our three most recent matches against Solihull, including this season’s trip there a couple of months ago, have ended in defeat. And only on one occasion in seven attempts have the Hatters managed to finish on top - with a single-goal home win, courtesy of Scott Spencer in March 2015, representing the sole success.
Founded a mere dozen years ago, Moors are officially the National League’s second-youngest club - but given that the youngest is the phoenix outfit which directly replaced Halifax Town in 2008, our visitors this evening feel more akin to being the completely newest kids on the block. And during their short life thus far, they have already become a non-league force of note - following up last term’s runners-up finish with another concerted tilt at the play-offs (or… erm, even Moor) this season.
But how did they come to be? And whence did their name derive its unique suffix? Time to head back to the very beginning of the previous century to find out…
1. Originally Moor than one club
It was 1901, in a small area within the South Birmingham suburb of Moseley, when Moor Green started life as the original ‘Moors’. It took 21 years for them to begin playing competitive football as founder members of the Birmingham and District Amateur Football Association (AFA), another eight beyond that before they moved into their permanent Moorlands home in Hall Green, and half a dozen more until they won their first silverware by becoming champions of the Birmingham AFA for 1935/36. A hat-trick of Central Amateur League titles followed for Moors in the next three seasons - with post-war spells in the Birmingham and Worcestershire Combinations sandwiching a return to the Birmingham and District League, as well as preceding promotions to the Southern League and, consequent upon restructuring of non-league’s second tier in 2004, the newly-created Conference North. Their 2003/04 campaign was made all the more memorable by a single-goal victory over Wolves that saw them lift the Birmingham Senior Cup for the third time.
Four miles or so to the south-east of The Moorlands, and over half a century following the establishment of Moors, Solihull Borough came into being - initially as Lincoln FC - in 1953. After progressing through the local leagues, and undergoing the name change, the ‘Boro’ joined the Midland Combination for 1969/70, before being promoted to the Southern League Midland Division as runners-up some 22 years later, and as champions to the SL Premier Division at the first time of asking in 1992 - by which time Solihull had become tenants at The Moorlands, after the Boro’s Widney Lane ground had been sold for property development. Seven of the next dozen seasons saw Boro and Moors also rub shoulders alongside each other as Southern League rivals in the Premier, Midland and Western Divisions - although for the final two of those seven, the two clubs once again had separate homes, as Solihull ground-shared for a year at Redditch United, immediately before purchasing land further out of town in the Damson Wood area that had once accommodated a golf-driving range, and constructing the Damson Park stadium for 1999/2000.
2. Less is Moor
If 2004 was Moor Green’s zenith, then the following year was very much an annus horribilis - courtesy of two arson attacks on The Moorlands that left the clubhouse and main stand completely gutted and Moors effectively homeless. Solihull, meanwhile, were treading mid-table water two tiers below Moor Green in the Southern League Western Division - but did have a new ground, and so it came to pass that the two clubs reversed their earlier landlord-tenant relationship, as Moors moved into Damson Park. A couple of years later, with it becoming clear that both outfits were struggling to attract sufficient, sustainable gates, the merger of both seemed the only viable way forward - so each was dissolved to form a new club in the summer of 2007, with Solihull providing the home, Moor Green the nickname (as well as a place in the Conference North), and the pair of them one half apiece of the merged outfit’s designation as Solihull Moors.
3. Moor of a force to be reckoned with
The new Moors began life in 2007/08 with much the same team as that with which Moor Green had ended the previous campaign - while no Solihull Borough players were retained. Eight relatively modest seasons of generally mid-to-lower-table performance in non-league’s second tier followed, before a momentous campaign of 2015/16 in which Moors beat Birmingham City by the odd goal in three at St Andrew’s to win the Birmingham Senior Cup and, moreover, to wrap up the National League North title with three weeks to spare. They achieved last term their highest-ever finish in the Pyramid by coming in second, just three points behind National League champions Leyton Orient.
4. Moor teams at Damson Park
Damson Park - or, if you will, the SportNation.bet Stadium as it is currently known - hosted the matches of Birmingham City Reserves in its early days as a venue, and before the overhaul of reserve football at the higher levels. Rugby Union was briefly played there by Pertemps Bees between 2010 and 2012, before Bees dropped into RU’s fourth tier - although Moors did get to keep afterwards a seated stand donated from their tenants’ former Sharmans Cross Road ground - and Birmingham City ladies have plied their trade in B91 since 2014/15.
