Hope Springs Eternal.
I started writing this article on the third of May 2018. Then, I committed this thought to paper:
“If only it was ten days ago. Then, three points against Cambridge United would have booked the Shrimps a berth for a tenth season in the EFL.
Better still, if only it was ten years ago.”
Then, Shrimps fans crept out of the woodwork from wherever they normally exist en masse to load-up a massive fleet of coaches to head south from Christie Park to Wembley. Trains were not available.
Could what has always been a small-town club actually overcome a team – Exeter City – which they had never previously beaten even once in the Conference?
The omens were not good. Not just the previous results. On the day, Wembley Stadium was packed three-to-one with Grecian fans – many of them towed to the capital by trains which set off to do the deed from a depot not half a mile from my own house here in Carnforth.
Ironic, innit?
In the absence of trains from North Lancashire, my better half Annie and I drove south to watch the match. In her car: a Ford Ka. Power steering and whatnot: for younger readers, a real improvement from crash gearboxes (ask your grandparents if you don’t know what I’m talking about) and my own crappy old Citroen C15 (which you had to double-declutch to get third gear).
When we finally arrived at the stadium in North London, it was to discover that we were outnumbered even more obviously than had been the case on the one time we had played at the old venue in 1974 to win the FA Trophy. I was working in London way back then and went to the match on the Tube and then walked to the stadium with my brother. We got there so early that the Wembley staff showed us round the place: even the mortuary. They said that at least one person is expected to die of a heart attack during an average FA Cup Final…
Way back then, Morecambe never fell behind once the game started. But we were outnumbered then as at the New Wembley. Almost half a century ago, Dartford fans behaved appallingly in defeat. So I’m personally delighted that the god-forsaken place is best known for having a tunnel these days. Tee hee. But we fell behind against Exeter: to a well-worked goal scored by Lee Phillips right in front of where we were sitting and totally against the run of play.
But did Morecambe just lie down and die?
No chance. The Manager of the team – Sammy McIlroy – had done this before: with Macclesfield, who I am personally delighted are going to be back where they belong next season.
And in Centre-Half and Captain Jim Bentley, you had a man who never knew when he was beaten: it was clearly not a part of his vocabulary, then as now.
So, against all odds and with a truly exceptional goal from Danny Carlton – who played as if his life depended on it throughout – Morecambe won. And Exeter fans took it on the chin and even wished us luck. God bless them.
It surely wasn’t real…
It meant that we were in the Football League.
Imagine you were sweeping the floors at the local Town Hall. Councillors of all parties don’t even seem to notice you exist: their eyes are exclusively focused on much bigger things: County Council and then Parliament. But next thing, you find yourself on the Front Bench of the House of Commons ahead of all of them.
That’s how Morecambe’s promotion into what is currently the EFL felt like to me at least when it happened.
Old fossils like myself (born in Morecambe in 1954) realistically thought that the Football League was a Promised Land reserved for Chosen People not of our ilk.
But we have stayed there. Not only that, we have thrived at times. The Play-Offs during 2009 (let’s draw a veil over what happened but at least we got there). A 5-0 defeat of Bournemouth as they gained promotion during the same season. And a 6-0 demolition of League leaders Crawley during 2011 was even better, given that the charmless Steve Evans was their Manager at the time. These were just three instances of many that showed that the club with the smallest budget and home gate in the Football League was not flattered to be there.
The Bookies have made us favourites to be relegated ever since Morecambe entered the Promised Land of the EFL but – under Sammy Mac and latterly Jim Bentley himself – we have routinely defied them. Jim has led us to the top of the League Two table on a small budget and ever decreasing gate receipts ever since.
I’ve supported Morecambe Football Club all of my life. Thick and Thin. Ten Years ago, it was well and truly Thick.
But today was the absolutely polar opposite.
The Shrimps needed to at least draw at promotion-chasing Coventry City.
Yes – Coventry City. The same Coventry City who beat Spurs to inflict Tottenham’s first ever defeat in an FA Cup Final just thirteen years after Morecambe beat the hateful Dartford 2-1 in the first Cup Final they had reached at that venue.
Today at the Ricoh Arena, Morecambe would drop out of the EFL after ten years if they managed anything less than draw and Barnet beat already doomed Chesterfield at the Hive. Just as had been the case a decade ago when the town emptied as its inhabitants headed to the Play-Off Final at Wembley, loads of buses made their way south from the Lancashire seaside. On this occasion, they were provided free by the club.
