The Pyramid Football Guide to Non-League 2004-05

Sean O'Conor

If you have yet to savour the delights of English lower league football, then what sublime pleasures and delights await you: For here beats the true heart of English football with its die-hard fans who wouldn't swap it for the Premiership any day.

For the uninitiated, there is no better starting-point than the Pyramid Football Guide to Non-League 2004-05, a superb 200-page glossy guide to the teams and competitions below England's four full-time professional divisions. Here you will find the Blyth Spartans, Hickley Towns and Leigh RMIs of this world; as the cover says, “local clubs for local people”.

There are six divisions covered, plus resumes of all the major competitions, useful local information and excellent directions for finding the stadia, never an easy task at this level! In the introduction, editor Joe Bush rightly mentions the “value, history and unique nature” of this level of football, “a culture”, he continues, “that you would struggle to find anywhere else in the world and whose praises we should all be keen to sing.”

The Joys of Non-League Football

In the introduction to the splendid 2004/5 edition of the Pyramid Football Guide to Non-League, editor Joe Bush rightly mentions the “value, history and unique nature” of this level of football, “a culture” (my italics), he continues, “that you would struggle to find anywhere else in the world and whose praises we should all be keen to sing.”

The fact is there is a world of difference between ‘armchair' fans, who may, thanks to today's blanket cable and satellite TV coverage, be as knowledgeable as an actual season-ticket holder, and lower league fans.

It is a cultural divide. Premiership fans apparently find no problem in paying astronomical prices for tickets in modern arenas where they sit and cheer skilful players from around the world. Should they ever go away in the FA Cup or League Cup to watch their stars at a lower-league stadium, they are wont to haughtily bemoan an experience that until Sky TV and Rupert Murdoch's millions arrived in England in the early 1990s had merely been the norm across the land for decades, if not centuries.

Like people who discover and fall in love with a food they had previously arrogantly shunned, if only the soccer arrivistes would savour non-league football for a while then they would realise what they have been missing all along.

A few years ago it seemed that all football below the media-hyped Premiership was in danger of collapsing into insignificance but there is a definite sense now that non-league football can survive the commercial onslaught of recent years by re-inventing itself.

Now that the football bubble appears to be unable to grow any bigger, the non-league pyramid has swallowed hard and accepted a fact the Football League might do well to heed: You're not going to make it so just enjoy your football instead.

The old tenet of faith that held England's league's together in a common bond of fan identity was that in theory any team could rise up the divisions if they were good enough.

This explains a greater historic importance attached to the FA Cup in England than to the domestic cup competition in any other nation. And after all, didn't Nottingham Forest rise from the lower echelons of the old second division to become champions of Europe within three seasons?

But the Premiership's megabuck gold rush has fatally devalued the FA Cup, priced out the smaller clubs and millions of fans and created a cartel whereby newly promoted teams now almost uniformly serve as cannon-fodder for the ‘big three' (it was the big five pre-Sky) and their rotating squads of superstars.

Yet rather than giving up and going shopping instead on a Saturday afternoon, non-league fans are palpably starting to revel in their separate status. Increasingly there are many fans turning up who have been ripped off or bored once too often by the ‘greed is good' creed of the Premiership and Champions League that has dripped down and infected the leagues immediately below it (the ITV Digital debacle that threw Football League clubs into financial turmoil is a good example).

For them, a switch to watching non-league football is also a return to the roots of the game, when medieval English villages waged war against each other. You feel like you are witnessing something quintessentially English at a non-league football match, an England that has deep roots in the past and clings on to those traditions like glue.

Like many a child growing up in an area without a professional team to call their own, I attached myself to a high-profile team I had seen on TV, in my case Nottingham Forest in the late 1970s. Only when I was aged 14 did a school friend encourage me to come and watch our local non-league side Woking, then in the equivalent of around the eighth national division.

I found three-figure crowds, shantytown ‘stadia' and salt of the earth people around me, and I absolutely loved it. Watching Woking FC gave me a sense of local identity and a feeling of belonging to my home town that is usually desperately lacking in people from the Home Counties, a point wisely made by Nick Hornby in his famous book Fever Pitch.

Boys in their late teens are naturally very tribal and if like me they come from suburban Surrey, then the longing to belong to something and have a home to sing about is ever more acute.

Soon I was adoring the ‘ugly beauty' of watching a Surrey Senior Cup tie on a freezing February Tuesday with other travellers (and their dogs) in ramshackle grounds where the half-time chips gave you food poisoning and the hot chocolate was a sludgy, sugary slop served at thermonuclear temperatures. I relished the fixture list and wallowed in the shared misery of a miserable defeat on a chilly night in January or jumped at the chance of sharing a car for a trip to some forlorn ground somewhere in Sussex for a Saturday showdown. Where else could you enjoy a match and then travel back on the same coach as the players?

I must say it did help that my attachment to Woking FC neatly coincided with the club's greatest spell in a century of playing as they rose to the Conference, one division below the professional leagues, and embarked on several memorable FA Cup runs in the early 1990s.

In 1991 we reached the 4th round proper, only to lose 1-0 away to Everton, a club six divisions above us. In the previous round we had trounced second division West Brom 4-2 away, thereby etching our name in giant-killing history and for those of us who were there, having one of the happiest days of our lives and certainly our most blissful football experience ever.

Football fans are not all the same. Like humans in general they come in all shapes and sizes and non-league fans, i.e. those devoted to following semi-professional and amateur teams, are undoubtedly a race apart. And there is no shame in this instance of being labelled a cultural snob. Given a preference of cultures between the Greed is Good Champions League and the all-English non-league I know which my heart would plump for.

Now why would you want to be warmly ensconced in your sitting room's armchair feasting your eyes on Manchester United v Real Madrid for the umpteenth time when you could be out on a cold winter's night in Yorkshire on your way to a decrepit old ground for a Northern Premier tie? And why follow Thierry Henry & his playboy pals at Arsenal when you could be following a team of plumbers, taxi drivers and computer workers at Hendon instead? Why indeed.

Sean O'Conor

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