5. Played for Moor than one team
For the second home match running, we welcome a club for whom ex-Hatter Jimmy Ball has been playing this season. Having started the campaign with Saturday’s visitors Ebbsfleet United, the midfielder transferred to Moors last month and is likely to feature tonight. Other players once of the SK3 parish to have worn the blue and yellow of Solihull include midfielders Jamie Milligan and Simon Travis and serial club-collecting striker Richard Brodie. Two members of Moors’ management team - namely, gaffer Tim Flowers and first-team coach James Quinn - also spent very brief spells with County in their playing days.
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Post by hatter_in_macc on Dec 7, 2019 13:37:44 GMT
Today's programme-piece, featuring the second of three tidings/charms/gulps of 'Magpies' to visit us this term...
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GUEST INFORMANT: CHORLEY
As in ‘Chorley’ we’ve met before - and rather often in recent seasons! This afternoon’s fixture sees us complete a sixth year in a row of league contests with our Lancashire near(ish)-neighbours, as well as providing a fourth opportunity of the campaign finally to beat a pesky mischief of ‘Magpies’. Hatter in Macc rolls back the years, while hoping that our second meeting of 2019/20 with the Victory Park outfit will be a case of ‘two for joy’.
Chorley and County have an interesting, albeit a rather interrupted, shared history. No other current National League club other than Wrexham (against whom we first played in The Combination as early as 1891) was involved in an earlier competitive match against the Hatters. And none at all can match these Magpies’ current, unbroken run of half a dozen seasons in the same league as us - with this statistic, of course, being consequent upon our promotion together from the National League North seven months ago. But for over a century in between, our teams did not meet at all. Time to look a little more closely at the eras that have seen them in and out of each other’s footballing orbits…
1. 1894-1900
Chorley were initially founded as a rugby outfit - although, having spent eight years from 1875 playing with an oval ball, the club switched to football in 1883, thereby sharing County’s year of birth.
For 1894/95, County and Chorley were not only simultaneously admitted to the Lancashire League (from The Combination and the Lancashire Alliance, respectively), but were also paired with each other for their opening fixture that ended two-apiece at our former Green Lane ground. The Magpies were to draw first blood in the title-winning stakes - finishing as champions in 1896/97 and 1898/99 - but failed in a bid to join the Football League on the latter occasion, before the Hatters topped the table the following season and were elected to join Division Two in 1900.
2. 1900-2014
Having become annual Lancashire League opponents in County’s late-19th Century, pre-Football League days, the two clubs were then to go a whopping 114 years without doing competitive battle. While the Hatters made themselves at home in the FL - except during 1904/05, when they dropped out for a season but did not see their path cross with Chorley’s - the black-and-white-striped-shirted Magpies joined the Lancashire Combination (which was formed from the Lancashire League) in 1903, and stayed there for 65 years, winning the title on 11 occasions.
They were subsequently founder members of the Northern Premier League for 1968/69, and following that, ahead of gaining automatic promotion to the National League North in 2013/14, spent the majority of their time at one level or another of the NPL - save for a decade in the Cheshire League (1972-82) and a couple of years in the top-tier Conference (1988-90).
3. 2014-2019
Reuniting with the Magpies in the NLN did not work terribly well in the first instance for County, who lost home and away matches for both 2014/15 and 2015/16 - scoring just the one goal, and conceding nine, in the process. But at the fifth attempt, during October 2016, Danny Lloyd’s route-one effort at Victory Park simultaneously secured all three points for the Hatters and - given that we had not enjoyed a win of any kind against Chorley since 1899 - exorcised a rather long-standing historical demon.
Late during 2017/18, the clubs’ fortunes came together twice within just over a fortnight, as, first, a sharing of the points in PR7 guaranteed the Hatters a finish in the play-off positions, and, subsequently, the two sides were paired in the Play-off Quarter-final at Edgeley Park that saw the Magpies edge out County by a single goal. Last term arrived without our having beaten Chorley in SK3 - ever. But a 3-0 NLN win on the evening before Halloween laid that sorry sequence to rest - and, just to prove it was no fluke, County repeated the score less than a month later to put the Magpies out of the FA Trophy. All the while, too, the Hatters were making ground on the long-time, table-topping Magpies, before overtaking them in early March 2019 - and although Chorley’s Easter Saturday two-goal triumph over us on Easter Saturday deposed County briefly, the Lancashire club were defied two days later in County Durham, where Matt Gould’s penalty save and Glen Taylor’s late, late strike led to another, more permanent, title-twist in our favour, as well as ensuring that neither of those two Spennymoor players would ever have to buy a drink in Stockport again!