I bought our tickets last Wednesday at the club shop. Just £15 a pop for old fogies like us. Plus two free coach tickets. (We tried to give these away to anyone who wanted a free ride but there were no takers…)
This is because we had already decided to drive down for the match. After the Exeter match, Annie and I drove straight home again. This time, though, we decided to stay in Coventry and visit the sights, particularly the Cathedral and its amazing stained glass, which neither of us had ever seen.
Her Ka and my own C15 are long gone and today we went in my Berlingo. Down the M6, then a detour which I used to take regularly in a former incarnation as a recovery driver for the Fourth Emergency Services in various big yellow trucks through Bloxwich and Walsall. From there, it was on to Junction 7 of the motorway to avoid the logjam where the M6 and M5 intersect – as well as the expense and further needless miles of the M6 Toll road. And then a brief hop from there to leave at M6 Junction Three.
We parked-up at the `P1’ site on Winding House Lane – e-ticket at the ready – in the grounds of Coventry’s Christ the King Football Club within sight of City’s own remarkable stadium:
The Ricoh Arena.
Presumably the Sky Blues give the club the proceeds of the parking and the clubhouse was open for refreshments after the match – very enterprising of everyone concerned and good luck to them.
We walked to the ground and got talking – as you do – to other people from Morecambe. One of them told us he had been working in Wycombe the previous week.
“Is it twinned with Liverpool?” he asked. “Most of the locals didn’t know they had a football club in the town. `Chairboys?’ they’d say; `who are they, Mate?’ And when Klopp’s team played in the European Cup during the week, nearly everyone in the pub we went to was wearing red Liverpool shirts!”
It was a really lovely Summer day in Coventry. Getting to the ground about an hour before the match was due to start, we wandered round. The atmosphere was brilliant; the Coventry fans very friendly and welcoming and the whole experience very different to that you experience on matchdays at the Globe Arena back at home. A bearded Greek fellow who said he could speak seven languages descended on us and told us of his plans to produce free football programmes and make himself rich in the process as from next season. He intends to target Aston Villa; Wolves; Birmingham and Coventry City and give away programmes he will fund with advertising from local restaurants and other businesses with articles he will have written himself about all four clubs. Sounds like a plan. Can’t see it working at Morecambe personally. But if it does, I might just send him ten percent…
Anyway – talking about making yourself rich…
Who’s this?
Annie suggested I take the photo from this angle to make a visual and perhaps subliminal statement about this gentleman’s role in making Premiership footballers rich beyond dreams of avarice and other peoples’ (usually doomed) attempts to emulate them by means of a Roulette Wheel…
It’s the ex-Chairman of the Professional Footballer’s Association; TV pundit and presenter; Manager of the Highfield Road Sky Blues and who the approach road to the ground from the city centre and the motorway is named after. If only he had done all this at Lincoln – they could re-name the rather prosaically-named `Steep Hill’ by their Cathedral `Jimmy’ in his honour instead…
And here’s something else to be seen outside the East Stand, where the names of famous ex-Coventry players are displayed on the side of the building:
I hope these are the Coventry centre backs today!
I was very impressed – and quite moved – by this thoughtful touch. I just hope the current controversy about ground sharing with Rugby Union giants Wasps doesn’t spoil it in the future…
Inside the ground, we had a drink: Amstel in a plastic container. £4.50 a pint.
Come back, JB’s bar at the Globe and a pint of decent cask ale in a proper pint glass for a fraction of this price…
We didn’t eat anything though. Probably couldn’t afford to. Looking at the re-heated gloop on offer, though, recalled Vegan Vince’s words as Chairman of Forest Green Rovers: “Typically football food is hideous. Burgers are the most awful parts of an animal and are really unappealing products that are cheap as dirt.” Cheap as dirt for the producers, not consumers of such stuff. But there I go getting all serious. And like heavy, man. But there was nothing heavy about the atmosphere here beneath the South Stand prior to kick-off. It was absolutely electric, noisy and very positive:
Did we dare to hope? Of course we did: without hope, being a football fan is a completely pointless exercise.
Once in the ground itself, the excitement became even more tangible. I was speaking to a woman whose window I was removing to repair it earlier this week who simply doesn’t get football. As far as she is concerned, it is twenty-two men kicking a ball around.
“Have you been to a rock concert?” I asked. She had. Did she enjoy it? Yes she did. Was it just to do with the music? No, it wasn’t. So what was it, then?
“It was the vibe” she said.
Bingo!
Her son is married to a Scouser. Her family are Evertonians and they actively support the club.
