My dream match from 16 years reporting on The NLP
ON a warm May morning just after the turn of the century, I left my Nottingham home to head south to the Big Smoke, as my family would always call London, to interview for the role as editorial assistant on a new publication.
It went well, and I was asked if I was around for a couple of days as the following night there was a launch party for The Non-League Paper at the Sports Café in Haymarket, where Sir Bobby Robson was present as patron.
I didn't get to meet this particular legend of the game, but being in the same bar was enough for me. Within weeks I was sharing a stage with Kenny Dalglish, passing him trophies to hand out as part of the Team Talk magazine annual awards. I'll have some of this for a job, I thought.
And for the next 16 years, through different roles on Team Talk, The Non-League Magazine, The Football League Paper and the one constant – The NLP – I had the second best job in the world, after being a professional footballer, which unfortunately I wasn't good enough to do.
Talking and writing about football all day. And getting paid for it. Going to watch football matches. For free. I've been extremely fortunate to be able to do that at all your grounds.
Today it's over. Not for The NLP, a wonderful publication I leave behind in the more than capable hands of my colleagues. But for me, as I leave for a new challenge heading up Luton Town's media team.
Challenge
So please forgive me the indulgence of a double-page spread for my final column as editor (hopefully there will be future guest dispatches to come) to share some of my memories and the great players of that time. I tried to select just one team, but it was impossible so you'll see to the right I've come up with a Dream Match!
For my first eight years in the job I was still a player myself, and I joined a fantastic club in the summer of 2000.Sutton United had just been relegated from the Conference and I know that if they hadn't been a Ryman Premier club, manager John Rains and his assistant Alan Taylor – a man who'd go on to become one of the biggest influences on me – wouldn't have even considered me.
Although I didn't get off the bench, my first game was away at Aldershot Town, which is appropriate as although the reborn Shots were already and working their way back from Ryman Division Three, my time with The NLP can be summed up best as the Phoenix and Fans' Club era.
My actual debut came a fortnight later at Stonebridge Road, against a Gravesend & Northfleet side who would later become Ebbsfleet United and eventually part of one of the most curious way of fans running a club; remember MyFootballClub.co.uk, everyone?
Within 2002 we had Wimbledon fans defying the FA's judgment that the creation of a new club “would not be in the wider interests of football”, and the AFC boom was born.
Aldershot would be the first to make it back into the Football League in 2008, but the Dons' story keeps having chapters added to it, and we've seen new histories written at Telford, Chester, Rushden & Diamonds, Hereford and Salisbury, to name just a few.
Thanks to Tony Williams, the doyen of Non-League, for suggesting I take over from him as editor of the magazine, and then David Emery for keeping me in a job on The NLP for all these years and teaching me all I know about football journalism, I've been able to write about FA Cup runs, title successes, golden boots…and bladed ones, too.
Campaigns
Yes, we've run campaigns to ban dangerously sharp studs, we've fought for insurance for all players and had players, managers, officials and supporters up and down the country wearing green wristbands in support of our Clean Up Our Game campaign.
This job has enabled me to appear on TV, working with some great people at Setanta, Premier Sport, ESPN and BT. And it's always been terrific fun doing the Non-League Show on radio with Caroline Barker & Co. It may no longer be on the BBC after today, but it deserves to find a new airwave home in time for next term.
I've been lucky enough to interview some of my heroes as a kid like Stuart Pearce and Nigel Clough, who I watched from the Trent End at Nottingham Forest, and become great friends with men like Chris Wilder and Gary Mills, both of whom I had cheered as a Notts County fan.
I've sat on Alesha Dixon's living room sofa, when she was married to MC Harvey, who I interviewed at their Stevenage home as he made his playing comeback at Ford United.
Years later, I'd play against Harvey, when he was at Chesham, and hear my Hitchin team-mate Stuart Lochead come up with one of the funniest on-pitch one-liners as he sang the So Solid Crew rapper's most famous line “You've got 21 seconds before you've got to go…” as Harvey was shown a red card for pushing him to the ground!