4. Chorley not as many as that?!
As well as having an ancient connection, County and Chorley can produce an extraordinarily long list of players who have turned out for both clubs. This writer gave up after going back no further in time than the 1920s, so my list is probably not exhaustive - but here goes…
Current Hatters Dan Cowan and Darren Stephenson once plied their trade for Chorley, while ex-Hatters Lewis Baines, Mark Ross and Chorley skipper Courtney Meppen-Walter(s) may all face us this time around. Players to have previously turned out for both clubs as non-league outfits include (deep breath…) Chris Blackburn, Delial Brewster, Max Cartwright, Kieran Charnock, Cameron Darkwah, Micah Evans, Tom Field, Sefton Gonzales, James Hooper, Kyle Jacobs, Alex Kenyon, Danny Lloyd, Alex Meaney, Sam Sheridan, Chris Smalley and Harry Winter.
There are some familiar characters harking back to our Football League days that feature on the list, too. Andy Kilner, Neil Matthews, Mark Payne and record-appearance-holder Andy Thorpe - all from the Danny Bergara era - are among them, as are: Louis Barnes, Kevin Ellison, Wes Fletcher, Danny Pilkington and Lloyd Rigby (2000s); Tony Caldwell, Barry Diamond, Dean Emerson, Mike Lester, Paul Lodge, Frank Worthington and one-time County Youth midfielder Karl Marginson (1980s); Tommy Bell (1950s); and Fred Broadhurst and Billy Hayes (1920s). The Magpies’ Assistant Manager Andy Preece (1991-94) was a goalscoring legend at EP under Bergara, while former County goalkeeping coach Dave Felgate (2006-09) had also previously played a game between the sticks for Chorley in 2004 - but, to be honest, I stopped counting at 40 names!
5. Oh, those Magpies…
There are three lots with whom to contend this season - and so far, we have but one point from our three attempts to bring them down in flight, following the opening-day defeat here against Maidenhead, a draw (well-deserved, admittedly) at Notts County, and a three-goal reverse at Victory Park - all within the space of five weeks. Fingers - or wings, if you will - crossed that it will be fourth time lucky!
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Post by hatter_in_macc on Dec 26, 2019 13:27:56 GMT
Happy Boxing Day, everyone! Here is my programme-piece about this afternoon's opponents...
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GUEST INFORMANT: FC HALIFAX TOWN
This afternoon’s festive guests bring with them to Edgeley Park a familiar name from our Football League days - but, paradoxically, arrive as the National League’s youngest club at just 11 years old! Hatter in Macc raves with the ‘Shaymen’ - with whom, in their current guise, County can boast a playing record that remains En-Tact…
The simple explanation is, of course, that FC Halifax Town came into being as a new club during the summer of 2008 - founded by the same directors and using the same facilities as those of its predecessor outfit, but with a slight tweak of the name from that of Halifax Town AFC which had been consigned to liquidation, in the face of tax and other debts, after 97 years.
The original Shaymen completed 69 seasons over two spells in the Football League, having first joined it in 1921 - a decade after formation - as founder members of the Third Division North. And for some 46 of those FL campaigns, they had County for divisional companions - primarily in that regional section and, following the FL’s restructuring for 1958/59, the Fourth Division. The Hatters’ record against the West Yorkshire club was generally good, and, over 30 contests from 1927/28, we suffered defeat on only three occasions - inflicting along the way upon the Shaymen the 13-0 Division Three North scoreline at EP on 6 January 1934 that remains to this day a joint-highest FL victory (repeated just over a dozen years later by Newcastle against Newport).
One of the cold, hard ‘fax’ of which our visitors will not care to be reminded - especially any of a certain, very senior, age who happened to be here more than 85 winters ago! - so let us instead look back at some better memories. And we only need to fast-forward a campaign, too…
1. Shaymen, Mark One
As it happened, in 1933/34, Halifax had not been enduring a season of struggle ahead of that dark day on the pitch for the club - having arrived to face second-placed County while holding down fourth position (before ending up a top-half ninth). And if proof were needed that the result had been a rather temporary blip for the Shaymen, it arrived the following season - which saw them finish as Third Division North runners-up. There was, alas, no promotion for second-placed, third-tier teams in those days - and nor was there for third-placed ones in 1970/71, when Halifax completed the campaign just four points away from a crack at what is today’s Championship. The Shaymen, by way of consolation, did enter the pre-season 1971 Watney Cup - open to the two highest-scoring clubs in each of the four divisions not to have earned promotion or a place in Europe. And on the last day of July, in front of almost 20,000, and novelly sporting numbers on the fronts of their shirts, they enjoyed a famous home victory, by the odd goal in three, against a Manchester United side that included George Best, Bobby Charlton and Denis Law.
