I WAS there the last time Histon staged a big FA Cup night, when Roberto Martinez's Swansea City beat Steve Fallon and John Beck's side 2-1 to progress to the fourth round.
Just under 3,000 were at Bridge Road that wet Tuesday night when the Welsh side, then in the Championship, fizzed the ball around what amounted to a churned-up Fenland field in their now customary style.
Current Premier League stars Ashley Williams, Leon Britton and Nathan Dyer – a 65th-minute substitute – were on the visitors' teamsheet, while the Stutes, on their way to finishing in the Blue Square Bet Premier play-offs, had the likes of Nat Knight-Percival, Lanre Oyebanjo, Danny Wright and goalscorer Josh Simpson in action.
Fast forward four years and ten days to this coming Wednesday, and the Blue Square Bet North strugglers are due to host a Premier League club – Liverpool. And things couldn't be more different.
The competition may be the FA Youth Cup, for players under the age of 18, but many of the young boys on show double up as the Stutes' current first team.
Manager Brian Page takes control of both and he and his players are paid for their fourtimes-a-week morning training sessions by their education provider, Soccer Coaching Limited.
Page knows they will most likely get a football lesson against Liverpool, especially when you consider the Reds could, if they wish, field England winger Raheem Sterling.
Belief
But it's not something they aren't already getting at Step 2 of the men's game, as well as on a six-match Youth Cup odyssey that has yielded away wins at Crawley and then, on penalties last Thursday, Bradford City.
“We had 11 current or ex scholars in the 16 for last week's win over Workington, and it's a case of needs must for us as a football club,” says Page, whose oldest first-team player is recent signing Levi Porter, 25.
“It can be difficult if things aren't going well, because the lads don't have the experience to fix the problems they come across on the pitch. It's down to us as coaches to try and guide them, and what I've found is that you're actually coaching in warm-ups and during games.
“You would expect to do that at academy level, where the only matches where the result really matters is in the FA Youth Cup.
“But we're having to do it in the Conference North, and it's not easy when a team with an average age of 19.4 – as we had at Colwyn Bay – are up against players with three or 400 games at this level or higher. But we do have a youthfulness, energy and belief that they can make anything happen.”
Striker Matty Waters, especially. The 18-year-old climbed off the bench to score twice against Workington, a day-and-a-half after netting the opener in the 2-2 extra-time draw at Valley Parade.
Waters has 38 goals in all competitions this year, with nine in the Youth Cup.
The other marksman in Yorkshire, 17-year-old winger Nick Freeman, has bagged eight during the cup run, and also has a first-team goal to boast about from the 2-0 Boxing Day win over Bishop's Stortford.
A couple of names to look out for to eventually follow Crawley's Simpson, Peterborough's Knight-Percival and York's Oyebanjo into the Football League perhaps?
Things haven't been great at Histon for a while. Swingeing budget cuts leading to relegation on the pitch, but survival off it, are well-documented since those heady days beating the likes of Leeds United.
Cherished
More recently they failed to fulfil a fixture, after losing a court case to a former director, and were fined by the Conference.
Not great stories to write. But let's give them credit for trying to produce their own, and getting results. The senior team may still be relegated to Step 3, but as Page says, this week should be cherished.
“I was watching Liverpool's Under-21 match against Southampton on LFCTV the other night and the commentator said ‘Many of these lads' next game will be at Histon in the FA Youth Cup',” he adds. “Neil Mellor – their former striker – asked where Histon was and the commentator replied ‘It's a little village next to Cambridge'.
“It's not often you see one of the world's greatest clubs coming to a village club, even at youth level, so it's some achievement. Hopefully we'll have a crowd of 5-600 – double what we get for a first-team game. We're all excited about it.
”So they should be. The days of milk and jam (their ground was donated by one of the club founders, John Chivers) that saw the Cambridgeshire village side come within a whisker of the Football League are long gone.
But the new Histon way is obviously as rich to the people involved – and hopefully helping preserve the 109-year-old club's future.