It was the same with Olly Murs, who played for Witham Town in Ryman Division One North when I was at Ware. Before he found fame and fortune, I interviewed the young centre-forward following an appearance on Deal Or No Deal as we had pictures of him taken in the office at the recruitment agency he worked for, and he told me how he practised his singing at his local pub's karaoke nights. Look at him now!
But in Non-League, it's not the big names you deal with on a daily basis. It's the ordinary folk who are juggling work and family commitments to run a football club, play for their local team or simply volunteer their support.
People like Neil Jensen, press officer at Hitchin during my two years at Top Field, and now a regular NLP columnist after years of being one of hundreds of hard-working match correspondents who file their copy every Saturday teatime to enable us to bring it out by Sunday morning.
Alan Taylor always said to me at Bracknell, where he signed me from Sutton, that “at the end of your career, it's not the extra money you were offered to go and play for the team down the road that you'll remember, but the people that you met along the way”.
Respect
He was spot on. Neil Baker and Jon Underwood – currently joint managers of Slough – and Jon Palmer will always be three of my best friends from that dressing room. Alan himself came to Wembley as my guest for the National League Promotion final recently. We talk a lot and I respect him as much now as when I played for him, more than a decade ago.
The same goes for my last manager at Ware, Glen Alzapiedi, who helped give me some of my best playing memories, reaching the FA Cup first round proper for the first time in my final season, when Kidderminster boss Mark Yates ordered his players to give us a guard of honour after our 2-0 defeat. It's the guys working away in the lower leagues who are always the most welcoming.
Managers like John Still always offering me lunch at Dagenham and Luton; Jim Harvey chatting football for hours through the cigar smoke in his Morecambe days; Micky Mellon answering his phone minutes after winning the title while sitting on a deck chair outside a caravan with his kids, nephews and nieces badgering him for ice-creams!
John Coleman, Mark Stimson, John Reed and Justin Edinburgh inviting me to train with their teams before our interviews; Gary Brabin, Mark Cooper, Steve Burr, Liam Watson, Kevin Wilkin and Dale Belford gathering in pubs and casinos for close-season brains trusts that filled our pages for weeks; Terry Brown and Graham Westley making the tea at AFC Wimbledon and Stevenage, and Garry Hill getting the kettle on in his Essex home.
Paul Fairclough has always made us NLP boys feel part of the England C set-up wherever we've travelled to watch them, while his Barnet predecessor and multiple-time colleague Martin Allen has been different, but equally first class with me.
“Stu Pot, one for your Funny Old Game column – guess who's cleaning out our ovens at Underhill today?” Mad Dog of the south once rang me to ask. David Beckham's dad, Ted, was the answer I was never likely to get!
Laughing
I'll never forget people like Mitchell Cole, who wasn't just a talented flying winger for Grays and Stevenage, but a cracking lad who died so tragically young. The last time I saw him he was laughing behind the wheel of his car as he forced me to jump onto a grass verge to avoid him, as he passed me on the school run for him, and a road run for me.
Great men like Del Deanus and Mark Maddox, who were stricken by the terrible, debilitating Motor Neurone Disease. Mark, the marvellous Mad Dog of the north is, typically, still fighting the terminal illness six years after diagnosis.
There are too many names to mention individually here, but those of you who have helped me fill columns, pages and papers over the years and offered support, friendship, honesty and humour, you know I'm offering thanks to you.
To the people who have come up to talk to me in Press boxes, tunnels, toilet and tea bar queues as I travelled around the country, reporting on matches, I thank you all too. I wasn't part of a team on matchday, but I never felt alone with your endless enthusiasm for Non-League football and this paper making the long journeys all worthwhile.
And my colleagues in The NLP office, you've been great team-mates to be alongside in the trenches. For 16 years, the privilege has been all mine.