Halifax dropped out of the Football League after finishing in the basement position for 1992/93 - although were a tad unfortunate to do so, given that only the Conference Champions were promoted in those days, and Maidstone United, as a FL club, had folded at the season’s outset. A return to the League, with the Conference title in their own name, followed five years later for the Shaymen - only for them to suffer a second relegation from the fourth tier in 2002. Within another five years as a Conference club, they had been placed into administration - and, at the end of 2007/08, despite securing safety from the drop-zone by a point, they were wound up.
2. Shaymen, Mark Two
The replacement, current club was required to start life in the Northern Premier League Division One North - three levels below that in which its predecessor had ended its days. In their second season, the new Shaymen were divisional champions with 100 points, and 12 months later, with a certain Jamie Vardy leading the line, they won their second title in as many seasons after finishing atop the NPL Premier Division. Victory in the 2012/13 Conference North play-offs saw them elevated to non-league’s top tier five years after the defunct Halifax had left it - and despite relegation from the Conference three seasons later, they bounced straight back, again by means of the play-offs in what was now known as the National League North, for 2017. The pain of the Shaymen’s 2015/16 demotion had also been eased a little by an inaugural trip for any Halifax side to Wembley, where a single-goal victory against Grimsby enabled them, as an eight-year old club, to lift the FA Trophy.
3. The Shay
Derived from the old English word ‘shaw’, to denote a small wood thicket or grove - and providing the basis of the old and new Halifax Town clubs’ nickname - The Shay Estate in the Calderdale Valley was, during centuries past, one of the finest areas in the town on which once stood a mansion. Following the grand residence’s demolition in 1903, various schemes for using the land were put forward - including plans to create a railway goods depot and a slaughterhouse - before it was used by the local Territorial Army for trench-digging practice during the First World War, and finally transformed into a football ground as the Shaymen began to take their Football League bow in 1921, following short stints in the Yorkshire Combination and the Midland League. For the last 20 years, the ground has also provided the town’s rugby league club with a shared home, and, over two spells following the Second World War, hosted speedway for the Halifax Dukes.
4. Throwing Shay-pes for both clubs (1)
Rubbing shoulders regularly as County did with the original Halifax Town, we should not be surprised that Hatters quite often became Shaymen - or vice-versa. And no fewer than three players subsequently inducted into our Hall of Fame have appeared for each club: defender Tommy Sword and current manager Jim Gannon spent respective loan-spells at The Shay in 1987 (from Hartlepool) and 1990 (from Sheffield United); while striker Bill Atkins got to ply his trade there twice, either side of being a Hatter, and famously refused to cut his hair for the duration of Town’s 13-match unbeaten Third Division run in 1971.
5. Throwing Shay-pes for both clubs (2)
Current Hatter Devante Rodney was on loan to our opponents earlier this year, while Stockport-born goalkeeper Matt Glennon, together with midfielders Kevin Holsgrove and Paul Marshall, have also played for both County and FC Halifax Town - against whom, over two drawn National League North contests and a trilogy of pre-season friendlies at The Shay, we Hatters are currently unbeaten. Let us hope that sequence continues this Boxing Day… and New Year’s Day!
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Post by hatter_in_macc on Jan 4, 2020 13:35:36 GMT
My first Guest Informant of 2020, about the first of four successive opponents making their maiden visit to EP...
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GUEST INFORMANT: BOREHAM WOOD
For one matinee performance only (well, at least so far as this regular National League campaign is concerned), welcome, if you will, our guests from the ‘British Hollywood’! Before seeing them take their Edgeley Park bow, Hatter in Macc went out on location to the home of British film and television to discover all that you, the viewers, ‘Wood’ need to know…
The commuter town of Borehamwood (all one word) is better known to most of us than we realise, even without paying it a visit. The various production studios to have operated there since the 1920s often included shots of local streets in their movies and outside broadcasts - and even today, every open-air glimpse you may catch of an Albert Square scene in EastEnders is actually from South Hertfordshire, within the BBC Elstree Centre, rather than anywhere near the actual E postal districts to be found more than a dozen miles away. Kinks frontman Ray Davies moved a similar distance in the opposite direction, to become a real-life Borehamwood resident, during 1968 - having the previous year watched Terence Stamp and Julie Christie from his city window, by way of inspiration for penning the classic Waterloo Sunset - and for a while lived the life of A Well Respected Man in a house formerly occupied by wholesome actress Dame Anna Neagle.
