Industry | 2009.04.16
Joe Moran on Glossop North End's Wembley appearance
The glittering prize of Wembley immortality awaits my home town\'s lowly football team
The Wembley trail of one small club shows that the magic of this cup is not dead. Here is one football result I couldn\'t find on the Guardian sports pages: Glossop North End have reached the final of the FA Vase, the cup competition for non-league teams, to be held at Wembley on 10 May. You may not have noticed this glaring omission; I did, because I used to go and watch Glossop North End from the age of eight, paying 20p at their single rusty turnstile.
Until now, my Derbyshire home town\'s main claim to fame has been that its neighbouring town, Hadfield, was the real Royston Vasey in the sitcom The League of Gentlemen. Naturally, Glossopdale residents weren\'t thrilled that their locality was portrayed as an insular community of weirdos, sadists and secret cannibals. But they rose above it and, the last I heard, Hadfield had a Cafe Royston and a butcher\'s shop advertising "human flesh" sausages. Now the BBC, in a case of well-meaning overcorrection, has set its cosy new drama series, All the Small Things, in Glossop. Questioning the verisimilitude of this series in the New Statesman, Rachel Cooke wrote enigmatically: "I know Glossop, and it makes The League of Gentlemen look like Terry and June." What can she mean? This Glossop sounds racier than the one I grew up in.
In truth, no fiction could compete with the real-life drama of a team from the lowly North West Counties League battling through nine rounds to Wembley - except perhaps the Roy of the Rovers comic, which was serendipitously revived in the week that Glossop sprinkled some Melchester magic over the semi-finals, equalising in the last minute of extra time against Chalfont St Peter, then winning on penalties. I felt a pang of homesickness when my dad described this victory over the phone. He said the cheers could be heard from our house, all the way across the valley.
Glossop\'s triumph has an added piquancy, as it is the smallest town ever to have a team in the English league\'s top division - in the 1899-1900 season, when they finished bottom. Back then, in the days when investing in a football club was a form of philanthropy rather than an opportunity to grow a global brand, they were bankrolled by a mill-town Abramovich called Samuel Hill-Wood, the local cotton magnate. But when the Football League restarted after the first world war, Glossop, who had lost several players at the Somme, were not in it. With the cotton industry in decline, Hill-Wood left for London in the 1920s and invested in Arsenal, where his grandson is now the chairman. The younger Hill-Wood\'s views on Glossop\'s gallant cup run are not known.
Fans of JL Carr will hear echoes of Glossop\'s success in his classic novel, How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup, which follows a village team all the way to Wembley. Not everyone was impressed by Carr\'s comic riff on the British love of the underdog. Brian Glanville dismissed the book in the Sunday Times as "absolute crap. There\'s nothing wrong with the fantasy of a village team winning the cup, but you have to work out some internal logic of how they got there. In this book they just won because they won."
This isn\'t quite true. The Wanderers are helped by the brilliant intuitions of the Hungarian village headmaster, Dr Kossuth, whose coaching philosophy ("Every player except the centre-forward must defend his own goal, and every player except the goalkeeper must assault his opponents\' goal") sounds like an anticipation of total football. But Carr\'s biographer, Byron Rogers, reluctantly agreed with Glanville. He once attended a first division game played in a closed ground, with empty terraces. The atmosphere of a Sunday league game brought the extraordinary pace and skill of top-flight footballers into sharp relief. "Steeple Sinderby Wanderers," Rogers concluded ruefully, "could never have won the FA Cup."
Maybe not, but they could have won the FA Vase - and so can Glossop, if they can defeat the Goliaths of the Northern League, Whitley Bay FC. The romance of the FA Cup is dead. Only three times in the last 20 years has it been won by a team from outside the big four Premiership clubs. The FA Vase is the last redoubt of Corinthian spirit. Come on, Glossop! For brave hearts, the glittering prize of Wembley immortality awaits.
• Joe Moran\'s book, On Roads, is published in June
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]bley-glossop-north-end-fa-vase