“Go with him!” I suggested, remembering the roar from the Goodison Park crowd when the Toffees appeared at the beginning of matches I have watched there as among of the loudest I have ever experienced. “You may not enjoy it – but you won’t ever forget it!”
The vibe at Coventry was fantastic before, throughout and even more so after the game.
Taking in the atmosphere
Cat Stevens on drums!
This in the fourth division!
On a personal level, I felt a lump in my throat when the players came out to wave to us before the game started. For them, this was about far more than just a football match: on what was to happen here during the next two hours did careers, livelihoods; reputations – and even more than this, perhaps the very survival of the club itself – depend. I felt their angst. I shared their trepidation. We would have all shared their pain if they were about to lose.
Remember: Morecambe needed to draw.
And they did so after a master Class in the Goalkeeping Arts from Mr Barry Roche in the Shrimps’ net. City needed a point to get into the Play-Offs. So they were happy as well.
Never has a 0-0 been more welcome
Celebrating with the hordes of Shrimps
(Later, I saw ex-professional player Clinton Morrison on The Goal Rush on Channel 5. He told Caroline Barker effectively that the score was a stitch-up between Coventry and Morecambe involving “Five yard passes” which sent Barnet down. Only one thing to say to this, Clinton old son: you weren’t there and if you had been, you wouldn’t say anything as patronising, cynical and frankly outrageous: City went for it and the Shrimps weathered the storm. )
But who cares what people like him think about anything anyway?
This was a day that everybody who was there – Sky Blue or Red – will remember forever. At half time, club legends were introduced to the crowd. The late Cyrille Regis’ family were Guests of Honour and the whole crowd stood to applause them as sixty blue balloons (Cyrille was in his sixtieth year when he died earlier this year) were released:
What a nice gesture: simple, effective but undoubtedly heartfelt.
There was another one at the end:
“You are staying up! You are staying up!”
This was the City fans en masse in front of us on the pitch as they saluted us – and we returned the favour. Fantastic stuff. Twenty-two men kicking a ball around? I think not…
So the day ended on a very positive note for everybody. The day was better than I could have ever hoped for and there are little things that give you a notion of what sort of club you are visiting. During the game, a little lad sitting near to where we were popped the red balloon he had managed to grab as a trophy before kick-off. He was only small and there were tears. One of the Coventry stewards saw what had happened and – completely unprompted – brought the kid another one. Hats off to that man. Hats off to everybody there. I love Coventry. I love the town; I love their club; I love its supporters. I hope they win the Play Offs. I hope they get back to the Big Time.
And for what it’s worth; I hope that Barnet persuade Martin Allen to stay with them as well. They’ll be back and I, for one, will be glad to see them.
Next day, Annie and I explored the world’s biggest Transport Museum in the centre of town. Even there, you couldn’t escape the reality that Coventry City is a really big club:
Sorry about the poor quality.
Then we went to the nearby Cathedral and to see the adjacent ruins of the ancient one which was turned into an inferno during the Blitz by German incendiary bombs. The theme of this place is reconciliation – and hope. I recommend Coventry – City of Culture in 2021 – to anyone seeking a short break. City of Culture no less. Who would have thought such a thing from within the wreckage of the bombed city way back in 1940? But this in itself is proof – if any is needed – of what springs eternal to the human breast.
So there’s that little word which means so much popping-up again: `hope’.
Hope is one of the things represented, the blurb states, by John Piper’s modern designs in glass which illuminate the nave walls of the newer Cathedral by the means of
`ten narrow floor to ceiling windows filled with semi-abstract symbolic designs arranged in pairs of dominant colours (green, red, multi-coloured, purple/blue and gold) representing the soul’s journey to maturity, and revealed gradually as one approaches the altar.’
Here’s a bit of one:
I lie. This was made by my own fair hand as the Working Glass Hero as one of several panels to be found in a bathroom window designed for the man I made them for somewhere in Cheshire. They represent the eternal struggle of Good and Evil; here to be seen in the bluish hues of Coventry City juxtaposed with the red of the Shrimps: their blood spilt so that Mankind can be redeemed and…
OK – the Shrimps didn’t literally spill blood on Saturday but the analogy still stands.
And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Or that I really should have taken that degree in Bullshit…
See you all next season. If Morecambe had lost last Saturday, it would be Roger Over And Out: National League football doesn’t feature on this site after all.
Instead – it’s cheerio the noo instead. Enjoy the summer everybody. Remember, Barnet and Chesterfield fans: whatever else happens, there’s always hope…
words Roger Fitton, D3D4 Morecambe correspondent