But showbiz, schmowbiz - we’re here for the football. And, on being formed in 1948, the town’s club itself put the thinnest of camera filters between its own identity and that of the surrounding settlement by reprising the old two-word ‘Boreham Wood’ designation. Not that it was quite the first local footballing outfit to have done so - although to find out more, we shall need to go beyond the beginning - with nods in the titles to ‘that Oscar-winning rabbit’ and The Bugs Bunny Show:
1. Overture! The inaugural ‘Boreham Wood’ club name was used by a junior outfit formed following the Second World War’s outbreak. The Under-18 Boreham Wood Swifts played in the Mid-Herts League - winning, during their brief life in flight, the Mid-Herts Benevolent Cup for 1944/45 and, one year later, the corresponding Shield. They were not direct ancestors of the current club, but did use a pitch on Meadow Road (adjacent to grazing land on which the modern-day Meadow Park is situated) that was to provide our visitors with a home for their first year of existence. Meadow Road had also been used for the two decades preceding World War Two by another club, Boreham Rovers, who were to be of direct historical significance for the as-yet unborn Boreham Wood. The Rovers disbanded on the commencement of war in 1939 - but reformed following its conclusion, in time for the 1946/47 season. By that stage, a second, and new, team was in town - after a number of returning servicemen had formed the splendidly-named Royal Retournez, who turned out on a neighbouring playing field. (By contrast, players for Boreham Wood Swifts were now coming of age and having to leave the area for their national service.) Following two campaigns that saw several family members and friends face up uncomfortably to each other in matches between the two teams, Boreham Rovers and Royal Retournez pooled their resources in June 1948 to establish the merged ‘Wood’ we know today.
2. Curtain, lights!
There just had to be a star of the screen lurking somewhere in the club’s playing records - so, step forward Bradley Walsh (for it was he), who had been on Brentford’s books in the late ‘70s before a brief spell during the early years of the next decade in non-league football that included time spent at Meadow Park. Ankle fractures brought on a premature end to his serious footballing days in 1982 - but, at the same time, an opportunity to begin a light entertainment career, initially as a Pontins Bluecoat, and then as a gameshow presenter, comedian, actor and singer.
3. No more rehearsing and nursing a part…
Boreham Wood began plying their competitive trade in the Mid-Herts League, before embarking, from 1951, and for more than half a century, on a 20th and early-21st Century classical history tour through the amateur leagues with Ancient Greek names for clubs in and around London. First up for The Wood on this Odyssey was the Parthenon League - of which they were champions in 1955/56 and runners-up three times. Nine campaigns in the Spartan League - during which they moved from their Eldon Avenue home of 14 years to Meadow Park - saw them claim second spot twice in the mid-1960s, before another eight as members of the Athenian League yielded that competition’s Second and First Division titles - and finally a nice, round 30 in the Isthmian League whose second-tier divisional championship they won on three occasions.
4. This is it, we’ll hit the heights.
The dawning of a new century was, for Boreham Wood, to be swiftly followed by the dawning of a new era. Following an Isthmian League reorganisation that saw the club transferred to the Southern League, The Wood switched back a couple of seasons later after becoming SL First Division East champions for 2005/06 - a campaign during which they also reached the last four of the FA Trophy. Promotion to the Conference South, via the IL Play-offs, followed in 2010 - and a similar progression to the renamed first-tier National League in 2015. Their 70th anniversary in 2018 was so very nearly marked by celebrating entry to the Football League - but after seeing off Fylde and Sutton in the first two Play-off rounds, and playing with a one-man advantage for almost the entire Final, they were edged out at Wembley against Tranmere by the odd goal in three.
5. On with the show…
And this, dear audience, is where we find ourselves getting a tad stuck, without, for once, having identified a player who turned out both for us and our visitors. (Sorry, Tyrone Marsh and Keiran Murtagh - but your having been at nearby Macc isn’t quite enough.) Our only hope, as has already been the case at least once this season when entertaining southern guests, is that former Hatter and subsequent M25 journeyman Michael Malcolm, who played for more than a dozen non-league outfits either side of the orbital motorway, might - just might - have at some stage been a trialist for The Wood? Possibly an unsuccessful one ahead of the 2015/16 season, that led him to lower his sights and opt for a few games with local rivals St Albans?! Answers on a postcard, please…
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